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Troubling Spaces explores the relationship between the representation of space and place on the Northern Irish stage and the production of space that occurs within Northern Irish society during the Troubles. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, I examine how Nationalists and Unionists produced a series of communal narratives which allowed them to reorder Northern Irish space and its social relations. Additionally, I examine how these communal ideologies create divergent concepts of Northern Irish place which Doreen Massey refers to as negative and enclosed concepts of place. This not only reinforces the dualistic binary between Nationalism and Unionism, it also incites tribal associations and allegiances. Moving on from this, I conduct a close reading of three Troubles plays, Stewart Parker’s Northern Star and Pentecost and Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup, to examine how their dramatic narratives intersect and interact with non-traditional stage space to produce dramatic environments which provide compelling commentaries on Northern Irish spatiality. My examination of Northern Star traces the development of the ideological structures which shape Northern Irish spatiality; in Pentecost, I explore how its liminal domestic space is perfectly suited to illustrate the dynamic conceptualisation of place Massey argues for; and, finally, in Tea in a China Cup, I develop the distinction between private domestic spaces and public social spaces further by examining matrilineal narratives in relation to communal symbols within a female-coded domestic space. Through these close readings, I will demonstrate that a dialogical relationship can be discerned between the production of space and place that occurs within Northern Irish society and the representation of it on the Northern Irish stage. While many plays have the potential to act as an endorsement of the restrictive and enclosed concepts of space and place in the ideological frameworks of Nationalism and Unionism, the three that I have chosen provide important counterpoints during the Troubles that actively resist their cultural hegemony.

Recently, there have been rapid developments in the fields of mobile and wireless technologies which have enabled the acquisition of information at anytime regardless of the location and mobility status of the users. However, despite the increasing popularity of mobile devices which are becoming an indispensable part of our everyday activities, the disappointing results regarding the adoption and use of mobile applications and data services lead scholars to question the understanding of the adoption and usage behaviour within these new wireless environments. The author believes that there could be attributes which are still unexplored and could provide an explanation why the mobile data services are still unsuccessful. The aim of this study is to explore, understand and highlight the role of place in the decision of the people to use mobile data services and thus to assist professionals and scholars to consider the importance of the attributes of place in the design of new applications and in the adoption and usage models of mobile technologies and services. In order to achieve this objective an exploratory in nature research was conducted combining conventional and innovative research methodologies. A model of place was generated which served as a sensitizing device in order to interpret, and analyse the collected data. The first phase of this research involved the understanding of the market in question and the selection of the appropriate case (mobile data services platform) to conduct the research. The second main phase of the research then sought to get a better understanding of how users experience place before deciding to use mobile data services. The research methods were applied within everyday settings with 30 users of the selected mobile data services platform, all of whom were selected according to specific criteria. The findings tend to suggest that participants did experience the different places in a similar way before deciding to use mobile data services.

This dissertation argues that the symbolic force of deindustrial Rust Belt decline is expressed through patterns of rhetorical invention, what I call ruination rhetorics. Ruination, I argue, works to construct divergent orientations toward space and time in representations of the Rust Belt. I trace these orientations as a way of charting the contours of how we understand domestic urban decay in our contemporary political and economic climate. This project argues that ruination's inventive force hints at a number of thematics including: ruination as urban waste; ruination as a claim to forms of nostalgia and authenticity; ruination as a linkage between temporal configurations of the past and the present; and ruination as a narrative form enabling what I call a "melancholic" rhetorical style. In all of these instances, ruination supports differentiated orientations toward time and space, creating temporal and geographical connections and boundaries through rhetorical manipulations. In this way, the times and spaces of and for industrial ruination shift, and in so doing, their discursive manifestations elucidate the diversity and instability of spatio-temporal structures. Conceptually, I argue that ruination shapes an understanding of space and time as fluid concepts, rather than stagnant or pre-determined categories. And by unpacking the ways that ruination traffics in representations of Rust Belt geographies and citizens, we discover an increasingly complex discursive field out of which meaningful relationships to decay and renewal might be forged. In this way, ruination does not weave a cohesive narrative of what the Rust Belt is, where the Rust Belt is, or who does or does not lay claim to its political realities and challenges. Rather, its divergent and contradictory modes of rhetorical invention suggest ruination expresses the incoherencies and compatibilities constitutive of an everyday life lived in the ebbs and flows of a material space that is always-already a site of ongoing decay and renewal.

During the course of the last decade successive governments in the UK have placed young people’s aspirations at the core of their attempts to address poor outcomes within the education system and the labour market. An area-based approach to policy has come to the fore which links ‘low aspirations’ with particular community- and neighbourhood-level factors, in particular area-level deprivation. This area-based focus on the determinants of aspirations has faced intensifying critique from the academic research base. Responding to this policy and research debate, this thesis examines whether, and how, young people’s occupational aspirations are shaped by the areas they live in. The thesis is based on a mixed methods research design and has two sections: an extensive phase and an intensive phase. The extensive phase of the research consists of logistic regression analysis of data from the Understanding Society Youth Questionnaire, and considers whether the types of occupations young people aspire to vary between different types of area. The intensive phase of the research consists of phenomenographic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with young people in a deprived, outer-urban neighbourhood in Manchester, and considers how young people’s subjective orientations towards the area they live in produce different forms of aspiration. The thesis finds compelling evidence that young people’s occupational aspirations are shaped by the areas they live in, but does not corroborate the claim at the core of current government policy, that aspirations are lower in more deprived areas. The extensive phase of the research instead identifies area type, rather than deprivation, as the primary area-level factor shaping young people’s aspirations, with young people from particular inner city area types almost five times as likely as their peers from deprived outer-urban areas to aspire to ‘higher’ professional, managerial and technical occupations. Meanwhile, the intensive phase of the research finds evidence that experiences of neighbourhood and family life in an area of concentrated deprivation can lead young people to adopt particular forms of aspiration that require lower levels of skill and further training, but on closer examination of the motivations for these forms of aspiration, finds little evidence that these aspirations are straightforwardly ‘low’. Above all, the research demonstrates that young people produce multiple different senses of place, and myriad forms of aspiration, from within the same deprived spatial context: they do not simply reproduce what they see around them when imagining their futures. While there is compelling evidence that young people’s occupational aspirations are shaped by the areas they live in, these area effects demand more nuanced research alongside policy approaches that are more receptive to young people’s constructions of place.

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Following the literary criticism of Zadie Smith’s NW by critics such as Lynn Wells and Wendy Knepper, this thesis seeks to engage with the social scripts and spatial dynamics of Smith’s fourth novel. I argue that NW is concerned with the neoliberalization of both real and virtual spaces, emphasizing the consequent effects of neoliberalism on agency and subjectivity and highlighting the neoliberal advancement of hyperindividualism and securitization over social responsibility and solidarity. Much detail is given to NW’s exploration of race, class and social mobility at the tail-end of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. NW’s fragmented four-part narrative channels a perspectival approach to space and place by delineating its structure through the four separate subjectivities of the main characters. I contextualize my thesis alongside Paul Gilroy’s cultural criticism of contemporary British multiculturalism, conviviality and melancholia, while also anchoring NW’s spatial concerns to Jeff Malpas’s spatial philosophy and Emily Cuming’s explication of British council estates in various forms of contemporary literature. As well, this thesis incorporates the philosophical frameworks of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a guide for recognizing some of NW’s interest in the subjective experience of people and spaces, and to reorient the act of ‘seeing’ as a radical form of agency and mediation in itself. Ultimately, this phenomenological and epistemological approach to interpreting Smith’s fiction creates the potential for meaning to be co-constructed between author and reader, forming a new social vision for the novel as artform. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Tunnelbanan knyter ihop stora delar av staden. Det finns människor som gärna vill bo kvar runt den t-banelinje de bor på. I denna uppsats analyseras intervjuer med fem personer som bor i stadsdelar dit den Gröna t-banelinjen går. Det undersöks hur t-banan medverkar till att bygga upp identiteten var och en skapat sig under tiden som boende på platsen. Undersökningen tar reda på hur varje person blivit en del av platsen de bor på, och hur platsen har blivit en del av dem. Med hjälp av intervjuerna tas det också reda på vad tunnelbanan kan ha för betydelse utöver att vara ett transportmedel. Studiens resultat visar att tunnelbanan bidragit till platstillhörighet, trivsel och identitetsbygge, men att platsen kan vara rörlig. Personerna kan känna tillhörighet till flera platser, genom möjlighet till rörlighet som tunnelbanan bidragit med. Resultatet visar också att tunnelbanan kan betyda något mer än att vara ett transportmedel, den är såväl landmärke som markör för urbanitet.

L’objectif de cette étude est d'analyser les structures territoriales que nous identifierons et de mettre en évidence leurs liens avec la formation de la communauté. Dans cette perspective, il s'agira dans un premier temps d'identifier les éléments phares de l’organisation territoriale de la ville et de la construction identitaire romaine, éléments indispensables pour comprendre la territorialité de la communauté romaine. Nous nous pencherons ensuite sur les implications du franchissement des limites sacrées urbaines afin de déterminer le poids des espaces et celui des limites dans la définition des pouvoirs et des normes juridico-religieuses. L'immense territoire qui constitue l'empire de Rome est d'une extraordinaire complexité juridico-sacrée. Les anciens avaient déjà conscience de cet état de fait, lié à des normes politiques et religieuses que les érudits de l'époque impériale (Ier – Vème siècle de notre ère) ne maîtrisaient sans doute plus complètement. L'analyse détaillée, à la fois de la complexité territoriale, conceptuelle et fonctionnelle, ainsi que celle des rituels qui permettent de définir les statuts, contribuera à donner son sens à un état de fait qui ne peut pas s'expliquer uniquement par un « conservatisme religieux » romain, mais repose aussi sur une fonctionnalité réelle. / The objective of this study is to analyze the territorial structures which we shall identify and to bring out their connections with the formation of the community. In this perspective, it will be a question at first of identifying the key elements of the territorial organization of the city and the roman identity construction, essential elements to understand the territoriality of the roman community. We will then examine the implications of crossing the sacred urban boundaries to determine the weight of spaces and the limits in the definition of powers and legal-religious norms. The vastness of the Roman empire has an extraordinary juridical-sacred complexity. The ancients romans were already conscious of this established fact, connected to political and religious norms which the savant of imperial period (Ist - 5th century AD) no longer mastered completely.The detailed analysis, both the territorial complexity, conceptual and functional, as well as that of the rites which allow to define the statutes, will contribute to give its sense to an established fact which cannot give some explanation only by a « religious roman conservatism », but also by a real feature.

The thesis attempts to illuminate the construction process of the Middle East as a separate region. Within this context, it first seeks to find out what a region means. For this sake, the thesis outlines the historical development of the discipline of geography and the changing meanings of region in line with the disciplinary developments. Furthermore, it concentrates on the emergence of the region Middle East, its denomination and transformation along with changing international politics. Finally, the thesis evaluates the existence of the ethnocentric geographical term Middle East within the context of current global conditions.