A proliferation of media discourse on the ‘phenomenon’ of violent women in 1960s and 1970s West Germany suggests that the violent woman is a troubling figure who provokes both fascination and fear. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject provides a language for understanding and accounting for the complex mixture of emotions the figure elicits. For Kristeva, abjection is a violent revolt against something which threatens the subject, which may be both “other” or foreign, and familiar; we abject that which cannot be tolerated, cannot be thought or known, which provokes both desire and repulsion. Troubling about the violent woman, and what renders her culturally unintelligible or unimaginable, is that she takes life rather than giving it. In this study, I trace the various attempts made by the print media to assimilate the violent woman, to make her thinkable and knowable and, as a result, to defuse her threat. More frequently, she is made other, abjected either in the Kristevan sense or in the (related) more literal sense: ‘cast off,’ ‘excluded,’ ‘rejected’ or ‘degraded.’ West Germany of the 1960s and 1970s provides a good time-frame for the study: West German terrorism, which involved a large number of women, was at its peak in the 1970s, and a number of high-profile trials against non-politically violent women also took place during the period. In chapter one of the thesis, I look at how the violent woman is rendered the negative and ‘unnatural’ (m)other of the proper German woman and nation, the better to bolster hegemonic understandings of both woman and nation; in chapter two, how she is made hysterical and feminised so as to defuse the threat that she poses; in chapter three, how her crime is redefined as a crime against her gender and sexuality (one idea here is that it is the ‘man inside’ who is to blame). Finally, in chapter four, I explore how the violent woman is abjected through association with filth and defilement. Arguably it is because the strategies which attempt to assimilate, to know and to name her fail or are only partially successful, that the violent woman must be abjected from the body politic through association with dirt.

There have been significant advances in the research of nanoparticle technologies for formation evaluation and reservoir engineering operations. The target applications require a variety of different retention characteristics ranging from nanoparticles that adsorb near the wellbore to nanoparticles that can travel significant distances within the porous medium with little or no retention on the grain substrate. A detailed understanding of the underlying mechanisms that cause nanoparticle retention is necessary to design these applications. In this thesis, experiments were conducted to quantify nanoparticle retention in unconsolidated columns packed with crushed Boise sandstone and kaolinite clay. Experimental parameters such as flow rate, injected concentration and sandpack composition were varied in a controlled fashion to test hypotheses concerning retention mechanisms and enable development and validation of a mathematical model of nanoparticle transport. Results indicate nanoparticle retention, defined as the concentration of nanoparticles remaining attached to grains in the porous medium after a volume of nanoparticle dispersion is injected through the medium and then displaced with brine, is a function of injected fluid velocity with higher injected velocities leading to lower retention. In many cases nanoparticle retention increased nonlinearly with increasing concentration of nanoparticles in the injected dispersion. Nanoparticle retention concentration was found to exhibit an upper bound beyond which no further adsorption from the nanoparticle dispersion to the grain substrate occurred. Kaolinite clay was shown to exhibit lower retention concentration [mg/m2] than Boise sandstone suggesting DLVO interactions do not significantly influence nanoparticle retention in high salinity dynamic flow environments. / text

“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” -- Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs As we stand beyond the brink of the 21st Century, we are outside of the boundaries where the Ivory Tower approach to education is applicable, particularly in regards to the teaching of practical knowledge and the acquisition of necessary technical skills. We must also, however, address the very real scalability issues inherit in the One Room Schoolhouse approach, as the numbers of students who need education are not likely to shrink anytime soon. We are no longer apes on the savannah and we can no longer afford to act as robotic vessels in search of knowledge from academia’s font of knowledge. Technology is the future of our society and it is only growing in complexity. If we are to efficiently instruct our students in the ever-growing fields of general study and technology they face, we need to find a hybrid, or cyborg, approach, melding the ape and the robot. / text

Over the past decades, people have had an increasing chance to receive eco- nomic information, especially news related to the stock market. This is because the fraction of the U.S. population owning stocks has increased rapidly. However, it does not mean that a majority of news sources have started to deal with financial news more. We do not know how traditional media, such as newspapers, have dealt with financial news during the same period, nor do we know the influence of this environmental change on political attitudes. In this report, I analyze the type of contexts in which the stock market has been described in The New York Times from 1981 to 2011 by Wordfish and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. I find that a plunge in the stock market and political events affect the amount of political topics in stock market news. In particular, after the financial crisis of 2008–2009, stock market news consisted of economic, political, and social topics. / text

A movement through a calm -- Five responses -- Storms and staples sing halleluja! -- A day in Monroe County. / text

In today’s new media landscape, who tells the story and how it is told has changed from the traditional journalistic rituals of the past. This study examines four cases within sports media that challenge the sports media complex, a complicated partnership between sports organizations and personalities and the outlets that cover them. This research focuses on the impact of technological advances in communication on this institutionalized connection between media and sport and finds that while there are several factors that have affected the strength of the sports media complex, new media continue to serve as a catalyst in the erosion of the relationship between legacy media and sports’ governing bodies. / text

An observation of the evolution of the marketing messages of Telecommunications Company Vodafone between 2007 and 2013 sheds light on the significant changes that occurred in the communications arena throughout this period. The shift is not a hypothetical one; it is real and reflected in the shifting usage profiles of millions of mobile users. Moreover the shift is not limited to the changes in the technology which enables mediated conversation. Reference is made to existing literature to define the activity under study, understand the historical context of conversation, both in the mobile and online space, measure the present shifts and explore how findings can contribute to a better understanding of the future. In the context of the existing body of work and the significant changes that occurred over the past years, the research aims to propose a new model of conversation in response to the chosen research question, which asks, “how is conversation evolving as a result of take up of new media in Malta?“ A two‐step approach is adopted. The first research stream makes use of a data set of usage logs of a sample of smartphone adopters on the Vodafone network. A comparison of the usage logs before and after adoption is used to shed light on the influence of the device on the users’ conversations. The analysis is supported with two secondary experiments, one relating to the usage of mobile Internet on specific days during the year and the other extending the experiment to everyday conversation on Facebook. The second research stream consists of a review of the new media landscape with a specific focus on key themes. The findings are used to corroborate a model of shifting conversation. The model proposes that conversation is captured in three dimensions - a shift from synchronous to asynchronous conversation, from private to public and from transient to persistent exchanges.

The critical commentary presents and contextualizes a film and video making practice spanning three decades. It locates a contemporary visual music practice within current and emerging critical and theoretical contexts and tracks back the history of this practice to the artist’s initial screenings of work as part of the 1980’s British Scratch video art movement. At the heart of the body of work presented here is an exploration and examination of methods and working practices in the encounter of music, sound and moving image. Central to this is an examination of the affective levels that sound and image can operate on, in a transsensorial fusion, and political and cultural applications of such encounters, whilst examining the epistemological regimes such work operates in. A combination of factors has meant that work such as this, arising in the UK provinces, can fall below the historicizing and critical radar – these include the ephemeral and transitory nature of live performance work; the difficulties of documenting such work; the fragility and degeneration of emerging and quickly obsolescent formats; and a predominance of a London–centric focus on curating, screening and historicizing of experimental film and video art practices. My film and video practice has been screened nationally and internationally over three decades, and has been recognized as exemplary practice both in the early 1980s at the inception of the Scratch movement and in more recent retrospectives. The critical commentary argues that this work contributes new knowledge of the history, contexts and practices of film and video art and audiovisual and visual music practices.

This research examines Vietnamese in London, focusing on identity formation and community networks through transnational activities. I argue that ‘the transnational’ is a ‘subset’ of migrant categories, and that Vietnamese transnational identities depend on the measurable activities in which they are involved. Important aspects of this research are: First, the Vietnamese are one of the first major non-British Commonwealth peoples to migrate into the United Kingdom in the modern era. This has had implications related to settlement into British society, overcome by the subsequent shift from refugee status to transnational activity and identities, resulting in widespread Vietnamese transnational networks. Second, the Vietnamese represent one of the first ‘quota’ refugee populations granted entry into the UK. Refugees were accepted prior to entering Britain, and upon arrival, government and private support structures were provided. Also, Vietnamese refugees underwent mandatory dispersal across the UK, a detrimental situation prompting a subsequent intra-Britain migration to urban centres, particularly London. Third, Vietnamese communities in Britain have distinctive characteristics, making a study of identities and networks an interesting and useful one, particularly in light of developing research in transnational studies. These characteristics include the Vietnamese North-South cultural and linguistic ‘divide’, the presence of Vietnamese and Chinese-background Vietnamese, and differences in the timing and reasons for migration. Key research questions relate to transnational activities, identities, and community networks played out in the role, reach and specific pathways of those activities across national borders. Key questions are: ‘What does it mean to be a transnationally active Vietnamese Londoner?’ and ‘How are Vietnamese Londoners engaged in community-based transnational networks?’ These questions are addressed using interviews, participant observation, participation in Vietnamese-related conferences, and in informal conversations on the street and in local Vietnamese shops. This research relates stories of contextualised transnational identities linking Vietnamese from London across the globe.

This thesis examines the mediation of the nation-state as a dimension of the diasporic experience of place. It focuses on the consumption of mass-media about Israel or originating from it by people residing outside of the country. I understand this mediation to take place continuously throughout the day, in multiple spaces, through different technologies. As such, it forms part of the experience of place in media- saturated (urban) environments, allowing for a distant nation-state to become embedded in daily routines. In order to theorise this experience, I draw on Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology, which understands place through embodied perception and habit, and on studies of diaspora and media, which examine the social meanings and uses of media among specific transnational groups. This qualitative project is based on a researcher-absent exercise and extended interviews with British Jews and Israeli immigrants in London. Analysis reveals that orientation includes four areas of practice: investing and withdrawing emotions as part of managing ‘care’, searching for truth, distinguishing between ordinary and extraordinary time, and domesticating media. Some of these practices may be particular to the case of Israel, but some are shaped by discourses around insecurity, rather than Zionism itself. Others appear to be related to experiences of migration and diaspora in general. I argue that these practices are ‘orientational practices’ in which people endeavour to make sense of spatial positioning through negotiating distance and controlling media. I theorise media as ‘orientation devices’ in diasporic everyday life, but ones that are unstable, contested and reflected upon, and hence never fully habituated. The resulting experience is one of increased reflexivity about everyday place and, paradoxically, increased dependency on media for orientation. I conclude by suggesting that practices of orientation point to a mode of being in place in globalisation that is not sufficiently addressed by the dominant understanding of ‘belonging’.