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The term contemplative place, a new concept that forms the core of this research is defined as "space where a meaningful sense of calm can be experienced." Contemplative place situates itself as a category of place. M. Auge defines place as that which is "relational, historical and/or concerned with identity" (1995). For the artwork to be meaningful, it needs to be expressive and significant through its response to its physical, cultural, historical and/or social identity. With reference to Isamu Noguchi's sited works, three projects are seen as representatively defining his career. They are The UNESCO Garden in France - Noguchi's early attempt at using the landscape as an art form; the California Scenario in the USA -a corporate park where Noguchi successfully creates a meaningful sense of place; and the Domon Ken Museum of Photography in Japan -a simple reductive approach that addresses its context on several levels. Through the analysis and contextual isation of Noguchi's works, I begin to explore the strategic processes and principles that he used to make his works contemplative places. In my practice, I review and test evolving processes that incorporate the notions of place as well as my practice of meditation. Three case studies of past and current works are presented, each with a summary of analysis and a completed (or anticipated) experience. Then, through post-reflective thoughts, I begin to consolidate my own strategic processes and principles, and study how they have evolved and in some instances been influenced by Noguchi. As a final chapter, an evaluation addresses the similarities and differences between Noguchi's works and mine in achieving contemplative place. The intention of this research is that the term contemplative place can be understood and evolve over time with future research. The strategic processes and principles used by Noguchi and those newly developed through my own practice could prove as useful examples to inspire new frontiers for creating contemplative places as art forms.

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.

From the 1891 establishment of the Trustees of Public Reservations, a private statewide landscape preservation organization, to America’s 1941 entry into World War II, a citizen-led effort to safeguard and improve Massachusetts’s woodlands resulted in the establishment of a multiple use state forest and park system that combined timber production and outdoor recreation in order to restore, protect, and connect people to the Commonwealth’s forests. This interdisciplinary dissertation argues that conservationists, public officials, and foresters strove to revitalize Massachusetts’s natural landscape, rural economy, and cultural identity by promoting scientific forestry, founding publicly-owned and -managed timber reserves, and providing outdoor recreational opportunities. The state expanded these public forests’ number, size, and function during the early twentieth century in response to shifting cultural, economic, and political forces. By analyzing how changing institutional priorities, professional practices, and cultural attitudes shaped the landscapes of Massachusetts’s state forests and parks, this dissertation provides a new perspective on state level forest conservation in the early-twentieth-century United States. Chapter One examines the private organizations and public institutions that experimented with different methods of forest protection, in particular the Massachusetts Forestry Association’s campaign to promote forestry and encourage the legislature to appoint a state forester. Chapter Two closely appraises how the state foresters’ efforts to educate the public, control fires and pests, promote reforestation, and establish state forests were intertwined with anxieties over Massachusetts’s dominant Yankee cultural identity in the face of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. The third chapter recounts how the reorganized Department of Conservation began to weave recreational features into an enlarged state forest system in response to shifting cultural attitudes and new pressures during the 1920s. Chapter Four demonstrates how the 1930s arrival of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal employment relief program, accelerated the ongoing shift to a multiple use land management system as landscape architects coordinated a massive improvement of recreational facilities, some of which reinscribed distorted cultural narratives into the landscape. When World War II halted progress, Massachusetts’s roughly 175,000-acre network of state forests and parks constituted a sophisticated multiple use public land system of national significance that met a diverse society’s needs.

Recent archaeological investigations demonstrate that landscapes of the past are not just passive backdrops to people's practices, but rather play a key role in social, cultural, political, and economic processes. Archaeologists have typically studied landscapes by analysing settlement patterns and architecture, yet newer approaches include the study of production practices such as pottery or stone-tool production. One such approach focuses on the ‘taskscape’, which includes skilled agents, and daily tasks occurring on the landscape. Scholars using this framework consider the rhythms and the embodied experience of people in specific places, and explore both the social relationships and ecological affordances of landscapes. Archaeologists, in particular, have considered the embedded nature of daily tasks performed on the landscape, and the material remains of these tasks. In this project I focus on the taskscapes of the Late Formative Period (200 B.C.- A.D. 500), in the Upper Desaguadero Valley, just south of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Little is known of Late Formative landscapes, a period prior to the rise of the Tiwanaku state. I study Upper Desaguadero landscapes to contribute to scholarship exploring the social, political and economic changes of the Late Formative Period, prior to the emergence of the Tiwanaku state. I study ceramics from two recently excavated sites, Khonkho Wankane and Iruhito. My research explores the difference between Khonkho Wankane and Iruhito taskscapes and whether this is evident through ceramics. Potters’ choices during production are based on their taskscapes, which can affect the materials selected for the paste (the mixture of clay and inclusions), to how the vessels were decorated. Pottery was not only made but also used during daily tasks and thus pottery usage can be used to examine taskscapes. I conduct attribute analysis, with particular attention to paste. For a more detailed analysis of paste I employ a Dino-Lite digital USB microscope. The digital USB microscope is portable, affordable and time efficient, allowing for analysis to be conducted in the field. This method is promising for ceramic analysis, as it encourages standardization and inter-site comparisons. Ultimately, this tool provides quick yet detailed insights into past social landscapes. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Large amounts of carbon are stored in soils of the northern circumpolar permafrost region. High-resolution mapping of this soil organic carbon (SOC) is important to better understand and predict local to global scale carbon dynamics. In this thesis, studies from five different areas across the permafrost region indicate a pattern of generally higher SOC storage in Arctic tundra soils compared to forested sub-Arctic or Boreal taiga soils. However, much of the SOC stored in the top meter of tundra soils is permanently frozen, while the annually thawing active layer is deeper in taiga soils and more SOC may be available for turnover to ecosystem processes. The results show that significantly more carbon is stored in soils compared to vegetation, even in fully forested taiga ecosystems. This indicates that over longer timescales, the SOC potentially released from thawing permafrost cannot be offset by a greening of the Arctic. For all study areas, the SOC distribution is strongly influenced by the geomorphology, i.e. periglacial landforms and processes, at different spatial scales. These span from the cryoturbation of soil horizons, to the formation of palsas, peat plateaus and different generations of ice-wedges, to thermokarst creating kilometer scale macro environments. In study areas that have not been affected by Pleistocene glaciation, SOC distribution is highly influenced by the occurrence of ice-rich and relief-forming Yedoma deposits. This thesis investigates the use of thematic maps from highly resolved satellite imagery (&lt;6.5 m resolution). These maps reveal important information on the local distribution and variability of SOC, but their creation requires advanced classification methods including an object-based approach, modern classifiers and data-fusion. The results of statistical analyses show a clear link of land cover and geomorphology with SOC storage. Peat-formation and cryoturbation are identified as two major mechanisms to accumulate SOC. As an alternative to thematic maps, this thesis demonstrates the advantages of digital soil mapping of SOC in permafrost areas using machine-learning methods, such as support vector machines, artificial neural networks and random forests. Overall, high-resolution satellite imagery and robust spatial prediction methods allow detailed maps of SOC. This thesis significantly increases the amount of soil pedons available for the individual study areas. Yet, this information is still the limiting factor to better understand the SOC distribution in permafrost environments at local and circumpolar scale. Soil pedon information for SOC quantification should at least distinguish the surface organic layer, the mineral subsoil in the active layer compared to the permafrost and further into organic rich cryoturbated and buried soil horizons. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

Road signs form a non-verbal semiotic system – by many encountered on a daily basis – that dictates the actions of the users of the road, in order to create a safe and efficient traffic environment. It is clear that road signs are not just ‘saying’ things but ‘doing’ something. This study examines the commanding and performative aspects of a set of Swedish road signs. The first part of the analysis is a detailed investigation of (the ‘grammar’ of) the warning sign, drawing on a theoretical framework of semiotics and Grice’s cooperative principle. The second part investigates the speech act status of warning signs, priority signs and prohibitory signs, by applying Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Results show that the warning triangle is not arbitrary but iconically motivated, both in color and in form, and that the silhouettes vary on a number of parameters, including the perspective of their mapping, the degree of iconicity and the degree of ‘danger reality’. Warning signs, just like verbal warnings, are best categorized as directives, whereas priority and prohibitory signs, unlike verbal prohibitions, emerge as declarations. Ultimately, this raises questions regarding the limits of and the ‘translatability’ between verbal and non-verbal language.

Elite athletes of today use specialized, scientific training methods and the increasing role of science in sports is undeniable. Scientific methods and equipment has even found its way into the practice of everyday exercisers, a testament to the impact of sport science. From the experiential, personal training regimes of the first half of the 20th century to the scientific training theories of the 1970s, the ideas about training and the athletic body shifted. The rationalization process started in endurance sports in the 1940s. It was part of a struggle between two models of training; natural training and rational training. Physiologists wanted to rid training of individual and local variations and create a universal model of rational, scientific training. The rationalization of training and training landscapes is here understood as an aspect of sportification, a theory commonly used to describe similar developments in sports where increasing regimentation, specialization and rationalization are among the main criteria. This dissertation adds the concept of technologies of sportification to explain the role that micro-technologies and practices (such as training logs, training camps and scientific tests) have in the scientization of training. This thesis thus sets out to analyze the role that science has played in training during the 20th century. It is a history about the rationalization of training, but also about larger issues regarding the role of personal, experiential knowledge and scientific knowledge. The main conclusions are that the process of scientization never managed to rid training of components from natural, experiential training, and that the effort by Swedish physiologists to introduce rational training was part of the larger rationalization movement at the time. In the end, training knowledge was a co-production between practitioners and theoreticians, skiers and scientists. / <p>QC 20161114</p> / Rationell träning: vetenskapliggörandet äv träning för längdskidåkning

Les classiques conçoivent le champ artistique pluriel comme un dense réseau de correspondances, en y décelant un potentiel d’une riche expérience de la culture du temps. En renonçant à chercher dans leurs textes les présages de la conception moderne de l’Art (le génie fulgurant, l’invention, la créativité, l’originalité), nous remettons l’accent sur un autre versant de l’esthétique classique, se focalisant sur la résistance de la matière à la forme, l’exécution, le faire et la durée. En concevant la mimésis comme une équivalence entre poiesis et aisthesis, les classiques affirment que l’expérience artistique doit son déroulement, ses inflexions et la qualité de sa richesse au(x) médium(s) engagé(s). Que ce soit potentiellement ou concrètement, la variété du champ des arts conditionne nécessairement toute expérience artistique. Stimulante ou dérangeante, l’intermédiation des registres allogènes dans la contemplation d’une œuvre ainsi que dans la définition d’un art devient un détour inévitable, un dispositif de cohérence, récalcitrant à toute systématisation. Cette vision des arts anime l’imaginaire depuis la Renaissance jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, en trouvant dans la littérature jardinière un terreau particulièrement fécond. Au XVIIIe siècle, la tradition classique fait l’objet d’une importante pression : la nouvelle disposition épistémologique et la lente autonomisation de l’expérience esthétique incitent à l’organisation de relations interdisciplinaires jugées trop chaotiques. La réponse se montre ambiguë entre les constats, les impératifs et l’expérience relatée. La théorie du jardin restreint alors le cercle de ses références aux arts « libéraux », en assignant à chaque alliance interdisciplinaire une fonction particulière. L’entreprise remporte un certain succès : elle parvient à s’ancrer dans l’opinion publique et suscite un débat esthétique inédit dans l’histoire des jardins. Toutefois, la conceptualisation de la correspondance des arts se heurte à une difficulté : l’homogénéisation et l’unification du champ pluriel des arts. La déclaration du jardin en tant que foyer de « tous les arts » a pour but de prévenir le risque de sa monopolisation par un seul intermédiaire. En tout, suspendus entre les tendances du sujet unificateur et le désir de conserver la multiplicité des arts, les Lumières génèrent une forme de gestion de la pluralité que nous appelons une « dissipation contenue ». Les détours interdisciplinaires sont les chemins de la connaissance propres à la culture opérant dans le champ multiple des arts. Le contexte du jardin radicalise cette sémiose détournée. Les différences entre les objets acquièrent ici la valeur de simples différentiels. Dans une composition artistique qui fait de son exposition facteurs imprévisibles et contingents sa raison d’être, la logique fondée sur l’identité et l’opposition est inopérante. Par la voie de contigüité ou de similitude, les valeurs des arts se déplacent des objets à d’autres : la demeure principale rayonne et transmet son ordre architectural aux parterres environnants, le tableau imprime sa copie in situ de qualités picturales, la fabrique abritant une figure se pare de traits sculpturaux, etc. A réunir dans un enclos jardinier « tous » les arts, ses amateurs lui permettant de perpétuer cette sémiose potentiellement à l’infini. Les jardins des classiques ne sont pas conçus pour apporter de nouvelles connaissances, mais pour sonder l’expérience accompagnant son acquisition. L’enchaînement des dérapages disciplinaires « contenu » transforme la lecture du jardin en un « art de la promenade » érudit : une disposition cognitive constituée de comportements intellectuels et corporels étudiés, paradoxalement, dans le but d’atteindre le délassement et le naturel. / The art of gardens in France (1760-1808): Correspondence of arts in theory and practice. Classical thinkers understand the plural artistic realm to be a dense network of correspondences, where the rich experience of the culture of time (of cultivating time) yields a high potential. Having renounced to search through their works for harbingers of modern art (brilliant genius, invention, creativity, originality), we concentrate more on another aspect of classical aesthetics which focuses on the resistance of matter to form – execution, the act of doing and duration. Considering mimesis as an equivalence between poiesis and aisthesis, classical thinkers maintain that artistic experience owes its unfolding, its inflections and its quality to the chosen medium or media. Be it potentially or concretely, the diversity of the art realm necessarily conditions every artistic experience. Whether it be stimulating of disturbing, the intermediation of allogenic registers – as regards both the contemplation of an art work and the definition of an art form – becomes a necessary detour, a coherence mechanism, recalcitrant to any systemization. This view of the arts inspired public and artist imagination from the Renaissance to the end of the XVIIIth century, finding in garden literature a particularly fertile ground. During the XVIIIth century, classicism begins to be questioned : a new epistemological tendency, coupled with the growing autonomy of the aesthetic experience, results in the ordering of seemingly chaotic interdisciplinary relations. Assessments, imperatives and portrayed experience make for an ambiguous response. As a result, garden theory reduces the scope of its references to the “liberal” arts, ascribing to each interdisciplinary alliance a particular function. This new approach enjoys considerable success, permeating public opinion and triggering an aesthetic debate never before seen in garden history. Nevertheless, conceptualizing a correspondence between the arts meets with difficulty: homogenizing and the unifying the plural domain of the arts. Presenting the garden as the source of “all of the arts” aims to prevent one single discipline from monopolizing it. All in all, torn between the subject as unifier and the desire to retain the multiplicity of the arts, the enlightenment philosophers invent a way to manage plurality that we call “contained dissipation.” Interdisciplinary detours are paths to knowledge specific to culture, operating in the multiple realm of the arts. In the context of the garden, this indirect semiosis is radicalized. Differences between objects thus acquire simple differential values. In an artistic composition whose existence is defined by its display vis-à-vis unpredictable and contingent factors, logic based on identity and opposition is inoperable. Through contiguity and resemblance, art values are displaced form one object to another: the principal residence radiates, transmitting its architectural order to the surrounding beds, the painting transfers pictorial qualities to its in situ copy, the factory harboring a figure takes on its sculptural traits, and so on. By uniting "all" of the arts in a garden enclosure, enthusiasts of the latter endow it with a material which makes it possible to perpetuate this semiosis infinitely. Classical gardens are not conceived to contibute new knowledge, but rather to enquire into the experience brought about by its acquisition. The succession of "contained" disciplinary blunders transforms the reading of the garden into an erudite “art of promenading” : at work is a cognitive mindset composed of prepared intellectual and bodily comportments whose paradoxical goal is to achieve relaxation and naturalness.

Access to water from San Antonio Creek was critical in Claremont’s growth from a small stop on the Santa Fe Railroad to an agricultural powerhouse and an elite college town. While Claremont has sought to distinguish itself from surrounding communities since its founding in 1882, the innovative Pomona Valley Protective Association (PVPA) aligned Claremont with the City of Pomona and its other neighbors in a scheme to conserve the Creek’s resources at the turn of the century. Organized around the discovery of local confined aquifers and the development of a strategy to recharge them with water from the San Antonio Creek, the Association was a contradictory moment of cooperation in an otherwise highly contentious zero-sum game of water rights politics. As conflicts wore on, the PVPA quietly orchestrated the purchase of large tracts of land in the San Antonio Creekbed, where the construction of diversion dams and spreading grounds served dual purposes of water conservation and flood control. As dam building in the Creekbed continued, large tracts of the previously undevelopable Wash were transferred to the aggregate mining institutions that gouged the area’s many gravel pits. This thesis uses the story of the PVPA and the contemporary example of the Claremont University Consortium Gravel Pit to explore the context of development in the San Antonio Creek Wash. Understanding the political and social contexts of the gravel quarry problem reveals possibilities for a more integrative, conscious, and sustainable approach to improving the former gravel quarries that currently occupy the Wash landscape.