Karate is a sensuous martial art-come-sporting practice. Through a combinations of tacit exchanges of kicks and punches, sweaty touches, sweaty smells, aggressive shouts, communal laughs and helping tweaks of the body karate practitioners come to develop their practice, know their body and one-another, and assert their status in the karate hall. As a combative bodily practice, karate replicates an imagined, and often real, source of men’s power over, and distinction from, women. Yet in practice karate is an arena where women and men spar, sweat, and laugh together whereby, through inter-bodily, sensory, interactions, women can, and often do, out perform men. As such, karate presents a fruitful arena for exploring the sensory formation of gendered relations and embodiments of gender. Despite the integral role of the body and the senses to embodied participation in sport, and indeed in our gendered performances of self and distributions/assertions of power between women and men, exploration of the role of the senses in our sporting and gendered embodiment is largely absent from existing literature. This thesis argues that to understand gendered embodiment within karate requires reflection to these multidimensional, multi-sensory threads spun between sportsmen and women in embodied play. Building a sensory ethnographic framework for conducting the research, data was gathered from 9 months of ‘sensuous participation’ at 3 karate clubs engaging in mixed-sex and a women-only classes, 6 photo-elicitation interviews and 11 semi-structured interviews with women and men from across the three clubs, and reflections from my own embodied history as a karate athlete. The findings suggest that in both mixed-sex and women-only classes karate practice could ‘undo’ conventional performances of gender, and in turn gendered embodiments, through asking its participants to engage in a range of sensory bodily motions that are conventionally seen as masculine – such as combative movements and aggression – and feminine – such as control, elegance, and artistic performance. These embodied ways of being held magnified gender subversive potential in mixed-sex karate practice whereby ideas of men’s inherent superiority in sport could be challenged, and ideas of distinction between women and men could be challenged. Recognition of similarity as karate practitioners through shared physical engagements side-lined the importance of gender to practitioners embodiment. Together the findings of this thesis point towards the role of the minute, mundane, and thus often overlooked or unconscious elements of our bodily practice in ‘naturalising’, reproducing, or subverting gendered arrangements of power. In this way, this thesis contributes to sociological understandings of both embodiment and gender.

This thesis uses ethnographic field research and literature analysis to examine the sometimes fraught interactions and relationships between the archaeologists and heritage managers who manage and interpret the material remains of Britain’s ancient past and contemporary Pagan groups to whom such remains are sacred. It provides a description of contestation of sites and human corporeal remains followed by a detailed analysis of the reasons presented in the discourse of contestation and the underlying attitudes behind the issues. The Thesis concludes with some thoughts on how heritage managers and archaeologists may better manage their interactions with the Pagan community in the future.

This thesis examinest he use of silence by Japanese learners of English in cross-cultural communication. It also considers how cross-cultural misunderstandings can be avoided in a pedagogic context. To this end, an analysis is made of a contrastive study of the use of silence by Japanese students learning English, and by Western students learning Japanese. The study draws on insights from the ethnographic approach. The study consists of three parts. The first part, Chapters 1-4, investigates the theoretical background to the study. Chapter 1 examines various definitions of the word 'culture' and investigates the role of Pragmatics in cross-cultural communication. Chapter 2 surveys studies of silence in various socio-cultural contexts. Chapter 3 more specifically explores the use of silence in the Japanese context and its relation to Japanese cultural values and sociocultural norms. Then, Chapter 4 shifts attention to examine differences of communicative styles between Japanese and Westerners, and several important features in interaction. In part two, Chapters 5-8, the ethnographic approach takes the lead in the interpretation of the interview and observational material. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the study and carefully considers the principles of ethnography guiding this investigation. Chapter 6 considers the research design in relation to the context and purposes of the investigation. The data is analysed in Chapters 7 and 8 interpreting the use of silence from a socio-cultural perspective. Chapter 7 discusses the results of the questionnaires. Chapter 8 concentrates on the analysis of the video-recorded data. The last Chapter, Chapter 9, concludes with suggestions of possible pedagogic approaches tackling cross-cultural misunderstanding in foreign language learning.

What is the shopping centre, and how can the works of Gilles Deleuze, help us to understand it ethnographically? In light of a growing interest in Deleuze’s work across both the humanities and social sciences (see Jensen and Rodje, 2010) as well as the long-standing calls to “take Deleuze into the field” (Bonta, 2005) and develop what research methodologies might emerge in conjunction which his philosophy (see Coleman and Ringrose, 2013), this thesis explores the possibilities of an ethnography which tries to take seriously the questions surrounding an ethical practice of working with philosophy in the field, grappling not only with Deleuze’s concepts during and as part of fieldwork but attempting to meaningfully engage with the incongruities between the philosophical assumptions which underpin ethnographic practice and Deleuze’s metaphysic (often labelled a “transcendental empiricism”); the most salient of these being “the subject”. In unfolding the stories of the shopping centre, a behemoth of social machination which is both reflective and productive of the contemporary sociocultural milieu, this thesis will explore the various forms of “madness” which populate the field, threading connective lines between the highly plural groups of interlocutors, widely separated spaces and the varying rhythms and temporalities which can be said to correspond to the shopping centre. Focusing on central issues of bodies (space) and time as they are encountered in the shopping centre , this thesis shall take, as one of its major points of inquiry, the questions surrounding the writing of ethnography and the ways in which this represents and reaffirms the metaphysic which is taken-for-granted as a part of the ethnographic encounter; at times delving into what might be called the ‘pataphysical or the absurd, playing with thick and thin description and taking various flights of madness in order to find ways of pushing against what Deleuze calls, the ossified and dogmatic images of thought at the core of Western philosophy.

Este estudo volta-se para a educação indígena, mais especificamente ao do grupo Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau do Alto Jamari em sua educação tradicional e a sua expectativa quanto à educação escolar. Esse grupo habita a região central de Rondônia próxima às nascentes dos rios da serra dos Pakaas Novos. Como o objetivo dessa dissertação é o estudo do grupo e da educação escolar que será oferecida a essa comunidade, portanto, para isso, estão presentes todos os aspectos que servirão de contextualização para o grupo e para a educação escolar indígena. Assim o grupo está descrito na sua perspectiva histórica, dentro das grandes migrações indígenas na região amazônica, nos choques interétnicos com as migrações dos não-índios, que estão também descritas, o seu primeiro contato, em 1981, até se conseguir a demarcação de suas terras em 1985. A partir daí serão apresentados os estudos etnográficos que foram feitos sobre a cultura Kawahiba, a qual pertence os Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, acrescidos aos relatos feitos pelos integrantes da própria comunidade, que poderão dar uma extensão maior a tais estudos. Para tanto, conseguiu-se nesse estudo o relato dos mitos, a descrição da sua organização social e outros aspectos da sua cultura, através dos membros mais velhos da aldeia do Alto Jamari tendo como intérpretes os próprios jovens da aldeia. Sobre a educação escolar há uma exposição relativa aos aspectos mais importantes do Referencial Curricular Nacional para as Escolas Indígenas - o RCNE/Indígena elaborado pelo MEC - e, ainda, a atual situação da educação escolar indígena em Rondônia, com relevância para as primeiras escolas dos grupos Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, parentes do povo do Alto Jamari. / This research concentrates on the indigenous education of the group Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau of the Alto Jamari. It considers the indigenous traditional education and the expectation towards school education. The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau inhabits the central regionof Rondônia near the Springs of Pakaas Novos. In order to carry out the study of the group of school education I present all aspects. Which will help to contextualize the indigenous school education. Thus the group is described in its historical perspective within the big indigenous migration in the Amazon region in the inter-ethnical chocks with the migration of non-indigenous, which are described here too; the group first contact, in 1981, until they got the demarcation of land in 1985. Then I present the ethnographic study on the Kawahiba culture which belongs to the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau together with the reports made by members of the community, who will give a larger dimension to the study I present, therefore, the myths, the description of its social organization and other aspects of the Indians culture as related by the older people of the group who used the young ones as interpreters. The work also presents the most important aspects of the National Curriculumfor Indigenous Schools elaborated by the Ministry of Education and the current situation of the indigenous school education in Rondônia, mainly what is concerned to the groups Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau relative to the people of Alto Jamari.

The current moment of education in Canada is increasingly asking educators to take up the mandate and responsibility to integrate Indigenous perspectives into curricula and teaching practice. Many teachers who do so come from a historical context of settler colonialism that has largely ignored or tried to use education to assimilate Indigenous peoples. This project asks how teachers are (or are not) integrating Indigenous perspectives into the classroom curriculum. It asks if and how Eurocentric and colonial perspectives are being disrupted or reproduced in classroom dialogue, and how learning spaces can be guided by an ethics of relationality and co- existence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing. Finally, it seeks promising pedagogical practices through which curriculum can be a bridge for building a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in what is now Canada. This project is a critical ethnography of five high school English classrooms in which teachers were attempting to integrate Indigenous perspectives into the curriculum. Over the course of a semester classroom observations, interviews, and focus groups gathered the stories, experiences and perceptions of five high school English teachers, their students, and several Indigenous educators and community members. The stories and experiences gathered describe a decolonizing praxis, which pedagogically situates Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews in parallel and in relation, each co-existing in its own right without one dominating the other. The teacher and students who took up this decolonizing praxis centered an Indigenous lens in their reading of texts, and saw questions of ethics, responsibility, and reciprocity as key to changing the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Despite this promising pedagogical approach, I identify knowledge of treaties and the significance of land to Indigenous peoples as a significant gap in knowledge for students (and some teachers), which allows many colonial misunderstandings to persist.

This study theorises and conceptualises place as an object of consumption, formed, shaped, and affected through practices. The study problematizes place treatments in extant managerial sciences and its contextual interpretations within consumption. It draws from a range of disciplinary inspirations from management studies, social sciences, philosophical, and phenomenological musings to empirically interrogate place construct using ethnography, in itself understood as placemaking practice. It analyses and interprets place through the lens of practice theories and non-representational methods to conceptualise place in consumption, and critically revisits its ontological hierarchy vis-à-vis space. The study delivers several methodological, theoretical, and axiological contributions. It uses an adapted form of historical street ethnography to interrogate place, imbuing it with a critical reflexive standpoint, and positions a revitalised and reinvigorated street ethnography as a critical reflexive epistemic tool of knowledge production in the analytical transitions from phenomenological to post-phenomenological narratives. The study’s theoretical, discipline-specific contributions arise from synchronous examinations of place, consumption, practice, and non-representations. It empirically validates heuristics of non-representation and practices in contextually examining place in consumption, appreciates genomic qualities of practices brigaded through universality of human experiences as pools of actions and competencies articulating consumption, and contemplates place as a processual, aspatial, fluid entity grasped beyond marketplace logic through practices. It expands understandings of marketplace, setting, structure, and actor, and invites attention to the liquefied, flowing nature of market and consumption through place plasticity and path-dependent practices. It emphasises the illocutionary force of place as object of consumption shaped through and in each moment of practice. The study empirically validates the reenchanted ontology of place, resituating it as the universal supreme abstract with space and time as component, co-constitutive elements, thus resituating extant place-space hierarchy. The study’s axiological and managerial contributions highlight mutability of practices in shaping place beyond marketplace logic in its many forms and settings, valorise everyday activities in shaping marketplace, illuminate the role of public, civic, and communal spaces and their contributions in the transition from market economy to marketized society not captured by marketplace discourses, and invite practice and non-representations into depictions of place marketing and consumption.

Muslims in the Metropolis is about everyday social and cultural practices through which Muslim identity and ‘community’ are made. The study takes Birmingham, a city synonymous with Muslims and the area of Sparkbrook, which has decades long associations with racialised communities, as sites of Muslim-making. While there is considerable literature concerned with the Muslim presence in Western European public spheres, much of it treats the city as merely incidental in the lives of Muslims; as places where they have settled and, then, generated formal spaces, infrastructures and narratives relating to their presence. A key argument advanced in this thesis is that impressions of Muslims as a ‘community’ defined through the lens of settlement patterns resulting from immigration, folk-religious practices carried over from other homelands, socio-economic disadvantage and various other markers of their presence, lend them to being understood in essentialist ways. A number of scholars have noted this and how discourses about ‘parallel lives’, ‘clash of civilisations’ and ‘religious extremism’ have culminated in the Muslim question. In this study I do not so much seek to challenge such representations, but to consider what is left over – the excess - from these framings. A key consequence I argue is that Muslims, when viewed and worked with officially as a ‘community’ based on sensibilities of race relations management in the city, misses the vitality of Muslim life as it is made everyday in relation to discourses and materials linked with their presence in the city. Through the use of ethnography and specifically observations and interviews conducted with people involved in setting up and running an ‘alternative Muslim arts centre’, a local ‘community’ radio station and diffuse networks of social action across the city, I trace different contours of Muslim identity and ‘community’ in the making. Ethnographic methods, I argue, allow valuable insights into how Muslims relate to the city as a place historically marked and presently targeted through racialised narratives and categories of control. There are complex negotiations that go on, where Muslims occasionally resist as well as fold into authoritative discourses and structures around them. Attention is paid to how Muslims live in the interstices of these and how through their social practices generate alternative meanings toward being Muslim; as something not given in the existing nomenclature of multicultural identities in the city, but in process and becoming. These everyday urban rituals of Muslims, therefore, present a challenge to official and academic efforts that attempt to represent or confer recognition on Muslims.

This interdisciplinary research project investigated the process of healing utilized by Açorean Portuguese traditional healers. The purpose was to facilitate an understanding of this process for multicultural counselling practices in North America. The theoretical framework is informed by medical anthropology and the work of Arthur Kleinman (1980, 1987). Kleinman has been called an ethnographer of illness because of his belief that suffering is social and, as such, culturally constructed. He contends that without consideration of the experience of suffering and the social aspects of suffering, health care practitioners face poorer outcomes in treatments (Kleinman, 2005). The current ethnographic study was carried out in the Açorean Islands of Portugal and asked the following research question: How do traditional healers in the Açorean Islands facilitate wellness in people suffering from illness? Illness was defined as the personal experience of physiological and/or psychological disease or distress (Kleinman, 1980). This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge dealing with multicultural counselling as follows: a) it adds knowledge by contributing an in-depth description of Portuguese Açorean traditional healers, which was previously absent from the counselling psychology literature: b) it expands on existing research to further explicate the significance of suffering in the world for Portuguese Açoreans and the role traditional healers play in witnessing this suffering; and c) it highlights the multifaceted impact of language when English speaking counsellors work with second language English speaking clients. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

This thesis uses an ethnographic study to interrogate the policy discourse of capturing ‘child voice’ specifically in relation to a ‘looked after’ child. In recent years, attempts have been made to involve children who are ‘looked after’ in discussions and decisions about their care arrangements to ensure that their voice is heard. To ensure this happens, children ‘in care’ are asked about their care placement regularly as part of the care planning review process and their views are incorporated into decisions about their care plan. This study focuses on the lived experiences of a seven-year old female child, who I have referred to as ‘Keeva’, who is ‘in care’ under a Kinship Care arrangement. Over a period of a year, I was based in Keeva’s home one afternoon a week to gain insights about her lived experience as a ‘looked after’ child and how she represented herself. I also observed three care planning review meetings to see how her voice was captured by those charged with her care and how she was represented. I relate Keeva’s experience through seven narrative episodes to capture the rich complexity of the social world she inhabits. I explore aspects of her home and family, her interactions with others and her experience of exploring physical spaces both inside and outside the home. I suggest that these experiences underpin her sense of self and how she relates to others. Drawing on the ideas of Bourdieu, I suggest these experiences and her sense of place in the social order write themselves ‘onto her’ through her habitus and dispositions. Using a Foucauldian lens, I problematise the notion of voice as I contest that the child I observed engaged fully in the statutory processes that surround her. I suggest Keeva, a child who is ‘looked after’, will neither have nor feel she has the agentive properties to influence the care planning process. Instead, as her voice is irrevocably bound up in a bureaucratic process that is uncritically accepted as representative of her, she is obscured as a consequence. I also examine the multivocity in representations of Keeva highlighting the competing discourses of safeguarding, child protection and the ’rights-based’ agenda. I conclude that Keeva was not well represented in care planning reviews and had very little influence in decision-making about her care plan. Despite believing the opposite, those charged with her care failed to hear her or take note of what she said. Furthermore, there was an absence of criticality in representations of Keeva allowing Keeva to be constructed by those professionals involved with her care, in an unchallenged way. As a consequence she was silenced and less visible than the process itself.