Food security has long been a component of the global development project. Over time, extensive definitions and conceptual frameworks for food security have emerged. This thesis explores food security policy discourse in middle income, non-crisis contexts in the Global South. Taking as its research site the Southeast Asian state of the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), the thesis explores how food security is defined as a policy problem, and what solutions are proposed. Using an interpretive analytical approach, the research analyzes authored policy documents and constructed policy texts drawn from interviews conducted between 2011-2013 with 25 international experts to identify narratives emerging from the praxis of formal policy documents, institutional mandates and policy-in practice. The role of international expertise in shaping the national level discourse is explored in detail. Four policy narratives are identified: food security as modernization/economic growth, the smallholder narrative, the nutrition narrative, and food security as development. Particular attention is paid to the totemic status of rice in the discourse. For each narrative, a matrix of problem statements, proposed solutions, key indicators, and supporting institutions is presented. A metanarrative analysis of how these narratives intersect suggests that one of the characteristics of food security conceptually is its inclusiveness, giving it a remit across a range of sectors. This research presents food security as a valence issue, which, by virtue of its expansiveness, provides a platform on which multiple, divergent policy agenda coexist. Despite recognition among experts of serious shortcomings in both the conceptual framework and applied use in policy, this fluidity ensures that food security remains in consistent use, as both a component of national policy and as an artefact of global development discourse at the national level. Because of its continued focus on undernutrition in rural areas, the omission of issues such as overnutrition, urban food systems, and environmental degradation from the discourse, narratives in food security policy are presented as hewing to pre-existing problem statements and solutions. This renders food security an incomplete fit within the policy context of rapidly developing nations in 21st Century Southeast Asia.

This study examines notions of the professional criminal and career criminality in Turkey. Bourdieuian dispositional theory of action and Lacanian psychoanalytically-inflected discourse theory are together employed to understand and explain how one becomes, and continues to be, a professional criminal. The study presents the data from an offender-based ethnography in Ankara, the capital. The research pays special attention to the role of affects in the formation of criminal habitus, thus squarely placing the process of becoming a professional criminal within a process of symbolic identification with available criminal social types. The research reveals that the formation of bodily and mental criminal dispositions of younger, lower-class subaltern offenders can never be considered separately from the implication of their affective investments in the model-image of perceived gayrımeşhur [infamous criminal] 'big brothers' in the street. Moreover, it explains the appeal of a career in crime using the psychoanalytical notion of jouissance (enjoyment): the unconscious pleasure obtained from pursuing and enacting a criminal lifestyle. The unequal distribution of volume and structure of criminal capital among agents is argued to generate, particularly in the drug field, a strategic mutuality between perceived gayrımeşhur big brothers and younger generations who identify with the former. The affectively-constructed strategic proximity between generations transmits the understanding of crime as work from one generation to the next. The other finding of the study is that the modus operandi of professional burglary is put into practice within a structured division of labour in which each individual criminal capital is used collectively to overcome deterrents and effect the intended result: cash and jewellery. This research represents an original contribution to the literature of sociology and criminology by its theoretical neologism in explaining the formation of professional criminal subjectivity and its practice, and also by ethnographically exploring the patterns of crime and criminality in the socio-cultural context of Turkey.

Interactive TV, a new media service based on an amalgamation of traditional TV watching and Web-based features, has turned consuming TV programmes and value-added services into an individual and interactive experience. This research aims to stimulate thinking about the changing role of interactive TV as it moves from a passive medium to a more active medium, enabling learning opportunities for young adults previously confined to the personal computer (PC) domain. This new paradigm of interactivity for education and learning offers personalised and innovative ways to learn that differ from learning in traditional academic courses. To ensure that TV-based learning is adequately supported, the research provides teaching and learning materials through electronic media. A Taiwanese educational TV multimedia home platform (MHP)programme entitled 'Follow Me after School', which is composed of science topics, reference materials, study quizzes and interactive functions, is used to facilitate teaching through screen-based media and stimulate youths' after-school learning activities. Joshua Meyrowitz's 'situational' approach is adopted to form the methodological framework of this work. The framework incorporates a set of quantitative questionnaires and the formation of youth groups to watch interactive TV's edutainment programmes. The methodology also involves qualitative data-collection methods, such as participant media activities recorded on a guided, open-end, diary-style form and multitasking analyses, to provide in-depth understanding of learners' experiences in the new media environment. Drawing on new technologies' involvement in children's educational and social experiences, this research focuses on pre-adolescents in Taiwan and presents a scenario demonstrating that although well-designed interactive TV has highly elevated technological capabilities, it cannot change the fact that children's TV watching at home is mostly a social and shared activity. Watching TV is a major part of routine activity in a family environment, neither complemented by nor substituted for PC-related behaviours in certain time, space and social-cultural conditions.