This thesis explores and analyses the mythical quality of modem Athens as experienced by tourists. It is an exploration of the tourist gaze upon the Athenian landscape, as well as an account of how tourists narrate its urban mythology. This research is largely concerned with the relationship of time and space through memory, exploring the interplay between the spatial arrangement of urban elements, temporality and the experience of the city. Athens is viewed as a city marked by a temporal collage where different historical periods are juxtaposed. This juxtaposition gives Athens the character of a deconstructed city. The city is made present through spatialised remainders, her genius loci. This thesis thus analyses the relationship between Athens past and the present, the strangely familiar and the stereotypically exotic, as interwoven within an urban landscape imagined, gazed and finally, narrated by foreign tourists. The core argument of this work is that the Athenian landscape embodies an urban mythology constructed by the nineteenth century romantic travellers: these, through their writings, fashioned the stereotypical imagery of Athens. Modem tourists are the consumers of these myths. Like their nineteenth century predecessors, tourists stroll around the city following the traces of their memory - key landmarks and symbols, recognising what they have already known; feeling nostalgic for the past -their past, fragmenting the landscape into different historic layers, depopulating it from its present inhabitants, orientalising it. In this work I explore the transmission and reinvention of the myths of Athens through guidebooks, travel brochures, guided tours and tourist photographs. The exploration of the different images of Athens as visualised by tourists leads to a discussion of gendered, orientalised, literary, photographic and cartographic aspects of the Athenian urban landscape. The theoretical framework of the thesis is based on post-modernism, post-structuralism and semiotics. My research methods have been qualitative, including both in-depth interviews and participant observation, following tourists around the city and participating in their activities. I also analysed the ways tourists 'gaze' and photograph the city. My intention is to draw -metaphorically speaking- a mental map including the sites visited, consumed and experienced by tourists.

This paper breaks down my process of transitioning to a new environment through ethnographic documentation. Through the progression of my creative work, I explore the various ways in which I express my own internal feelings through my art. By expressing an alienation within a foreign country in a multitude of filmic ways, these depictions help illustrate my mental and physical journey. My work is informed by psychoanalytic theory and I am most influenced by Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. These theories help me understand the human condition and how I create media art to help me come to terms with my surroundings. Another part of my influence is the genre of ethnographic film, and in my use of this style, I attempt to portray the isolation that I’ve experienced as an American citizen while living in Ankara, Turkey. Many contemporary artists have influenced my approach to the post-production treatment of my ethnographic footage such as David Lynch and the Propeller Group. In addition to a summary of these influences, I discuss the thesis exhibition and my plans for the future.

Abstract The purpose of this research is to study identity construction in an ICT organization, which is generally seen as a flexible environment to be employed. The demise of a bureaucracy is generally seen as a positive thing. In new organizational forms employee participation is considered a central factor. The lack of boundaries in work brings not only freedom but also challenges. Organizations, tasks and people change constantly and employees find that they have to reconstruct their identities. This study is inductive, meaning that any theoretical frame was not chosen before doing the empirical analysis. The paradigm underlying narrative research is similar to constructivism in that human knowledge is not regarded as a coherent view of reality but as a plurality of small narratives, local and personal in nature, which are always under construction. The constructivist paradigm is based on the idea that social reality is socially constructed. This study contributes to identity narrative discussion and is thus current. Four different identity narratives are produced within this study: nostalgic, future-oriented, instrumental and chameleon narrative. Hence, the analysis resulted in four separate identity narratives. The relationship between the individual and the organization vary in each of the identity narratives. The empirical results also show that older employees produce more coherent identity stories and appear to be more committed to the organization. For younger employees the company is not as important, instead are more committed to their own career, family or something else. This is a significant result both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically it is interesting because it shows that in constructing identity, the organization does not have a central role. Empirically it means that the skilled employees might easily leave the organization if they feel they are not respected or if the organization does not support their personal careers. The present study provides evidence of narrativity supporting the construction of identity in a post-bureaucratic organization. Maintaining open dialogue requires open communication, which is not present in traditional, bureaucratic, top-down management. A post-bureaucratic organization allows for open dialogue in principle, but the time and space needed for narration in this environment is fragmented.

The movement of people and the fluxes of the world create complex topographies and destabilise the location of our homes. In this practice-based PhD, I explore the shifting sense of home that this manifests. The dramatic transformation of the boundaries of home that demarcates the borders between ‘here’ and ‘there’, “us” and ‘them’ is examined through an autoethnographically informed approach, which takes the researcher’s self as a medium as well as a source of research. Based on personal experience, the changing nature of ‘home’ is studied as it is anchored into the self, adopting an approach that studies the cultural through the personal. In this research, the methods of research are: strategies of observing, attending to the unsettling forces of the unfamiliar, documenting my personal responses on a daily basis, and unpacking some of the existing forms and practices that sustain ideas of belonging and proposing new forms of expression to this unhomely feeling. In this study, the objective is the study of the field (including the dissolving of the ground one is standing on) and the proposing new forms, new visions. This being the case, my methods come from the disciplines of autoethnography and art practice. Throughout my PhD, I aimed to negotiate the different means these two approaches work through their field that challenges the issues of representation, documentation and presentation in cultural inquiry. This thesis explores the transformation of the sense of home and my own sense of belonging based on personal experience. It is also a contribution to the discourse that has flourished between ethnography and contemporary art over the last two decades. The project is situated at the transdisciplinary site between artistic and ethnographic disciplines and reconsiders their mutual interest in the work of cultural inquiry. With a particular focus on the moment that inquiry meets its public, I explored other possibilities of “graphy” (writing) that conventionally translates as a descriptive, textual representation in ethnography. I strived to suggest alternative forms through the ways artistic inquiry work on its field that takes this moment of encounter as a crucial part of its process. Thus, the thesis is an account of these negotiations that complements the experiments in my art practice, through which I have explored the dialogue between the two distinctive approaches to inquiry.

This study provides a representation of the lived transitional experiences of a group of student-cricketers on a passage toward professional cricket. Set in the local context of a university cricket academy, the investigation focused on players’ adoption of a cricketing role that they used in combination with their structured cricketing environment to explore what it might be like to be professional cricketers. The aim of the research, therefore, was to portray a culturally embedded process of identity-exploration through which a group of young men arrived at a conception of themselves as ‘cricketers’. The data on which the study is based have been drawn from research conducted over twenty seven months from November 2010 to March 2013 where I, as a researcher, became immersed in the research context as an active member of the participant group. The methodological approach of ethnography was used to obtain an insider’s account of the student-cricket experience as seen from the point of view of the actors involved. Application of traditional ethnographic techniques such as participant observation, note taking and unstructured, field-based ‘interviews’ provided the means through which situated, day-to-day experiences were captured and explored. What is presented, therefore, reflects some of the contextual responses to real-life situations experienced by the group and its individuals, mediated through a developing analytical interest in players’ identity engagements with their cricketing environment from the theoretical standpoint of ‘emerging adulthood’ (Arnett, 2000, 2004). Adding to the ethnographic accounts offered within this thesis, the study contributes a conceptual framework that plots players’ transitional pathways through the academy to share the key points of interaction that impinged on individual participants ‘finding their level’ in the game. Through contact and exposure to a cricketing way of life, players’ involvement with the academy saw their cricketing experiences intensify and their attachments to the game transform. This resulted in individuals either accepting or rejecting cricket based on what they came to know about themselves and the game, with the findings of the research helping to further understanding on how a group of ‘emerging adults’ engaged with the ‘project’ of their self-identities to reach a point of self-understanding on which to base prospective identity-decisions.

Based on ethnographic research on exiled Tibetan political institutions and practices in India, this thesis investigates sovereignty in exile. The Tibetan Government-in-exile (TGiE), based in India since 1960, remains internationally unrecognised, has limited judicial powers and lacks de jure sovereignty over territory in both Tibet and in exile. However, this exiled administration claims legitimacy as the official representative of the Tibetan population, attempts to make its voice heard within the international community and performs a number of state-like functions in relation to its diasporic 'citizenry'. Given that conventional political theory is premised on the territorially-bounded sovereign nation-state as a container for political activity, and governments are legitimated according to the territory over which they hold authority, this is an exceptional case of a government which appears to refute these orthodox assumptions. As such, this study of the form, functioning and limitations of TGiE and of its existence and state-like operations within another sovereign state, raises important theoretical issues which speak directly to political geography's concerns with power and space. These include the nature of sovereignty, the extent to which sovereignty can be disentangled from jurisdiction over territory, and the role of 'the exception' in geopolitical discourses. Employing multi-sited ethnographic methodologies, the broad aims of this research are to investigate what kind of political entity the TGiE is, and to examine the nature ofthe sovereignty it articulates. To do so, attention is paid to Tibetan settlements in exile as sites of sovereignty, TGiE's construction of a Tibetan 'population' in exile and its management of livelihoods, the negotiation of exilic political identities, and the strategic spatialities of TGiE's election systems. Rejecting realist arguments that polities such as TGiE should be viewed merely as discrepant forms of political practice, it is argued that if sovereignty is understood as historically contingent and socially constructed - and the state, sovereignty, and territory thereby conceptually disentangled - this opens up the theoretical possibility of territorial-less sovereign polities.

More and more traditional industries (especially have a own brand company) have invited their customers or suppliers to attend an activity which performs and coordinates new product innovation, thus, these all still have not a formal model to executed. This thesis is regarding that let company to aware demand and consuming behavior of consumer market as whole and seeking a new product creative from customer through establishing an innovation activity. This customer innovation activity model that is build up from an Ethnographic model combined with knowledge spiral and cultural creative industries for example. The combination reason is that both of ethnographic model and knowledge spiral need to supplementation with together, because its have each of advantage and disadvantage. An Ethnographic model, could be explore the customer behavior, need, taste and so on in the innovation activity; other more, knowledge spiral could be stimulate the company¡¦s staff and customer knowledge tacit. Whether the customer innovation activity model is practicable? In first step, it should verify and explore the phenomenon of cultural creative industries invited the customer to attend the innovation activities is exit. Therefore, the customer innovation activities models hypothesis verifies information is obtained by four companies or interviewers. Other than, it will be proof these hypothesis, if it has exits the phenomenon of customer attend to innovation activities invited by companies. However, the value of customer innovation activities model should within base of innovation concept, customer innovation, and customer orientation are necessary.

In this thesis, historic Hopi ethnographic data are employed to model ancestral Hopi agricultural land use through the lens of archaeological landscape theory. Emphasizing the interconnectedness of landmarks--loci of discrete interactions between humans and the land--within networked cultural landscapes, archaeological landscape theory provides a unique perspective from which to examine overlapping planes of historic and prehistoric land use.Drawing on ethnographic accounts, a model is constructed that integrates the physical, social organizational, ritual/ceremonial, and traditional history dimensions of historic Hopi agricultural land use. Durable material correlates of agricultural land use are proposed on the basis of ethnographic documentation. This holistic model is applied to archaeological data from the Homol'ovi Ruins State Park (HRSP), northeastern Arizona. The integrative model produced herein allows for the interpretation of relationships between archaeological features representing different land use behaviors and the conceptualization of linkages between landmarks in the ancestral Hopi agricultural landscape.

This Thesis is an experiment. Within its pages a number of stories will be told, the foci of which will apply a particular methodology—what I call ‘Ethnographic Criticism’—to the examination of a specific concept: modern Atheist identity. First, it will introduce Ethnographic Criticism as a new and significant style of literary analysis aimed at reading fictional texts in order to generate anthropological insights about how particular identities are formed. Second, it will use this new means of criticism to discuss and evaluate how Atheist identity might be perceived as being constructed within a dialectic between seemingly exclusive forms of Theism and Atheism. Ethnographic Criticism exists at the nexus between fiction and ethnography, and its genesis derives from three foundational pillars: ethnographic construction, Ethical Criticism, and discourse analysis. In the three Chapters of Part One, each of these pillars will be established, both exegetically and critically. This examination will play a key role in explicating how the ‘made-up’ qualities of fiction might be converted into the ‘made-from’ qualities of ethnography. Additionally, these Chapters will reveal the roots of Ethnographic Criticism through an analysis of discourses dealing with the ‘literary turn’ in the theory of anthropology, how Ethical Criticism associates fictional character development with identity construction, and the anthropological benefits of discourse analysis. As a case study, I will apply Ethnographic Criticism to an analysis of Atheist identity construction. Due to the combination of a relative absence of existing ethnographic sources on the subject, an ambiguous academic discourse on the definition of the term, and a paucity of cultural units or ‘tribes’ of Atheists in which to observe, my use of Ethnographic Criticism will attempt to fill a methodological lacuna concerning the study of Atheist identity. Thus, in Part Two, I will focus on two fictional texts by the contemporary English novelist Ian McEwan: Black Dogs (1992) and Enduring Love (1997). In this analysis, not only will McEwan’s fictional characters be treated as if they are ‘real,’ historical individuals, they will be evaluated through an anthropological lens in order to isolate within their interactional validations a means to understand how Atheists define themselves via dialectical communication. In this way, and in both explicating and reflecting upon this approach, my experimental analysis will identify a number of dynamic, yet no less precarious, outcomes that might surface from reading fictional texts as if they were authoritatively equal to ethnographic ones.

Empirical methodologies have recently attracted increasing attention from the broader software engineering community. In particular, organisational issues and the human role in software development have been addressed. Qualitative research approaches have been identified as necessary for understanding human nature. One qualitative methodology which has become increasingly recognised in the software engineering community is ethnography. It is also the qualitative approach that is addressed in this thesis, i.e. ethnography in relation to software engineering. Ethnography emphasises the members point of view in an effort to understand the organisation of a social, cultural and technical setting. Until now, only a handful of ethnographic studies focusing on software engineering have been carried out in accordance with the original conception of ethnography; these studies have traditionally been performed by sociologists. The understanding and application of ethnography by software engineers differ from that of sociologists as it gives up the studied people's point of view in the analysis of data. The thesis is based on two independent ethnographic studies where the ‘inside’ perspective which complies with the original understanding of the methodology is applied. Using these examples as a basis, the relation between ethnography and software engineering research is explored. The objective of this thesis is to promote ‘ethnographic knowledge’ by giving an overview of ethnographic work within software engineering, presenting an original understanding of ethnography, comparing software engineers' understanding of ethnography with the original understanding of ethnography, demonstrating how the different implicit research attitudes of ethnographers and software engineers produce different research discourses, and finally pointing to an opportunity to combine ethnography, which contributes an ‘inside perspective’, with software engineering's need for constant improvement.