Identical twins John and Edward Grimes (artist name "Jedward") have been active for six years and have a heterogeneous following of fans. This thesis aims to investigate how and in which situations fans think about Jedward as part of their everyday life. Each of the three informants, plus the author, kept diaries recording the above for the course of one week. The diaries were subsequently coded into the groups Traditional Fandom, Social Media, Music, Places, Family & Friends, Interests & Hobbies, Studies, Film & TV and Food & Drink respectively. Auto-ethnographic method was implemented and combined with work within the spheres of fandom and music. At a later date informants were asked if there are any products or causes that they associate with John and Edward; in lieu of comprehensive answers, the author compiled such a list. For the fours fans taking part, John and Edward are experienced as being close to them in many different situations during their day-to-day lives, in much the same way as a close friend or loved one. The conclusion is that through aiming to portray my own interpretation of fandom, it has been possible to see just how creative and imaginative fans are, an enlightening reflection contrary to those which in many cases have been none too positive.

The young child’s experiences of living with cancer are crucial to providing evidence based care. The overall aim of this thesis was to explore and describe experiences of health and functioning in the everyday life of young children with cancer, over a three year period from diagnosis, to provide insights and suggestions to improve evidence based care. The first and second papers in the series of four for this thesis used a qualitative content analysis to describe the child’s experiences shortly after diagnosis and six and 12 months later. The third paper used mixed methods to identify a comprehensive set of ICF-CY codes describing everyday health and functioning in the life of the young child with cancer. The fourth paper used the identified comprehensive set of ICF-CY codes to follow changes in everyday health and functioning over the study’s entire three year period from diagnosis. Entry into the health-illness transition was characterised by trauma and isolation. Health and functioning in everyday life was utterly changed and physical difficulties were at their peak. The passage through transition was characterised by an active striving on the part of the child to make a normal everyday life of the cancer experience. Difficulties affecting health and functioning in everyday life decreased and changed during the trajectory, though feelings of loneliness prevailed. A new period of stability in the child’s post treatment life was seen from two years after diagnosis and onwards, with (re)-entry to preschool/school and other social activities. However, an increase in difficulties with personal interactions with others and access to, and support from healthcare professionals was seen. Variances were seen within individual children’s’ trajectories. In summary it can be stated that the everyday life of young children with cancer changes over time and health care services are not always in phase with these changes. Young children living with cancer want to be participatory in their care and to have access to their parents as protectors. They need access to and ongoing contact with peers and preschool. Although physical difficulties in living an everyday life with cancer reduce over time, new difficulties emerge as the child post cancer treatment re-enters society. A structured follow-up throughout the cancer trajectory and not just during active treatment is necessary. A child-centered philosophy of care would guide the child towards attainment of health and well-being. Both the child’s own perspective and a child’s perspective as described by adults caring for them should be seen on a continuum, rather than as opposites. This view could help ensure that young children become visible and are listened to as valuable contributors to care planning. Knowledge of health-illness transition can be useful in illustrating everyday health and functioning through long term illness trajectories.

Urban conservation and development practices are often in conflict. This thesis examines this general claim in the context of rapid urban development in East Asia through an analysis of the postcolonial historic city of Tainan, in Southern Taiwan. Following a particular line of urban conservation scholarship (Ashworth, Larkham, Conzen) this thesis argues that urban conservation is best conceived as the management of urban change, and that change should be considered as part of urban conservation policy. The aim of such urban conservation practice would be not only to maintain the historic traditions of a place, but also to promote the development of new possibilities of place. In this sense, the treatment of historical urban fabric should aim to preserve memory and tradition as much as serving as an ‘incubator’ for new senses of place. To this end, the thesis seeks to combine morphological and everyday life approaches to urban scholarship. A sense of place is not only derived from the emotional feelings, orientation or identity attached to an existing environment, but also relies on the practices of everyday life. These practices are significant aspects of urban places, but they are often difficult to map, measure and analyse. Thus, the thesis argues, mapping the morphological changes of a city is not enough for a rounded study of the everyday life dimensions of urban space. As a result, this thesis proposes that empirical approaches to everyday life are as important as morphological studies when exploring issues of urban change. The thesis builds on a number of existing approaches to this wider issue of the interrelationship between urban morphology and everyday life. In particular, it examines the Versailles School’s approach to typomorphological study. This approach to urban analysis emphasizes morphological change and its grounding in existing typological rules of everyday space, so as to continue the everyday life culture that it supports. This thesis develops methodologies based on these principles. In addition, it draws on the concepts of time-geography and heterotopic spaces as a means of specifying the representational approaches to everyday life narratives and an understanding of postcolonial complex urbanism, respectively. Following this approach, this thesis presents a series of case studies on the historic city centre of Tainan, the ancient capital of Taiwan. As a result of its colonial past, the urban blocks in that city can be understood as heterotopias in the contemporary city. Drawing on the case studies, this thesis argues that the everyday life-style in Tainan city centre is inseparable from the existing block typology and the functional conditions that reside in the coexistence of the historical and the modern urban structures. Thus, when considering urban conservation policies, the relationship between this social spatial condition and the everyday life that it supports must be carefully considered.

This research study intends to find out about the use of online collaboration tools in supporting knowledge workers for the practice of employee volunteering. Online collaboration tools refer to the web-based technologies such as popular Web 2.0 tools like blogs or wikis and traditional online tools such as instant messenger, discussion forums, online chats and e-mail used by several individuals with the aim of achieving a common goal. The employee volunteering program- called Corporate Service Corps (CSC) - is an employee volunteering program in which the IBM employees tackle the economic and societal issues of the less developed countries they have been sent to while getting involved in project-based learning activities. This study provides an insight into how online engagement enabled the continuation of non-formal workplace learning practices such as volunteering and opened up possibilities for new ways to contribute to the learning process of employees. When it comes to online communities there is a mixture of entanglements, partnerships, negotiations and resistances between these tools and human actors. This research study explores how online communities are created by employee volunteers and also provides an understanding of non-formal learning practices within such fluid settings; important issues for organizations interested in non-formal learning practices of their employees are also raised. Today’s workplace settings are in constant need of recurrent learning processes interwoven with daily tasks on digital spaces. However, these digital spaces are not devoid of any issues and hence suggest the need for employees to be conscious of the emerging issues. The results from the case study are analysed by using participatory design methods in order to contribute to the understanding of the use of technology as both a single and collective experience. This research identified the specific benefits of online collaboration tools, and explored how their usage has been appropriated by employee volunteers for their practice of volunteering and how they influenced the process of their meaning-making. By doing so, it raised an awareness of the digital tools that provide collections of traits through which individuals can get involved in non-formal learning practices by having digital interactions with others.

This diploma thesis is focused on forms of everyday life of gendarmers in the first half of the twentieth century in Bohemia. The main goal of the thesis is to show the specifics of the gendarmerie profession in comparison with everyday life of normal population. The applied methods are based on established approaches of everyday life research and also on normative- comparative method. The historical sources come mainly from archive but the memoirs of gendarmers and members of their families were used as well. There are analysed gendarme service, their family life and leisure time and finally social and health care in three main thematic parts. The everyday life of married and unmarried gendarmers is researched separately (always in connection with gendarm service).

Este estudo foi realizado junto a um grupo de nove famílias de um assentamento do Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), em Rondônia. Estas famílias organizam o trabalho e a vida de forma coletiva há mais de dez anos, em torno do Grupo Coletivo 14 de Agosto. Teve como objetivo compreender as vicissitudes do processo organizativo cotidiano desta experiência e os sentidos de trabalho e de vida que vem sendo construídos a partir dela. De inspiração etnográfica, essa pesquisa tomou o cotidiano como horizonte de visibilidade que permitiu entender o processo de coletivização. O cotidiano é entendido enquanto o espaço onde se dá a vida e a ação social (SATO & SOUZA, 2001; SPINK, 2008). Composto basicamente por militantes do MST e do Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores (MPA), já nos primeiros anos de acampamento estas famílias começaram a desenvolver práticas de cooperação agrícola e reciprocidade. Depois de significativos experimentos, o grupo resolveu coletivizar definitivamente a terra e trabalhar em sistema de autogestão em todos os setores de produção agrícola. Para dar concretude a essa proposta, sentiram necessidade de coletivizar também parte do trabalho doméstico, passando a ter uma cozinha coletiva. Orientados por uma matriz camponesa e agroecológica, terras, trabalho e cozinha (enquanto espaço de sociabilidade e de trabalho) compõem o tripé que sustenta diariamente a existência do Grupo Coletivo 14 de Agosto. Terras para trabalhar, trabalho livre e associado e a reorganização da vida em torno de uma sociabilidade construída a partir de uma vivência coletiva anticapitalista. Trata-se, nesse sentido, de uma experiência contra-hegemônica que disputa os sentidos da vida e do trabalho na sociedade capitalista por meio de um projeto político profundamente enraizado no cotidiano / This study was carried out among a group of nine families of a settlement of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST ), in Rondônia. These families organize work and life collectively for over ten years around the \"Group Collective August 14\". Aimed at understanding the vicissitudes of everyday organizational process this experience and ways of work and life has been built from it. Inspired in ethnography, this research took everyday life as a horizon of visibility that allowed to understand the process of collectivization. Everyday life is understood as the space where life and social action happens ( SATO & SOUZA , 2001; SPINK , 2008) . Composed primarily by MST militants and the Small Farmers Movement (MPA), since early in camp these families have begun to develop practical agricultural cooperation and reciprocity. After significant experimentations, the group decided definitely collectivize the land and work on self-management in all sectors of work. To give concreteness to this proposal, also felt the need to collectivize domestic work, going to have a collective kitchen. Guided by a matrix and agroecological peasant, land, work and kitchen (as a space of sociability and work) make up the tripod that supports the daily existence of the \"Group Collective August 14\". Lands to work, free and associated labor and the reorganization of life around a sociability constructed from an anti-capitalist collective experience. It is, accordingly, an experience counter-hegemonic that fights the way of life and work in capitalist society through a political project deeply rooted in the everyday life

Esta Dissertação foi desenvolvida em meio a um importante ciclo de protestos de oposição ao governo que usurpou o poder com o golpe parlamentar concretizado em 31 de agosto de 2016. Entre as diversas ações para implementar o novo pacto se encontram a PEC do Fim do Mundo e a Reforma do Ensino Médio. Com isso, uma onda de ocupações estudantis tomou conta de escolas, universidades e institutos tecnológicos. Provocados pelo exemplo da mobilização estudantil, técnicos e docentes da maioria das instituições federais de ensino superior deflagraram suas greves. Na Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), a greve dos técnicos durou 44 dias, e a dos docentes 21. Esta pesquisa militante assume a defesa que Lefebvre (2014) faz do cotidiano como categoria de análise e do marxismo também como conhecimento crítico da vida cotidiana. A experiência concreta da realidade, o ‘vivido’, representa o mundo percebido, a focalização da consciência em uma prática. Seu contraponto dialético é o ‘viver’, a virtualidade projetada, fruto das expectativas de um futuro desejado (LEFEBVRE, 2014). O estudo da greve, através da vida cotidiana – este lugar de transição, encontros interações e conflitos -, permite compreender sua construção desde baixo, a partir do vivido e do viver, do individual e do coletivo. Além disto, destacamos as ações e práticas que suspendiam a repetição e desafiavam a alienação a partir da coesão que brota da tomada de consciência das possibilidades que o coletivo constrói ao se organizar para tentar mudar a realidade com a qual se confronta. / The study that originated the present Dissertation was developed amid an important national cycle of protests in opposition to a constitutional amendment that established a spending limit the growth of federal government spending to the rate of inflation for 20 years, and to a bill introducing radical changes in high school curriculum. Both reforms were proposed by the government that took power after the Brazilian parliamentary coup of May 2016 and were approved by the National Congress at the end of this year. These projects were opposed by massive student’s movements and university strikes, among others. In the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brazil), a technical-administrative staff strike lasted 44 days, and a teachers strike 21 days. We were part of the strike commands – one of us is from administrative staff (and an MSc student at that time) and the other is a teacher. We are also members of the Organization and Liberating Practice research group, based at the School of Administration, in which Marx and Marxist authors have been studied, such as Henri Lefebvre. Therefore, it was obvious that we could interconnect these two spaces (activism and academy) based on Lefebvre’s (2014) propositions on the critique of everyday life. The aim of this activist research was to analyze the everyday construction of these strikes, considering the living and the lived experience of workers and its meaning to transform potentially their everyday life. Lefebvre (2014) provided the theoretical framework to analyze conflicts, practices, ruptures, discontinuities, repetitions and creations, mainly through categories such as ambiguity, alienation, moments and possibilities Data were collected throughout the strikes and was supplemented with social network information and interviews with members from the strike commands after the end of movements. The rupture with everyday labor by rote, the recognition on the importance of cohesion beyond the hierarchies determined by the university structure, and the horizon widening of possibilities for the movement participants were some of the conclusions. Another relevant aspect is that these strikes were not organized in defense or to achieve goals directly related to labor conditions. They were organized together with the student movement that occupied more than 40 buildings in different campuses in defense of the education system, providing a space for mutual recognition that went beyond tactic alliances involving the three sectors of the university community. The everyday collective construction of this movement became evident the importance and potentialities of articulating and supporting each other in each specific struggle workplace while simultaneously being intensively involved with the wider context of social struggles.

FundaÃÃo Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Cientifico e TecnolÃgico / Investigamos como os moradores de Fortaleza se relacionavam com os âcaminhos da Ãguaâ na cidade. Atentando para as diferentes construÃÃes dos espaÃos e usos da Ãgua doce, elaboramos uma reflexÃo em que a existÃncia de riachos, aÃudes, lagoas, olhos dâÃgua, poÃos e cacimbas estava ligada aos gestos e sentimentos de indivÃduos que praticaram â e assim instituÃram â esses espaÃos. Livros de reminiscÃncias, romances, crÃnicas, periÃdicos, plantas cartogrÃficas, relatÃrios oficiais, cartas e censos demogrÃficos foram utilizados para compreender os sentidos atribuÃdos à Ãgua e Ãs aguadas. Tomou-se como balizas temporais o perÃodo compreendido entre a contrataÃÃo do engenheiro Adolpho Herbster (1856) â marco para as obras pÃblicas na cidade â e a inauguraÃÃo do sistema de abastecimento de Ãgua encanada do AÃude Acarape do Meio (1926) â por proporcionar um fornecimento de Ãgua que, mesmo nÃo contemplando a maioria da populaÃÃo, oportunizou uma nova relaÃÃo com o lÃquido.

<p>People are creators of their own acts. That is a premise of this thesis. Social contexts offer action alternatives but given their individuality people, to various extents, put the set of alternatives into question, re-shape them and make them into theirs. What people do in their everyday life has political significance. The theories that frame this work focus on how people reappropriate culture and in so doing bring forth infinitesimal changes in society.</p><p>I have interviewed seven young women in Beirut who take action to get to do what they desire. Given their social conditions and individuality they find different ways around the prohibitions that they are facing. Organized independently and within networks of foremost relatives they find their ways. They negotiate with family and community, make allies and create paths to 'forbidden' spaces. They seize opportunities and increase their space for a day, night or occasion. Then they accord their life to the surrounding's restrictions – until opportunity strikes again. The women also create an imaginary space where they are ruling queens. From there they tell the surrounding to shut up and fuck off, in there they hope, smile and fall in love.</p><p>The thesis then goes on to discuss the socio-political effects of young women's spacing practices. When the women do what they desire they enter, what they claim are, forbidden spaces. Their entry appears to be a threatening force; it diminishes gaps between the 'allowed' and the 'unacceptable' and between the 'good' and 'bad' girl- and womanhood. These practices, sprung from the daily life, challenge the surrounding and young women's spacing is thereby a micro-political phenomenon with subversive potential.</p>

During the last decades, immigration to Sweden has increased. As a result of this, a larger number of individuals are growing up with two languages. This means that the field of bilingualism has emerged as topic of relevance in Sociology, as well as other disciplines of Social Sciences. Bilingualism has been studied from different perspectives in Linguistics. However, in Sociology, focus has been mostly on the questions of integration, culture and ethnicity, where language has been seen as one of many aspects. I argue that bilingualism is an important social phenomenon in its own right, since it shapes the everyday lives of bilingual individuals and changes the landscape of our society. Using Grounded Theory, bilingualism in the everyday life is analyzed and explored, using material from qualitative interviews with ten individuals who have grown up with Swedish and one other language. It is here suggested that bilingualism in the everyday life can be understood as a process of handling ambivalence. This process takes place between the social context and the self and is influenced by and influences them both. A central part of this process is bilingualism seen simultaneously as tension and as resource.