One of the first commercial oil wells in the world was drilled in southwest Trinidad, and the century of hydrocarbon production that followed has shaped the region's social and physical landscape. The Shell Oil Company built the town of Point Fortin to be its oilfield headquarters in this territory, and through the first half of the 1900s the company was a pervasive employer, sponsor and overseer in the town. In recent decades, Point Fortin's oil refinery has closed down and the Atlantic Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Corporation began operating its facility on a nearby site. Corresponding with Trinidad and Tobago's structural adjustment period, this transition ushered in a new labor regime and community relations model that have reconfigured the relationship among Point Fortin residents, major petroleum companies, and the state. This dissertation utilizes an ethnohistorical approach to illuminate how livelihoods, sense of place, and expectations for the future have changed through the town's dynamic 100-year encounter with petro-industrialization. It explores the distinct features of oil and natural gas, tracing the particular ways they animate and constrain the social, political and industrial networks of which they are part. These two fossil fuels behave very differently, from the communities where they are produced and processed, to the global market. Attending to the materiality of the resources themselves yields insights into the assemblage of machines, bodies, logics, and institutions that constitutes the industrial ecology of Trinidad and Tobago.

The act of creating anything, from a novel to a simple meal to a building, requires the combination of many elements. Broadly speaking, these elements are technique, technology, and materiality, the three of which are bought into combination according to the intent of the maker. The effects of the combination of these elements can be very powerful. One need only call to mind the cool, damp weightiness of stepping inside a church whose walls are made of solid stone or to contrast this experience with that of picking up a lightweight rowing shell whose thin wood frame and taut fabric skin combine amazing strength with impossible slenderness. These experiences amaze and move us because the various elements that brought them into being are combined in a harmonious way and one that is aligned with a poetic ambition. This is not to say that all three elements need to be mixed in equal proportions or that there is a hierarchy of importance; it is the mixing that is essential, not the presence of any one element. A specific focus of this thesis is technology and the way that architects use it and are shaped by its use. Many architects have rushed to embrace recent advances in digital design and fabrication tools, forgetting that that the act of making requires the convergence of a number of forces. Focussing too much attention on one will often come at that detriment of another. Through a series of projects, this thesis explores a number of methods of designing and making. The projects undertaken range from a series of hand carved spoons, to sculptural, physical translations of flowing water, through to the full-scale realization of a suspended ceiling for the North House prototype. An effort has been made to work across a variety of scales, and to employ as wide a range of techniques and technologies as possible. These projects have afforded a kind of research through making, one that engages the entire body rather than merely the mind, and which has been supplemented with more traditional means of research. In addition to the role of technology in architectural practice, attention has been paid to the relationship between ways of making and time, and to the way in which certain artists, designers, and architects are able to slow, compress, or even transcend time. A series of brief case studies serves to illustrate how this is possible while also describing a set of values against which the work of this thesis can be calibrated. By its very nature this thesis takes the form of an ongoing project, one in search of a somewhat elusive goal. The path that a powerful and moving project must take is often full of uncertainty. If I am certain of anything however, it is that achieving the proper mixture of elements requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to let a project take on a life of its own.

Grasping the wooden handle of a dozukime saw with both hands, I make a rip-cut into a block of eastern white pine, leaving behind a 1/64-inch wide kerf. I am cutting a dovetail: a wood joint developed over five-thousand years ago by the hands of our ancestors. Even now, a well-fitted dovetail joint remains one of the strongest, most elegant ways to join wood. I knew nothing about traditional woodworking when I first picked up a hand-plane, but I was soon inspired by the richness of the craft: the quality of a hand-planed finish, the spirit of craftsmanship, and the nature of material. I was amazed by the wealth of knowledge embodied in craftwork. The tools and materials I encountered spoke to me; I learned to care for them and for my work. How would the things I make endure through time? How would the things I make affect others? In an era where materialism has come to represent a spiritless relationship to the things around us, traditions of craft can teach us how to imbue the human spirit in our work. After making a harvest table, four chairs, ninety-four earthenware pots, and a lamp, I reflect on the act of making as a means of discovery. Making affects our thinking and our approach to material and environment. Making can help us develop a craftsman???s capacity to listen, a great respect for material, and a desire to make better objects for posterity. Making is learning.

Noise is noisy. Its multiple definitions cover one another in such a way as to generate what they seek to describe. My thesis tracks the ways in which noise can be understood historically and theoretically. I begin with the Skandalkonzert that took place in Vienna in 1913. I then extend this historical example into a theoretical reading of the noise of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, arguing that sound and noise are the unheard of his text, and that Derrida’s thought allows us to hear sound studies differently. Writing on sound must listen to the noise of the motion of différance, acknowledge the failings, fading, and flailings of sonic discourse, and so keep in play the aporias that constitute the field of sound itself. / Graduate / 0413 / 0422 / mitchrenaud@gmail.com

O objetivo da presente dissertação é conhecer e compreender como se dá a manifestação do culto dos fãs a um produto de entretenimento contemporâneo, assim como as motivações e desdobramentos de tal prática. O trabalho é um estudo de caso realizado a partir de uma comunidade virtual, mais precisamente, um fórum de discussão sobre a série audiovisual americana Game of Thrones, produzida e exibida pela emissora HBO. A pesquisa apresenta e discute diferentes conceitos sobre fãs, culto, comunidade virtual, cultura fandom, cultura material, gênero fantasia, experiência estética, complexidade e estratégia narrativa, se guiando pela perspectiva metodológica da materialidade da comunicação. A partir de uma questão levantada pelos próprios fãs, este trabalho busca ainda confirmar ou refutar a hipótese de que o rompimento com o clássico modelo narrativo, conhecido como Jornada do Herói, amplamente utilizado por Hollywood nas décadas de 80 e 90, poderia contribuir para a manutenção e/ou recrudescimento do culto em torno da obra audiovisual analisada. Com este propósito, também são demonstrados os dados sobre as observações realizadas em campo e o que estes representam. Por fim, são trazidos à tona novos fenômenos, experiências e intuições como possibilidades de aprofundamento em estudos futuros

This dissertation investigates what Christianity implies for contemporary Chinese Christians, and theorizes the interplay between unity and diversity within the Christian phenomenon. I collected data from January 2015 to May 2016 through ethnographic fieldwork primarily in Nanping City, Fujian. While the study focuses on the main local Protestant network there, it also considers the four other local Christianizing denominations, as well as the influence of and the interaction with alternative religious traditions. In order to investigate how Chinese Christians manifest their religious commitment, I apply Actor-Network Theory as a methodological tool and document how Christians interact with a wide range of material objects and virtual entities. Through the study of Christian buildings in their Chinese environment, the layout inside places of worship in relation to religious performances, the ways in which local Christians invest their wealth in the construction of elderly homes, and also through the analysis of the local Protestant blood taboo, this dissertation presents the set of relationships that local Christians constantly produce and reinforce. Thus, I argue that the turn to Christianity in Nanping is not just about meanings and values, but about the constant creation of a specific web of relationships with the recognition of a few key actors. To describe further the particularities of the central ‘actor,’ the Christ, I apply the notion of the ‘face’ from Emmanuel Levinas to unfold the type of agency and change that this actor induces within its Christian network. Yet, Christianity in Nanping emerges not only in relation to Christ’s face, but also in relation to the continuous making of two other entities: the Church as a semi-transcendental being and the pastoral clergy as a unique type of clergy. Paired in a twin-sponsorship, Church and pastors participate in the constant production and adjustment of the Christian network, including its religious norms and moral rules, to allow local Christians to collectively recall and respond to the presence of the face.

Background and problem: Global Reporting Initiative has come up with new guidelines for how companies should report sustainability. GRI is at the front regarding sustainability reports. The new G4 standard has meant that companies should only report what is considered essential to their business. The problem in the study is that it is criticized for GRI, as it is based on the triple bottom line, which is considered a misunderstood concept. Some research even shows problems with the indicators that GRI use. Furthermore, there is research showing that the automotive and construction industry is among the largest environmentalists in the world, while various scandals characterized the automotive industry. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to highlight what construction and vehicle companies consider to be important in their sustainability reports according to GRI's latest guideline G4. Method: This study has used a quantitative method. A content analysis has been the basis for the study where the sustainability reports have been in focus. Furthermore, the data collected has been transferred to a coding schedule and a coding manual. This has since been derived from an analysis of the collected data. Conclusion: The transition from G3 to G4 has led companies to take into account the essentiality requirement, which means that we see major differences between the different regulatory frameworks. Even though research shows that building and automotive industries pose a threat to the environment, our study shows that these companies still choose to take into account their stakeholders' views primarily. The stakeholders' demands via the materiality analyzes diverge any studies that criticize the construction and automotive industry regarding environmental aspects.

This thesis brings feminist ontologies into a renewed dialogue with post-phenomenological landscape studies through the development of a critical arts-research practice. Contemporary landscape scholarship in cultural geography foregrounds landscaping practices as performative; visual culture studies, similarly influenced by phenomenology, critiques the powerful fixings of representation; whilst current commentaries on art-geographies focus on questions of interdisciplinarity, rather than the potential for art practice-as-research to be generative of politically complex cultural geographies. Landscape, replete with complex power geometries and tension, both resists fixing and framing, and also becomes defined or imaged by these same operations. My goal in this thesis is to find a way of working, as an artist, with an understanding of landscape as being continually in eventful—and sometimes violently eventful—process, beyond conventional framings of image and landscape. Initially, this art practice (undertaken as research within cultural geography) worked with a violent flash flood and resultant loss of life, and was set against the backdrop of picture-postcard West Cornwall. Whilst focused through practice on this usually trickling mile-long moorland stream, something happened. This research became infected by concurrent geo-political events. Through practice in the studio, the violent lifeworld of the stream collided with an activist project associated with the 2014 Gaza conflict. Land and image became both occupied and ghosted. This corporeal and material collision of practice(s) afforded a productive entanglement of practice and theoretical engagement. My search for a way of working with landscape as an artist that accounts for the unpalatable dimensions of material formations, for the dying within living, for the exclusions, subjugation, violence, or even extinctions of landscape—led me to realise that I cannot stand back innocently and safely behind the camera, outside of the frame. I propose that landscape is inherently violent, and that as such, landscaping practices are always politically differentiated and situated. It is a violence in which there can be no innocent place of on-looking; we are all mutually implicated in landscape and landscaping-practices, and indeed, the ghosts of our own vulnerabilities are never far away. The thesis demonstrates that the unpredictability and riskiness of researching through a critical arts practice, can produce the conditions for disruptive interventions generative of new ways of (body)knowing in the world. These ways of knowing serve to confront the violence and contradictions of a fast changing enviro/geopolitical landscape. Working from within an art practice—as geographical research—contributes a perspective of political complexity and generative encounter, in which unexpected collisions, between things, practices, and bodies function to produce spatial connections beyond contemporary analysis.

A construção do campo pictórico: acúmulos e sobreposições baseia-se na pesquisa sobre uma prática plástica, na construção de um campo pictórico. Assim, é apresentada, nesta dissertação, uma série de pinturas, produzidas entre 2002 e 2004, que tiveram como conceitos norteadores as noções de acúmulos e sobreposições exploradas na elaboração de pinturas. A narrativa é construída em paralelo ao processo de pintar. Seguindo, preferencialmente, a mesma seqüência de construção, procura-se apresentar os elementos que dão condição à instauração desses trabalhos. A partir da análise dessa experiência, se propõe o levantamento de questões recorrentes nessa prática, desde a seleção de referenciais, passando pelas ações operatórias, bem como elementos de naturezas variadas que envolvem uma prática plástica particular e que encontram reverberações na produção. Assim, são abordados assuntos como: o uso do recurso fotográfico na pintura, a exploração da matéria pictórica, a importância da ação do tempo nesse processo, os registros de trabalho e os reflexos e os diálogos firmados com a obra de outros pintores. Essa pesquisa estrutura-se como uma documentação de um processo de trabalho. Nesse sentido, aqui são apresentadas as hesitações, os questionamentos, as hipóteses e as experimentações relativas ao pintar. / The construction of the pictorial field: accumulations and overlaps is based on research about the plastic practice, in the construction of a pictorial field. Hence, it is presented in this dissertation a series of paintings, produced between 2002 and 2004, which had as guiding concepts the notions of accumulations and overlaps explored in the elaboration of paintings. The narrative is built in parallel to the process of painting. Proceeding, preferentially, the same construction sequence, trying to present the elements that allow the instauration of these works. Starting from the analysis of this experience, one intends the rising of appealing subjects in such practice, from reference selection, considering the operative actions, as well as elements varied in nature that involve a particular plastic practice and that find reverberations in the production. Hence, the approached subjects are: the use of the photographic resources in painting, the exploration of the pictorial matter, the importance of time effect in this process, the work recordings and the reflexes and dialogues with the other painters' work. This research is structured as a documentation of a work process. In that sense, here, the hesitations, the questionings, the hypotheses and the experimentations related to painting are presented.

This project explores the relationships between people, environment, and possibility through two of the world's smallest materials: agricultural seeds and mushroom cultures. While often seen as products of nature, seeds and cultures also embody complex social, historical, political and economic realities as they come into contact with human hands. Through fieldwork on small-scale farms in southern Illinois, including farm tours, agricultural trainings and interviews, as well as an analysis of seed descriptions in a popular heirloom seed catalog, this thesis explores how produce seeds and mushroom cultures become things that are known through place and practice. Planting a seed or inoculating a culture is not a simple action, but one imbued with intention, hope and even revolution.