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This thesis is a study of popular social history and education in mid-twentieth century Britain. It argues that the ‘history of everyday life’ was a guiding framework for how ‘ordinary’ people sought to understand themselves and the world around them in this period. The ‘history of everyday life’ told stories of how the ‘uneventful’ lives, practices, feelings, and social and material environments of individuals changed across generations. It was the dominant form of popular social history in Britain from 1918 to the end of the 1960s, and it flourished long before academic social history championed similar themes, in a different idiom and for very different audiences. This thesis follows the ‘history of everyday life’ across a range of public-facing, educational institutions that were interested in producing histories for a mass audience. It delves into the myriad ways in which ‘amateur’ historians (often women) produced and disseminated ‘everyday’ histories. The ‘history of everyday life’ was a flexible intellectual resource available to both the radical left and conservative right. Whilst still attending to this full political spectrum, this thesis shifts focus away from explicit ideologies to the visual, emotional, and practical elements of historical activity.

This thesis is an art historical study focussing on contemporary Japan, and in particular the artists Murakami TakashL Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, and Nara Yoshitomo. These artists represent a generation of artists born in the 1960s who use popular culture to their own ends. From the seminal exhibition 'Tokyo Pop' at Hiratsuka Museum of Art in 1996 which included all four artists, to Murakami's group exhibition 'Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture' which opened in April 2005, central to my research is an exploration of contemporary art's engagement with the pervasiveness of cuteness in Japanese culture. Including key secondary material, which recognises cuteness as not merely something trivial but involving power play and gender role issues, this thesis undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of cuteness in contemporary Japanese popular culture, and examines howcontemporary Japanese artists have responded, providing original research through interviews with Aida Makoto, Mori Mariko and Murakami Takashi. Themes examined include the deconstruction of the high and low in contemporary art; sh6jo (girl) culture and cuteness; the relation of cuteness and the erotic; the transformation of cuteness into the grotesque; cuteness and nostalgia; and virtual cuteness in Japanese science fiction animation, and computer games.

Societies in Southern Africa remain largely gift economies, their art conceived as an infrastructure within everyday life, and yet art from the region continues to be read within the values of mimetic art where art is conceived as part of the superstructure of restricted Western economic and social thinking. My research on how the problematic of the gift and Bataille’s theory of the gift, the ‘general economy’, animates various aspects of my art praxis has set out to correct this discrepancy. It includes a re-examination of the general economy of the modern African society, which Achille Mbembe has described as the ‘postcolony’, and how it has impacted on the development of my work as an artist. My research is reflexive and practice-led. The specific praxis considered has included a body of work – published novels, films, installations, multimedia artwork and personal experiences – stretching back to 2000, when I made my first conceptual work of art, as a professional artist in Malawi. The problematic of the gift within my work has been explored alongside contemporary African art with a focus on Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art, and contemporary art at large with a focus on Situationist theory and praxis. I grew up in Malawi, a Chewa, and my research identifies the aesthetic sensibility in my art praxis as being directly influenced by the Nyau gift giving tradition which manifests in Chewa everyday life through play and a robust masquerading tradition, Gule Wamkulu, now a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This thesis compares aspects of the animastic and all-encompassing Chewa Nyau philosophy to Situationism as rooted in Dada and Surrealism. In light of the recent marginalisation of Gule Wamkulu in modern Chewa society, my research identifies the contemporary artist after Situationism as the new creative elite, Gule, akin to Gule Wamkulu in the heyday of Chewa prestation society. In my praxis, Nyau philosophy identifies the ‘cinema of attractions’ (manifest in the Malawi of my childoood as ‘Nyau Cinema’), the internet and the internet bureau, as new bwalo, arenas, to orchestrate play and invariably gift giving within the liminal spaces of modern spectacular cultures and commercial networks in what Negri and Hardt have described as the age of Empire. My thesis is presented as a ‘general writing’, a form of gift giving described by Derrida, and is communicated through an intellectual panegyric with an extensive appendix documenting the nature of my art and research as praxis. The appendix includes a detourned Facebook timeline (2011-16) and legal documents from a Venetian court regarding my installation Sanguinetti Breakout Area at the Venice Biennale 2015. The panegyric is what has united the theoretical and practice components of my research into one on-going inquiry into the problematic of the gift within everyday life.

The consumption of LSD and similar psychedelic drugs in New York City led to a great deal of cultural innovations that formed a unique psychedelic subculture from the early 1960s onwards. Historians and other commentators have offered conflicting views on this phenomenon by using either an epidemiological approach or by giving drug users more agency. The present study sides with the latter category to offer a new social history of LSD, but problematizes this topic in a sophisticated way by understanding psychedelic drug use as a social fact that in turn produces meaning for its consumers. It analyses the multiple cultural features of psychedelia through the lenses of politics, science, religion, and art, but also looks at the utopian and radical off-shoots of that subculture. To balance this thematic approach, it historicises the subculture by analysing its early days and discussing its origins, and then by pointing to the factors that led to its metamorphosis towards the end of the 1960s. In order to give LSD consumers a clearer voice, this dissertation is based on memoirs, correspondence and interviews that are used to balance press coverage gleaned from archival collections. With this wide array of primary sources supplemented by up-to-date secondary literature, it argues that the use of LSD and psychedelics led to a rich subculture that can be explained by the inherent complexity of the psychedelic experience. In turn, the plurality of opinions regarding the meaning and purposes of the experience led to tensions and polarisations within the large subculture, as well as with other drug subcultures and outsiders leery of illicit drug use. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the social history of illicit substance consumption and adds to the fields of urban history and the history of subcultures, and makes a case for understanding LSD and psychedelics as a unique category of forbidden drugs that differ vastly in their cultural meaning from other drugs.

This work looks at the artistic production of the Porfiriato (1876-1910) with particular attention to the representation of prehispanic cultures and their incorporation into an official historiography. Whilst highlighting the growing popularity of prehispanic and conquest themes, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the research centres on the study of what may be described as a 'neo-prehispanic' genre in order to explore issues of identity and nationalism in the arts. The use of academic styles for the artistic interpretation of prehispanic material coincides with an already growing concern to redefine prehispanic cultures as 'classical' civilisations. The neo-prehispanic as a style may therefore be understood as a reappropriation of the past via western canons and art schools, and the construction of a neo-prehispanic imagery as a means of 'cleansing' the barbaric. The analysis concentrates on the function of neo-prehispanic representations by looking at the reception of these images in relation to the aesthetic ideas operating at the time, and their production within the institutional framework of the Academy of San Cartos. It also looks at State-funded projects in order to highlight the cultural politics of the Porfiriato which sought to celebrate the cultural legacies of prehispanic Mexico. The study will hence seek to explore the particularities of a national style, the function of art in the Porfiriato, and the relationship between artistic production and the construction of a national identity. All of this will be looked at in relation to history painting, monuments and architecture. The main objectives of the research aim to be both practical (a catalogue of material 'Appendix B'), and interpretative. The correct cataloguing and identification of this material together with an analysis of their function within the context of Porfirian society will provide invaluable material for more research, and will constitute the original contribution of my PhD.

The main objective of this thesis is to offer an understanding of the nature and political importance of English royal councils in the reign of Henry II (1154 -- 1188), a subject that has never attracted historical attention before. While the analysis of particularly controversial meetings has been incorporated in several studies, the common features of councils have never been made a subject of historical enquiry. The present study has relied on the evidence provided in contemporary sources, such as the numerous chronicle and a large body of royal charters, treatises, and official documents which have been preserved for this period. It has also studied a number of political, legal, administrative and "seal treatises, all of which provide useful insights into the mentalities of the time and the Institutional makeup and governance of England under Henry II. The first chapter is a chronological narrative which aims to introduce the reader into the subject and to associate group of councils with the different phases in Henry's reign. Then the terminology employed in the sources to identify and describe these meetings is analysed so to understand how were these assemblies perceived in the political community. The third chapter deals with the circumstantial aspects of councils by offering a study of the places and buildings where assemblies take place, as well as the calendar and the frequency they followed. The following two chapters discuss the evidence for and the process of conciliar consultation, and the matters discussed at royal councils In this period. The following chapter studies the attendance and the social aspects of these meetings. The last chapter Is an essay which evaluates the place occupied by these councils within the early history of parliament. The central conclusion which brings together all these chapters is that the unprecedented frequency with which Henry II summoned great assemblies meant that most important decisions made during his reign are connected with conciliar activity and, therefore, assented by the nobles of the realm, and that gathering councils consequently became a very useful Instrument of royal governance and a most public occasion for baronial politics in this period.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Applied Linguistics, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 261-271)

This thesis employs the bodily wound as a metaphor for exploring HIV/AIDS in visual culture. In particular it connects issues of bodily penetration, sexuality and mortality with pre-existing anxieties around the integrity of the male body and identity. The thesis is structured around four case studies, none of which can be said to be ‘about’ HIV/AIDS in any straightforward way, and a theoretical and historical overview in the introduction. In doing so it demonstrates that our understanding of HIV/AIDS is always connected to highly entrenched ways of thinking, particularly around gender and embodiment. The introduction sets out the issues around HIV/AIDS particularly as they relate to visual culture and promotes the work of Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida as philosophical antecedents of queer theory, a body of ideas that emerges alongside HIV/AIDS and is intimately connected with it. Chapter one continues to engage with Bataille through the work of Ron Athey. Athey’s work uses religious and sacrificial imagery, wounding and bodily penetration to explore living in the world as an HIV-positive man. The work of Mary Douglas, who argued that the individual body could stand in for the social body, along with Leo Bersani, who argues that male penetration is tantamount to subjective dissolution are instructive in this regard. The second chapter examines how Bataille’s work has been incorporated into the discourse of art history but subject to strategic exclusions that masked its engagement with sexuality, corporeality and politics at the height of the AIDS crisis in the western world. It argues that the work of David Wojnarowicz addresses similar concerns but in an embodied, activist form. The third chapter looks at a film by François Ozon from 2005 and argues that, through photography and trauma discourse, it returns viewers to a time when HIV infection was invariably terminal and fatal. The film, therefore, is an engagement with mortality on the part of a young man. The final chapter looks at the films of Pedro Almodóvar to argue that his films simultaneously undercut our expectations around gender and sexuality while promoting an understanding of sexual difference as the originary experience of loss in our lives. The work of Judith Butler is instructive in this regard and also draws out its connections and implications to HIV/AIDS. In conclusion the thesis argues that HIV/AIDS, understood as a wound to the idea of an integral, stable and sacrosanct body, has made such an understanding of the body untenable and that this has enabling and productive consequences for our understanding of gender and sexuality.

D.Litt et Phil. (Greek) / This is a study of how, when and why the popular theatre influenced the character, behavior and the formation of the Greek people’s culture from the establishment of the Greek state up until today. The thesis attempts to fill a gap in current literature as to date there has been no study dealing with the influence exerted by the popular theatre as a whole in shaping the culture of the Greek people. The first chapter captures the historical and social context of the time period within which the thesis unfolds. The second chapter refers to existing theories and studies related to the thesis’ topic. Their importance is twofold as a number of them assist in providing answers to issues which are relevant to the popular theatre and its different forms and other studies and theories will be used as a basis upon which to complete the study. The third chapter presents the historical progress of the popular theatre from the establishment of the Greek state up until today. The major milestones are defined and the conditions and events that influenced the popular theatre are identified. The chapter also outlines the history of urban theatre within the Greek state. Finally, the chapter identifies the relationships between the urban and the popular theatre, namely their manner of communication and mutual influence as well as the means of information exchange, and attempts to answer the question of whether and when the popular theatre influenced the evolution of the urban theatre and vice versa. The fourth chapter identifies the interactions between popular theater and the Greek society. The chapter relates the evolution of popular theater with the simultaneous evolution of Greek society and explores the relationships between the two. It examines individual parameters defining the relationship between the formal education within the country and popular theater. The chapter also identifies the role that the popular theater had in the dispute over the language issue, which was one of the most serious issues that concerned the intellects of the nation before and after liberation. The fifth chapter presents the most important primary forms of popular theater such as “the day of the midwife”, “the court”, “the skylodeftera” and others, following as far as possible the calendar year.