The thesis describes how family life is organised in the car, with a particular focus on exploring the role and use of mobile technology in this setting. The objective of this research is to use the insights from video ethnographic data collected with families to discuss how social interaction between family members may be situated to technology use. Drawing from the notion of ‘ordinary work’ discussed in ethnomethodology and applying this to naturalistic video data of families in cars, the thesis demonstrates how family activities are locally produced, drawing on background knowledge and common-sense understandings of family members’ work. Using methods from conversation analysis, the research demonstrates how transcribed instances of talk can reveal how parents and children produce their actions and talk to jointly produce activities in relation to media use. The analysis presented in this thesis demonstrates how the family car provides an opportunity for parents and children to come together, and engage in mundane family activities of talk and play while using a range of mobile devices. The thesis draws on richly documented and closely analysed episodes of interaction to demonstrate how family life unfolds in the accomplishment of activities in which interactions are situated, orderly and observable. The production of family life within the car involves talk and embodied action that is artfully placed within interactions between parents, children and technology. The analysis elucidates how the features of negotiation, collaboration and coordination around device-use are placed alongside driving activities. The contributions of this thesis lie in providing a descriptive analysis of the social organisation of family life through technology, developing an understanding of family technology use in a mobile context and highlighting elements of interaction that will inform the development of insights for the design of technology that is sensitive to the nuances of family life, mobility and technology practices.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis traces the trajectories of a group of young Cameroonian learners as they engage in new social and educational spaces in two South African primary schools. Designed as a Linguistic Ethnography and using data from observations, interviews and more than 50 hours of recorded interaction, it illustrates the ways in which these learners position themselves and are differentially positioned within evolving discourses of inclusion and exclusion. As a current study in a multilingual African context, it joins a growing body of literature in Europe which points to the ways in which young people’s language choices and practices are socially and politically embedded in their histories of migration and implicated in relations of power, social difference and social inequality. The study is a Linguistic Ethnography of young school learners’ language experience, which falls outside the scope of much mainstream research. It is one of very few studies to focus on migrant children in contexts of the South where multilingualism is the reality yet where language-in-education policies tend to follow monoglossic norms. The focus is on how a group of 10-16 year old Cameroonian children use their multilingual repertoires to construct and negotiate identities both inside and outside the classroom. It also investigates in more detail the acts of identity of two individuals entering the same school with different linguistic profiles, who are positioned in differentiated ways in relation to transnational and local flows and interconnections. The context is a low socio-economic suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, where Cameroonian practices of language, class, and ethnicity become entangled with local economies of meaning. The study also contributes to an emerging body of qualitative research that seeks to develop greater understanding of the relationships between language learners, their socio-cultural worlds and processes of identity construction (Cummins, 1996; Gee, 2001; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). ; Rampton, 1995, 2006). Recent international and South African studies tend to focus on secondary school learners, showing how they are struggling to negotiate the currents of a complex society (Adebanji, 2010; Sayed, 2002; Sookrajh, Gopal & Maharaj, 2005), although there is a recent and rapidly growing body of Scandinavian research on primary school children (for example, Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2008; Madsen, 2008; Møller, 2009; Møller, Holmen & Jørgensen, 2012). In contrast, the children in this study are negotiating the transition between childhood and adolescence, faced with issues of race, linguistic competence and discrimination at a time when moving from one age group to the next should have been relatively unproblematic. They are thus entangled in different levels of transition: emotional, physical and spatial. These issues of transition and negotiation will be highlighted through the lens of positioning. The concepts of ‘position’ and ‘positioning’ (Davis & Harré, 1990) appear to have origins in marketing, where position refers to the communication strategies that allow certain products to be placed in a market among their competitors (Tirado & Gálvez, 2007, p. 20). Holloway (1984) first used the concept of positioning in the social sciences to analyse the construction of subjectivity in the area of heterosexual relationships (Tirado & Gálvez, 2007). Positioning here was explained as relational processes that constitute interaction with other individuals. The present study focuses on how ‘interactants’ position themselves vis-à-vis their words and texts, their audiences and the contexts they both "respond to and construct linguistically" (Jaffe, 2009, p.3). As they make use of lexical and grammatical tools available to them in interaction, it becomes apparent that the process of identity construction through positioning does not "reside within the individual but in intersubjective relations of sameness and difference, […] power and disempowerment" (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 607). Thus to interpret multilingual children’s positioning requires a recursive process, using a double perspective: it means looking at the day-to-day moments of interactional and other practices, and also the wider political discourses in which these practices may be embedded and historically rooted (Maguire, 2005) and which they index in different ways. These day-to-day moments of practice thus involve different “acts of identity” (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) which can also be described as acts of stance-taking (Jaffe, 2009). A stance may index multiple selves and social identities. However, not all stances are open to everyone: those whose who have their social, cultural or linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991, 1997) recognized in a particular space will be able to position themselves more strongly there than those who do not. Moreover, stances are not successful unless 'taken up' by interactants (Jaffe, 2009): this uptake may take the form of interlocutors’ stances of alignment, realignment, or misalignment (C. Goodwin, 2007; Matoesian, 2005). Uptake in multilingual contexts is influenced by the prevailing "linguistic market" (Bourdieu, 1991, pp.55-67): day to-day acts of positioning take place in inequitable markets. These ‘markets’ are fertile grounds for social stratification where speech acts and the languages in which they are realized are assigned different symbolic values (Bourdieu, 1991, 1997). Mastery of the 'legitimate' language or languages is then often a pre-condition for claiming symbolic and material resources. New institutional spaces in South Africa become interesting here, because they are characterized by new formations of class, changes in gender roles and relations and other instances of macro-structural shifts. In such spaces, linguistic hierarchies and patterns of distribution of linguistic resources are rapidly changing (Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele, 2014). The school as a key institution in the distribution of social, cultural and linguistic capital is thus an important site for exploring the role of language and multilingualism in social and educational change. This thesis sets out to answer the following research questions: a) How do immigrant learners use their linguistic repertoires to construct, negotiate or contest identities in new school spaces? b) How do different spaces enable or constrain the new identities negotiated? c) What are the implications for language learning policy and practice? Data collection took place over two years between February 2010 and June 2013, and followed participants from grades 5 to 7 in the English medium and Afrikaans language classrooms. Participants were 10-16 year old Cameroonian children in two Cape Town schools, ten in each. The study contains nine chapters, with chapter 1 providing an overview of the background, rationale, and conceptual and methodological framework. Chapter 2 traces the shift towards the social in language studies, considering frameworks for understanding the differential values placed on linguistic resources as actors move across social spaces, both local and transnational. Here interaction is viewed as a crucial site for identity construction, generating a social stage through which reality is constructed, shared, and made meaningful. Chapter 3 reviews studies of interactional positioning amongst multilingual learners in social and educational contexts in South Africa and more globally. Chapter 4 focuses on the methodology used in the study, discussing the research design based on Linguistic Ethnography, a qualitative approach which is based on the two broad planks of ethnography and Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) and which enables an analytical framework combining Conversation Analysis (CA), Discourse Analysis (DA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Together, these analytical tools enable a multifaceted illumination of the construction of identity in discourse. The various tools used in data collection are discussed in depth followed by comment on reflexivity, challenges in the field and limitations of the study. Chapter 5 delineates the researcher’s trajectory in the field. This comprises profiles of the study schools (including the schools’ socio-economic, ethnic and linguistic make-up in relation to teachers and learners), perspectives on why the schools were chosen, the differing receptions to a research presence there, and some reflections on the researcher’s identity construction. The chapter further explores different techniques of data collection within this context: field notes and thick description, interviews, and audio recordings of interactions in and out of schools. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 present and analyse findings from classroom observation and interview data, together with audio-recordings of a group of Cameroonian learners interacting with each other and with children of other nationalities in classrooms, community and home spaces. These chapters aim to illustrate how these learners used linguistic resources to position themselves and others, to build, maintain and negotiate identities, and to assert or negate identifications. Chapters 7 and 8 build on the analysis presented in chapter 6 by focusing respectively on two key emergent themes: owning participatory spaces and defying positioning in multilingual spaces. Chapter 7 centres on the interactional and other means by which a 12 year old Anglophone learner, James, navigated his way increasingly successfully through new social and educational spaces, expanding his linguistic repertoire. Chapter 8 focuses on a 12 year old Francophone learner, Aline, and the ways in which she tried to convert her linguistic capital on new linguistic markets. Her efforts were more often than not met with negative evaluation, leading to a loss of both social and academic identities. The analysis of data thus serves as a rich point of entry for understanding the connections between linguistic repertoires, relations between ethnic groups, youth culture, and the experience of social change. Through their discursive production of selves, these adolescent learners supposed to be negotiating only the normal transition from one age group to the next) are here negotiating the currents of a complex society and dealing with issues of race, language and segregation. Findings suggest that participants had multiple identity options that were negotiated through different practices, from food choices to language and interactional norms. These different identity options were however constrained by existing norms and linguistic hierarchies in each space, allowing some to accommodate new linguistic practices and ways of doing things, while others experienced more ambivalent and contradictory processes of adaptation. In informal settings there was evidence of a third space characterized by a mélange of languages in which both formal and informal versions of English and French, along with Cameroonian Pidgin English (CPE) and other Cameroonian languages, were used. However, even in these settings there was a gradual shift to English, indicating the penetration of macrosocial and institutional discourses into private spaces. The thesis concludes with a set of recommendations for caregivers, teachers and policymakers seeking to create schools more welcoming of diversity. It is hoped, then, that this study will help families and schools to realize the variety of ways in which linguistic repertoires influence school success, both social and educational, and to find ways of using these repertoires for development and learning. In this way, they might contribute to immigrant youngsters’ ability to construct strong identities as learners and valued social beings.

This thesis brings a view of the Leanness level of company based on ethnographic research. The combination of these two disciplines, the Lean concept and ethnography, is unique and brings new direction to research the level and approach of organizations to Lean philosophy. There is possible to assess the company in areas of value for customers, waste and continuous improvement through the research. Through the analysis, it is possible to find out where the organization has areas for improvement. The aim of the thesis is to propose the step to increase the level of Leanness of the organization. The thesis deals with the analysis and measurement of Leanness level of production and administrative processes in a manufacturing plant in the electronics industry.

The present study examined the language and literacy practices of one ethnolinguistically diverse family literacy English classroom for women who recently migrated to the United States as refugees, and whose access to formal, school-based learning was interrupted prior to migration. More specifically, this study investigated how institutionally-valued practices socially positioned the women in class, and how the women discursively negotiated and claimed new or different positionings for themselves. Overall, this study draws on social positioning theories (Davies & Harré, 1990; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999), to attempt to address the relationship between English language education for women and notions of social inclusion (Allman, 2013). Designed as a linguistic ethnography (Copland & Creese, 2015), data were collected over the course of two years and included eight months of thrice-weekly classroom-based participant observation; classroom audio (105) and video recordings (39); photographs (1038); audio and video-recorded semi-structured interviews with the focal teacher (4), three focal students (2 each), and the main administrator (1); and document collection. Data were transcribed and analyzed utilizing thematic (Saldaña, 2012) and micro-ethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome et al., 2006). Findings show a range of institutionally-valued language and literacy practices and diverse accompanying positionings. Some practices served to socialize learners into specific “storylines” (Harré & Moghaddam, 2003) related to socially-preferred ways of “doing” language and literacy both inside and outside the classroom, particularly in relationship to the learners’ positions as mothers. Other practices served to position learners as legitimate co-authors and community members, affording them ways to use English to “write (and speak) themselves into” the times and places of their surrounding communities (Trend, 1994, p. 226). The findings further illustrate that learners used language and other multimodal means (i.e., photographs, video, social media) to make inter(con)textual, intercultural, and transnational connections for both academic and personal purposes—and to draw others into those connections with them. These connections positioned learners as academically, technologically, and relationally resourceful transnational women. Implications for pedagogy, programming, policy, theory, and recommendations for future research are discussed.

This thesis examines number sense in primary mathematics. I begin by presenting literature to demonstrate how a cognitive definition of number sense, dominates understandings of mathematical development. I argue that this has influenced fixed-ability practices in mathematics (e.g. Boaler, 1997; Marks, 2014) presenting number-sense as a natural ability. I outline the political landscape and explore data which demonstrates that mathematics education systematically disadvantages some people (Zevenbergen, 2001). After reviewing mathematics learning from a range of theoretical perspectives, I demonstrate a gap in the literature: a sociological exploration of number sense in primary school and illustrate the need to examine school structures and their implications for equitable outcomes for all children. To address this gap I have employed Bourdieusian tools of habitus, field and capital, to explore number sense development. Through ethnographic methods in Year 4 classrooms, I examine how number sense positions children in the field of primary mathematics. This research was undertaken during the first year of statutory implementation of the National Curriculum (DfE, 2013) allowing insight into the lived experiences of children at this time. My findings show that facts, fluency and flexibility are key ways children demonstrate their number sense. Through rapid recall of facts children are seen by their teachers, peers and themselves as ‘able’ at mathematics, leading to explicit reproduction of social class, as these facts are usually learned at home. Similarly, a demand for fluency has led to a focus on procedural accuracy with calculation. Based on this, children are sorted into ability groups magnifying infinitesimally small differences between them (Bourdieu, 1986). Finally, children demonstrate flexibility through different calculation strategies; however, lessons usually rehearse single methods, hiding this key mathematical practice. Each aspect of number sense differentiates children, advantaging those with middle-class habitus and therefore reproducing educational inequalities.

This dissertation interrogates how diverse actors ascribe semantic, affective, and political meanings to instrumental music under changing historical circumstances and in different performance contexts. In what I call an “ethnographic reception study,” I employ historical and ethnographic methods to assess the ways in which the popular samulnori percussion genre from South Korea has been imbued with associations as divergent as a sonic symbol of Korea to narratives of resistance against the state. Through five chapters, I track some of the contested and multiple meanings as they interact, both in historical moments in South Korea and vis-à-vis transnational circulations that led to the genre’s transmission outside Korea. As a genre of percussion music that was first created in South Korea in 1978, samulnori has had a complex reception during three dramatic decades in modern Korean history—leading to life-changing encounters from its fans while also eliciting scorn from its detractors. As a dynamic musical genre that is now notated and largely nonverbal, samulnori has served as a user-friendly sonic canvas upon which identities and affinities have been easily grafted by non-Korean fans, leading to the development of amateur samulnori ensembles and musical communities around the world. By considering the ways in which the samulnori genre has been evaluated, interpreted, and practiced by different actors, I show how the genre’s complex reception exhibits a relational and imbricated set of meanings over time. Last, by considering the cultural politics of samulnori from diachronic and synchronic perspectives, I offer a working methodology for contemporary studies of music reception. / Music

This dissertation presents an instrumentalist’s perspective on cognition and meta-cognition in music performance. The goal of the study is to identify and apply methods of inquiry that are phenomenologically resonant with instrumental practice. The first chapter, situating the study in the context of the writer’s musical training, examines ways of studying and representing performance knowledge. The second chapter presents a case study of the preparation of Tōru Takemitsu’s Masque for Two Flutes (1959-1960). Using grounded theory methodology, this chapter investigates the role of gesture in the negotiation of musical understanding. Chapters 3 through 5 draw on Herbert H. Clark’s joint activity theory of language use to conceptualize music-making, taking into account context, process, and other domains of musical activity. Finally, Chapter 6, in addition to re-defining "virtuosity" for the 21st century instrumentalist, presents a set of philosophical considerations for cognitive studies in music performance. / Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies / Graduate

This thesis seeks to uncover some of the cultural practices central to youth activist subcultures across three urban centres in Canada: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. I undertake this work within the context of rising moral and state claims about the apparent need for ‘good citizenship’ to be exercised by young people, alongside a late modern relationship between liberalism, neoliberalism, and Canada’s history of class- and race-based exclusions. The theoretical framework bridges cultural and political sociology with youth cultural theory. It also draws heavily upon the work of feminist philosophers of agency and the state. The main methodology is ethnographic, and was carried out within a phenomenological and hermeneutic framework. In total, 41 young people, ages 13-29, were involved in this research. Participants self-identified as being involved in activist work addressing issues such as globalization, war, poverty and/or colonialism. The findings of this study suggest that the effects of the historical and contemporary symbol of the ‘good citizen’ are experienced within youth activist subcultures through a variety of cultural means, including: expectations from self and schooling to be ‘responsible,’ with its associated burdens of guilt; policing practices that appear to rely on cultural ideas about the ‘good citizen’ and the ‘bad activist’; and representations of youth activism (e.g. within media) as replete with out-of-control young people being punished for their wrong-doings. Wider effects include the entrenched impacts of class- and race-based exclusions, which manifest within youth activist subcultures through stylistic regimes of ‘symbolic authorization’ that incorporate attire, beliefs, and practices. Although findings suggest that many young people come to activism via a predisposition created within an activist or Left-leaning family, this research also highlights the relational means by which people from outside of this familial habitus can come to activist practices. Taken together, findings suggest that youth activism must be understood as a cultural and social phenomenon, with requisite preconditions, influences, and effects; that such practices cannot be disassociated from wider social inequalities; and that such effects and influences demand scrutiny if we are to reconsider the role of activism and its part in expanding the political boundaries of the nation-state. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

Although the curative model of medical care is predominant it is necessary to consider the palliative strategies at the end-of-life. The inter-relation of dying children, their families and pediatric palliative care teams are seldom analyzed outside Palliative Care. However, it is important to ethnographically think about the disturbing experiences of body and subject disintegration while people are directly experiencing them, even when the person is a child or a newborn baby. A central topic in this study is how personhood, body formation and disintegration, and childhood can be understood within the context of unevenly constructed and shared palliative communication with and without words. Hence, I analyze in this study how a Palliative Care Team in the city of Buenos Aires provides care, communicates, and ultimately produces a particular companionship to dying children and their families. This work is built on qualitative information gathered and produced during my four-month fieldwork with the Palliative Care Team. The ethnographic techniques (participant observation, non-participant observation and open-ended semi-structured interviews) I conducted show that their strategies of care and communication have as the main goal the process of companionship at the end of children’s lives. It is necessary to understand how patients, parents, and other family members are situated in this field of tensions between restorative and palliative medicine, and brought into this culture of Palliative Care in a public children’s hospital. My research asks, in what ways are pediatric Palliative Care practices exclusive to the social and cultural contexts of Buenos Aires? This work has three main sections: 1. care, 2. communication, and 3. companionship. In section one I focus on the clinical and non-clinical aspects of care involving the professionals’ and volunteers’ practices of giving care. In section two I concentrate my attention on the verbal and non-verbal aspects of the Palliative Care Team communication with children and families. In section three I consider the professional production of ‘companionship’. In this thesis I will demonstrate the significance of this concept according to the Palliative Care Team members and how care and communication are the base for the ‘production of companionship.’ / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation develops the conceptual framework of landscape political ecology (LPE) to consider particular forms of socio-ecological transformation resulting from the relatively re- cent but heavily contested practice of ‘swiftlet farming’ in Malaysian cities. Swiftlet farming is a colloquial term given to the semi-domestication of edible-nest swiftlets (Aerodramus fuciphagus) in converted buildings within urban areas in order to harvest their nests. These nests have long been a highly sought-after delicacy in China and overseas Chinese communities, and subsequently fetch over US$2000 on the international market. The primary research question investigated asks how the industry has been perceived and contested on an everyday basis in Malaysian cities. Engaging these controversies provides the opportunity to capture the significant negotiation that is embedded in the mechanisms of landscape production and capital accumulation as they take place through struggles over swiftlet farming in contemporary Malaysian cities. This research also seeks to understand how the swiftlet farming industry has transformed not only the cities in which it has been located, but also the ecology of swiftlets and their breeding patterns. The dissertation is centered on a six-month participatory ethnography which took place primarily in the city of George Town, Penang, but also investigated other related sites in peninsular Malaysia. I maintain that such ‘co-productive’ research has enabled a more situated view of socio-ecological transformations that have transpired through urban swiftlet farming in Malaysia, and the controversies surrounding them. The empirical chapters aim to unpack the controversies and discourses that emerged in response to swiftlet farming in the study areas, primarily its perceived impact on urban health, forms of cultural heritage, and the wider implications of ‘farming’ such animals in urban residential areas. In exploring these topics, LPE provides a cohesive and integrated approach that helps to untangle the interconnected economic, political, ecological and discursive processes that together form increasingly heterogeneous socio-natural landscapes. The implications of this thesis thus speak to the fraught cultural politics underlying processes of urban socio-ecological transformation in contemporary Southeast Asian cities.