This reflexive ethnography investigates both the practice of cultural regeneration movement and fieldwork engagement in the context of contested development. The setting is Mt. Apo National Park where the Philippine National Oil Company has built a 250-megawatt geothermal power plant. The project aims to reduce government's dependence on imported oil and fuel its industrialisation program. Mt. Apo, however, is an ecologically and politically sensitive site, being a sanctuary of Southeast Asia's rich biodiversity, home to indigenous peoples, and shelter for armed insurgents. The local NGO and Church opposition grew into a massive national and international protest. Despite the hesitant hospitality of the affected community, PNOC managed to transform its image into a corporate environmentalist and pursue its project. This thesis explores the interaction among the various contextual actors, including social scientists and the sick, the pastors, priests and protesters. It also analyses the politicisation of rituals and the construction of advocacy in Europe. My main focus, however, is the kin-based movement called Tuddok. Tuddok aimed at cultural regeneration and territorial recognition. It emerged, apparently, from the failure of both development project and political protest to take seriously the predicament of the host community. Cultural politics research rightly treats this type of movement not simply as resistance, but as struggle for meaning and existence. Even recent literature, however, still equates movement with protest. I highlight, instead, what may be called cultural energies-the human capabilities by which people collectively re-animate themselves in face of, but not exhaustively in reaction to, political binary oppositions. My fieldwork (September 1995-January 1997) consisted mostly in accompanying Tuddok from its revival of Manobo dance, to its retrieval of Mt. Apo history and territory. As Tuddok became central to my research, my research in turn served as resource for the movement. This partnership grew tense as the ethnographer's status as Catholic priest allegedly threatened the peace of the Protestant village. The last section of the thesis reflects on the practice of fieldwork as social intervention before it is transformed into a textual invention.

Researchers explore various aspects related to art and urban life using terms such as cultural economy, the 'creative class', cultural clustering; and there are many more. Public art is one strategy, employed for any number of broader agendas spanning from economic aims to community identity. This study examines public art at the intersection of cultural planning strategy and community participation. A midsize New England city Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with a significant industrial mill heritage, provides a location from which to study public art within a specific context over a period of time spanning from 1970 to the present. Qualitative methods such as interviews, document review and survey of specific public art initiatives, both temporary and permanent, will help to uncover motivations and expectations that drive the development of public art projects. More knowledge about these purposes can lead to informative lines of questioning that may help planners and designers better understand the best application of public art in the landscape within a given community

Since the 1990s, urban cultural policy in the UK has been bound to the cause of urban regeneration. Much has been written in examination and critique of this relationship, but what happens when the direction of strategic attention is reversed and civic leadership seeks to regenerate culture itself? The city of Glasgow, having made capital of culture over many decades, has moved towards a strategy for the development of literary Glasgow. This thesis documents a search for those factors crucial to that strategy. The research focuses on literary Glasgow as one aspect of the city’s cultural sector; identifies and examines gaps in the relationship between the civic cultural organisation and literary communities; and highlights those elements vital to the formation of a strategy for development of the literary in Glasgow. An extended period of participatory ethnographic research within the Aye Write! book festival and Sunny Govan Community Radio, is supplemented with data from interviews conducted across the literary sector and analysis of organisational documentation. Through these a gap has been identified between the policies and operations of a civic cultural organisation, and the desires of those engaged within the literary community. This gap is caused, in part, by the lack of a mechanism with which to reconcile contrasting narratives about the cultural essence of the city, or to negotiate the variations in definitions of value in relation to cultural engagement. The interdisciplinary approach builds upon insights from existing work within publishing studies, cultural policy, complexity theory and organisational studies to construct an understanding of the dynamics of Glasgow’s literary sector. This reveals the need for a framework in support of a landscape of practice, a desire for the placement of boundary objects to facilitate engagement, and the significance of value in relation to participation in literary activity. This work informs a strategy for literary Glasgow and contributes to conversations on strategies for cultural development in other cities.