This semester-long microethnography explores how the emotional geography in two online, synchronous critical multicultural education courses are shaped by online interactions and infrastructures as well as social frames. Using a microethnographic approach, video data, interviews, and open-ended questionnaires revealed patterns of interactions suggesting an online emotional geography characterized by a duality of physical place and online space. Key findings suggest that the levels of permeability in student and instructor's physical location influence how online participants gave or received emotion gifts and performances in online spaces. This study further supports emergent research suggesting gender frames as relevant in students' level of online participation and instructors' perception of professionality. Implications include an increased level of emotion work as instructors and students manage complex identities in online classrooms. Furthermore, online instructors should be aware of the unique characteristics of the online emotional geography as they seek to create more equitable online communities of learning.

This thesis examines the historical and contemporary roots of food apartheid in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, while employing a Black Food Geographies approach to highlight and interpret the lived experiences of people in the Delta. This work draws on interviews and participant observation in Clarksdale, Mississippi, to decenter popular narratives around food insecurity and region and instead center the ideas and opinions of people directly impacted. The thesis highlights Black Deltans’ experiences and understandings of food and foodways to provide a nuanced picture of how residents interpret, negotiate, and challenge the region’s unequal food geographies in light of a longer history of food apartheid

This thesis explores the theory and practice of sovereignty. I begin with a conceptual analysis of sovereignty, examining its theological roots in contrast with its later influence in contestations over political authority. Theological debates surrounding God’s sovereignty dealt not with the question of legitimacy, which would become important for political sovereignty, but instead with the limits of his ability. Read as an ontological capacity, sovereignty is coterminous with an existent’s activity in the world. As lived, this capacity is regularly limited by the ways in which space is produced via its representations, its symbols, and its practices. All collective appropriations of space have a nomos that characterizes their practice. Foucault’s account of “biopolitics” provides an account of how contemporary materiality is distributed, an account that can be supplemented by sociological typologies of how city space is typically produced. The collective biopolitical distribution of space expands the range of practices that representationally legibilize activity in the world, thereby expanding the conceptual limits of existents and what it means for them to act up to the borders of their capacity, i.e., to practice sovereignty. The desire for total authorial capacity expresses itself in relations of domination and subordination that never erase the fundamental precarity of subjects, even as these expressions seek to disguise it. I conclude with a close reading of narratives recounting the lives of residents in Chicago’s Englewood, reading their activity as practices of sovereignty which manifest variously as they master and produce space. / Master of Arts / Political philosophy has long been concerned with what makes political rule legitimate. Why should we be governed by others? In what ways should we be governed? Why is it that humankind is “everywhere in chains” despite being born free, as Rousseau asks? This thesis explores these questions through the concept of sovereignty. Political sovereignty expresses the idea of rule by the “highest” authority. This concept was initially rooted in a theological worldview that is no longer as dominant as it was in early modernity. Political philosophers from Hobbes to Kant turned instead to reason, which was supposed to determine who could rightfully rule. However, the question of what “rightfully” means in a political era where the state governs who is able to live a good life and who instead will live a life of poverty is increasingly tenuous. What allegiance do those who live in situations of dire need have to a distributional system that has only perpetuated their immiseration? John Locke argued that those who are oppressed have a right to “appeal to heaven,” i.e., to the highest power: the true sovereign. In a world where God’s sovereignty no longer undergirds political thought and practice as its final guarantor, the state as a form of rule seems to be groundless. Consequently, subjects regularly take matters into their own hands. This thesis explores how they enact their sovereignty in the world, using a This American Life podcast as an example through which to explore the theory and practice of sovereignty.

Since its invention nearly 150 years ago, margarine has proven itself adaptable to multiple ingredients and techniques whilst continuing to mimic the fatty tastes familiar to eaters in Northern Europe. In this thesis I argue that it this malleability that makes margarine a useful subject with which to explore constructions of eating-well. This thesis examines the ways in which margarine is done, why it is done in the ways that it is, and explores how such doings frame possibilities for eating-together-well. Eating-well has become something of a social obsession in the UK in recent years. Individual eating practices have become framed as a responsibility of care for personal and societal health, for agricultural workers, animal welfare and for the future of the planet. Nonetheless, it is commonly believed that although deeply personal, food habits are culturally and socially engrained, and as such are hard to change. This empirically led thesis, examines the knowledges and practices of producers and consumers, and establishes habit formation as a typical response by both producers and consumers to becoming overwhelmed with incompatible knowledges and information, compelling them to choose, prioritise and juggle ‘moral’ values. Yet, I demonstrate that such habits only remain stable until disrupted by an event which overflows and troubles this settlement. Building on this, this thesis then examines the possibilities offered by the creation of micro-events for encountering, knowing, and relating with, margarine matters anew. In this way, this thesis investigates the values, norms and power relations entangled with the presentation and enactment of margarine and its constituent parts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods, examining both what these framings do, and how they are maintained. In approaching margarine matters in this way, this thesis offers three key contributions to the area of food geographies. Firstly, I demonstrate how commodity frameworks shift political problems in to a technical and administrative realm and close down spaces of critical thought and political intervention. Secondly, I establish that ‘strange encounters’ are events which can add to understandings of the more-than human world-making of food knowledges, practices, and habits. Thirdly, I determine that the novel methodological approach of ‘playing with our food’ is a productive technique with which to prefigure and rehearse more nuanced ethical understandings of eating-well as a relational doing that is excessive to consuming-well.

This thesis explores the ways in which Christian faith ‘adds value’ to the ‘carescape’ and ‘caringscapes’ of statutory hostels for people experiencing homelessness in the United Kingdom. The ways that a distinctively Christian organisational ethos is created and experienced through the material, regulatory and performative dimensions of space, place and subjectivity, are explored through a case study of the Salvation Army’s contemporary statutory accommodation services for single homeless people. Drawing upon Cloke’s notions of ‘theo-ethics’ and Conradson’s concept of ‘therapeutic landscape experience’, the links between spirituality, care and ‘value added’ are examined from the perspective of staff, volunteers and service users. This analysis extends the debate on the potential for faith-based organisations to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to care for people experiencing homelessness, by foregrounding the spiritual and emotional dimensions that texture these organisational landscapes of care. A feminist epistemological approach is taken to illuminate the nuances of care-giving and care-receiving, with particular attention paid to the emotional and spiritual sensitivities underpinning social interactions, and how these dimensions are perceived, narrated and experienced from a variety of perspectives. Using an ethnographic methodology, this study involved the undertaking of 91 semi-structured interviews, a six-week period of participant observation in a specific Salvation Army Lifehouse, and attendance at four professional social service and chaplaincy conferences run by the Salvation Army UK. The research findings suggest that Christianity adds value to these institutional spaces of care in a highly nuanced way, dependent on one’s subjectivity. A second observation is that the potential for faith to add value within statutory arenas of care for the homeless is being compromised due to the pressures associated with the incumbent neoliberal contract culture within which Lifehouses are embedded. A third contribution concerns the potential for a faith-based organisation to act as a crucible for the emergence of postsecular rapprochement: it is suggested that an intersectional approach to analysing this socio-spatial process is necessary, due to the strategic role that gender, age, sexuality and race were revealed to play in fostering, or dissipating, the affective relationships that underpinned fragile moments of rapprochement.

This thesis analyses ethnographic data gathered during participant observation within two vernacular town carnivals in East Devon and Dorset during 2012 and within the professional Cartwheelin’ and Battle for the Winds street performances which were staged as part of the Maritime Mix programme of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad at Weymouth. The thesis presents qualitative perspectives with regard to the cultural performance of carnival in the fieldwork area, in order to analyse the ‘performativity’ of carnival in these contexts: how it enacts and embodies a range of instrumentalities with regard to notions of community, culture and place. The thesis serves to unpack the ‘performance efficacy’ of carnival within the wider political and cultural landscape of the UK in the early 21st century, revealing the increasing influence of institutional policy on its aesthetics and cultural performance. By way of contrast, the thesis also asserts the value of vernacular carnivalesque street performance as a contestation of hegemonic notions of ‘art’, ‘place’ and ‘culture’. The ethnographies of both vernacular and professional carnival practice presented in the thesis show how the instrumentalities of carnival are employed as cultural performances and as symbolic constructions of place, power and policy. These ethnographies reveal the contradictory ‘efficacy’ of carnival: how it functions both as a symbolic expression of a progressive, rhizomatic sense of place and also as a normative performance of vertical symbolic power and place-identity. The thesis offers a cultural geography of carnival as praxis in the south west UK, locating it within specific geographical, historical and socio-cultural contexts which have developed since the late 19th century. The thesis also offers a productive contribution to the emerging dialogue between cultural geography and performance studies through its analysis of the performativities of participants’ affective, carnivalesque experience: an analysis which articulates how people ritualise and perform the multiple boundaries between individual and community identities through carnival. Further, the thesis considers the means by which people present and enact particular symbolic representations of place and identity through their carnival performances, both in professional and non-professional contexts. In its conclusion and recommendations, the thesis seeks to frame these ethnographies within a critique of carnival practice which is considered through the contested geographies of the ‘creative economy’. It seeks to demonstrate how culture-led processes of policy enactment are increasingly critical influences within carnival and arts development in rural and small-town contexts and within place-based strategies of public engagement. Further, the thesis seeks to consider the effects that this hegemony has on ‘vernacular’ practices of carnival. The thesis adds a further voice to those cultural geographers who warn about the diminishing public space which is now available to people for spontaneous, ‘non-productive’ carnival festivity in the context of globalised late capitalism and ‘applied’ culture. Finally, the thesis offers a proposed remedy: a re-imagination of progressive structures of public engagement through culture; structures which support ‘vernacular’ practice alongside the instrumentalities of arts-development and public policies of place, in tune with a growing alternative discourse which seeks to ‘rethink the cultural economy.

There have been recent contributions to the world city literature and the new economic geography literature that have focused on city connectivity and practicebased research, through concepts such as city actor-networks, relational geographies and project-led enquiries. As this literature is developing, this thesis aims to analyse and contribute to it by providing an empirical focus in two main themes that have so far been marginalised in these literatures – the city of Sydney, and the cultural industries. An alternative conceptualisation of world cities, namely ‘new urbanism’, which employs Actor-Network Theory, will be utilised in this thesis to ask the question, what are the actants of Sydney’s cultural industries (specifically the film and TV production industry), and how are they enrolled to create the spacing and timing of Sydney’s actor-networks? By answering this question, this thesis will contribute to the knowledge in three ways: theoretically, by adding weight to the alternative concepts of new urbanism and relational economic geographies; empirically, by studying two themes that have been hitherto underdeveloped in the existing literature; and methodologically, through new developing empirical agendas that cover the quantification of Sydney’s world city network and ANT-inspired ethnographic, ‘project-based’ enquiry.

The original contribution of this thesis is through its conceptualisations of human more-than- human encounters on the allotment that break down the boundaries of subjectivities. This work extends knowledge of cultural food geography by investigating how people engage with the matter of the plot and learn to grow food. The conceptual tool by which this occurs is set out as processes of visceral learning within a framework of mattering. Therefore this work follows the material transformations of matter across production consumption cycles of allotment produce. This is examined through processes of bodily adaptions to the matter of the plot. The processes of growing your own food affords an opportunity to focus on the processes of doing and becoming, allowing the how of food growing to take centre stage (Crouch 2003, Ingold 2010, Grosz 1999). Procuring and producing food for consumption is enacted through the human more-than-human interface of bodily engagement that disrupts dualisms and revealing their complex inter-relationships, as well as the potential of visceral research (Roe 2006, Whatmore 2006, Hayes-Conroy 2008). Therefore, this is an immersive account of the procurement of food and the development of food knowledge through material, sensory and visceral becomings, which occur within a contextual frame of everyday food experiences. This study is contextualised in the complexities of contemporary food issues where matters of access, foodism and sustainability shape the enquiry. However the research is carried out at a micro-geographies lens of bodily engagements with food matter through grow your own practices on allotments. Growing food on new allotments is the locus of procurement reflecting a resurgence in such activities following from the recent rise in interest in local food, alternative food networks (AFNs) and food as a conduit for celebrity in the media (Dupuis & Goodman 2005, Lockie & Kitto 2000, Winter 2003). Moreover, the current spread of the allotment is examined as transgressing urban/rural divides and disrupting traditional perceptions of plot users. This allows investigations into spaces where community processes can unfold, providing a richly observed insight into the broadened demographics of recent allotment life.

Keeping forestland intact has emerged as a critical policy objective at state and federal levels. This target has been supported by substantial public investment. The collective impact from the bequest decisions of millions of landowning individuals and families has the potential to affect the extent and functionality of future forests in the United States. Despite a growing body of research devoted to studying these transitions in forest ownership, much remains unknown about how family forest owners make decisions in this arena. The social and emotional dimensions of woodland succession planning have been particularly under-examined. This thesis explores the process of planning for the future use and ownership of woodlands through in-depth analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with family forest owners in Massachusetts, Maine, New York, and Vermont. The first article investigates how family forest owners evaluate and integrate stories derived from their social networks when planning for the future of their woodlands. Analysis of the themes contained in stories framed as “cautionary tales” revealed common fears surrounding succession planning. The second article explores the complexity of emotional relationships with family forests showing how emotional geographies manifest in the succession planning process. Together, these studies deepen understanding of how family forest owners plan for the future of private woodlands and offer implications for Extension and outreach.

A geografia invisível norteia esse caminhar aqui proferido em diversos momentos, internos e externos, que diante de um ato reflexivo com a vontade de potência em Nietzsche, colabora para não desqualificar tudo que já ocorreu até aqui mas, provocar tudo e todos de alguma forma, para outros olhares geográficos. É preciso distanciar-se dessa perpétua materialidade desses sistemas de objetos e de ações, não aniquilar, mas potencializar para outros olhares. A presente pesquisa problematiza que uma realidade não cabe na outra, mas acima de tudo, uma esta na outra. Geografias Invisíveis é um ponto confrontador, inserido como meu meta-ponto para analise das realidades. A analise opera e situa-se por momentos no processo biográfico, genealógico das minhas experiências coexistentes. Assim, o termo invisível faz um papel de confronto às objetivações, idealizações que embora tenham uma genealogia profunda na sua praticidade tornam-se muletas, que fazem da realidade um ato desconexo para com o mundo da vida. Devemos ultrapassar a questão social e individual dos moldes atuais, para dessa forma, diante de um mundo de perspectivismo, elaborar uma nova forma de perceber e conceber esse mundo. Devemos encarar as perspectivas atuais como nocivas para esse homem atual, pois esse mundo foi criado para anular qualquer ordem diferente da sua. Coloco a filosofia de Nietzsche como um grande marco para um rompimento paradigmático, pois para o autor tudo tem interesse, e dentro desse caminho existencial a consciência é um subproduto insignificante da nossa psique, uma espécie de holofote, um recorte, um ponto de vista dentro da manifestação existencial do homem. / Invisible geography guides this journey, which has taken place in various moments, internal and external, that, in the face of a reflexive act with the will to power in Nietzsche, collaborates not to disqualify everything that has happened up to now but to provoke everything and everyone in some way, for other geographical views. It is necessary to distance ourselves from this perpetual materiality of these systems of objects and actions, not to annihilate, but to potentiate for other looks. The present research problematizes that one reality does not fit in the other, but above all, one in the other. Invisible Geographies is a confronting point, inserted as my meta-point for analyzing realities. The analysis operates and situates itself at times in the biographical, genealogical process of my coexistent experiences. Thus the invisible term plays a role in confronting the objectifications, idealizations that, although they have a deep genealogy in their practicality, become crutches, which make reality a disconnected act towards the world of life. We must go beyond the social and individual question of the current molds, so that, in the face of a world of perspectivism, we can work out a new way of perceiving and conceiving this world. We must view current perspectives as harmful to this present man, for this world was created to nullify any order other than his own. I place Nietzsche's philosophy as a great landmark for a paradigmatic breakthrough, for to the author everything has an interest, and within this existential path consciousness is an insignificant byproduct of our psyche, a kind of spotlight, a cut-out, a point of view within of the existential manifestation of man.