The 'haunted home' has enjoyed a long-standing position as a motif within society, crossing a span of narratives, from anecdotal local stories shared informally between family and friendship networks, to the established Gothic traditions of literature and film. This project uniquely examines the ways in which people who believe their homes to be haunted negotiate the experience of co-habiting with ghosts. It is a qualitative study which has applied a mix of creative methodologies to a number of in-depth case studies in England and Wales. Geographers and researchers in related disciplines have recently expressed interest in the idea of ghosts or haunting, but have tended to focus upon public metropolitan spaces, and to employ the ghost as a metaphor or social figure. In contrast, this project contributes to a growing literature on the material and immaterial geographies of the home, the intangible and affective aspects of everyday life within the particular context of the domestic interior. The project explores the insights uncanny events experienced within this space reveal about people's embodied, emotional, spatial and temporal relationships with 'home' as both physical place and as a set of ideals. It studies the way in which people negotiate experiences which appear to lack rational or natural explanation, and the interpretative narratives employed to explain them. It suggests ways in which different forms of belief influence interpretations of uncanny events. It also suggests ways in which inhabitants of haunted homes negotiate the co-habitation with ghosts through a number of strategies which reinforce their own subjectivity in the face of potential encroachment into their private space.

Despite a resurgence of religion in the provision of public welfare and care, geography has only recently begun to make sense of this public phenomenon (Kong, 2011). In keeping with recent calls to allow religion to ‘speak back’ to geography (Yorgason & Della Dora, 2009), this thesis presents a re-reading of one particular arena of Christian faith-praxi in socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods across the UK. Much of the literature on faith-based organisations has so far focused on service-provision and political advocacy roles adopted by faith-motivated groups, and there has been little, to no, acknowledgment of re-emeregent forms of ‘incarnational’ mission. Incarnational approaches differ from mainstream service-provision in the sense that faith-inspired individuals and organisations come to permanently ‘live amongst’ marginalised people and places, rather than physically serve from a distance. This thesis seeks to address this lacuna in the literature by critically assessing the faith-inspired praxis of ‘living amongst’, and developing a socio-temporal and ethical account of ‘incarnational geographies’. Drawing upon ethnographic research with one Christian incarnational FBO, this thesis investigates the historical development of the FBO and the experience and practices of staff and volunteers who relocate to live in one particular socio-economically deprived neighbourhood of Greater Manchester. In contrast to essentialist academic accounts of faith-praxis that might present ‘living amongst’ as either a form of self-betterment (see Allahyari, 2000) or proselytisation (see Woods, 2011), this thesis argues that ‘incarnational geographies’ need to be re-read as complex, emergent and performative landscapes that often involve a reconfiguration of purpose and praxis through proximate participation.

Residential schools for Aboriginal children were a primary site of negotiations between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous subjects. These schools, and the records of peoples who occupied them, provide opportunities to better understand colonialism in British Columbia. Residential schools were places created to transform Aboriginal children, through assimilation, into a modernizing and colonial society. They are simultaneously places that offer access to Indigenous articulations of self and Indigeneity, expressions of resistance, and exertions of agency. Cultural products created by children in residential schools, particularly creative art products, allow us to visualize and understand Indigenous response to and evasions of colonial education. When taken together with Aboriginal peoples’ testimonies about the residential school experience, and with colonial records of the schools’ intents, children’s creative materials and expressions allow some access to the complex places that constituted the cultural geography of colonialism in British Columbia. / Thesis (Ph.D, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-28 12:31:18.229

This thesis explores women's experiences in rural areas under state socialism in the GDR and in the New Germany since 1989. The study is located within feminist geographical thinking and draws on a variety of qualitative and quantitative sources. Data for the research were collated through various research methods both qualitative and quantitative including correspondence, focus group interviews, key informant interviews, and the consultation of documentary evidence and statistical sources. The thesis employs a modified grounded theory approach. Data were processed and analysed using the computer-assisted analysis programme NUD.IST Version 4.0. The thesis focuses on questions that emerge from a critical analysis of social transformation. A key concern is to evaluate how dominant patriarchal power structures have impacted upon women's everyday lives under socialism and capitalism. Three main themes are foci of this thesis: the changes in social dynamics in rural villages, the impact of economic rationalisations on women, and the nature and extent of women's participation in new political structures. With reference to the former GDR the research showed that many rural women found comfort in social relations they established within the village and the workplace. Such social networks became important elements for women's self-identification and helped counteract suppression through the patriarchal socialist State. German unification overthrew previous values and daily routines of many rural women through vast economic and political changes. The unfamiliarity with a new, sometimes undesirable framework of reference for everyday life and society caused many rural women to withdraw to the private sphere and question their previous identities as rural GDR citizens. Positive opportunities for women's futures have not outweighed negative experiences with transition. Instead, conflicts have prevented women's equal integration into the political and economic structures of the New Germany. Further areas of research are proposed that may add depth to insights gained from this thesis as well as offering possible areas for gender-sensitive policy development in rural Mecklenburg-Westpommerania.

This thesis advances understandings of the diversity of student populations, student accommodation pathways, and connections to processes of studentification. The massification of HE, coupled with widening participation and internationalisation agendas, has led to changes in the social composition of the student population. Alongside this transformation, student accommodation preferences are changing, and student accommodation is being supplied which contrasts with traditional notions of shared student housing. From this starting point, this thesis progresses existing knowledges of student geographies in several ways.

The men’s rights movement (MRM) is a loosely affiliated collection of primarily online communities that together form a substantial component of a broader constellation of online men’s groups known as the “manosphere”. Though the specific ideologies that comprise the core of the modern MRM have existed since the mid-1970s, it was not until the advent of modern online communications that the movement was able to iterate into the form it is today. This research project examines the MRM as a form of reactionary countermovement, rooted in a collective sense of grievance, which directs knowledge producers and movement participants alike to engage in collective identity construction and in-group boundary maintenance through a shared, collaboratively developed countermemory. The research, composed of a qualitative analysis of MRM-produced texts found across more than thirty websites and online communities, indicates that the bulk of MRM literature and online activity facilitates the maintenance of this countermemory and to enable the movement to challenge its ideological opponents. Additionally, through a limited number of narrative interviews with members of pro-feminist men’s groups, this research contrasts the inward-facing orientation of MRM knowledge production and activity against that of pro-feminist men’s organizations, which engage in outward-facing, community-focused activism rooted in a shared sense of responsibility. This dissertation contributes to social movement theory by illustrating how online movements make use of virtual space through the construction of what I term virtual geographies to facilitate identity construction and knowledge transmission. The MRM makes use of these spaces to construct alternative discursive frameworks – countermemory – which allow for a reconceptualization of men’s social position from one of privilege and dominance, to one of marginalization and oppression. / Graduate / 2019-08-22

This thesis brings feminist ontologies into a renewed dialogue with post-phenomenological landscape studies through the development of a critical arts-research practice. Contemporary landscape scholarship in cultural geography foregrounds landscaping practices as performative; visual culture studies, similarly influenced by phenomenology, critiques the powerful fixings of representation; whilst current commentaries on art-geographies focus on questions of interdisciplinarity, rather than the potential for art practice-as-research to be generative of politically complex cultural geographies. Landscape, replete with complex power geometries and tension, both resists fixing and framing, and also becomes defined or imaged by these same operations. My goal in this thesis is to find a way of working, as an artist, with an understanding of landscape as being continually in eventful—and sometimes violently eventful—process, beyond conventional framings of image and landscape. Initially, this art practice (undertaken as research within cultural geography) worked with a violent flash flood and resultant loss of life, and was set against the backdrop of picture-postcard West Cornwall. Whilst focused through practice on this usually trickling mile-long moorland stream, something happened. This research became infected by concurrent geo-political events. Through practice in the studio, the violent lifeworld of the stream collided with an activist project associated with the 2014 Gaza conflict. Land and image became both occupied and ghosted. This corporeal and material collision of practice(s) afforded a productive entanglement of practice and theoretical engagement. My search for a way of working with landscape as an artist that accounts for the unpalatable dimensions of material formations, for the dying within living, for the exclusions, subjugation, violence, or even extinctions of landscape—led me to realise that I cannot stand back innocently and safely behind the camera, outside of the frame. I propose that landscape is inherently violent, and that as such, landscaping practices are always politically differentiated and situated. It is a violence in which there can be no innocent place of on-looking; we are all mutually implicated in landscape and landscaping-practices, and indeed, the ghosts of our own vulnerabilities are never far away. The thesis demonstrates that the unpredictability and riskiness of researching through a critical arts practice, can produce the conditions for disruptive interventions generative of new ways of (body)knowing in the world. These ways of knowing serve to confront the violence and contradictions of a fast changing enviro/geopolitical landscape. Working from within an art practice—as geographical research—contributes a perspective of political complexity and generative encounter, in which unexpected collisions, between things, practices, and bodies function to produce spatial connections beyond contemporary analysis.

As the climate crisis continues unabated, documentary films have become an increasingly popular medium through which to communicate its causes and impacts. Such films are an easily accessible form of mass media that has the potential to reach wide-ranging and large audiences, and often star popular celebrities. However, few academic studies have examined climate change documentaries and considered the ‘story’ of climate change that such films create. The lack of critical engagement with climate change documentaries is significant as it suggests the narratives of such films have been left largely unexamined despite their importance as a form of popular environmental communication. In this thesis, I use content analysis and narrative analysis to examine how 10 popular climate change documentaries tell the ‘story’ of climate change and produce specific ‘imaginative geographies’ about regions that are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Though I note throughout my analysis that there are several moments of rupture in which counter-narratives emerge, the dominant discourse throughout these 10 films is one that generally reinforces Western science and technocratic modernity as the solution to climate change, and racialized ‘Others’ as its passive victims. Understanding how climate change documentaries construct their narratives and select their specific topics of focus provides important insight into how popular ‘imaginaries’ regarding the climate crisis have been produced. / Graduate

Reformed teaching is better for students' conceptual understanding compared to the more popular traditional style of teaching. Many beginning teachers wanting to teach reformed conform to traditional teaching within their first couple years of teaching. I argue that this can happen because the emotional labor to continue teaching reformed without support is too high. Having a reformed math mentor can decrease this emotional labor and provide more support to beginning reformed teachers. This study builds on and adds to Hargreaves (2001) emotional geography framework to better understand the emotional closeness/distance beginning and veteran reformed teachers have talking about their practice. The results of this study show the emotional closeness/distance of four emotional geographies: moral, political, physical, professional of two mentor/mentee teachers pairs.

Virtual reality (VR) and videogames present, enable, and constrain human engagement with what may broadly be called digital worlds. Videogames have already become a global force in popular culture. Although VR technologies have existed for half a century, it is only during the past decade that VR has become more widely accessible to the public beyond the confines of research institutions and industry use. Very little scholarship has examined the interconnections of videogames and VR as co-extensive cultural forces that shape ideas and feelings about inhabiting digital worlds. This thesis specifically examines the often-employed lexicon of immersion, presence, or feelings being inside of computer-generated contexts as they exist across videogames and VR. By analyzing 15 participants’ interactions with a contemporary VR videogame and interviewing them about this experience, I discuss how immersion, presence, or the feeling of being inside computer-generated worlds is performative and exceeds what the technology affords. Instead, engagement with digital worlds intersects with other performances, actions, and previous engagement with objects or other digital worlds to make sense of creating meaning in VR. / Graduate