This thesis explores the EuroAmerican ‘counterjihad’, a transnational field of antiMuslim political action that has grown significantly since it first became visible in the mid-late 2000s. Its key symptoms have included ‘Defence Leagues’ and ‘Stop Islamisation’ groups in various national contexts, grassroots mobilisations against mosques and minarets, campaigns to ‘ban the burqa’, as well as a very wide network of antiMuslim online spaces. The thesis argues that the counterjihad can be seen as a transnational political movement, and its discursive, aesthetic, organisational and tactical repertoires are all critically explored. It will be shown that the heterogeneous political tendencies that constitute the counterjihad are united by a shared narrative of Western crisis, decline and impending catastrophe; several overlapping conspiratorial narratives that attempt to explain this predicament; and, finally, a spectrum of compensatory political projects that seek to reinvigorate a sense of Western civilizational and white ethnic identity in a post-Cold War context where those identities are increasingly contested. The thesis also argues that the counterjihad is one aspect of a more general phenomenon: the striking reemergence in ‘late’ modernity of a number of ‘countermodern’ or ‘traditionalist’ political theologies. These new political theologies overlap with, but are not identical to, the ones that flourished during the long crisis of ‘classical’ European modernity in the early twentieth century (notably, ‘classical’ Italian Fascism and German National Socialism). Finally, the thesis considers the sociopolitical conditions that have fostered the reemergence of such phenomena today.

The Internet has provided a new context for the exploration of the concept of identity. This study used innovative perspectives in studying the online identities of a group of college students in China. (1) The study explored the individual ‘you’ rather than a collective identity. (2) The study linked all meaningful online settings which are suggested by the participants in discussions of the concept of online identity. (3) The study adopted the dialogical conception of identities of DST (Dialogical Self Theory) that gave each ‘I-position’ an opportunity to express its own story from its own perspective. Thus, the present study explored all the ‘I-online-positions’ and ‘dialogical relationships’ among them. (4) Comparing the relationships between the online and offline identities aimed to locate the concept of online identity and a comprehensive understanding of the whole concept of identity. Furthermore, it explored not only the relationship between the whole concept of online and offline identity, but also the relationship between each online sub-identity and the offline identity, with the aim to locate a more precise position for the online identity. Methodologically, the study settled in the transition zone between interpretivism and pragmatism, valuing philosophical stances from both of them. It also adopted a situationalist position by valuing the complementarity of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Data collection involved two stages: a questionnaire followed by in-depth interviews. These process were conducted under the concept of a ‘participatory sense-making’ relationship between the researcher and the researched. The study arrived at the following conclusions: (1) ‘Situational self’: there are different online identites in different online environments, each satisfying different needs of the individual and influenced by personal and cultural values, the specific environment and personal imagination. (2) ‘What is lacking tends to appear online’: each participant wants to achieve his/her own ‘circle’ of his/her offline identity online. (3) ‘Changeability’ of online identity: contrary to the relative stability of offline identity, a ‘changeability’ of online identity satisfies online users’ needs. Online identities are dropped or tend to converge with offline identities if certain needs are met. (4) ‘Beneficial to the college students’: most participants claim the transitions between various identities quite smooth and the experiences with online identities are quite beneficial to most. The exception to this is a case of addiction. (5) The personal ‘circle of imagination’ is the starting point of an individual’s engagement with identity choices, in the interaction between personal and cultural values. (6) ‘Rational man’: the participants reveal themselves as ‘rational’ in choosing the most advantageous online identities to meet their own needs, based on their personal values, cultural values, specific environments and personal imagination.

2014 was a politically interesting and eventful year in Scotland due to an independence referendum taking place. The referendum also provided a sociologically interesting moment: as the ‘Scottish nation’ was widely debated and reflected upon both prior and after the referendum, this political context provided an opportune moment to consider how nationalist narratives are constructed, expressed and experienced both from above and below. Thus, drawing on data collected before and after the referendum, this thesis seeks to make an original contribution to the broad field of nationalism studies. Specifically, it focuses on the relationship between nationalist narratives and ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, and belonging in Scotland. The fieldwork took place between May 2014 and September 2015, and this thesis draws on data gathered using a number of qualitative methods: interviews, observation and content analysis. Though the findings emerge within the political context of the referendum, this thesis seeks to situate them in a historically informed, post-devolutionary framework. This thesis has two broad aims: on the one hand it seeks to interrogate the post-devolutionary relationship between nationalism and minority communities within Scotland. In relation to this, it seeks to uncover the ways in which nationalist narratives are constructed and publicly expressed from above by the SNP, and how individuals from different ethnic minority backgrounds interpret, make sense of and potentially challenge nationalist narratives in and through their daily lives and experiences. On the other hand, this thesis aims to understand and investigate the legislative, institutional and structural contexts for the management and creation of ‘the nation’ and who belongs to it, as well as the individual, subjective understandings and negotiations of ‘the nation’ and how one’s place within it is understood. Contrary to much existing scholarship, this thesis argues that the SNP’s nationalism does not take a wholly civic form (and indeed that the civic/ethnic dichotomy is analytically unhelpful). Further, it underlines the importance of ‘values’ and emotions to nationalist narratives, and the centrality of England as Scotland’s ‘national other’. Finally, the findings shed light on ethnic minorities’ complex and often contradictory experiences of nationalist narratives — the findings support Smith’s (2016) argument that the capacity to experience the everyday as unreflective is a privilege. Ethnic minorities encounter continuous implicit and explicit challenges to their sense of belonging —consequently, in a ‘hyper-nationalist’ context the nation merely becomes louder.

This thesis investigates how football supporters in the West of Scotland craft meaning from their everyday lives around questions of sectarianism, nationalism, and related social issues, through the lens of their football-supporting experience. The thesis seeks to ‘rethink’ sectarianism, challenging discourses which simplify or construct it as a historical phenomenon, by developing a deeper, empirically-informed understanding of its enduring impact on people’s lives. The thesis was written in the context of significant social and political change for Scotland. The fragmentation of traditional political structures and the ‘constitutional question’ have reopened key fault lines around religion and competing nationalisms, and these political shifts continue to have a profound effect on socio-cultural life and identities. New hierarchies of belonging and exclusion, built on previous ones, are emerging in contemporary Scotland, and the thesis contends that analysis of sectarianism must be analysed within this context. The thesis challenges dominant understandings of sectarianism, and the undertheorisation of the topic, by combining a qualitative approach, which is attentive to lived experiences and meaning-making, with historical-sociological analysis which is sensitive to structural and political factors.

This thesis critically analyses the scholarly literature on the creation of human rights law in light of the author’s empirical investigation into the making of India’s ‘right to food act’. Human rights law is increasingly being used to combat poverty, but influential critics of human rights law are sceptical about the law’s capacity in this regard. Two critiques are of particular relevance to this study. The first is that human rights are minimalist i.e. they only provide for basic needs and do not address economic inequality (or, therefore, ‘relative poverty’). The second critique – which proceeds from the first – is that in contexts characterised by economic inequality, the poor are often unable to exercise their formally-accorded rights because they lack the ‘moral and material resources’ needed to do so. This thesis appraised these critiques and found that they are, in the main, valid. However, to reject human rights law on this basis is short-sighted. The construction of human rights law is a social process and it is argued in this study that there is no inherent reason why human rights law could not, in the future, develop in a manner which overcomes the problems presently associated with it. In order to gain insights into the reasons why human rights law is constructed in the way that it is, this thesis studied the social processes involved in the creation of India’s ‘Right to Food Act’. The findings shed new light on the potential and limitations of human rights. The content of the Act supports the contention that human rights are minimalist. However, an analysis of the social processes involved in its creation demonstrates that its content was not in some way ‘preordained’. It was shaped by a diversity of ideas and processes of contestation between a diversity of actors. It is conceivable that had particular circumstances been different, the Right to Food Act could have addressed at least some of the causes of economic inequality in India. This thesis therefore concludes that in order to meaningfully evaluate the potential and limitations of human rights law, further studies of the social processes involved in its creation need to be conducted.

Within the context of debates concerning the impact of global media on local youth, this study explores how a sample of South African youth responds to texts which were produced internationally, but distributed locally. Recognising the profound rootedness of media consumption in everyday life, the research examines the way these youth, differentially embedded in the South African economic and ideological formation, use these texts as part of their ongoing attempts to make sense of their lives. The study rejects the 'either/or' formulations that often accompany competing structuralist and culturalist approaches to text/audience relationships. Instead, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, it seeks to highlight the interplay between agency and structure, between individual choice and the structuring of experience by wider social and historical factors. The findings of the study point to the complex individual and social reasons that lie behind media consumption choices, and the diverse (and socially patterned) reasons why local audiences are either attracted to, or reject, global media. These and other findings, the study argues, highlight the deficiencies of the media imperialism thesis with its definitive claims for cultural homogenisation, seen as the primary, or most politically significant, effect of the globalisation of media. As such, this study should be read as a dialogue with those schools of thought that take a more unequivocal point of view on the impact of globalised media culture.

This thesis is an investigation of commercial spatial design practices. It contributes to an emerging sociological and anthropological scholarship on design and is grounded in a studio ethnography of a large London-based architecture and spatial design practice. The analysis is based on an understanding of spatial design as conceptual, problem-solving and form-giving and focusses on the mediating role designers take on. It is framed by a pragmatist approach that highlights the significance of mediation, contextuality and agency in design as situated practice. The purpose of this project is to analyse the complicated set-up of spatial design as creative, material and commercial practice against the backdrop of distinct competitive and regulatory environments. Here, the “market moment” provides the empirical window for investigating how spatial design is premised on linking up creativity, space and commerce. The thesis suggests that studio studies are crucial for retrieving a humanist element in sociological interpretations of (spatial) design to help analyse the significance of materiality and commerciality within design as creative-conceptual work. In the context of an emerging and increasingly politicised design scholarship, this can provide avenues for examining the nuanced forms of design agency as well as design’s entanglement with existing and emerging socio-economic conditions.

This research is an ethnography about the curation of the street food scene in London that looks at processes of cultural calculation to make markets and to assemble marketplaces. The main research question that is guiding this thesis is how is the street food scene in London being curated? This inquiry follows previous research in cultural economies in different scenes of cultural production like advertising, fashion or music (Du Gay and Pryke, 2002; Slater, 2002a; Entwistle, 2006, 2009; McFall, 2002, 2009, 2013; Ariztía, 2015; Negus, 2002; Law, 2002; McRobbie, 2016; Arriagada, 2014; Arriagada and Cruz, 2014). I am focussing on the idea of curation as analytical vehicle to understand the work of cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu, 1984) as a process of value generation, in which they culturally calculate markets (Callon, 1998; Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa, 2002; Slater 2002a) and assemble marketplaces (Farías, 2010; McFarlane, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c) by putting together knowledge, people, objects, aesthetics and other materials that configure the scene. This ethnography focusses on the working practices of market organisers, particularly from a company that I will call EAT-LONDON and four food traders who work in these and other markets. Nine months of fieldwork were conducted, working at offices, markets and food stalls across London. Through this empirical work with actors in the street food scene, rich data was obtained with the purpose of analysing how markets are formed in cultural economies, and how markets create place. Curators are actors that shape the social using their embodied and social knowledge to separate businesses, audiences or places based on the distinction of this cultural scene (Johnston and Baumann, 2015; Naccarato and Lebesco, 2012; Cronin et. al., 2014). The practice of curation reveals how economic calculations are also configured by cultural distinctions and how place is assembled and emerging from multiple actors’ relationships and negotiations of value.

Research on the politics of sexuality and the LGBT movement in contemporary Poland tends to overlook the larger socio-economic changes that affect them. Omitting these processes from studies of sexuality, given the profound transformations occurring in Poland over the last two to three decades, produces incomplete accounts. This study builds on the existing knowledge of the politics of sexuality in contemporary Poland and extends it by addressing the question of whether and how processes of neoliberalization matter and how differences of class, gender, and location position subjects differently within the landscape of politics of sexuality. Through a mixed qualitative approach, combining content and discourse analysis with semi-structured in-depth interviews, this project addresses existing empirical and theoretical research gaps. Empirically, it engages with the LGBT movement in general, focusing on two largely unstudied phenomena: Christian LGBT organizing – as exemplified by Wiara i Tęcza (WiT, Faith and Rainbow) – and religiously motivated sexual reorientation therapy, also known as Reparative Therapy (RT). Theoretically, this study explores how processes of neoliberalization collude with existing patriarchal regimes shaping individual subjectivities, but also affecting the kind of politics that are possible both locally and globally. Drawing on the literature on sexuality and capitalism I argue that WiT’s project is best understood through what I term godly homonormativity. My analysis of RT is informed by the literature on psychotherapeutics and how these align with neoliberal ideas of personhood but moving beyond the individual level, I argue that RT should be understood as commodification of homophobia and it must be analyzed in relation to the neoliberal framework that enables it. Finally, I demonstrate that LGBT organizing and RT are classed, localized and gendered and argue that these complex intersections can only be understood by linking them back to the material conditions in which they are produced.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of the (homo)sexual narratives that circulate in contemporary British contexts. It draws on three years of ethnographic research in Brixton, South London, centrally analysing in-depth interviews with 19 LGBTQ-identified residents to present a situated interrogation of (homo)sexual progress narratives. The research critically develops feminist and queer theorisations of the role progress narratives play in sexual politics, focusing particularly on the spatial and social imaginaries that are animated in celebrations of sexual modernity. Consequently, the thesis also interrogates the ways in which classed and racialized hierarchies are sustained through everyday attributions of homophobia. In addition, this analysis is brought into dialogue with research on gentrification and territorial stigmatisation to think about the role of sexual progress narratives in contemporary debates on housing and regeneration in London. I draw attention to the imbrication of local, national and transnational discourses in framing both spaces of homophobia, and spaces of sexual tolerance. This thesis argues that the ‘small stories’ made available through situated research should be turned to as a resource for critical theory. I identify and engage narrative techniques including proliferation, layering, periodisation, and fictionalisation, which can be deployed to tell a disorderly story of sexual progress. I suggest that layering these small, disorderly stories not only undermines the amenability of sexual progress narratives and gay rights rhetoric to stigmatisation, but also better reflects the heterogeneous experiences and desires of LGBTQ people. In this way, this thesis examines (homo)sexual progress narratives through new analytical frames, and contributes to scholarship on lesbian and gay politics, ‘gay’ gentrification, and sexual narrative.