This doctoral thesis investigates the question 'How and why does Martha Rosier, artist and activist, bring the wars of Vietnam and Iraq back home time and again?' The aims of the investigation are to consider the two series of Martha Rosier's photomontages entitled "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful" (1967 -1972) and "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, New Series" (2004 - 2008). The aims of such a consideration include: address of the photomontages themselves asthey relate to Rosier's particular development of a critical and activist photomontage practice (as initially developed in her feminist photomontage series "Beauty Knows No Pain: Body Beautiful" (1965 - 1974)); examination of original source images appropriated by Rosier for the making of her works, citing their original locations (work not undertaken previously by other scholars) and the events, scenes and valences thereof within these original photographs; theoretical propositions for how one can read the critical narratives and operative critiques embodied by Rosier's photomontages; and a consideration of the meta-commentary instantiated by Rosier's renewal of the anti-war photomontage series in light of 'the war on terror'. Results achieved This thesis has achieved a comprehensive overview of Martha Rosier's project as both artist and activist to bring the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq back home to the USas a work of anti-war activism, provoking a conversation with the population whose representatives in government are pursuing these foreign adventures in their names. The thesis achieves propositional readings ofthe theoretical workings of Rosier's images, alongside offering a historical contextualisation of both Rosier's extra-artistic activism and of the events depicted in her works which have not been recorded by other scholars. The researching and recording of original source material appropriated by Rosier in the making of these photomontages, again not recorded by other art historians elsewhere, along with the relevance of the selected source images, has been achieved within this thesis. Furthermore, this thesis has succeeded in postulating original theoretical appreciations of not only Rosier's photomontages in both eras ofthe series, but also ofthe nature of and motivation for her very act of renewal in the second stage ofthe series "Bringing the War Home". This is achieved specifically through my theoretical reading of the series as meta-commentary on the revision isms of American history and present foreign policy decision-making, presented through my concept of the 'reboot', which is developed in sympathetic concert with Rosier's own emphasis on popular culture / mass-media imagery asthe medium for presenting her critique within the series.

This thesis considers images of the falling body after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, starting with Associated Press photographer Richard Drew’s photograph of a person falling to their death from the north tower of the World Trade Center. From this specific photograph, this thesis follows various intersecting lines in what I am calling a meshwork of falling-body images. Consequently, each chapter encounters a wide range of examples of falling: from literature to films, personal websites to digital content, and immersive technologies to artworks. Rather than connecting these instances like nodes, this thesis is more concerned with exploring lines of relation and the way the image moves along these lines. This thesis will argue that the falling-body image offers an alternative topology of the attacks: as enmeshed in the unfolding lines of life of web users, artists, directors and writers alike. In this way, this thesis outlines the ways we have lived with the image of falling, and the event itself, and how we continue to experience its unfolding consequences.

Capturing Appalachia: Visualizing Coal, Culture and Ecology, draws on extensive ethnographic, archival, and ecographic research conducted across Appalachia between 2014-2016 to develop an empirically informed sociological image of the interactions between culture, geography, and industry. Of particular interest are the ways that extractive cultures in Appalachia are constructed and communicated, and so the project includes archival work researching historical images as well as fieldwork focused on the production of images. Drawing on the traditions of cultural and ‘green’ criminologies, geography, and critical ecotheory, concluding that the cultural, political, and ecological worlds of Appalachia exist in a dialectical relationship with one another, and that at the center of each is an intense cultural relationship with the region’s historic and contemporary capture (cultural, economic, and ecological) by resource extraction. These dialectical relationships are made clear in the visuality of Appalachia, with paradigms frequently challenged by the production of countervisual narratives in productions spanning photography, literature, cinema, and media. The project constitutes the first extensive empirical application of the suggestions of an emergent green-cultural criminology. This research contributes significantly to the existing theoretical literature on extractive cultures through the development and application of the concept of ‘capture’, which is employed in throughout and which constitutes a central concept the project. The concept of ‘regulatory capture’ informs much of the existing sociological literature on harmful industry. Expanding on the concept of ‘capture’, I consider the capture of Appalachian economies by a single industry (economic capture), the capture of cultural production by the dominant industry (cultural capture), the legal capture of material landscapes by industry (ecological capture), the visual-mechanical capture of images of ecology and culture (photographic capture), and finally, the capture of ecology and people by an emerging industry of incarceration (carceral capture).