Existing research shows that increasing numbers of young men are dissatisfied with the appearance of their bodies. Research has found that men will use sport and health-related sports acts to conceal these concerns from others. Accordingly, men s body dissatisfactions are documented less frequently because the practices drawn upon to conceal them are perceived as routine forms of masculine behaviour. Rugby union is one of the most popular sports played by young men in England. Historically, the male rugby player is culturally perceived as strong, tough and unemotionally articulate. Existing research draws attention to health issues, such as performance stress and injury that arise through participation in this sport. Research also shows that rugby union players are likely to experience concerns about gaining weight, yet these are disguised within the requirements of training for the sport. Although, there are studies that examine the constitution of masculinities, the experience of pain and injury and career transitions among rugby union players there are no studies, as yet, that examine how rugby union men experience body concerns and manage these experiences through their sport. The research discussed in this thesis examines how a group of rugby union men (25) aged 18-25, of varied racial identity, ethnic and social backgrounds, participating in an elite university rugby union 1st XV team, experience concerns about the appearance and performance of their bodies and the ways in which such concerns develop. It also examines if and how these men used the sport and health-related sports acts, to overcome their concerns and conceal them from others. A theoretical framework, which draws on the concepts of the three theorists: Connell (1995, 2008) Goffman (1959; 1961; 1979) and Bourdieu (1978; 1979; 1984), is developed. As part of this, a new concept has been created from Goffman s dramaturgical approach: that of the intimate dimension. In this dimension intimate relationships occur. It is located away from the front region, (the public), and the back region (semi-public spaces) where less formal relationships occur. It includes the research interview, with a woman researcher, and some other women such as girlfriends, sisters or female friends and also one or two other rugby men with whom the rugby men demonstrated a close bond. Within this dimension the rugby men are more forthcoming about the personal elements of their rugby lives. The theoretical framework is used to examine these men s concerns, how they are developed, experienced and managed. Recognising that cultural assumptions of a tough and less expressive masculinity assigned to this sport can potentially make it difficult for men to express these concerns, a combination of visual research methods and ethnography are used to examine these men s body concerns and their management. This includes collaborative collection of photography and photo-elicitation interviews. The research shows that embodied experiences of discomfort, associated with pain, injury, concerns about height, being overweight or out of shape, and social experiences of exclusion led to the development of the rugby men s body concerns. For these rugby men, their rugby masculinities are influential to the management and concealment of their body concerns. They suppress and conceal their body concerns in the front and back regions of the sport and reveal them in more intimate dimensions. The rugby men s relationships with each other, in the back regions of the sport, were the most influential to this identity, but more importantly, to the management and reinforcement of these concerns. This thesis contributes to filling the gap in existing academic research by examining body concerns and its management amongst rugby union men. It also extends existing research that has found men conceal their body concerns in sport, because it looks at how these men manage these concerns differently in different regions of their sport. Furthermore, a theoretical framework that combines interactionism and phenomenology is used to study sociologically men s body concerns in these different contexts. The combination of visual methods and ethnography goes beyond some of the existing methods used in clinical and sociological research that have examined men's body concerns. They can be used to enhance understanding of clinical forms of body concern and other emotional concerns rugby union men and other sportsmen, of all ages, have about performance, pain and injury. The incorporation of visual methods is potentially widely applicable because they have increasing precedence in sportsmen s lives to analyse performance and to represent them.

abstract: Eat Your Heart Out is a visually rich qualitative ethnic food research that examines consumption, production, and distribution practices transnationally. Through the example of Mumbai’s street foods, the study aims to discover how design participates in fashioning the street food experiences locally and globally. Food is an important cultural artifact in the world. However, past research in design suggests that the discipline has mainly focused on food as a catalyst for creativity and imagination or as a tool to examine materialistic, economical, sensorial, and emotional connections. Studying the user-focused involvement in the creation of food artifacts and focusing on cultural, global, and historical aspects of that participation are important to address the gaps in the knowledge required to solve increasingly “wicked problems” (Buchanan, 1992; Rittel, 1971). To achieve this goal, Eat Your Heart Out implemented a comparative practice-based study of the Indian street foods in Mumbai and Phoenix to examine consumption, production, and distribution practices at both places. The methodological design was highly multi-disciplinary in nature and included rapid ethnographic assessment, interviews, visual research, and a generative method of co-creation. The study revealed that street foods as cultural artifacts were deeply rooted in specific traditional values specific to the context, which significantly influenced personal and communal consumption, production, and distribution practices of Indian street foods in Mumbai and Phoenix. The values of standardization, formality, and higher food regulation practices limited the diversity and radically transformed the central values of Mumbai’s street foods when the foods re-territorialized in Phoenix. This resulted in lowering the consumption. Eat Your Heart Out presents cultural and practical insights into the interactions between contexts, artifacts, practices, and participants. Eat Your Heart Out recommends new frameworks of correlation for various consumption and production practices and suggests how street food artifacts alter when they move across cultures. Such knowledge can be valuable for similar ethnic food culture studies and the development of innovative research tools incorporating transnational and multidisciplinary methods in the future. On a broader scope, Eat Your Heart Out provides a unique opportunity to study a culture that has not been examined by scholars much in the past. It also focuses on gaining knowledge about ethnic culinary practices of Indian immigrants in the United States and encouraging enhanced cross-cultural acceptance. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Design, Environment and the Arts 2018

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the value of visual research methods to applied anthropology in the context of exploratory research with farmers in Ethiopia. The three methods of photo-elicitation, participatory photography, and ethnographic film, enrich and expand ethnographic methods to support the client's objective of supporting farmers. The applied project constructs a narrative from the local perspective to help consumers learn more about farmers' lives. The research focuses on specific farmers, and their experiences with direct fair trade and coffee farming. The client sees the application of research produced by ethnographic and visual methods as a good direction not only for his company, but the Fair Trade Industry as a whole.

My research is about stereotypes of women. Responding to scepticism towardsfeminist movements, my degree project aims to challenge the power structure of today’s Western society. How does visual communication play a big role in creating and/or reproducing inequalities? I have created a retro-futuristic exhibition, placed in an imaginary museum. In a utopian world based in 2050, the exhibition femme: extinct stereotypes, aims to show, explain and deconstruct how women were portrayed around 2020; how society and (pop)culture were deforming humans into stereotypical women.I have created a speculative scenario through different objects and artifacts displaying the expectations and instructions on how women should or should not behave. By showcasing the past and its conventions, this retro-futuristic exhibition questions their normality and rationality.

This dissertation deals with firms’ visual and pre-visual self-representations in accounting narratives. Self-representations are those descriptions about the company that firms include in accounting narratives to convey the current standings and their identity. External stakeholders increasingly expect non-numerical information about firms to be disclosed, and accounting narratives are a key medium for firms to account for their activities and maintain legitimacy as social actors. The question of which reporting conventions exist for legitimating selfrepresentations, especially from a visual perspective, remains unexplored. The purpose of this study is therefore to explore the empirical phenomenon of self-representations in accounting narratives in relation to legitimation rhetoric. The study is based on three research papers dealing with different patterns of self-representations in accounting-related narratives, including corporate reporting and business model diagrams. The examples are viewed through the theoretical lenses of semiotics and institutional theory, particularly legitimation theory. The study combines visual methods (visual content analysis and visual taxonomy) with other methods (interviews, text analysis) to conceptualize and exemplify what is meant by self-representations in accounting narratives. The study finds that there may be multiple parallel pre-visual self-representations at play to influence representations of the self, that visual self-representations are becoming more common in accounting narratives, and that several rhetorical strategies for legitimation are observable in these representations. By showing how diagrams can serve a legitimating purpose in accounting narratives, it is argued that diagrams should be considered on par with graphs and photographs as visual rhetorical devices in accounting narratives, and that they could be used as key communicative elements in the accounting process. Second, based on the longitudinal and comparative examples of self-representations, it is suggested that self-representations increasingly refer to abstract rather than concrete referents. This change is discussed in terms of the increasingly digital and service-based knowledge economy, where material referents give way to “amaterial” values. The contribution of this study is to describe selfrepresentations through several empirical examples, and to thereby increase awareness among practitioners and researchers of how visuals serve as communicative resources with legitimating functions in accounting narratives. Four concepts are proposed as tools for explaining the observed developments, and for improving visual literacy with regard to accounting narratives: inclusive perspective on accounting narratives, amateriality, self-representation, and diagrams. / Denna licentiatavhandling handlar om företags visuella och ”för-visuella” själv-representationer i kontexten redovisning. Till självrepresentationer hör de beskrivningar som företaget inkluderar i sin externt rapporterade information för att förmedla dess ställning och identitet. Externa intressenter förväntar sig i ökande utsträckning att även icke-numerisk information redovisas av företaget, vilket gör denna typ av externt rapporterade information viktig för att redovisa aktiviteter och för företag att därigenom bibehålla legitimitet som sociala aktörer. Frågan om vilka rapporteringskonventioner som finns kring företags självrepresentationer är i dagsläget inte utforskad. Syftet med denna studie är därför att undersöka det empiriska fenomenet självrepresentationer i kontexten redovisning kopplat till perspektivet legitimeringsretorik. Studien baserar sig på tre forskningsartiklar som behandlar olika empiriska exempel och mönster av självrepresentationer, exempelvis affärsmodellsdiagram. Dessa betraktas utifrån de teoretiska linserna semiotik och institutionell teori, speciellt legitimeringsteori. Studien kombinerar visuella metoder (visuell innehållsanalys och visuell taxonomi) med andra metoder (intervjuer och textanalys) för att konceptualisera och exemplifiera vad som menas med självrepresentation i kontexten redovisning. Studien finner att det kan förekomma många parallella för-visuella självrepresentationer som påverkar företags självuppfattning, att visuella självrepresentationer blir alltmer vanliga i företags externt publicerade information, och att flera retoriska legitimeringsstrategier förekommer i det undersökta materialet. Genom att visa hur diagram används som kommunikationsresurs så argumenterar studien för att fortsatt forskning behövs för att undersöka hur diagram, likt mer utforskade visuella format såsom grafer och fotografier, bidrar till företags legitimeringsretorik i externt publicerad redovisningskommunikation, samt att diagram kan fungera som viktiga resurser för självrepresentation i företags redovisningsprocess. Dessutom föreslås, baserat på longitudinella och jämförande exempel, att självrepresentationer i ökande grad relaterar till abstrakta snarare än konkreta referenter. Denna förändring diskuteras i termer av en alltmer digital och tjänstebaserad kunskapsekonomi, där materiella referenter överges till förmån för ”amateriella” värden. Studiens bidrag är att beskriva själv-representationer genom flera empiriska exempel, och att därmed öka medvetenheten hos praktiker och forskare om hur visuella format kan tjäna legitimeringssyften i kontexten redovisning. Baserat på studiens analys och resonemang lyfts fyra begrepp fram för att förklara den observerade utvecklingen, samt för att bidra till att förbättra praktikers såväl som forskares ”visuella läskunnighet”: ett inkluderande perspektiv på externt publicerad information, amaterialitet, självrepresentation, och diagram.

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This project report offers an in-depth, detailed account of my creative process and work during my two-year Master in visual communication at Konstfack, Stockholm. My degree project is a celebration of plurality and visual democracy. Starting with identifying different norms pervading the graphic design discipline in the Western world today, both in terms of aesthetic values and systems of thinking, I have worked to propose and visualize alternative possible futures.  Drawing has been my main carrier through an intense journey of un-learning and re-learning resulting in an artist’s book in unique copy.  With this book, I want to problematize the dominant discourses around objectivity as a utopian ideal with a suppressive agenda, while visualizing a world I can recognize myself in. I have used decoration as a method, emotion and femininity as explorative standpoints, giving space to the metaphorical, the ambiguous and the spiritual to challenge current visual norms.  This book emerges as an affirmation of my own quest for visual belonging  as a graphic designer and a woman; a testimony of the practice of drawing as actualized power.