As externships evolved from their vocational education roots into the university setting, both the course purposes and the expectations of student changed toward deeper learning. While the students’ responsibility for gaining knowledge has increased, teaching methods designed by educators to prepare students for more critically evaluated outcomes has not evolved at the same pace. Educators still grapple over how educational design can combine the structured teacher-centered learning strategy used in university classrooms with the learner-centered approach students typically utilize in for-profit culinary workplaces. This dissertation is about culinary externships in the urban environment. The study examined the roles, reasoning, and behavior of culinary externship stakeholders: student externs, externship sites via their externship supervisors, and educators who facilitate externships under the academic rules and guidelines of both culinary bachelor programs and the rigor demanded by higher education. Further, the study explored what factors encouraged and empowered students to acquire durable knowledge from their externship experiences and the forms of social capital they use to invest in their experience, as well as the conditions that failed to secure durable knowledge from the externship. The findings indicate that each stakeholder approaches an externship from their own working perspectives. Further, the ability of students to socialize, utilize agency to achieve their personal ends, bear the sole weight of evaluation, and acquire practical work experience prior to the externship yielded the best outcomes. Additional questions are posed and answered within the study.

Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird die Möglichkeit diskutiert, genderspezifischen sozialen Wandel in Schwellen- und Entwicklungsländern über Mikrokreditvergabesysteme anzustoßen. Anhand einer in Mittelägypten durchgeführten Studie mit mehrfach diskriminierten Frauen wird gezeigt, wie Mikrokredite die Akkumulation nicht nur von ökonomischem, sondern vor allem auch von kulturellem und sozialem Kapital im Bourdieu'schen Sinne unterstützen können. Wenn in diesem Kontext eine Veränderung des symbolischen Kapitals gelingt, kann dies zu neuen Wahrnehmungs-, Denk- und Handlungsschemata der Beteiligten und zu Strukturveränderungen auf der Makroebene führen. Die theoretische Modellierung von genderspezifischem sozialem Wandel erfolgt in diesem Artikel entlang empirischer Daten, die von den Autorinnen in Mittelägypten erhoben wurden.

Research has shown that late-arriving teen English language learners (ELLs) are deeply rooted in the sociocultural and educational system of their home country for a majority of their schooling time (Duff, 2001; Minichello, 2001). In their transition to a new society in North America, this group encounters sociocultural and linguistic differences in their daily lives. Through a lens entitled Critical Multiple Social Spaces, which combines the Multiple Worlds Model (Phelan et al., 1991), the concept of Third Space (Bhabha, 1994) and a sociocultural perspective on language use (Fairclough, 2001; Pennycook, 2010), this qualitative case study focuses on 10 Chinese ELL adolescents who came to Canada after the age of 15, and examines their cross-trajectory experiences of English practice in their daily lives and their language identities. At the time of this study, they were at the stage of completing high school and applying for admission to higher education institutions. Findings showed that this group’s language use in daily life is full of conflicts, negotiation and consolidation, not only at school as a usual space of contested language practice, but also at home, with peers and in other spaces. At school, social division existed both in and out of class, yet such social division was not merely due to ELLs’ reluctance to integrate. Participants positioned themselves differently in English Literature courses and core classes in accordance with their perceived proficiency. Home, generally regarded as a traditionally stable space of language practice, became another site of complex dynamics. Peer networks also emerged as embodying similar complications. In addition to racial and ethnic factors, age on arrival and length of residence played a significant role in social interaction, impacting both same-ethnic and cross-ethnic peer networks. Based on these findings, four categories are identified pertaining to participants’ cross-trajectory language experiences, in which English spaces are positioned differently in relation to other spaces. Equally noteworthy are the dynamics between social spaces, social relations and language use, which shape – and are shaped by – symbolic power, investment and language identities. The implications of these findings on ELL adolescents’ language use in a broader migration space are also discussed.

Research has shown that late-arriving teen English language learners (ELLs) are deeply rooted in the sociocultural and educational system of their home country for a majority of their schooling time (Duff, 2001; Minichello, 2001). In their transition to a new society in North America, this group encounters sociocultural and linguistic differences in their daily lives. Through a lens entitled Critical Multiple Social Spaces, which combines the Multiple Worlds Model (Phelan et al., 1991), the concept of Third Space (Bhabha, 1994) and a sociocultural perspective on language use (Fairclough, 2001; Pennycook, 2010), this qualitative case study focuses on 10 Chinese ELL adolescents who came to Canada after the age of 15, and examines their cross-trajectory experiences of English practice in their daily lives and their language identities. At the time of this study, they were at the stage of completing high school and applying for admission to higher education institutions. Findings showed that this group’s language use in daily life is full of conflicts, negotiation and consolidation, not only at school as a usual space of contested language practice, but also at home, with peers and in other spaces. At school, social division existed both in and out of class, yet such social division was not merely due to ELLs’ reluctance to integrate. Participants positioned themselves differently in English Literature courses and core classes in accordance with their perceived proficiency. Home, generally regarded as a traditionally stable space of language practice, became another site of complex dynamics. Peer networks also emerged as embodying similar complications. In addition to racial and ethnic factors, age on arrival and length of residence played a significant role in social interaction, impacting both same-ethnic and cross-ethnic peer networks. Based on these findings, four categories are identified pertaining to participants’ cross-trajectory language experiences, in which English spaces are positioned differently in relation to other spaces. Equally noteworthy are the dynamics between social spaces, social relations and language use, which shape – and are shaped by – symbolic power, investment and language identities. The implications of these findings on ELL adolescents’ language use in a broader migration space are also discussed.

This thesis challenges core assumptions associated with the peer production of culture using the web-based collaborative film production platform Wreckamovie to understand how peer production works in practice. Active cultural participation is a growing political priority for many governments and cultural bodies, but these priorities are often implemented without a basis in empirical evidence, making it necessary for rigorous scholarship to tackle emerging networked cultural production. Existing work portrays peer production efforts as unrealistically distinct from proprietary, market-based production, incorrectly suggesting that peer production allows distributed, non-monetarily motivated, collaboration between self-selected individuals in hierarchy-free communities. In overcoming these assumptions, this thesis contributes to the development of a consolidated theoretical framework encompassing the complicated and multifaceted nature of networked cultural production. This theoretical framing extends Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and reconciles it with Becker’s Art Worlds framework, and further embeds and draws on Benkler’s notion of commons-based peer production. Concretely, this research tackles the emergence of new collaborative production models enabled by networked technologies, and theorizes the tensions and challenges characterizing such production forms. Secondly, this thesis redefines cultural participation and considers the divisions of labour in online filmmaking materializing from the interactions between professional and non-professional filmmakers. Finally, this study considers the social economies surrounding networked cultural production, including crowdfunding, and characterizes associated conversions of capital, such as the conversion of symbolic capital into financial capital. Methodologically, this thesis employs an embedded case study strategy. It examines four feature film productions facilitated by the online platform Wreckamovie, as well as the online community within which these productions are embedded. The four production cases have completed all production stages, and have resulted in completed cultural goods during the course of data collection. This study’s findings were derived from two and half years of participant observations, interviews with 29 Wreckamovie community and production members, and the examination of archived production-related discourses (2006-2013). Ultimately, this study makes concrete proposals towards a theory of networked cultural production with clear policy implications.