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By 1909, Mexico City had a little more than 720,000 inhabitants, 250 schools, and almost 1,000 pulquerías -drinking establishments serving pulque, a fermented beverage made of the maguey plant. Today, pulquerías have almost disappeared; but just a century ago, people enjoyed gathering there. Since their beginnings in the 1530s, pulquerías became an integral part of the life of Mexico City’s inhabitants. These taverns offered pulque to take out, but far more importantly, a space where men and women drank, talked, danced, and enjoyed themselves as a part of their daily social life. These spaces represented an important place in the city’s lower-class culture and daily life. In this dissertation, I explore the social and cultural development of these businesses. I focus my discussion on the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century when there was a constant effort of making of Mexico a modern nation like England, France, or United States. Under the influence of liberalism, authorities increasingly sought to control the behavior of the population, especially in the public arena with the goal of creating hardworking and moral citizenry. They saw pulque as the core of social evils, and pulquerías, as centers where inebriated urban masses abandoned their daily routine, procrastinated, and fought. Consequently, authorities strictly regulated schedules, facilities, and all activities taking place in pulquerías. Patrons and owners resisted those regulations in different ways; especially customers, through their everyday practices, developed a vigorous and multi-faceted response to the processes of modernization. 13 Within these places, alcohol consumption fostered an environment of free interaction and gave men and women a platform in which they could demand and contest explanations about the behavior of their neighbors, partners, and coworkers. Their discussions and fights prove to be significant to the understanding of the regulation of the neighborhood dynamics as well as valves of escape during changing times. By analyzing the historical intersections of popular culture, nation building and modernization programs, and lower class responses to these reforms this dissertation contributes to the study of the cultural and social history of Mexico.

This work is about the study of the children's free play in kindergartens. The study aims to investigate what significance free play has in kindergartens and what role pedagogues have in their children's free play. This study was conducted in two different kindergartens located in the same municipality.  One of the kindergartens is located in a monocultural area and the other in a multicultural area. That provides the opportunity to explore what differences exist between the two kindergartens. A qualitative investigation, consisting of interviews and participatory observation, was performed to answer the above research questions. The results confirm my own original conviction that the free play develops children's social interaction, fantasy and language. The pedagogues role in the children's free play is to help children during their free play, to give them confidence, to make them happy, to give them new and developmental toys and to provide an environment to safe play in.  The difference between the monocultural and multicultural kindergarten was that children with multiethnic background had problems with understanding each other because of differences in language, and this affected their social interaction and fantasy, thus their playing too. The pedagogues had to make an extra effort in helping these children to start to play together.

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Everyone would agree that there is little action in Jacques Poulin's works. This minimalism, which characterizes his writing, is based on solitary individuals who share similar difficulties with social interactions. In Poulin's novels, every interaction seems like an event in itself, as if communicating with others was an adventure. Poulin places the interactions at the heart of his narrative writing. This thesis studies the similarities of these social interactions throughout his eleven novels published to date. The interaction will be analyzed in three phases: as recurring ritual, in connection with the representation of the reader, and with regard to the very language.

The present study examined whether children and adolescents develop mental models of peer relations that reflect observed gender differences in size and in density of friendship structures. A total of 278 children and adolescents, ranging from preschool level to CEGEP, participated in the study. Participants were given a questionnaire, consisting of schematic drawings of different forms of peer interactions, to assess their ideas about how friendships are organized for children of their age. Results indicated that both female and male participants at all grade levels judged typical boys to have a greater preference for group than dyadic interactions than did typical girls. Typical girls, however, were not judged to have preference for either dyadic or group interactions. Results also indicated that both female and male participants at all grades judged that the probability of mutual friends also being friends as higher for typical boys than for typical girls. Overall, the findings from the present study demonstrated that children and adolescents of both genders possess internal working models of peer interactions, beginning in early childhood, that are gender differentiated in a way that reflects patterns of behaviour.

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This dissertation responds to a recent zeitgeist and climate of controversy surrounding issues of "virtuality" and "simulation" Such terms are treated as problematic and essentially contested when framed in reference to notions of a fixed observable "reality" rather than considered in terms of socially constructed facts, relationships and identities. The concept of the "virtual stage" advanced in this thesis, refers to the current historical moment in communications technology development as well as to the dramaturgical perspective which informs the theoretical approach and argument. / In this dissertation, virtual reality is treated not as a single technology or corpus of machines, but following conventions established in recent telepresence research as an experience which can obtain in varying degrees by means of a host of communications media. / Several complementary approaches are proposed and examined as a provisional framework for the study of emerging contemporary discourses of virtuality. Issues of virtuality are discussed from the perspective of historical cases which invite comparison and suggest a palimpsest of earlier technological modes of communication within contemporary situations. The social construction of technology approach is introduced following recent suggestions for marrying this approach to the Canadian tradition of socio-historical study of communication technology. Finally, play and dramaturgical theory are offered as a model for understanding how community and individual identity are constructed and maintained in some forms of computer mediated communication (video games, MUDs, and IRC) while allowing for potentially plausible notions of human agency.

In this study the author attempts to identify factors that are determinants for why some pupils in Swedish grade school have high status in comparison with their peers. The study takes on the characteristics of both an ethnographic and a literature study by comparing the findings of interviews carried out with students of a first grade class with previous research. The study identify several tools for analyzing of how status may be understood in specific situations.The study also finds that important factors for gaining high status amongst children in aschool classes might be the ability to apply access strategies to get accepted in social interactions, such as game play, have the ability to create games that are enjoyed by peers and social skills, to name a few. Overall the study shows that children's game play with each otherare crucial for their social interactions and their social position. The study also show that children that have earlier established relationships with other children in a specific group alsohave a better opportunity to establish a high status position.