"Cine en Emergencia: National Identity in Post-dictatorial Audiovisual Production in Paraguay," is an academic study of narrative and documentary film from Paraguay. Cinematic production in Paraguay has "boomed" only with the last decade in part due to the censorship of the long-standing Stroessner regime and in part because new digital technologies have made audiovisual production more accessible. This study explores the dominance of a particular essentialized national identity in narrative and documentary film in Paraguay. This iconic protagonist and space (the campesino in the rural setting) is not the site of true Paraguayan authenticity, but rather, the product of competing national and transnational forces. Inside Paraguay, rural icons become the grounds from which to express political resistance and frustration with the status quo. Outside of Paraguay--particularly in the European power center of film festivals, funding and awards--a homogeneous and uncontested set of representations of national identity becomes the paradigm that satisfies the "first world" need to essentialize and orientalize the "third world." In the introduction I make my methodology clear, stressing that I am focusing my critical apparatus on circulating discourses regarding what it means to be a citizen of that Paraguay. I also grapple with the difficulty of dealing with a film archive that is classified as national while trying to dislodge the national frame as the paradigm for analysis and provide a problematization of the relationship between film and nation that has been so widely and uncritically accepted. In Chapter 1 I provide a historical contextualization for the relationship between film and the nation and provide important details in regards to the history of the moving image in Paraguay. In Chapter 2 I explore Hamaca Paraguaya's (2006) potential for resistance through formal subversion, historical revisionism, self-reflexivity and political denunciation. Using a double-register, in Chapter 3 I describe the transnational power structure as a palimpsest against which Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and how this bleeds through into Hamaca as a cultural product. In Chapter 4 I analyze Frankfurt (2006) as a documentary that creates parallels between Paraguay's historical border wars and present-day global neoliberal capitalism.

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Through the use of the smart phone application, Snapchat, people use the features and abilities to express themselves and communicate with their friends. With the accessibility of mobile phones and the special features of a camera on each side, making the action of taking a selfie more efficient, the allure of the application is endless. The temporariness of the photos taken through Snapchat and the additional features users are able to include provide an opportunity for them to have control over what they distribute throughout social media. The project included a variety of Snapchats from over 10 different users of various ages from all over the world. With the given prompts, they delivered Snapchats to their best friends, classmates, or on their "My Story" as they wished. The decisions of who received the Snapchats and for how long, demonstrated the control these participants were able to have while using the application. This control allows for the opportunity to explore and define one's self identity and representation through a social media platform.

With the rise of First Nations owned and created television content at the turn of the century, came a demand to see an accurate representation of Aboriginality that could look at Aboriginals as both here and modern. From 2003-2006, the first Aboriginal made and produced television series entitled Moccasin Flats, I argue, used modern day hip-hop discourse to both engage and dissect a host of complex issues facing modern day urban Aboriginal society. This research project mobilizes multiple methodologies; including: 1.) Eco’s code and sign function semiotic analysis, which operates to identify various hip-hop codes in the text; 2.)Hall’s method of articulation to look at how meaning is fixed in the discourse surrounding the show; and finally 3) Deleuze’s rhizomic approach to identity to see how the shows main characters are constructed in a way to highlight the paradoxical and undercut certain flirtations with essentialization. This three-tiered methodological process paints a picture of a new complex use of discourse to accentuate different facets of aboriginality that had previously been the sole product of dominant hegemonic institutions which relied on racist stereotypes. By dissecting how identity is formed on Moccasin Flats, I will show how aboriginal filmmakers construct a self-reflexive space where the character is perpetually in the process of ‘becoming’ and identity is always a site of negotiation.

This thesis examines some of the ways in which phenomenology might be applied to the representation of landscape experience within contemporary art practice. In particular, the thesis examines how embodied landscape experience, informed by an understanding of phenomenology, might be articulated by contemporary art practice that uses the media of film and digital video. The thesis also questions ways in which time might contribute to an understanding of such a representation of the landscape. Based on a critical analysis of landscape experience and its representation in art practice, the thesis identifies critical omissions both within the aligned disciplines of cultural anthropology and art history, particularly in instances where art has been employed ineptly as a tool for critical enquiry. Through a conceptual analysis of phenomenology, cultural archaeology, cultural anthropology, theories of technology, art history, critical film theory and art practice, this project makes a critical examination of new ways in which art can articulate phenomenological notions of landscape experience, both in the forms of a written exegesis and in examples of my own practice. To these ends, the writing of Christopher Tilley and Tim Ingold is examined in order to draw upon some of the ways in which cultural archaeology and cultural anthropology use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and James Gibson’s ecological theory of visual perception to understand an embodied engagement with the landscape. Following an expanded phenomenological examination of landscape the thesis identifies ways in which cultural anthropology has used painting. This examination is followed by an analysis of the work of Mike Michael and Don Ihde in order to determine the role played by technology within the mediation of experience and its representation in art. The writing of Joyce Brodsky is examined to analyse the relationship between embodied experience and art practice and, using Sobchack’s analysis, the thesis describes ways in which Merleau-Ponty’s idea of reversibility can explain moving imagery as the perception and expression of experience. As part of the method of analysis, a case study is conducted into how phenomenological ideas that have been identified in association with landscape experience might be understood within Tacita Dean’s work Disappearance at Sea. An analysis of phenomenological notions of landscape experience within my own art practice has led to the generation of a body of practice that includes film and digital video media. Key examples of my art practice have been selected that can articulate this thesis. Specifically, a 16mm film, Line, and a digital video, Length II provide evidence of contemporary art practice articulating an experience of the landscape from a phenomenological viewpoint. Within the production of moving imagery, there is a sequence of human actions and technological interventions that can be considered in phenomenological terms. Through a reflection of my own embodied experience - extended by vehicles, cameras and their associated technology - Line and Length II pay specific attention to how the placement of a camera and its associated technology mediates the mobile character of an experience of the landscape. Central to this enquiry has been the contention that through a rigorous application of phenomenology, a new mode of making moving imagery emerges, specifically one that gives particular emphasis to the placement of the camera and its associated technology in order to reveal the dynamic relationship between a perceiver and their environment in the twenty-first century.

This thesis has two main concerns. First it attempts to shed new light on the ways in which alternative "critical" approaches have developed within management accounting research, over the past two decades, to challenge approaches which depict accounting in organizations as a rational, objective and value-free device. My literature review analyses the range of issues covered by the new approaches, and their boundaries, and suggests that, to date, the more significant contributions have taken place at the theoretical level, although an increasing amount of empirical research is coming through. My second and major objective is to contribute to the critical project in two ways: empirically, by undertaking a field study in an area where management accounting systems (hereafter MAS) are not necessarily accepted in a taken-for-granted way, the not-for-profit performing arts sector, and theoretically, by developing and validating, via this field study, a conceptual framework adapted from organization theory, which may help shed light on a theoretical issue which seems to have been somewhat overlooked, the reciprocal way in which individuals interact with MAS, as a problem .of power relations. The play of relations which I wish to scrutinize is best expressed in the following two questions: How do the actions of individuals affect the power of MAS? How does the power of MAS affect the actions of individuals? Methodologically, the conceptual framework is designed to enable me to analyse action in terms of the interactions between "individuals", "concrete systems of action" and the social, economic and cultural "environment". I aim to identify the relative influence on power relations of MAS, when compared with other "concrete systems of action", bearing in mind three types of constraint: those arising in the "immediate" environment, and others deriving from the "politicaleconomic" and "cultural-aesthetic" environments. My objective is to examine the extent to which MAS are appropriated as a resource by individuals in search of, or in the exercise of, power within not-for-profit based theatres. I have undertaken comparative field research in two countries, in order to see what regularities and differences there may be within and between countries. Data were gathered through direct observation and interviews, plus written documentation from two theatres in Montreal, Canada, and two in the English Midlands. Given the qualitative nature of my research, and in order to maintain a formal separation of observations and interpretation, I first present the detail of my findings using a simple narrative format, before presenting the interpretation based on my conceptual framework. My findings suggest that, even though many organizational actors still perceive an incompatibility between MAS and artistic objectives, artistic activity is heavily shaped by accounting-related activities, across all departments, in all theatres. Accounting discourse in general, and the MAS in particular, does affect actions and represents an indispensable resource in negotiations with outside actors, e.g. sponsors, funding bodies, formal Boards. At the same time, my comparative data suggest that an MAS which is structured to allow individuals to participate actively and positively in day-to-day accounting work will be more positively perceived by managers, even in a not-for-profit, performing arts contexts, as a helpful and constructive means of reconciling the aesthetic and economic objectives which are required for their organization's survival and success.

The metaphor of politics-as-performance is commonly found in the political vernacular, from political ‘actors’ on the world ‘stage’ to the phenomenon of actors-turned-politicians. This interdisciplinary thesis comprises an extended exploration of the metaphor of politics-as-performance to generate a thick description of how political actors are represented in the visible public sphere. Performance theory has a strong heritage in other disciplines within social science, notably sociology (Goffman) and social anthropology (Turner), but has had more limited application in political science. Taking this limitation as a starting point, the thesis will argue that the metaphor of politics-as-performance is more than a banal turn of phrase. It can be a powerful analytical and theoretical tool in exploring the role, form and content of political information in a deliberative democracy. The thesis sets up and draws upon four UK-based case studies: the 2007 Blair-Brown premiership handover; the Scottish National Party’s 2007 election campaign; the Faslane 365 nuclear blockade in 2006-2007; and the London ‘7/7’ terrorist attack in 2005. These cases generate a thick description of the metaphor by combining ethnographic participant-observation and document analysis with the analytical tools and concepts of performance analysis such as staging, scripting and body work analysis. The analysis of the empirical research highlights the complexity of the practice of political representation in an increasingly mediatised public sphere, as well as providing an experiential account of lived deliberation. In the case of the Blair-Brown handover, the thesis shows how the scripted characterisation and iterative rituals of national identity reinforce each political actor’s representative authority. This is contrasted with the more playful, ludic performance of the Scottish National Party’s election campaign based on the ‘presence’ of key actors. The thesis also shows how unconventional political actors used more visceral and embodied performance techniques to gain visibility in the public sphere. The Faslane protestors, as well as incorporating devices such as humour and music into their performance, focus on transformations of their performing bodies and use themselves as representations of resistance. This theme of representing resistance is developed in the London terror attack case where the performance enforces violent transformations not only of the political actors’ bodies and symbolically-resonant spaces but of the audience as well. The empirical cases thus provide a richly textured account of the techniques that both conventional and unconventional political actors use to insert themselves into the public sphere. In conclusion, the thesis offers a descriptive construction of the metaphor of politics-as-performance. This demonstrates its applicability to the political sphere and highlights the performative aspects of deliberation.

This thesis argues that a performer’s relationship with a musical score is an interaction largely defined by social and cultural parameters, but also examines whether disparate musical traditions show any common underlying tendencies regarding the perceived relationship between musical sound and visual representation. The research brings a novel, cross-cultural perspective to bear on the topic, combining a systematic, empirical study with qualitative fieldwork. Data were collected at five sites in three countries, involving: classically-trained musicians based in the UK; traditional Japanese musicians both familiar and unfamiliar with western standard notation; literate Eastern Highlanders from Port- Moresby, Papua New Guinea; and members of the BenaBena tribe, a non-literate community in Papua New Guinea. Participants heard short musical stimuli that varied on three musical parameters (pitch, duration and attack rate) and were instructed to represent these visually so that if another community member saw the marks they should be able to connect them with the sounds. Secondly, a forced-choice design required participants to select the best shape to describe a sound from a database. Interviews and fieldwork observations recorded how musicians engaged with the visual representation of music, considering in particular the effects of literacy and cultural parameters such as the social context of music performance traditions. Similarities between certain aspects of the participants’ responses suggest that there are indeed some underlying commonalities among literate participants of any cultural background. Meanwhile, the overall variety of responses suggests that the association between music and its visual representation (when it takes place) is strongly affected by ever-altering socio-cultural parameters.

Student Number : 9206749J - PhD thesis - School of Mathematics - Faculty of Science / For right near-rings the left representation has always been considered the natural one. A study of right representation for right distributively generated (d.g.) near-rings was initiated by Rahbari and this work is extended here to introduce radical-like objects in the near-ring R using right R-groups. The right radicals rJ0(R), rJ1/2(R) and rJ2(R) are defined as counterparts of the left radicals J0(R), J1/2(R) and J2(R) respectively, and their properties are discussed. Of particular interest are the relationships between the left and right radicals. It is shown for example that for all finite d.g. near-rings R with identity, J2(R) = rJ0(R) = rJ1/2(R) = rJ2(R). A right anti-radical, rSoi(R), is defined for d.g. near-rings with identity, using a construction that is analogous to that of the (left) socle-ideal, Soi(R). In particular, it is shown that for finite d.g. near-rings with identity, an ideal A is contained in rSoi(R) if and only if A \ J2(R) = (0). The relationship between the left and right socle-ideals is investigated, and it is established that rSoi(R) #18; Soi(R) for d.g. near-rings with identity and satisfying the descending chain condition for left R-subgroups.