Verksamhetsförlagda studier

<p>This dissertation explores creative music, sound design and image production in the context of consumer culture (as defined by how its participants socialize in late-capitalist culture using commodities). Through the stylization of image, music and sound effects, advertisers communicate an abstract concept of a brand, and instantiate the brand through an audience member's heightened experience of the brand via the ad. Facilitated by socialized and mediatized frameworks for brand communications, branding is an embodied practice that relies on the audience member's participation with the brand through her/his real experience with an (audiovisual) advertisement. The effect of making the abstract brand tangible relies on successfully executing advertising objectives to create "impact" through stylized and often hyperreal representations of reality. At the same time, audience members' encounters with ads and branding practices represent bona fide experiences for them within American-capitalist cultural practices, and audience members take part in these practices as part of social participation and general making-sense of their everyday lives.</p><p>In late-capitalist consumer culture, the idea of the "consumer" operates within the liminal space of constructions of hyper-reality and the self. Through advertising, corporate interests mediate how people relate to and through commodities as consumers. Through ads, producers communicate an idea of a brand, that is, the collection and stylistic design of specific visual and sonic symbols, and the associated ideas, values or emotions that project an identity or persona about a company and its products or services. In attempts to increase the efficacy of their ads, ad producers fashion image, music and sound design specifically in ways they believe will generate "impact," that is, a physical, physiological or emotional response to audiovisual stimuli that are infused with symbolic meanings and values. </p><p>In their attempts to create effective ads, ad producers circumscribe identities of people based on demographics, behavior metrics, or a host of other measures intended to define what the industry calls "target audiences." With the belief that target audience members share wants, needs and values, ad producers build constellations of audiovisual signifiers that they believe will resonate with target audience members. These signifiers borrow from cultural narratives and myths to tell stories about brands and products, and communicate how people's lived experiences might be transformed through consumption practices. </p><p>With meticulous formulation of image, music and sound design, ad producers create a "hyperreality," that is exaggerated, heightened or stylized representation of reality. Through these carefully produced audio and visual artifacts, ad producers (re)circulate cultural narratives they believe communicate meaning and ideas of value, and make those abstract beliefs tangible through the audience member's sensorial experiences. With hyperreality grounded in an audience members' body and emotions, ad producers believe they can shape and direct audience members' ideas about their personal identities, and that of others and social groups. Additionally, ad image, music and sound design contribute to the naturalization of the ways people can socialize around branded identities and interconnect through commodities.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Ett syfte med studien är att introducera en metod för komparativ kulturarvsanalys. Metoden skall kunna användas för att analysera hur kulturarvsvärden värderas och hur de används i interpretation och presentation. Metoden som prövas skall uppfylla studiens övriga tre syften: att genom en nulägesanalys studera hur de olika kulturarvsvärdena i och kring Kinda kanal uppfattas, värderas, vårdas och visas, för att mot denna bakgrund jämföra liknande områden nationellt och internationellt och finna konstruktiva uppslag till framtida utvecklingsplaner och möjligheter för upplevelseområdet Kinda kanal.</p>

On the eve of 1920, the U.S. recording industry had been through a number of near-fatal economic downturns since its precarious emergence in the 1890s, and yet stood on the verge of its most influential decade to date. Already in its short history, the recording industry had nearly ceased to exist in the 1890s, saved itself by transforming the phonograph from office machine to nickel-in-the-slot novelty, survived the first of many format wars to come, and reinvented itself by introducing the phonograph into American homes. During the 1920s and 1930s, the recording industry participated in creating genre categories and identifying audiences for music that had previously gone unrecorded. By concentrating on both industry giants (Victor, Columbia) and smaller labels that were key to industry trends (Gennett, Paramount, Okeh), this dissertation's working hypothesis is that a new mode of production in the recording industry between the world wars -- based both on previous business strategies and new market conditions -- allowed a few large corporations to develop into a highly organized industry. This relationship between genre (understood as a configuration of social, cultural, ideological, and aesthetic beliefs) and mode of production (in its most concrete sense, how a given company operates) has continued to be an important one to the record industry, because with each new genre and sub-genre the industry has the potential to connect with underserved or unrecognized audiences. By combining industrial history with cultural analysis, this dissertation analyzes institutional cultures at various record companies and the contributions of musicians and various cultural intermediaries who helped shape U. S. popular music beginning in the early twentieth century. The central questions to which I continually return are: How did the consolidation of the recording industry into distinct company cultures shape the records that were made? What role did these cultures play in the shaping of genres, in terms of both creative control and technological formats? And finally, how do these various aspects interrelate in the context of the recording industry -- both as an industry involved in manufacturing culture and reflecting its own participation as a cultural institution? / text

This dissertation examines the production of culture among Indo-Caribbean communities in New York City and Trinidad. It seeks to understand how cultural producers use performance as a way to mediate their experiences of racialization in local, national, and transnational spheres. Based on a multisited ethnographic study, I analyze the Indo-Caribbean diaspora as a result of nineteenth and twentieth century indentured labor migration and as a focus of post-1965 transnational migration. To do so, I introduce the idea of "transnational performances," which I employ to examine how expressions of Indo-Caribbean identity are performed in Trinidad and New York City as a way of mediating global processes. Specifically, this dissertation begins with a geographic and historical overview of Indo-Caribbean transnational populations, then provides an ethnographic study of contemporary Hindu religious festivals in Trinidad, an Islamic festival held in both New York City and Trinidad, Indo-Caribbean media in New York, and a cultural and arts center in New York. In all these sites Indo-Caribbean cultural producers engage the politics of public representation of Indo-Caribbean identity. I argue that while Indo-Caribbean religious, festival, media, and cultural producers engage with diasporic formations of identity and develop diasporic narratives that address Indian origins, they simultaneously develop new, creative, and flexible Indo- Caribbean transnational performances in the public sphere often coproducing their identities in relation to other diasporic communities. Concerns about authenticity exist alongside the desire to create new cultural practices that employ hybridity as a strategy to assert belonging. These transnational performances are spaces from which Indo-Caribbean communities develop a public voice that responds to perceived exclusions and erasures. The geographies of belonging that are central in the transnational performances of Indo-Caribbean cultural producers suggest that we must attend to the cultural practices developed within and across boundaries while taking a historical perspective on global processes that are reconfigured in the contemporary period. / text

No description available.

Det här arbetet handlar om en släktmöbel och dess klädsel. Möbeln är en brudpall från 1900-talets början, som användes vid ett bröllop år 1910. Klädseln är ett nytillverkat yllebroderi, men med rötterna från samma tid. Syftet med hela arbetet har varit att söka efter brudpallens ursprung i fråga om stilhistoriskt uttryck, ändamål, uppbyggnad etc. för att sedan kunna söka och välja ett lämpligt broderimönster från samma tid att ha som förlaga till en ny broderad klädsel. Tyngdpunkten i examensarbetet har legat på det praktiska arbetet med att brodera denna nya klädsel. Målsättningen har varit att återskapa brudpallen till ett utseende som är så representativt som möjligt för det tidiga 1900-talet i Sverige. Valet av broderi för brudpallen föll på ett jugendmönster från 1905, tillhörande Röhsska Museet i Göteborg.

This project investigates the English-language life writing of diasporic Iranian Jewish women. It examines how these women have differentially imagined their diasporic lives and travels, and how they have in turn been imagined and accepted or rejected by their audiences. In the first chapter, I use “home” as a lens for understanding three distinct life writing texts, showing how the authors write about what it means to have a home and to be at home in contrasting and even contradictory ways. I show how, despite potential hegemonic readings that perpetuate unequal relationships and a normative definition of the ideal home, the texts are open to multiple contestatory readings that create spaces for new formulations and understandings. In the second chapter, I look more closely at the intersections between trauma stories and the life writing of Iranian Jewish women, and I argue that readers use life writing texts about trauma to support an egocentric reconstruction of American democracy and dominance. I also show how a critical frame for understanding trauma can yield interpretations that highlight, rather than ignore, relationships of power and privilege. In the final chapter of the thesis, I present a case study of two online reading groups, and I show that communal reading environments, though they participate in dominant discourses, are also spaces where resistance and subversion can develop. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-08 22:54:33.728

I den här uppsatsen undersöks en gård i Ljusdalsbygden i Hälsingland som kallas Utigården. På gården finns idag en byggnad som kallas mangelstugan där måleri och tapeter från 1806-1807 finns bevarat. Frågeställningen är när, hur och varför den inreddes samt vem eller vilka som kan ha utfört arbetet. Syftet är att frångå generella förklaringar, lägga ett mer individuellt perspektiv på en interiör och på så vis ge den ett mervärde. Arkivariska källor och litteratur tolkas tillsammans med den fysiska byggnadens interiör för att i viss mån kartlägga den sociala och ekonomiska kontexten som omgav interiören. Mangelstugan interiör visar också prov på hur måleri och tapeter verkade sida vid sida. Ur deras estetiska uttryck samt rumsplacering tolkas statusskillnader mellan de båda samt att mangelstugan bör ha varit en representativ byggnad. Stilinfluenser belyses också. Bland annat lyfter uppsatsen fram en fransk tapet som högst sannolikt varit förlaga till mellankammarens måleri i mangelstugan. Här säkerställs att allmogemålarna använde sig av förlagor, men att slutresultatet var unikt och personligt. Mangelstugans interiör visar prov på hur en sådan interiör kunde se ut på början av 1800-talet i en gård i ljusdal och ett möjligt scenario rörande upphovsmännen, där Ljusdalsmålarna Arve och HindriksOlle lyfts fram som potentiella upphovsmän, bidrar till att knyta fler värden till interiören vilket förhoppningsvis leder till ökade möjligheter att bevaras. I uppsatsen klargörs att gården bör ha flyttats till dagens gårdsläge troligen mellan 1802-1806 samt att mangelstugan uppförts efter flytten och av dateringarna att döma år 1806. Olof Jonsson brukade hemmanet när mangelstugan byggdes och inreddes. Hans bouppteckning visar att gården bör ha varit välställd. Utifrån detta diskuteras hur mangelstugan fyllde många funktioner. Representativitet, manifestation, exkluderande och inkluderande samt estetiska kvalitéer är exempel på sådana. / The focus of this essay is a building belonging to a farmhouse in Ljusdal, Hälsingland, called Utigården. The building has wallpaper and mural paintings preserved from the beginning of the 19th century. The aim of this essay is to investigate when, how and why the interior was made as well as by whom. This serves to put a more individual perspective on one certain interior instead of using more general explanations. This knowledge will lead to more knowledge and values being ascribed to this interior and hopefully an increased will to preserve it in the future. It gives us an example of how an interior from this time might look like, how traditional paintings are mixed with modern motives and wallpapers and how all of this together is symbolic and guides us through the rooms. Their aesthetic qualities shows that it was most probably a representative building. Different theories about influnces and inspiration are also illustrated. The mapping of certain social and economical factors serves to show the circumstances for when the interior was made as well as why. Probably the farm was moved between 1802-1806 and this might explain the new building. Different theories of why it was important to invest in these representative building and what different values they might have fulfilled are also discussed in this essay. Representatation, including and excluding factors and aesthetic values are some of them. Two potential painters are discussed as having painted the interior. They are called Arve and HindriksOlle. A possible scenario is created around their connections to Utigården.

This essay deals with ruins from the perspective of their cultural values ​​and the impact of add-ons, protective add-ons and caring actions affect these values. The issues in the essay are; What are the cultural values of a ruin?  How have ruins been used?  How are ruins treated today? Initially the definition of the concept “ruin” is discussed, what is a ruin? A building has an architectural biography: the creation, destruction, change and the decay. The concept of ruin is considered to be a state of this decay, rather than a dead building. This leads to that if a ruin is added or rebuilt, once again it becomes a building. Ruins has meant a lot to people even long ago, the history of the caring of ruins goes long back, in Italy to the 5th century AD. In the Nordic countries the protection of ancient remains came a bit later, in Sweden the first legislation is from the year 1666th. The ruins were preserved to show the greatness of ancient societies and the changes that led to the decay of the buildings. During the 18th century a cult grows around ruins, which later have been called the romance of ruins. This ideology is developing into constructing "new" ruins in the castle parks, ruins become a status symbol. The essay deals with three case studies as reference objects in a discussion regarding their cultural value. The ruin of the dome in Hamar, Norway, over-built with a protective roof that directly affects the cultural environment. The arguments for this operation are the task of conservation, but the goal is to use the building as a cultural arena. The castle ruin on Visingsö in the lake Vättern has an action plan with a clear cultural value description. The age of the ruin and bearer of abstract memories are emphasized values. The last example is the rebuilding of St Nicholas church ruin in Visby and how designers are taking into account its cultural value. Finally, the definition of the general cultural values ​​of a ruin is presented, in comparison with the reference objects included in the paper. The age of the ruin, structural engineering in past societies, the use of the ruins and the changes of extensions or restorations are the values ​​that occur in the examples. The conclusion is that the change is perhaps the value of most importance. Since the "ruin" is a stage rather than a fixed object the change is a fact. To freeze a moment of decay may remove one of the most important cultural values of a ruin. / Uppsatsen behandlar ruiner utifrån deras kulturhistoriska värden och vilka konsekvenser tillbyggnader, skyddstillbyggnader och vårdande insatser påverkar dessa värden. Uppsatsens drivande frågeställningar är : Vilka är en ruins kulturhistoriska värden? Hur har man brukat ruiner? Hur behandlas ruiner idag? Inledningsvis definieras begreppet ruin, vad är en ruin? I diskussionen tas en byggnads biografi upp med Tillblivelse, nedbrytning, förändring och förgängelse. Begreppet ruin anses vara ett tillstånd av varande förfall snarare än en död byggnad. Detta medför sig att en ruin som till- eller ombyggs åter kan bli en byggnad. Ruiner har betytt mycket för människor även långt tillbaka, ruinvårdens historia går, i Italien, tillbaka till århundradena efter vår tideräknings början.  I Norden kom skyddet för fornlämningar lite senare, i Sverige finns den första lagstiftningen från år 1666. Ruinerna skulle bevaras för att visa på forna samhällens storhet och på förändringar som lett till byggnaders förfall. Under 1700-talet växer en kult fram kring ruiner, som sedan kallas ruinromantiken. Denna ideologi utvecklar sig till att man uppför ”nya” ruiner i slottsparker, ruinen blir en statussymbol. Uppsatsen tar upp 3 fallstudier som referensobjekt i en diskussion kring de kulturhistoriska värdena. Hamar domkyrkoruin i Norge överbyggdes med ett skyddstak som direkt påverkar kulturmiljön. Argumenten för insatsen är av bevarandekaraktär men målet är att använda byggnaden som kulturarena. Visningsborgs slottsruin på Visingsö i Vättern har ett vårdprogram med en tydlig kulturhistorisk värdebeskrivning. Ruinens ålder och bärare av abstrakta minnen tas upp som viktiga värden. Sist tas ombyggnaden av S:t Nicolai kyrkoruin i Visby upp som exempel på hur arkitekterna tar hänsyn till de kulturhistoriska värdena. Slutligen definieras de allmänna kulturhistoriska värden som en ruin innehar i jämförelse med de referensobjekt som tagits upp i uppsatsen. Ruinens ålder, byggnadskonst i tidigare samhällen, ruinens användning och den förändring som skett i form av tillbyggnader eller restaureringar är de värden som återkommer i exemplen. Slutsatsen blir att förändringen är kanske det värde som är högst. Eftersom ”ruin” är ett stadium snarare än ett fast objekt blir förändringen ett faktum. Att frysa ett ögonblick av förfall kan alltså ta bort ett av de viktigaste kulturhistoriska värden som en ruin innehar.