The research upon which the outputs submitted as part of this thesis are based examines the socio-cultural environment of the Northeast of Scotland, from Aberdeen to Cabrach and from Portsoy to Laurencekirk. In total, five hundred and twenty hours of research data were collected as part of a project that began in 1987. This thesis investigates and visualises aspects of cultural identity representing the historical lifestyles of the "ordinary people" within rural Aberdeenshire circa 1890s-1950s. A unique feature of this research is the use of video as a tool for data gathering and presentation. The key themes are direct observations of the "ordinary people" and the author's rural ancestors. The use of the visual dynamic and the Doric dialect capture the ordinary person's testimony what a "past way of life" was like within Aberdeenshire. The research was initiated as a response to the author's cultural pride in his ancestors. It was not initially envisaged as a formal piece of academic research; the author conducted the research from a simplistic "desire to know". However, through reflective analysis of the research it can clearly demonstrate a rigorous research methodology, which has been replicated within the thesis. The procedures and methods engage with ordinary people in the real world, and help visualise and communicate material heritage. Through the identification of suitable topics, respondent selection, data capture, data analysis, critical review, post-production, archive management and research funding, aspects of the past are sustained. This new data has the potential to be future-proof and is unique in its content. The six topic videos, refereed conference papers, television features, and press articles have captured and sustained irreplaceable data. The research output has been utilised and subjected to critical peer review by diverse user groups locally, nationally and internationally. The work has credible and diverse endorsements and has also been accepted as authentic by the host community, going a long way to developing greater cultural pride. It captures a lost cultural identity in an innovative manner and presents output in a way which is both significant to user groups and also capable of furthering greater knowledge and understanding. This practitioner-based research has the potential to enhance future developments within the field of study through the embracing of modern visual technology in its widest sense.

The main objectives of this research were to determine the influence of bush identity on attitudes to mental health in rural Australia, what influence these attitudes have on service provision and utilisation, and what measures can be taken to improve attitudes to mental health and services in the bush. The research has included an extensive literature review of Australian historical and contemporary rural culture, the political economy of rural restructuring, rural mental health, as well as State and Federal policies and programmes for mental health care delivery. An ethnographic community study of “Ruraltown”, a rural centre in Queensland, was undertaken over a three-year period which involved semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, observations and community interaction. The results from the questionnaires and interviews in the community study indicate that attitudes to mental health in rural areas are influenced by bush identity, defined by reference to historical and current characteristics which include self-reliance, resilience, independence and stoicism. Social identity theories have been applied in this study to determine how the socialisation processes have incorporated these characteristics among the rural population, and rural males especially. In turn, these incorporated attributes and values have a direct impact on their attitudes to mental health and the willingness to seek help for problems of a psychological nature. Other aspects of rural life such as perceived lack of confidentiality and anonymity, fear of gossip, and isolation also impact on attitudes and the utilisation of mental health resources. Stigma is a significant barrier to recognition and acceptance of mental health issues. Hence, seeking help for mental health problems does not form part of the coping strategies for many in the bush. Mental health services, therefore, are not as readily accepted or utilised in rural Australia. Although some rural people do access mental health services, many more go on suffering with mental health problems rather than addressing them. Recommendations have been made to promote awareness and enhance education and attitudes to mental health, improve services and increase service utilisation. The study has also identified the problems facing mental health consumers in Ruraltown and some suggestions have been made to overcome these and assist in consumer empowerment.

<p>Recent national elections in the United States and Canada reveal an urban/rural cleavage in vote choice. This cleavage has been overshadowed by the red state/blue state analysis in the United States and dismissed as an artifact of demographic and regional differences in Canada; however, this voting gap appears to have emerged with the increasing salience of "culture war" issues in North American politics. Sociological theory suggests that there may be an affinity between urban and rural place of residence and the progressivist and traditionalist poles of the culture war which may explain urban/rural differences in vote choice. In the present study, urban/rural voting differences are assessed using election surveys from the Canadian Federal and United States Presidential Elections of 2004 and using aggregate data from Canadian Federal and United States Presidential Elections since 1920. The results show that the urban/rural gap has grown to its widest point in recent elections in both countries, coinciding with the reorganization of the right wing of Canadian party politics and the domination of the Republican Party by social conservatives in the United States. After controlling for demographic and social characteristics, rural residents are found to be on average more socially and morally traditional than urban residents. Individual attitudes on gay marriage, abortion and gun control contributed to the urban/rural voting differences observed in both countries. It is concluded that the high profile of moral and social issues associated with the culture war has led to the manifestation of urban/rural cultural differences as a political cleavage in recent Canadian and American national elections.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

Precision farming integrates satellite coordination and information communication technologies into farming practices to deliver self-driving and auto-regulating machinery and equipment to farmers, who can afford to invest, right across the globe. It is often sold on the basis that it can help clean up or ‘ecologically modernise’ conventional, industrial agriculture. It should also increase production rates in industrial agriculture to help to ‘feed the world’ as well as being cost effective in ways that could make farmers more money – miracle-grow formula and win-win technology. There are critical concerns that precision farming facilitates a continuing trend of transnational firms appropriating control over agricultural industries. Many neo-Marxist or neo-Weberian critics contend that any ‘green’ benefits fall secondary to the more dominant social and economic trend of ongoing capital accumulation, increasing rationalisation and industrial progress that has been deemed detrimental to natural environments and human populations. These social and economic pressures are actually the real drivers in change. Rather than greening industrial agriculture, precision farming is another way of masking over and profiting from the risks caused by ongoing capitalist accumulation and industrial agriculture. The other set of concerns are to do with human culture and labour. Farming is the grass roots of modern civilisation and dependent upon human labour, knowledge and cultural methods. With the introduction of data over knowledge, and auto-steering tractors over human labour and skills, what kinds of impacts will this have on farm families, rural cultures within countryside landscapes in Britain or other countries where precision farming is being adopted? As a farmer’s son, I was concerned about the impact the computerisation of agriculture will have on family farms, nature and rural communities. I spent four years interviewing and working with a cooperative group of Duchy of Cornwall farmers in the West Country of England. I wanted to know why they were using these new technologies and the kinds of benefits, impacts or outcomes that they experienced following adoption. The results tend to confirm critics’ concerns, unfortunately. Precision farming has much more to do with the organising of agricultural production. The restructuring of farming by way of precision farming greater empowers transnational agribusinesses and Agri-Food supply chains, rather than protecting the environment, feeding hungry people or making family farming more sustainable. I conclude my research by suggesting that it is not technology, or agricultural technologies such as precision farming that will deliver these end goals in and of them selves. There could be room to improve precision farming systems if they are coupled with well-managed policy designs and agri-environmental schemes.

No description available.

Esta tese investiga a representação do caipira na dramaturgia de Carlos Alberto Soffredini. Para isso, analiso quatro peças teatrais que tratam dessa temática: Na carrêra do divino, de 1979, A estrambótica aventura da música caipira, de 1990, Auto de Natal caipira, de 1992, e A madrasta, de 1995. A fim de entender como se construíram essas representações em sua obra, são examinados diversos elementos da cultura popular mobilizados pelo autor, a construção de personagens em cada peça, as escolhas entre recursos dramáticos ou épicos e as variadas fontes de pesquisa utilizadas pelo dramaturgo para a composição de seus textos, bem como a maneira como elas foram incorporadas. O trabalho também procura investigar as transformações ocorridas nessa construção do caipira dentro da produção do dramaturgo, entre o final dos anos 1970 e a década de 1990, e as mudanças em relação aos referentes anteriores nas letras e nas artes brasileiras do início do século XX (sobretudo a figura paradigmática de Jeca Tatu, criada por Monteiro Lobato). Sustento que há variações importantes no trabalho feito por Soffredini envolvendo a figura do caipira, que não é uma construção homogênea, como pretendo mostrar, o que nos leva a perceber, como um traço importante da sua dramaturgia, a consciência das contradições envolvidas no debate sobre a cultura popular. / This thesis investigates the representations of Brazilian rural man in Carlos Alberto Soffredini\'s dramaturgy. To do so, we analyze four plays that deal with such theme: Na Carrêra do Divino, from 1979, A estrambótica aventura da música caipira, from 1990, Auto de Natal Caipira, from 1992, and A Madrasta, from 1995. In order to understand how these representations were built into the author\'s work, we will analyze his use of different aspects of popular culture. We will also pay attention to: the construction of the characters in each play; the choices made between dramatic and epic resources and the variable research sources used by the author for the composition of his texts, as well as the way in which these sources were incorporated in his plays. The dissertation also seeks to investigate the transformations which occurred within Soffredini\'s work, between the late 70\'s and the 90\'s, and the changes in relation to the representation of the rural man in Brazilian\'s early twentieth century literature and culture (in particular, with reference to the paradigmatic figure of Jeca Tatu, by Monteiro Lobato). I argue and intend to show that there are important variations in Soffredini\'s work involving rural man\'s figure, which is not a homogeneous construction. This leads us to perceive, as an important aspect of his dramaturgy, a critical consciousness about the contradictions involving the debate surrounding popular culture.

Esta tese investiga a representação do caipira na dramaturgia de Carlos Alberto Soffredini. Para isso, analiso quatro peças teatrais que tratam dessa temática: Na carrêra do divino, de 1979, A estrambótica aventura da música caipira, de 1990, Auto de Natal caipira, de 1992, e A madrasta, de 1995. A fim de entender como se construíram essas representações em sua obra, são examinados diversos elementos da cultura popular mobilizados pelo autor, a construção de personagens em cada peça, as escolhas entre recursos dramáticos ou épicos e as variadas fontes de pesquisa utilizadas pelo dramaturgo para a composição de seus textos, bem como a maneira como elas foram incorporadas. O trabalho também procura investigar as transformações ocorridas nessa construção do caipira dentro da produção do dramaturgo, entre o final dos anos 1970 e a década de 1990, e as mudanças em relação aos referentes anteriores nas letras e nas artes brasileiras do início do século XX (sobretudo a figura paradigmática de Jeca Tatu, criada por Monteiro Lobato). Sustento que há variações importantes no trabalho feito por Soffredini envolvendo a figura do caipira, que não é uma construção homogênea, como pretendo mostrar, o que nos leva a perceber, como um traço importante da sua dramaturgia, a consciência das contradições envolvidas no debate sobre a cultura popular. / This thesis investigates the representations of Brazilian rural man in Carlos Alberto Soffredini\'s dramaturgy. To do so, we analyze four plays that deal with such theme: Na Carrêra do Divino, from 1979, A estrambótica aventura da música caipira, from 1990, Auto de Natal Caipira, from 1992, and A Madrasta, from 1995. In order to understand how these representations were built into the author\'s work, we will analyze his use of different aspects of popular culture. We will also pay attention to: the construction of the characters in each play; the choices made between dramatic and epic resources and the variable research sources used by the author for the composition of his texts, as well as the way in which these sources were incorporated in his plays. The dissertation also seeks to investigate the transformations which occurred within Soffredini\'s work, between the late 70\'s and the 90\'s, and the changes in relation to the representation of the rural man in Brazilian\'s early twentieth century literature and culture (in particular, with reference to the paradigmatic figure of Jeca Tatu, by Monteiro Lobato). I argue and intend to show that there are important variations in Soffredini\'s work involving rural man\'s figure, which is not a homogeneous construction. This leads us to perceive, as an important aspect of his dramaturgy, a critical consciousness about the contradictions involving the debate surrounding popular culture.

Historically, American farmers have been identified as white, middle-aged, working- to middle-class, men who reside in rural environments to grow large expanses of corn, soybeans, or wheat. However, this dissertation questions this fraught representation of past farmers and introduces a new identity in contemporary American agriculture - Young Farmers. Usually, Young Farmers are first-generation agriculturalists, who hold small parcels of land, produce a diverse assortment of crops, and adopt items of rural material culture to better perform as farmers. Additionally, they believe their lifestyles and their existences are dependent upon interactions with their local environments and members of their communities. By focusing on these individuals, this study examines how American farmers, the environments they inhabit, the goods they produce, and the locations they distribute their products have changed, especially after the most recent Farm Crisis in the 1980s.<div><br></div><div>To best understand these alterations, this dissertation offers an exploration of three farmers market locations in Michigan's Lower Peninsula to highlight and compare the social, cultural, environmental, and economic shifts occurring in the agricultural community. Arguably, farmers markets provide Young Farmers a space to meet prospective consumers and to distribute their products to them. Likewise, these site are a venue for Young Farmers to develop successful systems of community with other people involved with small-scale farming. Throughout this dissertation, I layer ethnographic and historical archive data with quantitative metrics, such as U.S. Census Bureau data to better explain demographic shifts occurring across Michigan's farming landscape. Additionally, I critically analyze images associated with past and current representations of individuals involved with agriculture to address how Young Farmers redefine themselves culturally and participate in methods of food and economic sustainability. By studying and understanding the codependence of the people and place who comprise farmers and farming communities in a representative location like Michigan, I recognize the relevance of the Midwest as a crossroads of contemporary American agriculture. </div>

Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-27T13:46:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MARIA APARECIDA DE CASTRO.pdf: 1517780 bytes, checksum: 42a122f451bbf8da8fe0dfdb12aeac7e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-18 / This thesis aims at analyze the role of religion, patriarchy, and coronelismo in rural genesis of the ethos of the culture in Goiás. In order to achieve that, we "interpreted", "scrutinized" and "unveiled" three tales of Bernardo Élis: Nhola dos Anjos e cheia do Corumbá, A virgem santíssima do quarto de Joana e A enxada. In these tales, we investigated the bernardiano rural world, a "fictional world" which never existed, but it is loaded with "truth." Its "truth" involves the regional and the universal tragedy experienced by the characters embodied in the rural landscape of Goiás. In the rural setting, enforced by Élis´ writing, religion is a synonym of rustic catholicism while patriarchy and the coronelismo are displayed, among other things, in degraded and hierarchical relationships marked by domination, psychological and physical violence against the weaker. We are relying on the literary hermeneutics and the thought of theorists, ranging from Bourdieu (1998) to Martins (1997, 2001, 2007), to conduct a study of Bernardo Élis under the light of theoretical views of religion sociology, rural sociology, agrarian history, literary and gender studies. Although the culture is a changing historical product, in order to "deconstruct" the tales of Bernardo Élis, we revealed disguised aspects of the "lasting" influence of rustic catholicism and the modus operandi of the patriarchy and the coronelismo in the ethos of the culture in Goiás. / Esta tese tem como objetivo analisar o papel da religião, do patriarcalismo e do coronelismo na gênese rural do ethos da cultura goiana. Nesse intuito, são interpretados , esmiuçados e desvelados três contos de Bernardo Élis: Nhola dos Anjos e cheia do Corumbá, A virgem santíssima do quarto de Joana e A enxada. Neles, investigamos o mundo rural bernardiano, um mundo fictício , que nunca existiu, mas que está carregado de verdade . Sua verdade comporta tanto o regional, quanto o universal na tragédia vivida pelos personagens plasmados nas paisagens rurais goianas. No mundo rural, erigido pela força do texto de Élis, religião é sinônimo de catolicismo rústico, e o patriarcalismo, assim como o coronelismo, estão à mostra, entre outros aspectos, em relações hierárquicas degradadas e marcadas pela dominação, pela violência psíquica e física contra os mais fracos. Utilizamo-nos da hermenêutica literária e do pensamento de teóricos, dentre os quais destacamos Bourdieu (1998) e Martins (1997, 2001, 2007), para realizarmos uma leitura de Bernardo Élis à luz das visões teóricas da sociologia da religião, da sociologia rural, da história agrária, e também de estudos literários e de gênero. Embora a cultura seja produto histórico mutante, ao desconstruirmos esses três contos, revelamos aspectos camuflados da influência duradoura do catolicismo rústico e do modus operandi do patriarcalismo e do coronelismo no ethos da cultura goiana.