This research study explores how future educational and occupational aspirations are constructed by young Sikh adults. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten young Sikh adults, both their parents, and their teachers at one school in West London to investigate how future aspirations are constructed, which resources are employed, and why certain resources are used over others. In some previous research on aspirations and future choices, Sikhs have either been ignored or, instead, subsumed under the umbrella category of ¿Asian¿ and this study seeks to address this. Furthermore, the study seeks to shed light on how British-Sikh identities are constructed and intersected by social class, caste and gender. This is important to explore since it can have an impact upon how young adults are structured by educational policy. A ¿syncretic¿ social constructionist framework which predominantly draws upon Pierre Bourdieu¿s notions of habitus, capital and field, along with the cultural identity theories of Avtar Brah and Stuart Hall, is employed to investigate the construction of identities and aspirations. In addition, the study contains ethnographical elements as it is conducted on my ¿own¿ Sikh group and at my former secondary school. Consequently, I brought a set of assumptions to the research which, rather than disregard, I acknowledge since they highlight how I come to form certain interpretations of phenomena over others.

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This thesis is primarily concerned with the effects of education for future teachers in the context of the Swedish teacher training (Government Bill 1999/2000:135 2000). It belongs to a theoretical tradition in which the education system is viewed as a key factor in cultural production and reproduction in educational practices through symbolic control (Apple 2009; Ball 2006; Bernstein 2000, 2003). Symbolic control defines how forms of social interaction affect what is possible to think, say and do in different situations. The thesis is focused specifically on student mathematics teachers learning to become teachers of mathematics. It has a particular focus on the materials used in this, the meanings given to these materials and the identities produced through the possible embodiment of these meanings. The use of different educational technologies, including in particular ICT, has been of special interest. It aims therefore to understand both how mathematical discourses are produced and reproduced in teacher education and how this colours student teachers’ views on mathematics and their professional identity (Bernstein 2000, 2003; Valero 2007). The main outcomes of my thesis are that through the way that mathematics is taught and learned, mathematics teacher education in practice reproduces traditional ways of teaching and learning. This in that mathematics instruction is built around a ritualized practice based on the ability to solve exercises related to an examined-textbook-based content. ICT use in this context is not transformative. Rather it seems as if teaching and learning with digital technology operate as a relay in the reproduction of traditional forms of education practice. This is contrary to the intentions to renew and revitalise mathematics education and the thesis thus suggests that there is a need to scrutinize the way new technology is formulated in official discourses and appropriated in educational work. Two other things are also noteworthy in the thesis findings. The first is an increased emphasis on formal subject content through recent policy developments. This re-emphasis reaffirms the value of authoritative subject studies content as the central and most important component in the professional knowledge base. On the basis of the finding from the thesis the logic of the reform may be questioned. Also important is the ICT discourse that is constituted in wider society by selected agents. In this discourse digital technology often in many ways defines (post)modern society and the position it and education have as a driving force toward economic competitiveness. An alternative, more reflexive and critical approach where questions about technology uses in education are emphasized is suggested as necessary. / Disputationen äger rum fredagen den 4 maj 2012, kl. 13.15, Sal Gamma, Hus Svea, IT Fakulteten, Forskningsgången 4, Lindholmen

This thesis provides an ethnographic account of the lived experiences of faculty development practitioners in Japan. Through participatory observation and ethnographic interviews, it seeks to understand the following research question: 'How do faculty development practitioners make sense of the concept of faculty development as a professional identity and a lived experience in Japan?' The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, MEXT, introduced and recommended institutional ‘fakaruthī diberoppumento (faculty development)’ or ‘FD’ in 1999 and later mandated it in 2008. As a result, universities created the role and position of FD practitioner. Those FD practitioners have been involved in crafting a genre of faculty development that reconcile policy requirements, university’s requirements, and their personal understanding. This leads to a daily struggle between acting as FD practitioner according to external requirements and sustaining or constructing one’s own professional identity and values especially as an academic. By incorporating notions of ‘identity’ and ‘community’, I describe practitioners’ constant negotiation of their position between an academic and a FD practitioner. I have three arguments. First, the title of ‘FD tantōsha’ that is most commonly used in Japan creates a semantic space for negotiations to take place between different types of identities, both practiced and/or idealized. ‘Tantōsha’ literally means the person in charge and it is relatively 7 neutral label to describe the position. Second, alphabetically written ‘FD’ prevents the evolution of the concept. The term ‘FD’ is just a symbolic noun therefore it allows various interpretations but it does not allow evolution of the concept like in the USA and the UK. As an English term, ‘faculty development’ means ‘to develop’ ‘faculty’. As the focus of faculty development shifted, the term also changed, leading to terms such as ‘educational development’. Third, the temporariness of the position prevents practitioners to engage with the community for faculty development practitioners in Japan and in other countries. Therefore interpretation of the concept of faculty development, creation of the common language and knowledge base as a field, and construction of professional identity have yet to be observed.

This thesis explores how coach-athlete relationships are influenced within the organisational culture of a rowing club. Relational Cultural Theory and the work of Weber are used to examine how the concept of organisational culture informs understanding of coach and athlete relating. The study, covering a complete competitive season, involved an eleven month long ethnography of an elite rowing club in Great Britain. The findings demonstrate the visceral, enculturated and complex nature of coach-athlete relationships in elite sport. Relational disconnection occurred in the disenchanted organisational life, where intrinsic values were subordinated to a rational quest for efficiency, control and ultimately success, as well as traditional social ordering based on status and gender. Relationships were characterised by power over relating, distance and impersonal relations, caretaking rather than caring about, fragile trust by the athlete and trust through surveillance by the coach, where emotion was concealed and conflict avoided. However, enacting shared identities, the emotion involved in competing and the fact this was a voluntary organisation with competing values, provided an escape from simulacra of elite sport to allow for multi-value paradigm of interests. The opportunity for coaches and athletes to connect with each other based on their values and with emotion exposed their humanity and revealed the potential for relational mutuality and authenticity. The study challenges the valorised coaching and elite sport relationships and lifestyle. Implications for coaching include providing individuals with confidence to raise the issue of relationship, providing coaches and athletes with knowledge of connection and disconnection in relationship and the outcome on well-being. The need to develop a systemised approach to embedding growth-fostering relationships in the culture of high performance sport is highlighted.

This dissertation combines an assemblage theory ontology of urban sociology with the concept of Bauman's 'liquid modernity' (2000, 2012). It subsequently incorporates the nascent "liquid" constructs of liquid retail, liquid legitimacy, and liquid community to analyze consumers, community, and retailscapes in a violent and impoverished inner city area that has experienced constant and dramatic change. Through this lens, ethnographic fieldwork reveals a construct called consumption lifelines, which explains how consumers and communities use market-facing resources to find and create relative stability in the midst of turbulence, whether they choose to enter, stay in or leave a highly territorialized community with contested boundaries. The study adds complexity to Bauman's concept of liquidity and the construct of urban assemblages, and it has implications for other inner city communities that are similarly affected by changing times and challenging circumstances.

<p>"Imaging Church" examines the impact of visual practices on a religious community's ecclesiology. I argue that visual practices potentially encourage others to perceive the church differently and participate in the mission of a community to which they do not belong. Employing ethnographic research and material analysis, I investigate the visual practices of the Congregation of St. Joseph, a Roman Catholic women's religious community. Seven of communities of the Sisters of St. Joseph reconfigured in 2007 to form the Congregation of St. Joseph: the communities of LaGrange Park, Illinois; Tipton, Indiana; Wichita, Kansas; Nazareth, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; Wheeling, West Virginia; and the Médaille community which includes sisters in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Ohio.</p><p>My ethnographic research consisted of interviews and participant observation. Between May 2011 and May 2013, I interviewed 107 sisters in the Congregation as well as 17 individuals who were Congregation of St. Joseph Associates (non-vowed members) and/or employees of the Congregation. Interviews attended to the sisters' personal prayer lives, ministerial activities, congregational life and worship, congregational space, and the commodification of images. To gain an understanding of their visual practices, I worshiped with the sisters and observed several ministries. I employ material analysis to examine the influence of images created by and used in the Congregation. Analysis of particular images and spaces employed by the Congregation reveals the messages they articulate and potentially share with those who engage them. </p><p>To assess the centrality of practices for examining the ecclesiology and justice commitments of religious communities, the first chapter argues that the Sisters of St. Joseph in seventeenth century France and nineteenth century America articulated and dispersed their vision of the church through their practices (ministries and the production of commodities). These practices provide the foundation for the sisters' contemporary practices and the means through which they work for justice. The second chapter explores the sisters' charism (spirituality and mission) and commitment to justice and how these concepts are articulated in their congregational spaces. I argue that the sisters promote their mission through a visual archive which emphasizes their history and unity as a community, their chapels which display their belief and charism, and their public spaces which attempt to unify the Congregation's visual practices and extend these practices outside of their religious community.</p><p>The third chapter argues that the sisters employ visual practices in their spiritual lives and ministries to manifest their mission and to promote engagement with society. I examine these practices in relation to John Fuellenbach's concept of a theology of transformation. Analysis of the sisters' individual and communal prayer lives reveals the way visual practices assist in discerning identity and relationships. I further argue that the sisters' train others in their visual practices through their ministries, including their publications, retreats, and artwork produced in the Congregation. The fourth chapter examines how the Congregation's production of religious commodities evangelizes viewers and encourages participation in the sisters' mission for social and ecological justice. Through their business, the Ministry of the Arts, the Congregation employs religious commodities to assert a new perception of the church and world and invite others to commit to this vision. Through these visual practices in their prayer lives, congregational life, and ministries, the Congregation demonstrates the transformative potentiality of visual practices and offers techniques through which the church can pursue justice.</p> / Dissertation

Contemporary labour immigration into the UK has been underpinned by two structural positions: the uneven development within the capitalist system and an intensification of competition driving towards flexibility and precarity. Immigrant workers are overwhelmingly concentrated in secondary sectors of the labour market with low pay, long working hours and poor health and safety and closely associated with non-standard work and informal economy where unions are often not available. How these immigrant workers in highly exploitative industries respond to work-related exploitations poses a great challenge to traditional trade unionism. While community unionism has received increasing attention from researchers and practitioners, an institution-centric approach is dominated in the scholarship which tends to overemphasize the role of institutional entity, such as trade unions and NGOs, in shaping collective agency and consider it as the centrality to immigrant workers activism. In contrast to such union-centred research, this study adopts a social movement perspective to explore whether and how community organizing approach can empower immigrant workers and enhance union organizing when globalization compromises its validity. By conducting the multi-method (interviews, surveys, participant observations and videos) ethnographic studies in an immigrant domestic worker self-help group-Justice for Domestic Workers in London over a year and a post EU-enlargement Polish association and local Polish neighbourhood in South Somerset over five months, the research shows that gendered and cultural space rather than traditional industrial entities could offer a political context in which immigrant workers start recognising structural class exploitations and develop an agency and activism for changes. This suggests that the collective mobilizations of immigrant workers in informal and individualised sectors may require creative leaps of sociological imagination in nurturing such communities of coping, wherever they may be occurring - in social clubs, cafés or churches. Community, however, is not a naturally harmonious and unified group setting. The internal divisions and competitions within immigrant communities pose limits to how far ethnic cohesion can serve as a basis for collective mobilization of immigrant workers. The research points to the potential tensions between immigrant community organizations and trade unions to compete for membership and social influence in the coalition building. There is a risk that the institutional goals of immigrant community organizations, in terms of securing funding and expanding its organizational influence, may take precedence over substantive goals of support provision. The research also suggests that academics and practitioners need to rethink the criteria that define the success of worker organising. To win union recognition and achieve collective bargaining agreements in the workplace is a rare case in community organizing of immigrant workers. A distinction should be made between capacity-building from the perspective of workers and organizations involved in community organizing of immigrant workers. There might be a contradiction between organizational developments and grassroots empowerment. Instead of merely focusing on political outcomes as the existing research indicates, more attention should paid to outcomes in social and cultural arenas and how gains in one arena facilitate or hinder gains in another.

Forbidden to stand aims to provide a comprehensive account of how participation in sitting volleyball (SV) has impacted upon the lives of players with impairments. To achieve this aim, this study uses capabilities approach, a theoretical and methodological framework unexplored in sport contexts but widely appraised in political philosophy as one of the most comprehensive approaches to well-being and quality of life. One of the implications of the use of capabilities approach was the compulsory need to pay attention not only to personal capabilities per se, but also to the contextual elements of the individuals experience in SV. As such, whilst identifying, describing and assessing the main personal capabilities in which participation in SV had a significant impact, the present study presents simultaneously an anthropological account of the SV field in the United Kingdom (UK) as it developed. In connecting capabilities approach and disability sport for the first time, this study contributes to our understanding of the impact of sport on the whole lives of people and to the development of a holistic tool to measure personal development, helping to address an acknowledged omission of such instruments in the academic field of adapted physical activity. In order to respect the pluralism and complexity of capabilities approach, an ethnographic methodological design was used due to its flexibility in combining a plurality of theoretical insights; data sources and perspectives. During the study the researcher performed different roles within the SV community facilitating empirical data collection using the ethnographic tool kit. A key development in this process was the definition of an analytical thematic framework which directed the extensive analysis of the whole data set. A set of ten relevant capabilities were then identified as the most relevant for SV players with impairments, and SV impact on those capabilities described. This study reveals that while the potential to enact and promote capabilities is present in SV context in the UK, it is very dependent upon influential factors operating at a personal, cultural and environmental levels. At a personal level, the enjoyment and expansion of capabilities in players with impairments was very much influenced by the possession of substantial financial resources and previous sporting capital; thus the players who have expanded their capabilities the most were individuals who already possessed a good level of capabilities enjoyment. At the cultural level, while SV field detains important qualities to promote capabilities enjoyment such as an equalisation of the social worth between people with and without impairments, these were often overridden by the political and cultural dominance of an able-bodied volleyball ethos. At an environmental level, the overdependence of Volleyball institutions from the funding allocated by national sport agencies such as UK Sport, as well as the incipient development of SV grassroots stream clearly placed SV in a vulnerable position in relation to external political forces. The most important outcomes of the present study is the identification of life dimensions that are significantly affected by participation in SV as well as the identification of the most important factors mediating such impact. Beyond the fields of disability sport and adapted physical activity, a theoretical/methodological symbiotic relation between capabilities approach and social sciences of sport would encourage those involved in sport to refocus their mission on people and human development instead of on economic and institutional benefits.

Engineering Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for robust information sharing is the fundamental area of investigation in thesis. Robust workflow based information sharing systems have the potential to be part of robust information infrastructures providing positive effects for the individuals and teams as well as opportunities for societal and economical gains. Challenges in design and implementation of open socio-technical systems include identifying engineering principles empowering individual and team using the systems as well as supporting flexibility in design and maintenance. Of specific importance are principles supporting semantically correct information sharing. Information sharing in open socio-technical systems is given affordances due to coordination and exchange of services. Approaches ensuring robust semantically correct information sharing and user empowerments are key requirements especially since changes in context, roles and intentions are the rule and not the exception in socio-technical systems. Empirical observations of behaviours have been important for identifying critical patterns in workflow. A configuration of models and methods under the umbrella Participatory Design has been used including Ethnography and approaches based on Situation Theory, Knowledge Engineering, Interaction Design and Computer Supported Cooperative Work. The results of the configurations of methodologies are context sensitive since the methodologies are domain dependant. Three cases illustrating engineering support for empowerment of individuals and teams in open sociotechnical systems are presented. Two cases are based on studies performed in Sölvesborg and concerns engineering principles towards empowering individuals with cognitive impairments via ambient assistance. In the third case the focus is on hand-over situations and ontologies/abbreviations assuring semantically correct information sharing in distributed handling of critical emergency calls in Swedish Emergency Service Centres (SOS centres). The main contributions in this thesis, methodological contributions included, are engineering principles for open socio-technical systems from an empowerments perspective. The principles support understanding of workflows, information flows, interaction models, data models, semantics of information, trust, resilience, validation and training as well as assurance mechanisms in hand-over of critical operations. Identification and validation of key service qualities including mechanisms for improving performance critical tasks of semantics in information sharing are contributions. Service, Agent based and sensor approaches presented are final contributions.