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In this essay I will describe my working method as an artist with a political perspective, talking about what political art can be and how it can have an effect. I also write about the development of my work, from the interest in the independent nature person to the contrasting role as a citizen. I contextualize my artistic method by raising some questions that I find interesting when dealing with the public in relation to my method; I am recording sound in the city. / Erla Silfá Þorgrímsdóttir

This thesis examines the relationships people have with rubbish in everyday life. Focusing on domestic recycling policy and practice, environmental concern and action is explored as a sociological problem in a way that moves beyond the individualising paradigms that dominate environmental discourse for behavioural change. In its place, this thesis argues that better explanation may reside in the social context of embedded practices, and how they get enacted in daily life. Beginning with a historical overview and evaluation of current policy, this thesis re-imagines domestic recycling as a complex socio-technical system involving the engagement of different actors. Conducted at the boundaries of sociology, this thesis draws on empirical and theoretical ideas that extend across disciplines. Methodologically the research has been grounded on a principle of mixed methods pragmatism, exploiting the Sequential Explanatory mixed methods research design. Conducted across two phases, Phase One involved the secondary analysis of the Scottish Household Survey and Phase Two the collection and analysis of qualitative data using the Diary- Interview method. The first phase was a macro- analysis of recycling practices in Scotland. The main results of this analysis are presented in Chapter 4, which built a Binary Logistic Regression model, using the Scottish Household Survey, to predict the characteristics of Scottish households likely to engage in recycling behaviour. In addition to identifying the social and structural dimensions of recycling in Scotland, this analysis also enabled a research site to be selected for Phase Two of the study. Chapters 5 and 6 respond to the macro- analysis by accounting for the micro- aspects of recycling practices by looking at the problem inductively. Using qualitative data analysed in Phase Two, these two chapters are based on the idea that how people value the environment is relevant for understanding contemporary recycling practices. Chapter 5 considers the explanatory usefulness of environmental ethics, values and citizenship for explaining why some households engage in environmental behaviour, but others do not. In Chapter 6 these arguments are developed further with a more detailed discussion about how household recycling practices get enacted in everyday life. Using evidence from the data, this chapter considers why commitment to ‘doing’ recycling varies between people and examines recycling as formed, cultivated and maintained habitual behaviour. Taken together the three data chapters try to show that, rather than be an inconsequential feature of normal domestic life, recycling is a practice deeply-rooted in wider social patterns and structural forces. In the final chapter, all of the micro- and macro- findings are integrated together and concluded, along with some reflections on the multidimensionality of contemporary recycling practices in the home, and what this might mean for policy and future research.

As computing technology has become a vital part of everyday life, studies have increasingly scrutinized the underlying meaning of computational things. As different devices become interwoven with daily practices and routines, there is a growing interest in understanding not only their functional meaning in computational terms but also their meaning in relation to other non-computation artefacts. This thesis investigates how people relate to artefacts and how their individual values and attitudes affect this relationship.  The analysis is based on four ethnographic studies, which look at the richness of ordinary interactions with technology to understand the impact of technology upon practice and experience. The process through which humans develop a relationship to artefacts is framed as a continuous series of encounters, through which the individual constantly reshapes their relationship to things.  Artefacts are seen as lines in the mesh of everyday life, and the encounters are the intersections between lines. This approach–grounded in phenomenology and paired with an anthropological understanding of everyday life–reconceptualises understanding of the processes of adaption, meaning-making, disposing and recycling. The work reveals how human relations to all kinds of things–in the form of meaning–is continually transforming. Core to this understanding is the cultural relative essence that becomes perceived of the artefacts themselves. This essence deeply affects the way we encounter and thus interact with technology, as well as objects more broadly. In the daily interaction with computing devices we can observe that computing technology alters the mesh on a different level than non-computational artefacts: digital interfaces pull our lines together, bundle experiences an affect how we encounter the material and the social world. This enables computing devices to have meanings distinct from non-computing technology. To go further, computing is itself a mode of existence – a crucial difference in things that helps us understand the complexity of the material world.

<p>How are you today? The question was asked on a website by the artist Erik Krikortz, and the answers were displayed as a light show on a building complex in central Stockholm. In this thesis more than 20000 people have rated their subjective well-being on their own chosen occasions, on a seven graded scale of smileys in different colours. Results from November 2007 were analysed. The most frequently chosen colour was yellow, symbolising slightly better moods than average. Comparing means between days of the week showed that people feel the best on Sundays and are least happy on Tuesdays. Posthoc tests indicated significant dips in well-being on two days of the month. After answering the main question participants could also choose to rate their subjective experience of how well their sleep, family and friends, physical activity, stress levels and inspiration had been that day. The variables with the highest correlation with well-being were found to be “inspiration” and “family and friends”. Lowest were correlations for “sleep” and “physical activity”. The last variable was blank, for people to fill out for themselves and rate. The most frequently used word here was by far “love”, followed by “work” and “weather”. Summing up the results it seems social activities means most for the subjective well-being.</p>

How are you today? The question was asked on a website by the artist Erik Krikortz, and the answers were displayed as a light show on a building complex in central Stockholm. In this thesis more than 20000 people have rated their subjective well-being on their own chosen occasions, on a seven graded scale of smileys in different colours. Results from November 2007 were analysed. The most frequently chosen colour was yellow, symbolising slightly better moods than average. Comparing means between days of the week showed that people feel the best on Sundays and are least happy on Tuesdays. Posthoc tests indicated significant dips in well-being on two days of the month. After answering the main question participants could also choose to rate their subjective experience of how well their sleep, family and friends, physical activity, stress levels and inspiration had been that day. The variables with the highest correlation with well-being were found to be “inspiration” and “family and friends”. Lowest were correlations for “sleep” and “physical activity”. The last variable was blank, for people to fill out for themselves and rate. The most frequently used word here was by far “love”, followed by “work” and “weather”. Summing up the results it seems social activities means most for the subjective well-being.

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The aim of my diplom work is to, at least partially, take a close look at everyday life in the mentioned city of Vsetín in the period of years 1939 - 1945. One of the primary tasks was to chronicle mainly commercial, communal and cultural life of this regional city using mainly archival sources, less commonly literature. The most of the information comes from official sources, which are stored in the State district record office in Vsetín. During the work, there were also used documents stored in Moravian provincial record office in Brno and in Provincial record office in Opava. In these cases, it dealt funds, that arose because of acts of German occupation authorities. In the submitted work, I have used not only literature, but also regional press. But it was used very marginally, because very little amount of it has preserved.

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This dissertation seeks to reengage the field of political economy to establish a political response to financial crisis, as well as the resulting social crisis of everyday life, using the political economy of Hyman P. Minsky. As an academic field, political economy is in a strange kind of limbo. The separation of politics and economics is easy enough to see, and even within economics, there is another cleavage between economics proper and the history of economics. This yields some very strange conjectures about what it means to be an "economist," and how things can be a matter for either economic "policy" or "political economy" as if these categories were all jumbled up in a grab bag of available methodologies. This dissertation seeks to carve out some intellectual terrain in what can be called political economy by engaging in an interdisciplinary way, inspired by Minsky, in order to offer a cogent political analysis of financial crises. Minsky gives five possible definitions for political economy: the discipline of Economics, a code name for Marxism, rational choice theory of profit maximization, the management of macroeconomic policy, and finally an interdisciplinary view of political economy that works in concert with other social sciences and humanities in order to identify and remedy social ills such as unemployment and poverty. The reading of Minsky in this dissertation is thus in an explicitly political way in order to bridge the gap between various kinds of economics and the various social sciences. By analyzing and critiquing each of these possible definitions of political economy, it becomes clear that a properly social definition of political economy is the final, interdisciplinary one. This dissertation argues that Minsky had a "preanalytic vision" of the kind of society he wished his political economy to yield, and is a first step in fleshing out a political program for that vision. / Ph. D.