"Las practicas cotidianas castellanas: hacia el imaginario cartografico de Miguel Delibes" offers a reevaluation of the image of Castilla that informs much of Miguel Delibes's novelistic work. Numerous scholars have examined the fundamental role the author's native region has in developing the thematics of his extensive narrative corpus. What has been missing in these studies is a broadly interdisciplinary optic through which to study the formation and evolution of Delibes's cartographic imaginary--to borrow a term from David Harvey. Applying the ground-breaking work of critical geographers including Harvey, Henry Lefevbre, Michel de Certeau and Sallie Marston to an analysis of the Spanish novelist's production allows for a calibration of his novelistic evolution against the mediating factors of the extensive and fundamental real spatial transformations that Castilla undergoes from the time Delibes started to write in the 1940s to the present. The key element in making this connection is a study of how the practices of everyday life take form in his imaginary. Employing de Certeau's explanation of the ways in which these practices coalesce into tactics and strategies is especially useful in charting the evolution of the author's cartographic imaginary and how it documents, confronts and resists fundamental alterations in the nature of Castillian spaces, both rural and urban.Chapter one of my study lays out the methodology for defining the cartographic imaginary, especially its portrayal of the practices of everyday life, and considers how to connect the study of real spaces and their conceptual articulation by cultural creators. Chapters two and three discuss, in turn, the portrayal of urban and rural spaces in Delibes's fiction, most importantly in Mi idolatrado hijo Sisi­, Cinco horas con Mario, Diario de un jubilado, El camino, Las ratas, and Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja. My final chapter (four) examines those texts in which Delibes plays rural against urban space--Diario de un cazador, El disputado voto del senor Cayo and Los santos inocentes. My investigation leads me to conclude that while deeply rooted in his own region of Spain, Delibes's work transcends local concerns.

This research calls for a reconsideration of the notion of rubbish; one that does not consider disposal as the final act of the production-consumption cycle but, instead, appreciates the practices enacted around rubbish as constitutive of value creation. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space (1991) and Rhythmanalysis (2004) this thesis traces the social life of rubbish to understand the social, cultural, political, and economic practices implicated in the organisation of waste. In particular, I employed a sensory ethnographic approach comprising of participant observations, self-reflexive observations, formal and informal interviews. I undertook a six months fieldwork, where I explored and documented the practices enacted by six sets of stakeholder who are involved in the organisation of rubbish in Lagos, Nigeria. Without overlooking the representational aspects (i.e. interviews, visuals) of practices, this thesis contributes to consumer research and the wider marketing discipline by tackling the more-than-representational elements of practices. The research exposes the spatial dynamics, embodied and multisensory experiences and power relations that are negotiated and co-produced when everyday practices are performed around rubbish. In so doing, I question and challenge the notion of disposal as being limited to environmentalism, green consumption and sustainability. I pushed these boundaries by investigating how rubbish acts as the lifeblood that fuels socio-spatial as well as economic relations in both formal and informal economies. This ethnographic study reveals the coping tactics and spaces of resistance that are utilised by marginalised informal operators to 'make-do' and sometimes subvert the strategies imposed by the formal authorities when they attempt to abolish these practices. The findings unmask the processual quality of practices and the recursive nature of objects in terms of their transformation from a state of 'rubbish' into valuable categories. It also makes visible the manner in which the practices enacted around rubbish (de)synchronises with natural rhythms such as seasons. The thesis alerts policymakers to the contributions of the informal waste economy to the socioeconomic development of the formal economy. It also suggests that the urge to engage in sustainable consumption practices - recycling and less consumption - can have detrimental effects on stakeholders that rely on the surplus or detritus that emerge post consumption to sustain their socioeconomic livelihoods in developing economies across the world such as Lagos, Nigeria.

Through an analysis of the Danish Immigration Law and asylum system, this research illustrates how the Danish state through state practices and policies permeates and produces the everyday space of humanitarian migrants. Furthermore, it examines how humanitarian migrants experience their everyday life in the Danish asylum system. An examination of state practices in conjunction with humanitarian migrants’ narratives of space and everyday practices, offers an opportunity to explore what kind of politics and political subjectivities that can emerge in the space of humanitarian migrants. This research contribute to our understanding of first, how the securitization of migration has direct impact on the everyday life of humanitarian migrants, second, second, how the state through practices and space governs and de-politicizes humanitarian migrants, and third, humanitarian migrants are able to act politically. Furthermore, this research problematizes the categorization of humanitarian migrants as “asylum seeker” in order to illustrate how the group of humanitarian migrants is a very diverse group of people from different places with various skills and education-, social-, and economic backgrounds. Even though “asylum seekers” are often portrayed as a homogenous group of vulnerable people we cannot assume that these people understand themselves as vulnerable docile “asylum seekers”.

In recent years, entrepreneurship studies scholars have begun studying entrepreneurship from a process-oriented philosophy and with an interest in the prosaic, everyday practices of entrepreneurs. In keeping with these "new movement" approaches, I have tried to "catch" entrepreneurship as it is happening within the field of private investigations. An in-depth, two-year field study of private investigators engaged in the entwined practices of investigating and entrepreneuring was conducted. Methodologically, I shadowed five private investigators and interviewed an additional 25. Because shadowing is an emergent methodology, an in-depth discussion of conducting and writing shadowing research is provided. As noted in this discussion, it is important that writing remain primarily descriptive yet linked to dominant contemporary discourses. Consequently, an overview of dominant narrative themes in popular and academic discourses about private investigating and entrepreneurship are included. Based on the framework of this methodology, dominant narrative themes, and field notes, various culturally-situated accounts of private investigator practices are offered. The findings of this research project suggest that private investigators use various rhetorical and practical strategies to successfully and simultaneously complete investigative and business-related tasks, such as "planting suspicions," using gender and race to strategically position themselves in relation to others in opportunistic ways, and incorporating contemporary technology into their work routines. Drawing on actor-network-theory, I argue that opportunities are enacted through a series of taken-for-granted and everyday interactions among subjects and objects. This research privileges descriptive accounts over theory-building. However, the descriptive accounts of the practices of subjects and objects suggest pragmatic solutions for private investigators to create and manage entrepreneurial opportunities. For example, I propose that private investigators should collectively engage in practices that further professionalize their field. Such professionalizing activities would include, among other things, engaging in knowledge accumulation through academic and professional research activities and professional association public relations campaigns. Insights are also provided regarding the role of rhetoric and technology in opportunity creation and destruction. Readers interested in organization communication and theory will find many of the descriptions to be empirically rich examples of ethno-methods used by actors in highly institutionalized contexts. Similarly, these scholars may also find the descriptions to validate recent arguments regarding organizing as "hybridized actions" (or action nets) occurring in multiple spaces, places, and times. The examples herein demonstrate the usefulness of shadowing as an approach to understanding organizing practices, especially in fields where actors are always "on the move." Readers interested in private investigating will find many of the examples rich in techniques that will enhance profitability. Finally, readers interested in entrepreneurship studies will undoubtedly find many novel potential research projects that are embedded in the various thick descriptions throughout the document.

Drawing upon my eleven-month ethnographic fieldwork in two business organisations in Bangkok, Thailand, this thesis explores Thai women office workers consumption of makeup and clothes at work. What emerges from this thesis is that a claim to beauty as a reason for which women are engaged in the consumption of makeup and clothes is not always valid. Grounded in theoretical discussions and empirical findings, I argue that the women s consumption of makeup and clothes is not always in the pursuit of beauty, but rather the pursuit of looking good. While beauty is perceived as an innate quality of the body, looking good entails the materialisation of the outer body through consumption practices in an attempt to achieve an ideal look. I introduce a concept of looking good practices. Looking good practices demonstrate the ways in which women office workers exert agency in mobilising their outer bodies to achieve an appropriate appearance at work. I argue that looking good practices entail a process of social learning. The women office workers learn to look good through the process by which they look at other women, participate in the practices shared amongst themselves, negotiate the meanings of appropriateness and reify such meanings through their consumption of makeup and clothes. By sharing meanings and practices, the women office workers inevitably participate in looking good practices, which, I argue, are social practices. My research also demonstrates how, through their engagement in the consumption of makeup and clothes, the women office workers aestheticise their bodies to be situated in the aesthetic workplace.

This thesis is about a specific locality- the Central Methodist Church- and it details the lives and experiences of a large group of migrants who lived within this locality. The study also examines the activities of a wide range of humanitarian organisations that instituted interventions at the church and analyses how individuals’ suffering is dealt with by humanitarian organizations. The individuals who inhabited the church were a product of large-scale structural factors- political conflict, economic decline and fragmentation and social despair. These individuals were however following traditional mobile livelihoods routes that have been part and parcel of the Southern African labour migration history. The central questions that this study examines are how and in what ways experiential suffering is dealt with and how the different ways and technologies of managing suffering, impinge upon individual and collective subjectivities in the specific locality of the church. In addition the study examines the categorizations and representations of indigent Zimbabwean migrants within South Africa and how these representations have been constructed and transformed over time. The findings made in the study are drawn from a year of ethnographic fieldwork, which combined a number of different methods. These included archival research, participant observation, in-depth interviews and narratives with individual migrants, state officials and officials from humanitarian organizations. The study also made use of diaries in order to detail the everyday lives of individual migrants and capture the texture of everyday life at the church. The findings indicate that the migrants emplaced within the Central Methodist Church were not only victims of structural, political and socio-economic factors as has been the common refrain in recent literature but were also victims of the ‘invisible’, silenced, unrecognized and unacknowledged violence and exclusionary nation-building mechanisms and processes in post-independence Zimbabwe and post-apartheid South Africa. The study finds that the ways through which organizations deal with suffering is mediated by numerous factors and humanitarian interventions interact and articulate with the aspirations of individuals in complex and unpredictable ways often with perverse outcomes. One of the key findings that emerges from the study carried out within a specific locality challenges the notion of places such as refugee camps and asylum holding centres as being ‘exceptional spaces’ where individuals are bereft of rights and even their sense of individuality and worth. Rather such places ought to be understood in terms of contextual, material and historical realities. These places ought also to be understood in terms of the meanings that are attached to them by those who inhabit them. In this regard the study shows the Central Methodist church building to be a material and political resource used by the inhabitants and it’s also an economic and political resource utilized by NGOs and other actors. The thesis shows that the ways through which humanitarian interventions are deployed leads to the creation of categories of victimhood and oftentimes these categories are negotiated and constantly reconfigured at times without necessarily interacting with the realities of the beneficiaries in the manner intended. The thesis shows that the everyday lives of indigent individuals are characterized not only by hardships but the manner in which these individuals attempt to assist each are processes fraught with tension and ambiguity. By so doing, the study challenges the romanticization of the lives of the poor which is often depicted as resilient and where the poor assist each other. The thesis makes a contribution to the anthropology of humanitarianism. In addition, the thesis contributes to broader debates on the intersections between migration, indigence, victimhood and the logics and practices of humanitarian institutions.

Pluralities of people s crossings of the Mekong Thai-Lao border occur as locals subvert, reject, ignore, and embrace the logic of the national border. From a state-centric point of view, the everyday movements of these people, who rely mainly on a subsistence economy and have their own modes of crossing, are undocumented. I argue that people s mobility co-exists with the practice of sedentary assumption. The aim of this thesis is to promote theory related to the Third Space in Borderland Studies by the presentation and analysis of people s pluralities in border-crossings. The borderland area of Khong Chiam (Thailand)-Sanasomboun (Lao PDR) is the location of an in-between state in which spatial negotiations, temporal negotiations, and negotiations of political subjectivities contribute to the nature of mobility in the Third Space. To achieve the objective of this thesis, ethnographic methodology was used over six months of fieldwork from March to September 2016, and included participant observations, interviews and essay-readings that involved 110 participants in the borderland site. People s movements across the Mekong River border occur daily without formal state approval. From the perspective of the Thai Ban, the river is a lived space in which they catch food and use for transport. However, their interpretation of the Mekong as the state boundary does not completely disappear. This thesis examines the everyday banal pluralities of the Thai Ban s border-crossings by weaving together the three concepts of space, temporality, and negotiations of political subjectivities. The spatial and temporal negotiations involved in the border-crossings shape and are shaped by this other interpretation of the Mekong as a lived space, and different political subjectivities contribute to the pluralities of the crossings. The presentation of these pluralities of border-crossings adds to Borderland Studies specifically and the social sciences in general in the development of an understanding of the Third Space. As this thesis focuses on people s mobility at quasi-state checkpoints and in areas along the Mekong Thai-Lao border with no border checkpoints, it is suggested that future research examines the everyday practices of border-crossings at land borders.

Submitted by Cássia Santos (cassia.bcufg@gmail.com) on 2017-07-10T15:22:43Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Lucinete Aparecida de Morais - 2015.pdf: 6534400 bytes, checksum: 2b03ba410d96850f0c08b2493193a1d8 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-07-11T10:44:07Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Lucinete Aparecida de Morais - 2015.pdf: 6534400 bytes, checksum: 2b03ba410d96850f0c08b2493193a1d8 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-11T10:44:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Lucinete Aparecida de Morais - 2015.pdf: 6534400 bytes, checksum: 2b03ba410d96850f0c08b2493193a1d8 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-17 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This thesis presents the issue of land , the struggle and the cultural heritage in the town of Ferreiro(GO) , historic site listed by IPHAN in the city of Goiás and experienced by settlers community - the Settlement Project Serra Dourada . The documentary sources added to the ethnographic method allowed to identify the representations and appropriations of the place through the social organization of production, the festivals , the sacred , politics and community memories. The outline of this work took into consideration the daily practices of the Ferreiro community and the desire to signify them for good collective life around the earth and the sacred . / Esta dissertação apresenta o tema da terra, da luta e do patrimônio cultural na localidade do Ferreiro, sitio histórico tombado pelo IPHAN no município de Goiás e vivenciado por comunidade de assentados - o Projeto de Assentamento Serra Dourada. As fontes documentais somadas ao método etnográfico permitiram identificar as representações e apropriações do lugar por meio da organização social, da produção, das festas, do sagrado, da política e das memórias da comunidade. O recorte deste trabalho levou em consideração as práticas cotidianas da comunidade do Ferreiro e o desejo de significá-las para o bem viver coletivo em torno da terra e do sagrado.

Mathare as an informal settlement of the Global South which suffers from an inconsistent water supply and periods of scarcity, relies for its provision on water vendors. This dissertation strives to advance scholarly debates on understanding the production and governance of the ‘actual water supply’ beyond and in relation to the centralised piped water network, and to thinking the conditions for possible change to modes of water supply. An empirical investigation was conducted on certain temporalities of change and continuity in the relational practices of governance actors of the water provision, the water vendors, situated in the informal settlement of Mathare in Nairobi, Kenya. As such, experiences of water scarcity among the water vendors are suggested to contribute to shape Mathare’s water provision by motivating practices circulation, especially regarding water storage. The water vendors might also crucially sustain and re-configure rules, interact with, and be affected by artefacts involved in the water infrastructure through practices of maintenance, repair, but also decay through temporary events of water infrastructure disruption. In turn, looking at relations shaping the water governance, stable relations are suggested to be re-produced through ‘twilight’ actors and temporal modalities in the water infrastructure.

In the years after WWII the Baltic Sea Area developed into an area strongly divided between East and West. Because of the tensions between the blocs, the coastal areas where strongly militarized and prepared for war. The new political situation after 1989 propelled an international military disarmament and closing down of bases, training areas around Europe. Since the Baltic Sea Area was one of the heaviest militarized part of Europe the question of disarmament here is of particularly great economic, social and cultural importance. This study is about the post-military landscape in the Baltic Sea Area with examples from Dejevo on the Estonian island Saaremaa, Dranske on the (East)German island Rügen and Fårösund on the Swedish island Gotland. The aim of this thesis is to shed light on the process where the military landscape of the Cold War is transformed in order to be incorporated in the macro-regional endeavors for unity in the new Europe. I want to analyze the implications that planning visions have on the everyday life of people. A following aim is to shed light on the challenges that urban planning has to face in this transformation. Three research questions frame the study. The first question analyzes the process where the coastal areas of the Baltic Sea after the end of the Cold War are disarmed and transformed, from a landscape of production of military services and objects into a landscape of consumption for recreation and tourism. The second question takes its point of departure in the relation between planning visions and everyday life. The third question concerns the matter of the past and analyzes what aspects of the military landscape are emphasized respectively pushed aside in the transformation into post-military landscape. The study is based on interviews with inhabitants and local planners as well as macro-regional and local planning documents, articles and photographs.