The Ilford Carnival was a procession of costumed individuals and decorated vehicles held annually in this then outer-lying London suburb between 1905 and 1914 to raise funds for establishing a local hospital. This thesis utilises the carnival to provide an insight into how different suburban organisations and social groups came together in a particular performance of community. It argues that the carnival's administrative body, and other organisations involved, provided opportunities for inclusion and social capital attainment. It also demonstrates how a local culture of voluntary action provided the basis of a large-scale charitable initiative with an ethos of communal self-help. The suburban setting demonstrates the continued relevance of carnival, originating in the premodern ritual year, within a modern urban environment. In the wake of Ilford's drastic expansion, the carnival's annual recurrence provided reassuring familiarity, and an opportunity for inversionary performances, with the carnival's philanthropic rationale providing a justification for what might have otherwise been seen as transgressive. The thesis illustrates that the procession functioned as a suburban public sphere. Performances throughout operated between poles of artifice and sincerity, with dominant ideals about national and imperial identity, or class and gender roles, being projected through acts of dressing up, while such ideals were both transgressed and upheld through practices like crossdressing and blackface. The suburb too was reimagined, as both rural idyll and metropolitan tourist attraction. It also highlights how the carnival's timing, structure and content were impinged upon and influenced by expanding cultural industries, with the carnival commodified by participating businesses and media, but also appropriating fundraising models and imagery from commercialised formats like sport and theatre, connoting the topicality and recognisability that enabled it to compete within the metropolitan market for people's spare time and money.

Magister Artium - MA / According to our ordinary conception of voluntary action, our actions are the causal result of conscious intentions. To take a very basic example: I wish to take a sip of coffee, and I therefore reach out and take hold of the mug. However, studies performed by Libet challenge this ordinary conception. What Libet found in his experiments was that the brain initiates voluntary actions and the person becomes consciously aware of an intention to act only some 400 msec after the brain’s initiation; for instance, my brain has already initiated the process of causing my arm to reach out and take hold of the mug some 400 msec before I am aware that I wish to take a sip of coffee. That is, conscious intention doesn’t appear to precede voluntary action at all – it actually follows it (or follows its initiation, at least), and thus Libet’s studies present a serious challenge to our ordinary conception of voluntary action. This project will investigate whether a particular theory of mind – namely, Armstrong’s Central State Materialism – can cope with the challenge posed by Libet’s studies and salvage our ordinary conception of voluntary action. Armstrong’s theory appears promising in this regard because his account of consciousness and introspection as higher-order states seems to allow room that we will become aware of our willings only after those willings are already initiated.

Since the 1970s all of the available literature suggested that the UK, in common with Europe, North America and Scandinavia, had seen significant growth of single issue self-help/mutual aid groups related to health and social care issues. Yet in the UK there appeared to be no real body of academic interest nor any sustained national policy initiatives. The aim of the study was therefore to enhance an understanding of the relationship of these self-help/mutual aid groups to UK social policy. The study was constructed in two parts. Part One, a historical study critically appraised the way in which the state appeared to have viewed and responded to various manifestations of self help/mutual aid, both pre- and post- the welfare state. Part Two, a case-study of two UK grassroots self-help/mutual aid groups explored members' viewpoints, their reasons for joining, benefits derived and the impact they felt it has had on their lives and their relations with professionals and wider `political' forums. The result of the study suggests a fundamental reframing of the relationship between self-help/mutual aid and the state is required at both a conceptual and practical level by UK policy makers and academics. This would acknowledge: that contemporary self-help/mutual aid groups are part of the broader tradition of voluntary action in the third sector, self-help/mutual aid's unique contribution in terms of social relations, process and knowledge; its difference from philanthropy/formal voluntary sector and therefore distinct characteristics and relations with the-state; and contemporary health and social care groups' potential dual identity with communities of interest and geographic communities and their relationship to and distinction from the contemporary service user and carer movements. 116, findings have implications for policy related to participation (citizen and health), social capital and citizenship.

How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here I argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one’s own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the self. In a subliminal priming paradigm I show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects.

How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here I argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one’s own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the self. In a subliminal priming paradigm I show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects.