"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.

<p>Literary modernism followed a century during which philosophical speculations about the mechanistic basis of human life found experimental validation in the work of physiologists, who stressed the power of environment to shape and delimit thought and action. By the late 19th century, the hypothesis that humans were "automata," as Descartes had conjectured, began to seem much more than philosophical speculation, as statesmen and industrialists appropriated blueprints of the human machine originally mapped by the sciences. So dominant was the conjunction of politics and habit that, writing in 1890s, the American psychologist William James would call the automatic operations of body and mind the very engine of political life: "Habit," he declared, "is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor." But James was only anticipating the wide range of thinkers who would associate physiological automatism with politics in the coming years. By century's end, the belief that habit determined social action and circumscribed individual volition was to find wide currency in a variety of cultural fields, including literary modernism.</p><p>Situating literary modernism in relation to this emergent sense of political modernity, <italic>Automatic Modernism</italic> argues that modernists reconfigured the discourse of automatism for political and aesthetic ends. Wary of the new political environment in which government, political parties and industry exploited the science of conditioned reflex to ensure automatic responses from docile subjects, writers of this period turned to the resources of literature in order to both disrupt the clichés of thought and action enforced by environmental stimuli and to imagine forms of politics adapted to the physiologically automatic body. Looking in particular at the fiction and non-fiction work of D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, and Samuel Beckett, this dissertation attempts to understand the recurrent equation of automatic behavior and twentieth-century modernity. Even as modernists vigorously rejected habitual behavior as the very element of twentieth century life that imperiled authentic art and social belonging, they forged alternative notions of bodily being, investing in the potentialities of human automatism as the basis of aesthetic possibility and social coherence. The formal experiments of these modernists emerge, then, as efforts to foreground, manipulate, rupture, and mimic the political habits of readers.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis examines the relationships people have with rubbish in everyday life. Focusing on domestic recycling policy and practice, environmental concern and action is explored as a sociological problem in a way that moves beyond the individualising paradigms that dominate environmental discourse for behavioural change. In its place, this thesis argues that better explanation may reside in the social context of embedded practices, and how they get enacted in daily life. Beginning with a historical overview and evaluation of current policy, this thesis re-imagines domestic recycling as a complex socio-technical system involving the engagement of different actors. Conducted at the boundaries of sociology, this thesis draws on empirical and theoretical ideas that extend across disciplines. Methodologically the research has been grounded on a principle of mixed methods pragmatism, exploiting the Sequential Explanatory mixed methods research design. Conducted across two phases, Phase One involved the secondary analysis of the Scottish Household Survey and Phase Two the collection and analysis of qualitative data using the Diary- Interview method. The first phase was a macro- analysis of recycling practices in Scotland. The main results of this analysis are presented in Chapter 4, which built a Binary Logistic Regression model, using the Scottish Household Survey, to predict the characteristics of Scottish households likely to engage in recycling behaviour. In addition to identifying the social and structural dimensions of recycling in Scotland, this analysis also enabled a research site to be selected for Phase Two of the study. Chapters 5 and 6 respond to the macro- analysis by accounting for the micro- aspects of recycling practices by looking at the problem inductively. Using qualitative data analysed in Phase Two, these two chapters are based on the idea that how people value the environment is relevant for understanding contemporary recycling practices. Chapter 5 considers the explanatory usefulness of environmental ethics, values and citizenship for explaining why some households engage in environmental behaviour, but others do not. In Chapter 6 these arguments are developed further with a more detailed discussion about how household recycling practices get enacted in everyday life. Using evidence from the data, this chapter considers why commitment to ‘doing’ recycling varies between people and examines recycling as formed, cultivated and maintained habitual behaviour. Taken together the three data chapters try to show that, rather than be an inconsequential feature of normal domestic life, recycling is a practice deeply-rooted in wider social patterns and structural forces. In the final chapter, all of the micro- and macro- findings are integrated together and concluded, along with some reflections on the multidimensionality of contemporary recycling practices in the home, and what this might mean for policy and future research.

As computing technology has become a vital part of everyday life, studies have increasingly scrutinized the underlying meaning of computational things. As different devices become interwoven with daily practices and routines, there is a growing interest in understanding not only their functional meaning in computational terms but also their meaning in relation to other non-computation artefacts. This thesis investigates how people relate to artefacts and how their individual values and attitudes affect this relationship.  The analysis is based on four ethnographic studies, which look at the richness of ordinary interactions with technology to understand the impact of technology upon practice and experience. The process through which humans develop a relationship to artefacts is framed as a continuous series of encounters, through which the individual constantly reshapes their relationship to things.  Artefacts are seen as lines in the mesh of everyday life, and the encounters are the intersections between lines. This approach–grounded in phenomenology and paired with an anthropological understanding of everyday life–reconceptualises understanding of the processes of adaption, meaning-making, disposing and recycling. The work reveals how human relations to all kinds of things–in the form of meaning–is continually transforming. Core to this understanding is the cultural relative essence that becomes perceived of the artefacts themselves. This essence deeply affects the way we encounter and thus interact with technology, as well as objects more broadly. In the daily interaction with computing devices we can observe that computing technology alters the mesh on a different level than non-computational artefacts: digital interfaces pull our lines together, bundle experiences an affect how we encounter the material and the social world. This enables computing devices to have meanings distinct from non-computing technology. To go further, computing is itself a mode of existence – a crucial difference in things that helps us understand the complexity of the material world.

This thesis is about the power of political elites to establish the framework of political discourse, and to thereby control political power, in Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rican 'status question' - the debate about the island's ultimate juridical and political relationship with the United States and the rest of the world – is considered a manifestation of such power. Formal domestic politics in Puerto Rico is structured around three party political desires for an uncertain and unknowable postcolonial future, and not around any set of distinctive ideological positions for engaging with political issues in the present. An unresolved question of nationalism and state building therefore becomes the structural filter through which all politics must necessarily pass. Inspired by the concept of hegemony, the thesis is firstly interested in how political elites exercise power to establish status as the framework for domestic political discourse. Secondly, and more importantly, it is interested in how this framework is reinforced, modified, resisted and even overcome through elite exercises of power in concrete political settings. The thesis takes a particular focus on the relationship between status positions and everyday political practices in three Puerto Rican municipalities: Guaynabo, Caguas and Lares. The author arrived at this focus through an ethnographic engagement with the field that was made possible by his research positionality as a white British outsider to Puerto Rico. The thesis tells the story of the nuanced ways in which local political elites engage with the status question through practices of politics on the ground. Elite performances of local state power do not straightforwardly reproduce the hegemony of status, but rather, create a more complicated empirical terrain of contradictory, unexpected and subversive effects. In certain places, everyday practices of municipal politics appear to reflect the intractable entanglement of local priorities and centrally prescribed status positions. In others, politics gets done in ways that leave the status question behind, creating effects that include city-state sovereignty, elevated standards of living, non-nationalist forms of politics, and non-state-centric possibilities for decolonisation. Ironically, therefore, a political system that is so profoundly shaped by discourses of nationalism and state building is disrupted in practice by some of the very actors who help to give the system this shape. These findings contribute to critical geographies of the Caribbean and to recent debates on politics, power and decolonisation in Puerto Rico.

Abstract: My vanilla, Grade A, white bread, run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road, threadbare, well-worn, moth-eaten, potato sack, butterscotch, grass stained America: Mundane American life is an existence clinging to the ordinary, where a quilt of mass- mediated preferences and ingrained traditions define many people, specifically from north to south and east to west. Yet, the tastes and dialects of people within the mundane are complex. Ideological preferences are rooted in immigrant history and political persuasion. Various modes of realism have been used by American painters such as The Ash Can School, Regionalists of the 1930’s, and Pop Art. The notion of the real and mundane have an integral link to each other in art, as often the real may reveal a truth about the world, that which may be ugly or sordid. Depictions of everyday objects and common people break down the great divide between high art and popular culture. Pop Art is postmodern in its "generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism." In this paper I will dissect the complexity of the mundane through the use of my own and others’ paintings and photographs. Through reference and description Americana’s well-worn customs and preferences in day-to-day life will be analyzed.

This research draws upon interdisciplinary studies of childhood and young people's agency to present an ethnographic account of one group of young people in Nepal's lived experience of 'the global schooling project', a term used to describe the series of policy initiatives and the complex landscape of actors and institutions furthering the aim of getting every child, everywhere into school. Based on five months of fieldwork in which I intimately embedded myself in the everyday lives and social, emotional worlds of a group of young people living on Mansawar Street in Pokhara, I show how the global schooling project and its values impact upon their childhoods and everyday choices, shaping their aspirations, daily routines and self-conceptions, and those of their families and communities. I bring attention to how these flattening policy initiatives can have the effect of marginalising many of these young people's unique talents, interest and competencies, not accounting for the diversity of their learning and their agencies in moving through and making sense of their everyday material and immaterial worlds. I emphasise how schooling can act as an ambiguous resource for these young people, not only providing opportunity, knowledge and pathways towards employment, but also drawing them into systems of inequality and exploitation, both inside and outside of school. This research, then, provides an account of the lived experience of schooling on Mansawar Street and the profound ways in which schooling shapes local economies and ecologies, transforming family and community relationships and young people's childhoods.

<p>How are you today? The question was asked on a website by the artist Erik Krikortz, and the answers were displayed as a light show on a building complex in central Stockholm. In this thesis more than 20000 people have rated their subjective well-being on their own chosen occasions, on a seven graded scale of smileys in different colours. Results from November 2007 were analysed. The most frequently chosen colour was yellow, symbolising slightly better moods than average. Comparing means between days of the week showed that people feel the best on Sundays and are least happy on Tuesdays. Posthoc tests indicated significant dips in well-being on two days of the month. After answering the main question participants could also choose to rate their subjective experience of how well their sleep, family and friends, physical activity, stress levels and inspiration had been that day. The variables with the highest correlation with well-being were found to be “inspiration” and “family and friends”. Lowest were correlations for “sleep” and “physical activity”. The last variable was blank, for people to fill out for themselves and rate. The most frequently used word here was by far “love”, followed by “work” and “weather”. Summing up the results it seems social activities means most for the subjective well-being.</p>

How are you today? The question was asked on a website by the artist Erik Krikortz, and the answers were displayed as a light show on a building complex in central Stockholm. In this thesis more than 20000 people have rated their subjective well-being on their own chosen occasions, on a seven graded scale of smileys in different colours. Results from November 2007 were analysed. The most frequently chosen colour was yellow, symbolising slightly better moods than average. Comparing means between days of the week showed that people feel the best on Sundays and are least happy on Tuesdays. Posthoc tests indicated significant dips in well-being on two days of the month. After answering the main question participants could also choose to rate their subjective experience of how well their sleep, family and friends, physical activity, stress levels and inspiration had been that day. The variables with the highest correlation with well-being were found to be “inspiration” and “family and friends”. Lowest were correlations for “sleep” and “physical activity”. The last variable was blank, for people to fill out for themselves and rate. The most frequently used word here was by far “love”, followed by “work” and “weather”. Summing up the results it seems social activities means most for the subjective well-being.

What is the best way to account for the variety of human experience? The range of ways to understand individuals has been debated across myriad domains of study without consensus. Rarely have the solutions involved the role of the observable behaviors of daily life; instead inferences are made from traits, opinions, beliefs, or needs. The current dissertation proposes assessing personality through the lens of time, focusing on individual differences in the objective, real world transactions of everyday behaviors. To accomplish this goal an inventory was created to closely approximate the totality of everyday behavioral life and explore its relation to traditional measures of personality. Study 1 analyzed the structure of behaviors in the American Time Use data as an aid in item generation within a narrowed, but comprehensive scope of the behavioral landscape. A thorough set of criteria were then applied to tailor the inventory towards measuring objective, high incidence, quotidian behaviors of psychological interest. In Study 2, the assembled 78-item behavioral inventory was administered to a large, diverse sample to explore the structure of everyday behaviors; the stability of behaviors over time; individual differences in everyday behaviors; the relationship of everyday behaviors to various measures of personality; and, the covariance of the behaviors with the language of everyday life. Six major dimensions of everyday behaviors were identified and found to be internally consistent and reliable over time. The dimensions demonstrated unique variance as a function of age, sex, and personality. The self-report format of this method of assessing everyday behaviors was shown to be construct valid in that analyses of open-ended linguistic descriptions of routine weekend behaviors paralleled the patterns of activity reported. The broader implications of assessing personality by way of everyday behaviors are discussed in that behaviors can be thought of as an enduring signature that implicitly incorporate our values, attitudes, beliefs, and overall means of expression. / text