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Love has been one of the most important issues in human life for all time. It means strong emotional and physical connections and lets people indulge themselves in its joy, depression, anticipation, and striving. Among popular music nowadays, there are always descriptions about love in most of songs, which called ¡§Love Songs¡¨. The goal of this study is to observe how the users interpret the gendered implications in love songs when they are listening to them. Furthermore, this study tries to find out the relation between users¡¦ interpretations of love songs and their love experiences and imaginations. Adopting the method of in-depth interviewing, this study interviewed 11 college students and collected related information. Through analyzing the interpretation toward specific love song lyrics of these interviewees and their explanations about their own love experiences and imaginations, this study finds that users will think about the gendered implications in the specific love song lyrics they chose when they are engaging in love song decoding. At the same time, they show their understanding toward the mainstream gender discourse. With the comparisons between users¡¦ decoding and mainstream gender discourse, this study categorizes the decoding of love songs of users into three positions: preferred, negotiated, and oppositional/ critical. Meanwhile, users will connect their love experiences and imagination about love relationship to the characters and plots in love songs, expressing their attitudes to the characters, including of identification, denial, projection, and question. Besides, study finds that there is a two-way interactive relationship between users; love songs decoding and their love experiences and imaginations. That is, not only users¡¦ love experiences and imaginations would influence their interpretations of love songs, users¡¦ interpretations of love songs would also influence their imaginations and anticipations toward love

This thesis explores how the art world negotiates what contemporary African art means, in the context of the international contemporary art system and in relation to the histories of Western perspectives on Africa. Using conceptual and methodological approaches drawn from cultural geography, it examines the field of contemporary African art, foregrounding the terms of negotiation framing contested geographical imaginations and ideas of Africa. The research considers curatorial practices, exhibitions, art institutions, networks and the wider art infrastructure as an arena in which geographical concepts and categories are formulated, debated and contested in relation to contemporary African art. It draws on interviews with artists, curators, gallerists, collectors and scholars, as well as ethnographic fieldwork conducted in institutions and at art events, to unpick the idea of 'contemporary African art' as a working category and conceptual frame. It reveals tensions running through the field hinging on questions of categorisation, scale and location, the geographical dimensions and implications of which are currently under-explored. The conclusions argue for the importance of geographical awareness in debates around contemporary art from Africa and its shifting position internationally, particularly in the context of globalising trends in the art world and beyond, which engender complex geographies of mobility, identity, belonging and opportunity. The thesis also highlights the relevance of debates around contemporary African art for geographers, proposing new directions in research on art within cultural geography.

Cette recherche doctorale interroge la construction des identités linguistiques dans les trajectoires migratoires et le processus d’intégration de migrants africains plurilingues, dont les parcours de vie s’inscrivent dans les espaces francophones pluriels et diversitaires que constituent l’Afrique subsaharienne, la France hexagonale et l’Acadie du Nouveau-Brunswick. Elle repose sur une démarche comparée ayant pour but de chercher à comprendre comment et dans quelle mesure les migrants originaires d’Afrique noire s'inscrivent respectivement dans les contextes d'intégration particuliers que constituent l'Acadie du Nouveau-Brunswick et la France, en misant ou pas sur leur identité et compétence francophones. Cette recherche s’inscrit par ailleurs dans une perspective qualitative herméneutique accordant une place primordiale aux expériences des personnes et à l’historicité des processus et des phénomènes sociaux innervant ces expériences. L’étude menée propose, dans cette perspective, une lecture sociolinguistique des histoires de vie et biographies langagières des migrants rencontrés : approche qui permet d’interpréter les expériences mises en mots par ces derniers, et de saisir la portée des reconfigurations engendrées par la confrontation à des environnements sociolinguistiques et socioculturels autres que ceux qui les ont institués en tant qu’individus-Locuteurs / This doctoral thesis explores the construction of linguistic identities in migrants' trajectories and the integration process of multilingual African migrants whose life courses are contextualized by the multiple and diversified Francophone spaces which Sub-Saharan Africa, mainland France and New Brunswick's Acadie represent. It is based on a comparative approach aimed at understanding how, and to what extent, migrants from Black Africa are integrated into each specific settlement context of New Brunswick's Acadie and France, and whether or not their integration validates their Francophone identity and competencies. Further, the research is informed by a hermeneutic qualitative perspective, which places primary importance on the lived experiences of individuals and the historicity of the social processes and phenomena underlying their experiences. Using this perspective, the study presents a sociolinguistic reading of life histories and linguistic biographies of the migrants interviewed. This approach makes it possible to interpret the experiences articulated in their comments, and to define the impact of reconfigurations generated by their contact with sociolinguistic and sociocultural environments different from those in which they first established themselves as individual speakers.

Pictures are often used when marketing a tourist destination. Photographs of a place, a destination, are used to convince customers and stimulate daydreaming in order to turn a potential customer into a real customer. For some people the photographic representations of a place is the only one they experience. With this in mind, it is reasonable to question how representations of places and geographical imaginations are being (re)produced when marketing a destination by using photographs. This paper aims to study how representations of place and people are used when marketing a tourist destination via travel commercial. The study was conducted by analysing images used for marketing tourist destinations located outside Europe, with a focus on photographs portraying people. The pictures included in this study were found in five travel catalogues for the Swedish market. The sample was narrowed down and reduced to three pictures, which were analysed by using a semiotic image analysis. The study aim to answer the following questions: When marketing a tourist destination how are people in the tourism advertising being presented? In what way can the images that are being used for tourism advertising generate stereotypes about places/people? The study indicates that, according to the included sample, the people portrayed in tourism advertising are being presented in a stereotypical manner.