L’objectif principal de cette thèse est l’analyse des configurations du lien social naissant au sein de systèmes alternatifs d’échange local, afin d’y retrouver la trace du « don maussien ». L’enquête porte sur un échange de biens, parallèle à l’échange marchand et localement accompli dans le contexte d’un monde globalisé, perspective qui inscrit la recherche dans le champ de l’anthropologie économique des mondes contemporains. Le phénomène de la mondialisation, associé au progrès des techniques de communication, permettant d’observer des procédés analogues, engendrés par des causes communes dans différentes parties du monde, le terrain, tel que défini ci-dessus, fut réalisé sur deux sites socio-culturellement différents puisque implantés en Colombie pour l’un, et en France, pour l’autre. Ces deux sites furent traités comme un seul terrain multi-local dont le croisement des données recueillies a enrichi l’analyse. Avant de passer à la partie descriptive des ethnographies réalisées, le travail évoque des théories et des expériences antérieures qui ont permis de reconnaître la différence entre les expérimentations monétaires et les systèmes d’échange multilatéral ou dispositifs comptables centralisés employant une unité de compte pour faciliter les échanges. La production et la consommation sont stimulées par un type de monnaie qui joue un rôle complémentaire à la devise officielle et permet des transactions multilatérales. Devant la diversité des systèmes alternatifs à l’échange marchand, un choix s’imposait pour déterminer ceux qui seraient l’objet de l’enquête de terrain. Les initiatives sélectionnées pour une observation directe furent les foires de multi-troc colombiennes et les systèmes d’échange local (SEL) français. Les deux monographies décrivent le déroulement des investigations en Colombie et en France, ainsi que les constats qui s’imposèrent à leur issue. Il apparaît qu’au-delà de la raison économique d’échanger biens et services sans se soumettre à l’usage de l’argent comme fin en soi, les adhérents à ces expériences de micro-économie y trouvent un milieu propice à cultiver de nouvelles relations sociales. Les raisons de participer sont multiples mais s’alignent souvent sur des valeurs communes telles que la confiance, l’entraide, le respect de l’autre, la tolérance ou la solidarité, autant de logiques qui font de ces groupements, des espaces de création de liens sociaux favorables à l’émergence du don moderne. Tel qu’il a été développé et actualisé par Jacques T. Godbout, Alain Caillé et les exposants du Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales –M.A.U.S.S.- . /ABSTRACT The main objective of this thesis is the analysis of configurations of the social link emerging within alternate systems of local exchange, in order to find traces of the “maussian gift”. The investigation covers the exchange of property which is parallel to trade exchange and is locally accomplished in the context of a global world, a perspective which integrates our research within the field of economic anthropology of contemporary worlds. The phenomenon of the globalization, coupled with advances in communication technology, allows us to observe similar processes around the world, engendered by common causes. The fieldwork, as mentioned above, was realized on two socio - culturally different sites, one in Colombia, the other one in France. These two sites were treated as a single multi-local fieldwork, and their combined information enriched our analysis. Before proceeding to the descriptive part of the conducted ethnographic research, the document evokes theories and previous experiences which allowed us to recognize the difference between monetary experiments and multilateral trading systems or devices using a centralized accounting unit to facilitate the exchanges. The production and the consumption are stimulated by a type of exchange that is complementary to the official currency and allows multilateral transactions. Considering the variety of alternative systems in the exchange market, a choice was necessary to determine, who would be the object of the fieldwork. The initiatives selected for direct observation were the Colombian multi-barter fairs and the French systems of local exchange (SEL). Both monographs describe the progress of investigations in Colombia and in France, as well as the resulting reports. It seems that, apart from the economic reason for exchanging goods and services without being subject to the use of money, which is an end in itself, those who take part in such experiences of microeconomics find a convenient environment to cultivate new social relationships. The reasons for participating are numerous, but often aligned on common values such as trust, mutual aid, respect for the others, tolerance or solidarity, which all contribute to transform these gatherings into spaces mean to create social links favourable to the emergence of the modern gift. This theory was developed and updated by Jacques T. Godbout, Alain Caillé and the members of the Anti-Utilitarian Movement in Social Science -M.A.U.S.S.-.

This study brings the insights of Slavoj Žižek’s Lacan-inspired approach to bear upon a series of influential 20th century plays and their engagement with what Lacan calls the Real. The plays to be explored share a focus on experiences, events or encounters which transcend, exceed, disrupt, and in some cases shatter characters’ normal, familiar realities. Examined through the lens of Žižek, these confrontations with the sublime and the fantastic reveal a crucial relation to the plays’ contemporary contexts, prompting us to “look awry” upon the dynamics of our own symbolically-regulated reality and the ever-changing and precarious nature of our relation to it. Similarly crucial is the relation of the Lacanian Real to our theatrical forms and modes of perception in the theatre. In staging “encounters with the Real,” these plays prompt us simultaneously to explore the ways in which the Real operates —and “appears” — in our own theatrical experience, ensnaring our gaze and the force of our desire. The study offers a Žižekian approach to works including Peter Shaffer’s Equus, John Mighton’s Possible Worlds, S. An-sky’s The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker, Tony Kushner’s The Illusion, and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Enigma Variations.

This study brings the insights of Slavoj Žižek’s Lacan-inspired approach to bear upon a series of influential 20th century plays and their engagement with what Lacan calls the Real. The plays to be explored share a focus on experiences, events or encounters which transcend, exceed, disrupt, and in some cases shatter characters’ normal, familiar realities. Examined through the lens of Žižek, these confrontations with the sublime and the fantastic reveal a crucial relation to the plays’ contemporary contexts, prompting us to “look awry” upon the dynamics of our own symbolically-regulated reality and the ever-changing and precarious nature of our relation to it. Similarly crucial is the relation of the Lacanian Real to our theatrical forms and modes of perception in the theatre. In staging “encounters with the Real,” these plays prompt us simultaneously to explore the ways in which the Real operates —and “appears” — in our own theatrical experience, ensnaring our gaze and the force of our desire. The study offers a Žižekian approach to works including Peter Shaffer’s Equus, John Mighton’s Possible Worlds, S. An-sky’s The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker, Tony Kushner’s The Illusion, and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Enigma Variations.

The management of online learning environments so that they are effective and efficient presents a significant challenge for institutions and lecturers due to the complexity of requirements in the learning and teaching domain. The use of 3D Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) for education introduces a novel set of management challenges. MUVEs were designed to cater for entertainment and commercial needs and as such do not intrinsically support managed learning. When MUVEs are used for educational purposes, forming 3D Multi User Learning Environments (MULEs), user support for learning management becomes an important factor. This thesis highlights the importance of managed learning in MULEs. It proposes a coordinated approach which accommodates the existing education institutional infrastructure. The research has focused on two very widely used and closely compatible MUVEs, Second Life (SL) and OpenSim. The thesis presents system and user studies that have been carried out on these selected MUVEs. The findings reveal the challenges that academics and students can experience if they do not have sufficient knowhow to manage learning activities in SL/OpenSim. User guidance and training tools were then developed for supporting learning management strategies in the context of SL/OpenSim and demonstrated in exemplar use-case scenarios. The user support models and tools which were developed have been extensively evaluated for their usability and educational value using diverse participant groups. The results validate the efficacy of these contributions, defending the research thesis. These contributions can be used in future research on managing MUVE supported education.

Drawing upon data from a qualitative interview study on the life stories of young women, the aim of this study is to analyze young womens experiences of difficult life events. Special interest is directed to how cultural frameworks are reflected in young women’s stories about themselves and the family and school worlds they have lived in. During a period of almost four years, I conducted deep interviews with ten young women on two to four occasions. They were between the ages of sixteen and twenty at the time of the first interview and of different classes and local origins. The young women were recruited to the study through leaders of a youth detention home and of a girl group activity. Methodologically, the thesis is based in the general field of narrative research and more specifically in the field of feminist life story research. I employed a holistic and thematic content analysis inspired by hermeneutic interpretation and the mainly focus has been on what was told in the stories. The thesis is written in a context of feminist epistemology and from a critical perspective (cf. Harding, 1986, 2004). It includes, among other things, an assumption that there is a social, cultural and historically created imbalance of power between different groups in society (cf. Anderson, 2003). The theoretical concepts that form the basis of this part of the theoretical framework are social worlds (cf. Shibutani, 1955), exclusion (cf. Goffman, 1963; Young, 1990, 2000), belonging (cf. Molin, 2010; Spånberger Weitz, 2011), agency (cf. McNay, 2003, 2004), space of agency (cf. Eduards, 2002) and social positions (cf. Anderson, 2003). The young women´s stories about family gathered around experiences of parents’ separation, family violence, parental substance abuse and the separation from parents. Their stories of school life gathered mainly around experiences of being different and othered, and these experiences of otherness and alienation were closely linked to bullying, school difficulties and to a general unhappiness at school (cf. Andersson, 1995). In contemplation of life as a series of life events, the young womens stories highlight the importance of difficult life events and the impact they have had on their ability to live their lives. The results portray the importance of considering life as a series of moving events, instant and recurring, and of understanding the consequences of social structures on how life and its conditions change and are linked across borders, between different worlds and different times. In a consideration of the life events as variable, instantaneous and sometimes recurring and changing, every life event has to be viewed as new and important to pay attention to, both as an event in itself and also how this event spreads to other moments and contexts than the time and world in which it occurred. In the assumption of life as moving and of life events as essential elements in a changeable life course, available positions and spaces of agency are made visible in the young womens stories. The cultural frameworks of the good family, the real schoolgirl and an authentic I represent structuring principles for how the events are possible to understand and talk about for the young women. They can be considered as ideal images that both increase and limit their opportunities to make difficult life events and their own actions in relation to the events understandable. In this thesis, it becomes visible that, in order to understand young women’s experiences of difficult life events, we need to place experiences in a context where the different circumstances, such as social positions and local structures, are made visible, analyzed and reflected upon.

In settings such as hotels, bars and boutiques, things like cars, sodas, clothes, and cities, are fueled with the symbolic capital of graffiti. The purpose of this ethnographic study is to understand how graffiti writers, through marketing, increase the value of their work, as well as that of other products, and how this commercialization affects the meaning of graffiti.  Utilizing a perspective of social constructionism, the analysis shows how actors and social fields that are constructed as incongruous (e.g., art galleries and graffiti culture), are at the same time being mixed together to create something new, and thus create value. This study shows how practices that are considered marginal, or deviant, at the same time generate value within the general economy. Deploying an abductive approach, and building on ample empirical material, this study shows that the narrative of graffiti as something illegal is one of the main traits that enables graffiti writers to exchange subcultural capital for economic. The results show that previous research, investigating graffiti from a dichotomous perspective of either art or vandalism, do not give a satisfactory understanding of this diverse subculture.   The empirical material consists of 30 participant observations in public events, in Sweden during the autumn of 2014, where graffiti is turned into a commodity embodied with subcultural capital. Moreover, four in-depth interviews were executed with graffiti writers who have sold their competence and art for purposes of marketing, and one group interview with three of their customers. Further, several documents were collected and analyzed.

The aim of this study was to describe and analyse online teaching practices in the Swedish higher education context. The study had an online ethnographic approach and was based on empirical data on the teaching in two university courses. The study rested primarily on observational data but interviews and available documents also formed the basis for analysis. Empirical data were analysed with a perspective of practice theory – a perspective within a sociomaterial account. The results showed that online teaching was characterised by an embodied sociomaterial practice. The teacher’s body could be understood as both multiple and closely interwoven with technology. Furthermore, the teacher’s body was used in the teaching situation to reduce technological complexity but also, along with other forms of materiality, to prefigure what kind of teaching would take place. Teacher interventions in online environments could furthermore be understood as relational to both technology (that is the virtual material arrangement) and teachers’ doings and sayings (that is the teaching practice). Teacher interventions were aimed at making the arrangement intelligible for the students. The study showed that teacher interventions arranged both students and information and communication technology (ICT) in order to make them work as a teaching practice. The teaching practice that emerged was characterised as an interplay between virtual materiality and social practice, where asymmetricrelations between teachers and the ICT prevailed. / Syftet med föreliggande studie var att beskriva och analysera undervisningspraktiker online i svensk högre utbildningskontext. Studien har en onlineetnografisk ansats och baseras på empiriska data av undervisningen i två kurser på universitetsnivå. Studien stödjer sig främst på observationsdata men även intervjuer och dokumentstudier ligger som grund för analysen. Empiriska data har analyserats med ett praktikteoretiskt perspektiv – ett perspektiv inom sociomateriell teoribildning. Resultatet visar att undervisning online kännetecknas av en förkroppsligad sociomateriell praktik. Lärarkroppen kan förstås som både multipel och tätt sammanvävd med teknologi. Vidare används lärarkroppen i undervisningssituationen för att reducera komplexitet men även för att, tillsammans med annan materialitet, prefigurera vad det är för typ av undervisning som kommer att utspela sig. Vidare kan lärarinterventioner i onlinemiljöer förstås som relationella till både tekniken (det vill säga det virtuellt materiella arrangemanget) och lärares göranden och säganden (det vill säga undervisningspraktiken). Lärarinterventioner syftar till att göra arrangemanget begripligt för studenterna. Studien visar att lärarinterventionerna arrangerar både studenter och informations- och kommunikationsteknologi (IKT) i syfte att få dem att fungera som en undervisningspraktik. Den undervisningspraktik som uppstår är inte given på förhand utan emergent. Den karaktäriseras av ett samspel mellan virtuell materialitet och social praktik där asymmetriska relationer mellan lärare och IKT råder.

This study investigates the representation of narrative space in the novel and the film of The Return of the King. As the two representations belong to two different mediums, the theories on narrative space in the novel and in the film are examined in order to distinguish between their modes of representation of space. In essence, the theory utilised for the spatial analysis focuses on the content, function and symbolic meaning within spaces, as created by the description of objects, the repetition and accumulation of spatial information, as well as the movement of characters within spaces and the interaction between characters and different spaces. This spatial interaction relates to the events, representations of time and the role of the narrator within the different dimensions of narrated space, that is, concrete and abstract space. The three most significant spaces within the novel and the film, namely Minas Tirith, Mount Doom and Hobbiton form the basis of the analysis, which focuses on the narrative spaces as they are represented. From this study, it becomes clear that there are different levels of meaning embodied within a space: the physical and geographical space, the social space of interaction and the abstract, symbolic space. The significant spaces and their meanings in the novel have been subjected to filmic transformation. Essentially, the spaces in both the novel and the film display the fact that space ultimately influences those events and people who interact with it and vice versa. These spaces thus embody specific meanings, which contribute towards the undertaken journey represented in Tolkien's fantastical, imaginative world. / MA (English), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Ce travail de recherche s’intéresse au potentiel thérapeutique de la lecture et vise à mieux comprendre le fonctionnement du dispositif littéraire, notamment dans son interaction avec le lecteur. En nous appuyant sur la théorie des mondes parallèles, nous faisons l’hypothèse que l’œuvre littéraire induit une simulation de la vie psychique du lecteur. Par le biais du canal sémiotique qu’est le texte et selon des dispositifs de représentation, le lecteur ressaisit le sens des mots et s’approprie le récit. En tant qu’expérience esthétique, la lecture littéraire fait appel au vécu du lecteur et engage ses émotions autrement que tout autre type de discours. Le geste de la lecture sous-entend déjà une certaine subjectivité du lecteur et nous pouvons donc, dès lors que nous nous intéressons de plus près à l’interaction entre texte et lecteur, concevoir une utilisation thérapeutique de la littérature. En proposant l’œuvre littéraire comme support de développement psychique, nous avons conçu, animé et évalué un atelier thérapeutique de lecture et d’écriture dans trois structures en santé mentale, à Toulouse et à Montréal. Destiné à un public souffrant de psychose, cet atelier s’appuie sur les principes de l’art-thérapie et vient concrétiser l’aspect (re)constructeur de la lecture littéraire inscrite dans notre réflexion théorique. Nos observations, d’une part, interrogent la perspective théorique littéraire, la fonction attribuée à l’œuvre et l’activité du lecteur et, d’autre part, débouchent sur des propositions thérapeutiques pour un atelier de lecture et d’écriture en milieu psychiatrique. / This research is interested in the therapeutic potential of literary reading and looks for a better understanding of the literary device, particularly in its interaction with the reader. Basing our work on fictional worlds theory, we make the hypothesis that literary work induces a simulation of the reader’s psychic life. Using the semiotic channel of the text and according to representation devices, the reader seizes the words’ sense and adapts the story for himself. As an aesthetic experience, literary reading calls for the reader’s past experiences and engages his emotions in a different way than any other type of discourse. The gesture of reading already implies a certain subjectivity for the reader and we can therefore, as we take a closer interest to text-reader interaction, imagine a therapeutic use of literature. Proposing literary work as a support for psychic development, we have designed, ran and evaluated therapeutic reading and writing sessions in three mental health infrastructures, in Toulouse and Montreal. Destined to a psychotic audience, these reading sessions are based on art therapy principles and concretize the (re)constructive aspect of literary reading within our theoritical reflection. On one hand, our observations challenge the literary studies perspective, the function of the literary work and the activity of the reader and, on the other hand, they lead on therapeutic propositions for reading and writing sessions in a psychiatric context. / Réalisé en cotutelle internationale avec l'Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail

This study of Canadian adventure romance for adolescents seeks to demonstrate the cultural significance of the genre through close readings of James Houston's Frozen Fire and The White Archer, Monica Hughes's Hunter in the Dark and Ring-Rise, Ring-Set, as well as Markoosie's Harpoon of the Hunter. By means of a semiotic-structuralist approach I examine the texts as a signifying system conveying discourses that constitute a code of connection to the social context of contemporary young-adult readers.Structured on the formula: separation-initiation-return and informed by the symbolism of death-rebirth, the stories hold out the promise of a life-enhancing return. Roland Barthes's definition of myth as a mode of signification underpins my discussion of how the narrative conventions become vehicles of existential truths by replicating and intensifying adventurous experiences. With the quest for identity and the polarization between two worlds as structural determinants, the selected books juxtapose the values of Western civilization with those expressed through the Canadian North and its indigenous population. As a defining category of Canadian identity, the northern wilderness provides the space and the challenges for the protagonists' initiatory experiences. My application of the dichotomy self-other to the selected books provides a number of polarized positions such as civilization-wilderness, white-native, male-female, and conscious-unconscious, polarities through which the different discursive levels of the texts are generated. Arguably, the formulaic character of the journeys into the unknown allows the stories to signify on various levels, thus inviting both psychological and ideological readings of the texts.It is primarily through a recycling of narrative conventions that Houston and Hughes invest their work with significance. By focusing on the structural and thematic similarities of adventure romance, my examination attempts to elucidate the parallels to mythic adventure and archaic rites of initiation with the aim of validating the role of the genre as symbolic representations of the process of maturation and vicarious rites of passage. The conclusions I draw have a bearing on much of Houston's and Hughes's fiction, on the genre of romance as a whole, and to some extent on the adjacent genres of fantasy and science fiction. / <p>Behandlar James Houston, Monica Hughes och Markoosie.</p> / digitalisering@umu