This thesis examines the social and urban history of mapmaking in Edinburgh between c.1880 and c.1920 and argues that cartography, along with the associated printing and publishing industries in the city, provides an effective lens on broader urban concerns. The predominant focus of the archival research is on the family-run firm John Bartholomew & Co., internationally-renowned map publishers during the period. The central questions of the thesis relate to print, knowledge, space and place. The work is grounded, in particular, within urban history and the geography of the book. Chapters are structured around the 'lifecycle' of a map and a re-modelled version of Robert Darnton's 'communications circuit'. Map production can profitably be contextualised within late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Edinburgh. A taxonomy of the contemporary printing and publishing industries shows - following Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the 'field of cultural production' - that it is crucial to understand the economic, industrial and intellectual setting in which cartographers operated. In this respect, mapmaking is viewed as a fundamentally social process, a theme that continues into the factory, where technological developments are considered in the context of workers' experiences. The buildings and spaces in which mapmaking occurred take on epistemological significance: they reflect how ideas about city space were made and the related importance of local knowledge. Changes in the sites and conditions of cartographic production corresponded with the increasing organisation of space shown in maps and fire insurance plans such as those produced by the firm Charles E. Goad. Once maps left the premises, a geographical approach to understanding distribution advances links between production and consumption: the local conditions of their making influenced international, national and local sales networks. Throughout, the thesis emphasises the importance of understanding maps as socially constituted objects. This also allows for new insights into the purchasing, ownership and use of maps. Tracing specific instances of use shows that meaning was not solely shaped by cartographers but also by the ongoing interactions and interventions of owners or readers. Overall, the thesis shows that mapmaking was a continually developing way of understanding the city. This was true for cartographers, city officials, or insurers, each of whose increasingly detailed conception of urban space corresponded with more accurate production practices and the greater availability of printed cartographic material. Mapmaking was also part of a broader move towards the growing documentation of urban places. The forms of cartography examined in this thesis show how codified, empirical systems of knowledge came to occupy a privileged position in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century cities. In particular, mapmaking practices in Edinburgh changed not only how the urban was depicted, but also how city spaces were conceptualised and used.

The decades following the Second World War witnessed a number of important developments affecting young people’s relationships and sexual lives, including the expansion of sex education initiatives and access to reliable contraception. The period has been heralded by some as one of ‘sexual revolution’, led by a rebellious youth whose views and practices were markedly different from those of their parents. This thesis examines the perspectives of young people growing up through these changes in Scotland, uncovering personal perceptions of their impact, or lack thereof, on their own emerging sexual lives. Whilst extant historical studies of sexuality in Scotland have focused on official perspectives and sexual governance, this thesis contributes to a history of sexuality ‘from below’, exploring the experiences of an untapped majority during a time of great change in heterosexual culture. Drawing on a series of oral history interviews with men and women growing up in various regions of Scotland between 1945 and 1980, evaluated alongside memoirs and contemporary surveys of sexual and contraceptive behaviour, this thesis examines the meanings and significance these developments held for young people in practice. These highly personal and subjective sources are key to understanding how young people learned about sexual matters, developed their ideas of appropriate conduct, and managed their early relationships and sexual behaviour. This research uncovers a piecemeal process of sexual learning against an atmosphere of mystery and shame, where educational initiatives and conversations on the topic were not necessarily comfortable or informative. Though growing numbers of young people were engaging in sexual activity outwith marriage, the illicit atmosphere they absorbed while growing up impacted on their perceptions of acceptable behaviour, and their ability to manage risk effectively and experience sex without anxiety. This was a time of flux for Scottish youth, who had to negotiate a path between traditional and liberal pressures, with resilient continuities evident in the form of rigidly gendered scripts defining appropriate behaviour, which continued to inform young people’s courtship practices and sexual experiences throughout the period. Interviewees detailed ongoing practical difficulties, for instance in obtaining contraception, alongside longstanding cultural concerns including the importance of reputation. Risk and fear of pregnancy remained preeminent throughout, despite the arrival of new options for young women in the form of the pill (latterly made available to the unmarried) and legal abortion. Gender, class, religion and region were all potentially significant in determining one’s experience of these issues. In all, the sources analysed here challenge conventional depictions of ‘sexual revolution’ and a confident, rebellious youth, with many interviewees feeling that the ‘Swinging Sixties’ was something that happened elsewhere. Changing patterns of behaviour were evident, but this was neither sudden nor revolutionary, and conventional attitudes to sex and relationships still held remarkable currency for many young people, with a clear separation of sex, marriage and childbearing only gaining ground from the later 1970s.

The thesis investigates the impact of western art music ('classical') upon the construction of Greek-European identity in the 19th century. Through the examination of institutions such as the Theatre of Athens that hosted the Italian opera for the better part of the 19th century, the Conservatory of Athens (1873), the Conservatory of Thessaloniki (1914), various 19th century literary societies, press content, scores, publications on music, and state regulations on education, the thesis utilizes both musical, as well as extra-musical material to construct a cultural and social history of Greece's understanding of the 'European' in relation to local Greek society through music between 1840 and 1914. At the same time, it highlights the importance of transnational institutional and interpersonal musical networks between Greece and Europe (mainly England, France, and Germany), to demonstrate how political and aesthetic preferences influenced long-term policy, cultural practice, and musical tradition. While examining the 19th century diplomatic, political, and cultural practices of the expanding 19th century Greek Kingdom, the thesis traces the development of western musical taste and practice in Balkan Greece in relation to the local modernizing society. It highlights the importance of local and European artistic agents and networks, identifies the tension between the projection of European identity and raw acoustic divergence, argues for about the contribution of music to the construction of Greek-European identity, and examines the cultural and political negotiations about the conflicting relationship between Byzantine-Hellenic-European-Modern Greek, as expressed through music and debates on music. The last part of the thesis assembles the 19th century material to explain the relationship between nationalism and musical practice at the turn of the 20th century, and as such the long-term influence of western art music upon the construction of Greek-European national identity.

This thesis examines the history of Scottish settlement houses from 1886 until 1934. The Scottish settlements have attracted little attention from academics and no overarching study of these organisations has previously been done. This thesis seeks to address this lacuna and situate their achievements within the wider context of the changing role of voluntary organisations in this period. Using archival resources, it argues that settlements made important contributions to Scottish society through social work, training courses and adult education. They pioneered new methods, explored new areas of work and provided their local communities with access to services that they may not otherwise have received. This thesis demonstrates the way in which voluntary bodies evolved in response to local and national pressures and changing social attitudes in order to remain successful and relevant in a period during which their role was changing. There were six settlements in Scotland, each with their own agenda and areas of interest. The settlements remained distinct and independent organisations and there was a limited amount of cooperation between them. This diversity in both location and aims of the settlements gives rise to a range of themes that will be examined in the thesis. The original settlement ideal focused on ameliorating class differences by reforming the characters of working-class individuals through personal connection between them and middle-class settlers. The thesis will examine how this evolved over time. As the state at both a local and national level assumed more responsibility for social services, the role of settlements adapted to encompass training for professional social workers and as the working classes gained more political power the settlements sought to make them ‘fit for citizenship’. Likewise, as the original settlement ideal had denied the legitimacy of working-class culture and community, this attitude also evolved and settlements began to focus on developing strong communities within working-class areas.

The increasing international concern about the consequences of warfare for civilian populations has led to a growing body of demographic and health research. This research has been essential in providing estimates of war-induced excess mortality, a primary indicator by which to assess the intensity of wars and the adequacy of humanitarian responses. Far less attention has been paid to war-induced changes in fertility and population health, and the limited existing literature has rarely adopted a longitudinal approach. This is especially evident in the case of the 2003–2011 war in Iraq. Several studies have sought to quantify excess mortality, whereas other demographic and health effects of this war have been largely overlooked. This thesis fills substantive knowledge gaps using longitudinal data from the 2000, 2006 and 2011 Iraq Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (I-MICS). The data collected during wartime are found to be of similarly good quality as those collected during peacetime. The analysis shows that, besides causing a heavy death toll, the Iraq war also had profound long-term consequences for women and newborns. It provides the first evidence on the effect of the war on early marriage and adolescent fertility, with implications for women’s empowerment and reproductive health. It is also the first to quantify the effect of the war on neonatal polio immunisation coverage, with relevance for the recent polio outbreak. It finally assesses the main challenges to Iraq’s health sector rehabilitation efforts, namely the ongoing insecurity and persistently high rate of population growth. Overall, the findings have important documentation functions for the international community and serve as inputs for the design of humanitarian relief strategies in Iraq and similar war-torn countries, such as neighbouring Syria.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of Lavasa, a new town planned, built and managed by a private company in India. It examines the ideologies, institutional arrangements, and political processes at work in the making of this town. It takes seriously the attempt to create a ‘market utopia’ (an inclusive, environmentally sustainable, properly planned, and profitable town), treating it as an empirical phenomenon with social consequences, and asks: why, how, and with what effects did Lavasa come to be? In tracing its conception, production, and contestation, the dissertation analyses the processes and consequences of transforming a rural landscape into an urban place. I make two main arguments. First, the construction of Lavasa is fundamentally speculative and is centred on the ability to transform cheap rural land into urban real estate. I show that the land market that enables the city is actively manufactured by the state, through powerful local political actors, and networks of brokers and agrarian intermediaries. The construction of this land market produces a speculative environment: one in which trading in land simultaneously becomes an opportunity to make money, a cause of dispossession, and a way to lay claim to the city. Second, such speculation generates both resistance against and support for the project. It also, paradoxically, emboldens the ideological project of city-making. Collective action is rendered difficult as it is mediated by the same conditions and state that created the land market. Therefore the contestation takes another form that moves beyond the domain of land, is couched in environmental concerns, and leverages a different level of the state to ultimately stall the project. I demonstrate how the symbolic power of this ‘market utopia’ conceals the conditions of its possibility, that is, the ways in which it was made through the state, through speculation, and the discursive and material operations of the land market. I show how this land market is historically and socio-politically constructed, and how its construction shapes and informs the politics of planning, privatisation, and resistance.

North American histories of homelessness have focused upon the specific image of the “tramp.” Exemplified by Charlie Chaplin, Jack London, and various other popular representations in a variety of media formats, the tramp, hobo or bindlestiff is a classic North American symbol. This “tramp” is often represented as a young, white, heteronormative man, and many histories of homelessness focus upon subjects like him. However, newly accessible police, charity and census materials suggest the early twentieth century homeless population in the Pacific Northwest was more racially and sexually diverse than previously thought. Using a Gramscian liberal order framework theory, I argue that the tramp became a North American liberal ideological icon in response to a growing tension between the needs of capital for a free moving body of labourers and the growing panoptic state. By breaking down the tramp mythos and offering a more accurate image of turn of the century homeless people, we can see the ways liberal ideology has been twisted to justify incarceration, harassment, and exclusion. / Graduate / 2019-08-24

Social media has become a global phenomenon. Currently, there are 2 billion active users on Facebook. However, much of the research on social media is about the consumption side of social media rather than the production or operational aspects of social media. Although research on the production side is still relatively small, it is growing, indicating that it is a fruitful area to study. This thesis attempts to contribute to this area of research to unravel the inner operations of social media with one key research question: How does social media platform organize information? The theory of digital object of Kallinikos et al. (2013) is used to investigate this question. Information display that users of a social media platform interact with is a digital object and it is constructed by two key components which are a database and algorithms. The database and the algorithms shape how information is being organized on information displays, and these influence user behaviors which are then captured as social data in the database. This thesis also critically examines the technology of recommender system by importing engineering literature on information filtering and retrieval. While newsfeed algorithm such as EdgeRank of Facebook has already been critically examined, information systems and media scholars have yet to investigate recommendation algorithms, despite the fact that they have been widely deployed all over the Internet. It is found that the key weakness of recommendation algorithms is their inability to recommend novel items. This is because the main tenet of any recommender system is to "recommend similar items to those that users already like". Fortunately, this problem can be alleviated when recommender system is being deployed in the digital information environment of social media platforms. In turn, seven theoretical conjectures can be postulated. These are (1) navigation of information display as assembled by social media is highly interactive, (2) information organization of social media is highly unstable which would also render user behaviors unstable, (3) quality of data aggregation casts significant implications on user behaviors, (4) the amount of data captured by social media platforms limits the usefulness of their information displays, (5) output from the recommendation algorithm (recommendation list) casts real implications on user behaviors, (6) circle of friends on a social network can influence user behaviors, and (7) metadata attached to items being displayed casts influence on user behaviors. Data from Last.fm, a social media for music discovery, is used to evaluate these conjectures. The analysis supported most of the conjectures except the instability of information display and the importance of metadata attached to items being displayed. Some kinds of information organization are more stable than initially expected and some kinds of user generated contents are not so important for user behaviors.

The present research concerns the global 'value chain' of the açaí berry, a NonTimber Forest Product (NTFP) derived mainly from the Tocantins Estuary region in the State of Pará, Brazil, and which sustains its mostly riverine population. Through the adoption of methodologies employed in studies of Global Production Networks (GPNs), the study aims to identify how contextual factors have, over time, influenced the formation of the chain by actors across geographical scales, how they sustain the chain in its current configuration, how they enable or preclude the capture of value regionally, and influence development outcomes. Existing research and interventions continue to be predicated on locally-based approaches that aim to cut out middlemen or otherwise reshape local extraction and processing arrangements, without taking into full consideration the ways in which the chain is embedded into different social, economic, and cultural contexts across geographic scale, conditioning chain formation, value distribution and actor behavior. The empirical work was carried out in the form of semi-structured interviews, supported by secondary data and field observations. Field research sites included several locations in the interior of State of Pará, its capital Belem, the States of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Southeast Brazil, as well as coastal towns in California, USA. From these findings, key policy recommendations are made, which are applicable to this specific NTFP chain, but which can be extrapolated to other NTFP chains. The research also employs knowledge about consumer cultures, and the subjectivities concerning value determination, to investigate the role of consumer myths about a product in contributing to its value chain. The conclusion indicates that a whole-chain approach, which appreciates in a reflexive fashion the ways in which actors negotiate territorial specificities to configure chains, is instrumental in the development of efficient, strategic policy programs that aim to improve the income of forest communities that exploit NTFPs. In order to understand, and build trade-based development interventions, researchers and practitioners must engage with the structures, material and cultural, that encase chain relations across geographical scales.

A successful transition into the knowledge economy is said to depend upon higher level skills, creating unprecedented pressure on university systems - as they expand across countries - to provide knowledge-based labour markets with the skills needed. But what are the political economy dynamics underlying national patterns of high skill formation? This thesis argues that existing theoretical approaches are not well-suited to answer the question: ideational and structuralist frameworks downplay persistent national differences, while institutionalist accounts assume that national differences rest upon the very lack of higher education expansion in some countries, downplaying the crossnational trend of higher education expansion. The thesis proposes a framework that accounts for distinct national trajectories of high skill formation within the convergent trend of higher education expansion. In particular, two crucial variables are identified to theorise the relationship between higher education systems and knowledge-based labour markets: (i) the predominant type of knowledge economy in a given country; and (ii) the degree of inter-university competition across different higher education systems. It is argued that the former explains what type of higher level skills will be sought by employers and cultivated by governments, while the latter helps understanding of why some higher education systems are more open at the outset to satisfy labour market demands compared to others, determining whether institutional change in a given higher education system is likely to be encompassing or marginal. Cross-national descriptive statistics and systematic process analysis across a set of diverse country case studies (Britain, Germany and South Korea) are used to test the theory. By highlighting the agency of universities, governments and businesses and by linking higher education policy with knowledge-based growth strategies, this thesis provides a theoretical and empirical contribution on processes of institutional change in higher education and on broader trajectories of institutional change across advanced capitalist countries.