This essay examines the body in post-cyberfeminist art to study possible changes in how the body is perceived in the shift from cyberfeminist to post-cyberfeminist art. I have studied the body by examining power and identity in four cases of post-cyberfeminist art, using postmodern feminist theories and concepts such as gender, gender performativity, heterosexual matrix and intersectionality. The essay consists of image, moving image and textual analysis and two shorter comparative analyses. In the first comparative analysis, I have compared the four cases of post-cyberfeminist art with each other. In the second analysis, I focus on a comparative analysis between the four cases of post-cyberfeminist art and earlier cyberfeminist projects. In the discussion, I present my results and elaborate on a possible shift in how the body's materiality is viewed within digital landscapes of post-cyberfeminist art. I argue that the cyborg, central to the earlier cyberfeminist project, might have been replaced by transformable avatars.

This dissertation investigates the processes and effects involved in the production of styles in contemporary Stockholm. Particular focus is given to materialization processes regarding gender and sexuality. It is an ethnographic study, organized around three different research methods: participant observation, semi-structured interviews and organic wardrobe studies, carried out during the duration of two years and mainly delimited to Stockholm, often focusing on but not limited to the queer-orientated downtown club scene. The study is centered on ten participants, but is also concerned with the events, situations and relations the participants become part of during this time. In this way, the analysis gives equal attention to the specificity of garments and the spaces and places of social interaction. Drawing on a combination of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, it analyses how styles are produced and maintained through interactions. The concept of style operates as a tool of analysis, approaching the subject matter from three different perspectives: verbal communication and politics of naming, the wheres and whens of sartorial practices, and lastly bodily matters as a point of intersection, where styles are constituted as bodily materializations through gestures, movements and orientation in space. Furthermore, this thesis engages in an on-going discussion within fashion studies on how the articulation of matters regarding sexuality, gender and identity projects can be theorized through the concept of style. In this way, it also challenges and furthers the definition of this concept by proving its productive qualities through ethnographic fieldwork.

The aim of this thesis is to conduct a post-relational reading of the programme of relational art and its influence upon current aesthetics. ‘Post’ is not used in the indicative sense here: it does not simply denote the passing of the high water mark of relational art’s critical reception. Rather, it seeks to identify what remains symptomatically unresolved in relational art through a reading of its texts together with its critique. Amongst these unresolved problems certain questions endure. The question of this art’s claim to autonomy and its problematic mode of appearance and materialism remain at large. Ironically it shares the same fate as the avant-garde it sought to distance itself from; the failure to unite art with the everyday. But it has nevertheless redefined the parameters of artistic production: this is its success. I argue that this is because relational art was internally riven from its outset by a contradiction between its micropolitical structures and the need to find a mode of representation that did not transgress its self-imposed taboo upon visual representation. I identify a number of strategies that relational art has used to address this problem: for example its transitive ethics and its separation of ‘the visual’ from formal representations of public space and of a liminal counter-public sphere. Above all, I argue that its principle of the productive mimesis and translation of social relations through art is the guarantor of this art’s autonomy. My thesis is premised upon the notion that one can learn much about new forms of critical art from the precepts and suppositions that informed relational aesthetics and its critical reception. Relational aesthetics, in fact, establishes the terms of engagement that inform new critical art. Above all, this is because the question of the ‘relation of non-relation’ is bigger than relational aesthetics. The ‘relation of non-relation’ does not denote the impossibility of relation between subjects. Rather, it is a category that identifies non-relation as the very source of productive relations. This can be applied to those liminal points of separation that 6 delineate the territory of critical art prior to relational aesthetics. For example, these instances of ‘non-relation’ appear in the separation of art from non-art; of representation from micropolitics and of the anti-relational opposition of the philosophical categories of the general and the particular. Overall, I seek to reclaim Bourriaud as instrumental to the re-thinking of these categories and as essential to a reading of current critical art discourse. I identify a number of misreadings of relational aesthetics that result from a misrecognition or unwillingness to engage with Nicolas Bourriaud’s direct influences: Serge Daney, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze and Louis Althusser are often overlooked in this respect. I argue that Bourriaud’s critics tend to bring their own agendas to bear on his work, often seeking to remediate what is problematic. These critiques introduce existing aesthetic and political paradigms into his work in order to claim him as their own. So for example we encounter antagonistic relational aesthetics as the reinstatement of the avant-garde. Also, relational aesthetics as an immanent critique of the commodity form within a selective reading of Theodor Adorno. Also, we encounter dissensual relational aesthetics as ‘communities of sense’ that adopt site-specific methodologies whose mode of inhabitation of the socius is a reaction to relational aesthetics and is premised upon separatism. This diversification of relational art’s critique does not address, however, its fundamental problems of autonomy and representation. Rather, in different ways, they sidestep these issues and duplicate their non-relationality in the form of an impasse. My reading seeks to read the relational programme as a whole and to reclaim that which is symptomatically post-relational within it. I think that this is important because the critique of Bourriaud is presently unduly weighted towards the analysis of Relational Aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. by S. Pleasance and F. Woods, (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002)), thus important developments within Postproduction (2002) and The Radicant(2009) have gone overlooked. Specifically, Bourriaud’s increased emphasis upon a topology of forms and an Althusserian ‘aleatory materialism’ demand that we ask whether relationality in art is ontological or epistemological in form. It also demands that we re-consider its claims to materialism and critical realism on its own terms. Bourriaud’s later works are important not simply because they set out how relational art might inhabit networks of electronic communication but because they begin to develop a more coherent thinking of new modes of relational representation. Bourriaud begins to address the aporia of micropolitics and representation in his later works. His notion of representation becomes increasingly a matter of spatio-temporal relation and the representational act becomes increasingly identified with the motility of the relational act as a performative presentation. In the light of these developments, I argue that the thinking of relation that has thus far dictated the philosophical analysis of relationality and political aesthetics results in an acute anti-relationality or a ‘relational anarchism’. This is why the philosophy of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou respectively, are inadequate to the demands of current aesthetics. In fact they hinder its development. On this basis I turn to Rodolphe Gashé’s re-thinking of relation. His thinking grants relation a minimal ontology that in fact excludes it from philosophy, but at the same time, plays a key role in the construction of singularities as new epistemological categories. Gashé suggests a unique epistemological value for relations and recognizes what is evental within them. These singularities find their modes of appearance within various forms of the encounter. Gashé’s thought is helpful in that it identifies the non-relational of relation with its event. Also, I argue that a theory of post-relational representation is necessary to address the ‘weak manifestations of relational art’, although not in a transgressive or messianistic form; also, that this thinking of representation, when combined with aleatory materialism, produces a 8 broad constituency of representational forms with which to construct a more robust critical art. This includes the documentary form. In order to address the objections of micropolitics I therefore advance Philip Auslander’s notion of the performativity of the document as essential to relational aesthetics because it is an art form that in fact requires mediation by the visual. My argument is premised upon the ineliminability of representation from the aesthetic and moreover, that the artwork is constituted within a broad nexus of operations and acts of signification. This fragmentary construction is the source of the objectivity or critical realism of these practices. I argue that ‘visual’ documentation functions as a tool for presencing and connecting relations of exchange but is merely one of the forms of representation available to visual artists.

The circumstance of mass incarceration in the U.S. has reached the point of social crisis. When the statistics on imprisonment are demographically disaggregated, they point to the overrepresentation of imprisoned men and women of color. Paying special attention to Black men and women, critical race, prison advocacy, and Black feminist research has been vital in theorizing the structural and ideological implications of this racial inequity. The insight that the U.S. prison system constitutes a prison industrial complex arose from such scholarship. More recently, transnational feminism has offered insight into the specific experience and socio-historical contextualization of raced women within a transnational prison industrial complex. Based on transnational and Black feminist precepts, this thesis will argue the need to reframe the discursive position of imprisoned Black women in liberatory discourse. Using the work of Homi K. Bhabha, I contend that Black women’s discursive positions should be understood as “culturally undecidable.” Dominant paradigms of mainstream feminism have assigned Black women the task of fulfilling the ideal of “true womanhood.” Black feminist scholars have argued that this model erases and marginalizes Black women’s resistance. I suggest the imposition of this ideal rhetorically fixes Black women as victims, pathologizes them, and ultimately pathologizes the Black community. In contrast, renaming Black women’s discursive position as “culturally undecidable” creates the possibility to decenter the transnational networks that underpin the transnational prison industrial complex. To proffer this argument, I will analyze performative resistances and reifications of criminalization within narratives of imprisoned Black women and suggest performance practices to encourage Black women’s sense of agency. / text

Disertacijoje analizuojama problematika, susijusi su šiuolaikinio meno praktikomis, kai menininkas ar kuratorius, siekdamas įgyvendinti savo kūrybinį sumanymą, meno projekte kaip medžiagą pasitelkia žmones. Tokie projektai paprastai išeina už estetinio lauko ribų: jie nebe reprezentuoja socialinę ar politinę tikrovę, bet ją atlieka. Todėl disertacijoje siekiama suformuoti koncepcinį modelį, kuris leistų kelti ir analizuoti dalyvaujamojo meno, kaip lygiagrečiai estetinėje ir socialinėje sferoje egzistuojančios praktikos, problemas. Modelis pagrindžiamas ir išplėtojamas remiantis pirmiausia klasikinės gamybos ir veiksmo (poiēsis ir praxis) skirties permąstymu ir pamatine prielaida, kad šiuolaikinė gamyba vis labiau panėšėja į veiksmą (Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agambenas). Teigiama, kad dalyvavimo praktikos bene aiškiausiai išreiškia šią gamybos ir veiksmo dialektiką šiuolaikiniame mene. Į vieną tinklą susiejus skirtingas filosofines koncepcijas (šnekos, taktikos, kasdienių praktikų, performatyvumo, kartotės), suformuojamas modelis, kuris pritaikomas dalyvavimo praktikų Lietuvos šiuolaikiniame mene analizei. Parodoma, kaip žvelgiant per gamybos ir veiksmo prizmę išryškėja tam tikros bendros su dalyvavimu susijusios problemos (pvz., dokumentacijos, meno įvykio ir meno kūrinio, darbo ir pramogos santykio ir kt.). Drauge koncepcinis modelis padeda atskleisti kiekvieno paskiro projekto specifiką, kvestionuoti kai kurias įsigalėjusias meno kritikos nuostatas, išryškinti naujus aspektus. / The dissertation deals with issues of those art practices, where an artist or a curator employs people as a project material so as to realize his/her creative purpose. Projects like this commonly expand beyond the aesthetic field: instead of representing social or political reality, they actually perform it. Therefore the dissertation aims at constructing a conceptual model that would enable the analysis of the problems around participatory art, as a practice operating both in aesthetic and social fields. The model is based primarily on rethinking of the classical divide between production and action (poiēsis and praxis) and the principle premise that contemporary production is increasingly becoming akin to action (Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agamben). The dissertation suggests that participatory practices are the clearest evidence of this dialectics between production and action in contemporary art. The model constructed of diverse philosophical concepts (idle talk, tactics, everyday practices, performativity, iteration) is employed for analysis of participatory art practices in Lithuania, which shows how looking through the prism of production and action foregrounds certain problems, general to participatory art (e.g. those of documentation, relation between art event and artwork, labor and entertainment, etc.). At the same time it proves to be a handy tool that helps to highlight peculiarities of a particular project, to question certain established prejudices, and to unveil new... [to full text]

This research concerns tensions between ‘personalisation’, a neo-liberal concept adapted by New Labour to empower and motivate students and ‘performativity’, an aspect of governance whereby institutional effectiveness is monitored by statistical outcomes. Their ambiguous reconciliation in Personalised Learning (DfES 2004a) continues to develop in schools and colleges. A research focus on Key Stage 3/4 wider curriculum choice, one of five key but under-researched elements in this policy, provides the opportunity to explore this paradox. Involving an investigation into the recent experience of 14-15 year olds in an inner city English comprehensive school, the degree of equity afforded students in decision-making, based on teacher perceptions of students as achievers and underachievers may reveal conflicting values in the management of this process. Taking an ethnographic approach to case study development, triangulation of method and source is used to test internal validity. Analysis of interview data from a range of pastoral staff provides outline images of the institutional management of student choice. A comparative statistical analysis using data from anonymous student questionnaires provides an independent account of the effects of this interpretation on the student stakeholder role. From the questionnaire sample, qualitative data from twenty student interviews offers further insight into the processing of decisions. Relying on respondent validation procedures throughout, for ethical reasons the identification of student interviewees as ‘achievers’ or ‘underachievers’ is retrospective. Demonstrating how student access to the KS4 optional curriculum operates, the research reveals power differences firstly between the student cohort and ‘gate-keeping’ pastoral staff and secondly between individual students. While some evidence of social control through self-surveillance, implied through Foucauldian criticism of neo-liberal strategies (Rose and Miller 1992) may exist, the extreme social and economic deprivation of the area is used to justify this institutional interpretation of the stakeholder role through the moral imperative of social inclusion.

This dissertation deals with the didactic consequences of assessment for learning (AfL) in the subject of physical education and health (PEH) at three upper secondary schools in Sweden. The purpose of the study is to investigate how assessment for learning is realised in PEH and what triadic relations between the teacher, student and subject content are established in the formative assessment practice. The empirical material consists of group reflections within a Teacher Learning Community (TLC) as well as field studies, including lesson observations and semi structured interviews with both students and teachers. In the first step of the analysis the material is categorized by means of the five key strategies (Wiliam, 2010a), in order to identify different ways of working with AfL in upper secondary PEH. The second step is a combination of a governmentality (Foucault, 1978/1991b), a performativity (Ball, 2003) and a didactic (Hudson, 2002) analysis, which illuminates what triadic relations are established under different conditions of governance. The findings highlight five fabrications of AfL in PEH, named after their most prominent features or functions, AfL as: i) Empowerment, ii) Physical Activation, iii) Grade Generation, iv) Constructive Alignment, v) Negotiation. ”Among the products of discursive practices are the very persons who engage in them” (Davies & Harré, 2001, p. 263). Accordingly, different teacher and student subjects as well as characteristics of the subject content are constituted in each of these fabrications. Moreover, the so called ‘backwash effect’ (Torrance, 2012) implies that the contrasting versions of AfL promote different kinds of learning, such as: i) increased autonomy, ii) participation in a community of practice, iii) criteria compliance, iv) acquisition of prescribed abilities, v) group development. However, the big idea of AfL is to adapt the teaching to the students and not the students to the knowledge requirements. Hence, this dissertation could serve as a basis for discussion on possible didactic implications of AfL in PEH.

Although Bernard Malamud's fiction has been frequently regarded as allegorical and symbolic, Malamud did not avoid the period's social issues in his works, such as the racial question and the changing nature of relationship between American Jews and African Americans. The present thesis aims to discuss Malamud's selected fiction dealing with Black- Jewish relations, namely short stories "Angel Levine," (1955) "Black Is My Favorite Color" (1963) and the novel The Tenants, (1971) and to place them into the context of Black-Jewish relations in the United States and of Black-Jewish literary dialogues and the tensions they express. It thus seeks to evaluate Malamud's role in the discourse of Black-Jewish relations in America. Calling upon a theoretical framework, outlined in chapter 2, based on philosophical and sociological findings of Judith Butler, John Searle, and Michael Omi with Howard Winant, the study examines the role of language and literature in constructing the Self and the Other (understood both as individual and collective identities, including categories of race and ethnicity), suggesting thus that literary texts, such as Malamud's selected fiction, are a part of discursive dialogue through and against which American Jews and Blacks construct their identities. Apart from the approaches to...

Cette thèse étudie le rôle de la critique dans la construction sociale des marchés. Le commerce équitable, et plus précisément la mode éthique, sont analysés comme cas extrêmes d’incertitude morale pesant sur l’organisation des marchés. Au travers d’une analyse qualitative de données secondaires, d’observations, d’entretiens et d’objets, cette recherche suit les acteurs dans les controverses qui performent le marché de la mode éthique. Inspirée par la sociologie pragmatique, elle éclaire les cadrages, recadrages et débordements qui solidifient ou déstabilisent les compromis portant sur la valeur des biens et sur les règles de l’échange. À l’origine, le cadre du vêtement équitable valorise l’artisanat, les conditions de production et les principes du commerce équitable. Puis, au début des années 2000, l’émergence de marques spécialisées contribue à recadrer le vêtement équitable en article de mode éthique. Enfin, à partir de la fin des années 2000, des marques de mode conventionnelle suscitent des controverses en se lançant, à leur tour, dans la mode éthique. Plus précisément, cette thèse analyse le travail d’un professionnel chargé d’organiser le marché, l’Ethical Fashion Show, le salon de la mode éthique. Cette recherche vise trois contributions. D’abord, elle propose la notion d’entreprise de marché pour décrire l’activité consistant à faire tenir dans un même cadre le marché et la critique. Ensuite, elle éclaire la notion de performativité de l’économie en soulignant les multiples manières par lesquelles la critique ré-agence les marchés. Enfin, elle met en lumière les dimensions matérielles et spatiales de la construction sociale des marchés au travers de l’étude de dispositifs de qualification, de disqualification et d’emprise. / This dissertation studies the role of criticism in the social construction of markets. Fair Trade, and especially ethical fashion, are analyzed as extreme cases of moral uncertainty related to the organization of markets. The qualitative analysis of secondary data, observations, interviews, and artefacts enables us to follow the actors through perfomative controversies. Inspired by French pragmatic sociology (Boltanski, Callon, Latour), this research highlights the process of framing, reframing and overframing that makes the compromises on values and market rules more or less stable. Historically, the frame of fair clothes values the production process of goods. Then, in the 2000’s, the emergence of pure players contributes to reframe fair clothes to fashion goods. Finally, at the end of the 2000’s, conventional brands of the fashion market raise controversies by involving in the ethical fashion markets. More precisely, this research studies the endeavour of the Ethical Fashion Show to organize the market. It aims at making three contributions. First, it proposes the notion of market entre-preneurship to describe the activity consisting in making compromises between market and its criticisms. Second, it highlights the notion of economic performativity by clarifying the multiple ways that criticisms shape market agencements. Third, it sheds light on the material and spatial dimensions of the social construction of markets by analyzing devices of qualification, disqualification and control.

La thèse interroge la façon dont les organisations imposent leurs attendus comportementaux et verbaux à leurs membres. Elles utilisent le caractère codique de la langue comme technique d’asservissement. Par la seule parole, elles inscrivent leur pouvoir dans une hiérarchie de places, de statuts et de comportements. Cependant, le maître n’est jamais totalement puissant, ni le serviteur totalement dominé. Nous pensons qu’une négociation des rôles se joue dans le verbe et dans les postures qui sont en partie contestés et recréés par les individus. Dans le cadre du déploiement d’un projet de management de la performance chez Schneider Electric et lors de cours de communication donnés à des élèves ingénieurs au CNAM, nous avons observé comment les individus s’approprient le langage et l’ethos prescrits par l’organisation. Une mimesis par rapport aux modèles prônés est à l’œuvre. Cependant, elle n’est pas une duplication mais une recréation. Le désir de correspondre aux modèles de l’organisation se heurte à l’envie d’être soi, c’est-à-dire unique. Au sein d’une forêt de symboles et de mythes qui engendrent des figures de la domination, les individus dupliquent, résistent et composent. A leur recréation se mêle une quête identitaire. Ils procèdent à une reconstruction de soi permanente car l’identité n’est pas un processus figé. Cependant, la mise en cohérence des parcours passe par une mise en récit de soi. / The thesis queries how organizations impose their behavioral and verbal expectations to their members. They use the coding nature of the language as a technique of enslavement. By the sole language, they settle their authority in a hierarchy of places, statuses, and behaviors. However, the master is never totally powerful, nor is the servant totally dominated. We believe that a negotiation for the roles takes place in the words and the postures that are partly challenged and re-created by individuals. During the deployment of a project of management of the performance at Schneider Electric, as well as during communication courses to engineering students at the CNAM, we observed how people appropriate the language and ethos prescribed by the organization. A mimesis of the prescribed models is at work. However, it is not duplication but re-creation. The desire to match the models of the organization faces the urge to be oneself, that is to be unique. In the midst of a forest of symbols and myths that create figures of domination, individuals duplicate, resist, and make up. Their re-creation mingles with an identity quest. They are a permanent rebuilding self-esteem because identity is not a static process. However, implementing the consistency of the route passes through a story in itself.