The aim for this master thesis is to create an understanding of the intersubjective processes of how individuals are experimenting with their identities in social media and the consequences for the identity and embodiment. The thesis is completed with the help of discourse analysis and a starting point in four complementary theories. Central to the implementation of the analysis is the concept of diffraction. Therefore the thesis is, which is reflected in the choice of theoretical approaches and methods, critical to many aspects of classical philosophy of science and method. The empirical material is based on interviews. During the analysis the theory is applied to empirical data received from the interviews, but the empirical data will also be used as inspiration for examining my chosen theories. The analysis covers several topics. First I discuss how a web-identity is constructed and how this can be considered as a process of negotiation with other users on the same website. Furthermore I discuss how my informants negotiate about boundaries conserning sexuality and corporeality, but that the subjective boundaries shift in the encounter between different discursive claim to legitimate expression of body and sexuality. In the final section, before the final discussion, I discuss the body's impacts on communication on a website. During the final discussion several questions are being raised. Centrally, however, is how the essays selected theories help to demonstrate how the negotiation of boundaries in social media is complex, and that experimentation with the identity of a website partly dependent on society's other discourses on gender, body and desires. But it is also discussed how discourses of gender, body and desire is shifted inside the selected websites, and that these sites creates new opportunities for identification and self-knowledge.

In Dharma Bums (1958), by Jack Kerouac, and Americana (1971), by Don DeLillo, the authors explore the complexity of selfhood as pertaining to individual identity and subjectivity in mid-twentieth century American culture and consciousness, paying specific attention to the relation that these concepts have with media, spatiality, and Buddhism. Although numerous critics provide extensive analyses of these texts, authors, and themes, no critic has paired these texts and authors, and investigated these particular themes in relation to selfhood. I argue that in Dharma Bums and Americana, Kerouac and DeLillo each investigate the influence of media, spatiality, and Buddhism on selfhood, as well as provide competing models of selfhood that offer either self-transformation or self-limitation.

This research focused on the metaphor of space as used by Afrikaans female poets in South Africa in the period 1994-2005, both space as an environment and as an abstract space in which the poets find themselves. In this period, South Africa got a new democratic dispensation and women were de-marginalised. As a background to the study, a brief overview was given of the work of various Afrikaans poetesses, but the main focus was on the work of two contemporary poetesses, namely Use van Staden and Wilma Stockenstrom, to observe whether the new role of women in society is reflected in the work of these two poetesses. In the study, the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, a French culture-sociologist, was used, namely that no text is ever "free", but that there is a close relation between text and context. Because only the work of female writers was studied in this research, and because the poetesses give a voice to the spatiality of women, theories of feminism as well as postcolonialism were also involved in the study. The spatial metaphors in the texts of the poetesses were also analysed, because they use metaphors to portray their spatiality. These spatial metaphors also lead to the exploitation of other relevant themes. In the investigation of the representation of spatial metaphors used by Afrikaans poetesses, and in particular Use van Staden and Wilma Stockenstrom, it was found that the spaces in which women find themselves play a prominent role in their lives. It was also observed that there is disharmony between poetesses and the spaces in which they find themselves. This research found that women have been de-marginalised and that the patriarchal system has been crossed, and that this phenomenon is being portrayed by the work of female poets who give a voice to the women of this country and portray the many facets of female experience. / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

This research focused on the metaphor of space as used by Afrikaans female poets in South Africa in the period 1994-2005, both space as an environment and as an abstract space in which the poets find themselves. In this period, South Africa got a new democratic dispensation and women were de-marginalised. As a background to the study, a brief overview was given of the work of various Afrikaans poetesses, but the main focus was on the work of two contemporary poetesses, namely Use van Staden and Wilma Stockenstrom, to observe whether the new role of women in society is reflected in the work of these two poetesses. In the study, the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, a French culture-sociologist, was used, namely that no text is ever "free", but that there is a close relation between text and context. Because only the work of female writers was studied in this research, and because the poetesses give a voice to the spatiality of women, theories of feminism as well as postcolonialism were also involved in the study. The spatial metaphors in the texts of the poetesses were also analysed, because they use metaphors to portray their spatiality. These spatial metaphors also lead to the exploitation of other relevant themes. In the investigation of the representation of spatial metaphors used by Afrikaans poetesses, and in particular Use van Staden and Wilma Stockenstrom, it was found that the spaces in which women find themselves play a prominent role in their lives. It was also observed that there is disharmony between poetesses and the spaces in which they find themselves. This research found that women have been de-marginalised and that the patriarchal system has been crossed, and that this phenomenon is being portrayed by the work of female poets who give a voice to the women of this country and portray the many facets of female experience. / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

Long overshadowed by the subsequent 1960s ‘Boom’, Cuban novels of the 1950s have been confined to the backwater of literary analysis, often grouped together and dismissed as mere social realism like their Spanish counterparts, or described as inferior. The spatial has been similarly overlooked in literary analysis in favour of a focus on stylistic experimentation, narrative structure, characterisation and the temporal. More recently, however, theorists such as Mitchell (1980) and (1989), and Wegner (2002), have argued that literature has become increasingly spatial, and that a greater focus on spatial analysis is needed. Furthermore, conceptions of space in literature have moved from the static notion of ‘setting’ and identification within a specific location and time, to embrace the function of actual physical spaces, whether exterior or interior, public or private, embedded or liminal, juxtaposed, dynamic, static or fluid. One Cuban novel of the 1950s has already been discussed from a spatial perspective - El acoso (1956) by Alejo Carpentier. Using the two previous studies on spatiality in this novel as a starting point (Stanton [1993] and Vásquez [1996]), this analysis expands on the conclusions made by these studies, stressing the importance of water imagery, and demonstrating that spaces in El acoso are essentially dynamic and female-gendered, arguing that the crisis experienced by the acosado is actually one of masculine identity. Building on the expanded analysis of space in El acoso, three lesser-known Cuban novels of the 1950s are then considered from the perspective of space: Los Valedontes (1953) by Alcides Iznaga, Romelia Vargas (1952) by Surama Ferrer, and La trampa (1956) by Enrique Serpa. The socio-economic, political and cultural backcloth for the novels is set out, before an investigation into theories of space, both literary and non-literary, is conducted. Spaces in Los Valedontes reveal that in the rural domain, sexual identities are stable with conventional masculine hegemony virtually uncontested. Spaces in Romelia Vargas demonstrate that in the urban domain, female sexual identity, albeit historically suppressed, triumphs over the traditionally dominant male norm, whilst a study of spaces in La trampa demonstrates that not only are gangsters, policemen and homosexuals shown to occupy particularly challenged positions, but also that constructions of mainstream Cuban masculinity are under threat. The conclusion compares the function of spaces across all four novels, adding new insights into existing theories of literary space where appropriate. This thesis, therefore, tests the hypothesis that the manipulation of space in these novels constitutes material worthy of study, showing that spaces are dynamic and challenging when female-gendered, and constituting a threat to the hegemony exerted by traditional models of masculinity. Spaces in these novels demonstrate how the early part of the 1950s was a period in which an unpredictable array of contested positions was exposed through cultural, racial, gender and sexual stereotypes, leaving conventional norms of identity open to question.

Being the capital of the young Republic, transformation of Ankara&rsquo / s urban environment into a modern one was one of the objectives of the Early Republican period. In the study, the transformation of urban culture is traced through everyday life of the inhabitants and lived spatiality in the new and old/traditional parts of the city. Urban culture clearly manifests itself in urban public spaces by means of everyday life and lived spatiality. It is not only the elite but the humble income social groups which are the main agents/actors of the transforming urban culture. In Ankara, gradual appropriation of a modern life style takes place in the urban public spaces but these spaces do not have to be part of the grand narrative of nation-building. Cultural places (Sergievi, theaters, movie theaters, people&rsquo / s houses), recreation places (parks, coffee shops, restaurants), shopping areas, streets and boulevards, districts are spaces of everyday life and new spatial and bodily practices flourish in these spaces. The reality of the city shelters both the new/modern, the old, and the spontaneously developing urban environments which equally participated in the transformation process. The research is based on memory in the study. Written documents, newspapers, literary constructions, memoirs and interviews with the old inhabitants of the city are the main sources. According to the analyses made on the obtained data, Ankara was a fruitful medium for creation of a modern urban culture during the mentioned period and middle social groups were the main components of this transformation process.

This dissertation examines how postmodernist narratives of memory in Graham Swift's Waterland, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines retrieve the stories of those who have been lost or forgotten in official history and refigure the temporal and spatial imaginary in intertwining personal stories of crisis with public history through acts of remembering. Questioning the modernist ideology of progress based on the idea of linear sequence of time, the novels not only retrace the heterogeneous and discontinuous layers of stories overlooked or repressed in official accounts of modern history, but also re-examine the contradictory and contested process by which subjects are situated or positioned, and its effects on the production of knowledge. These postmodern historical novels examine history as a discourse and explore its limits. The narrators of the novels are engaged with an autobiographical act of rewriting their lives, but their efforts to reconstitute themselves in unity and continuity are undermined by the disjunctive narrative form of the novels. The layered narrative of memory through which the novels reconstruct modern history is allegorical in the double sense that it exposes the act of signification by decentering the symbol of the transcendental signifier while telling an allegorical story of personal and familial history that mirrors national history in a fragmented way. In Waterland, Tom Crick retells his personal and familial stories intertwined with local and national history as alternative history lessons and challenges the Idea of Progress by revisiting sites of traumatic memory. Midnight's Children constructs counter-stories of Post-Independence India as multiple alternatives to one official version of history and addresses the limits of history in terms of "a border zone of temporality." In The Shadow Lines, the narrator retells his family history as a story of borders through his struggle with gaps in official history and creates a national imaginary with mirror images and events. The postmodernist narrative of memory in these novels turns the time of the now into a time for the "past as to come," a time to detect the unrealized and unfulfilled possibilities of the past, through retellings of the past.

Doctor of Philosophy / This ethnography is based on fieldwork in two very different cities, Hong Kong and Sydney. It traces the movements of subjects from Hong Kong through the analysis of differing modes of inhabiting urban space. The texture of lived spaces provides an analytic focus for examining a highly mobile migrant group. This ethnography explores the mesh of objective structures and migrant subjectivities in a mobile field of migrant ‘place’. A basic assumption of this study is that people from Hong Kong have acquired a common array of dispositions attuned to living in a specific environment. Hong Kong’s dense and challenging urban space embodies aspects of the singular historical ‘production of space’ underpinning a colonial entrepôt that has expanded into a major global economic node. The conditions of lived space are examined through an historical analysis of urban space in Hong Kong and an ethnographic analysis of spatial practices and dispositions. The sprawling spaces of suburban Sydney clearly differ sharply from that of Hong Kong. Interview accounts of settling in Sydney are used to investigate the ‘gap’ in spatial dispositions. Settling entails both practical accommodations to new and unfamiliar localities and an interweaving of cultural and ideological elements into the expanded everyday of migrant subjectivity. Language and speech are integral to spatial practices and provide means of referencing and evaluating ongoing social relations and trajectories. The ‘discourse space’ of interview accounts of settlement in Sydney and movements back to Hong Kong are closely examined, yielding an array of perceptions and representations of different, and contested styles of urban life. All the senses are brought into play in accounts of densities and absences in people’s everyday worlds. At the same time this thesis provides a perspective from which to interrogate contemporary interpretations of ‘transnational’ migration, suggesting the need for an analysis grounded in a specific economy of capacities and dispositions to appropriate social and symbolic goods.

En raison de l’incompatibilité des méthodes chromatiques architecturales promues en Iran dans les deux phases récentes de modernisation avec les conditions du milieu géographique et culturel, nous nous interrogeons sur la spécificité du sens de la couleur et de son rôle dans la spatialité persane. La couleur peut-elle être encore considérée comme un facteur structurant dans une situation où la ville affronte une forte tendance à l’uniformisation de son cadre bâti ? Si nous avons focalisé nos analyses à partir d’Ispahan d’un point de vue historique et théorique, c’est dans la mesure où l’urbanisme traditionnel comme les transformations contemporaines de cette ville permettent d’opérer une coupe épaisse et transversale dans l’ensemble de la société persane et iranienne. Si le point de départ de notre travail a d’abord consisté à analyser le sens et les valeurs des rapports entre couleur(s) et espaces, architectural et urbain, contemporains persans, après plusieurs années de recherche, notre point d’arrivée - et notre thèse principale - consiste à dire que les effets optiques et tactiles ou haptiques des couleurs dans l’espace architectural et urbain dépendent fondamentalement de l’interprétation donnée à la profondeur. Qu’entendre en effet par ce concept, complexe, et ses mises en œuvre urbanistiques dans le contexte de la culture persane ? C’est dans cette logique que nous essayons de projeter un nouveau regard vis-à-vis de la troisième dimension et de son expression par l’usage des couleurs à la fois dans la conception des habitats modernes à Ispahan mais aussi dans les projets d’aménagement urbain actuel de cette ville. / Because of the discordancy between the chromatic architectural strategies put forward in Iran during two of its most recent phases of modernization and Iran’s broader geographic and cultural context, I have set out to question the specificity of the sense of colour and its role in Persian spatiality. Can colour still be considered a structural factor in a city faced with the current trend towards uniform built environments? If I have focused my analysis on Ispahan from a historical and theoretical point of view, it is because traditional urban planning as well as the contemporary transformations of the city encompass a significantly broad and transversal sample of the entire Persian and Iranian society. If the point of departure of my work has been to analyse the sense and value of the relationships between contemporary Persian colour(s) and architectural and urban spaces, my point of arrival, and main thesis after many years of research, consists in saying that the optic and haptic effects of colour in architectural and urban spaces depend fundamentally on the interpretation that is given to depth. How can we understand this complex concept and its urban development usage in a Persian cultural context? It is following this logic that I will try to develop a new perspective on the third dimension and its expression by means of the use of colour, within both the understanding of Ispahan’s inhabitants, and the city’s actual urban development projects.

À partir de quelques repères biographiques, il s’agira de rendre lisible et d’expliciter une approche spécifique de la recherche, et de montrer par quels chemins et quelles bifurcations, à partir d’une formation d’architecte, j’ai ressenti la nécessité de me rapprocher de l’anthropologie. C’est-à-dire comment, à partir d’un « savoir faire » considéré comme pratique, technique et lié normalement à l’opérationnalité, est apparue l’exigence d’y accoler - mais on pourrait dire, aussi, d’y retrouver - un « savoir » considéré comme plus théorique. L’architecture est ici conçue comme une « savoir de savoirs » et une modalité de connaissance dynamique capable de toucher à l’existence comme un tout. Se mesurer avec l’environnement naturel, pour organiser l’espace et le temps des sociétés nous demande alors de prendre constamment la « mesure » des changements induits suite à cette organisation et présence, en en réinterrogant le sens, dans une réciprocité constante. Dans le travaux ici réuni, la rencontre entre l’architecture (le fait de donner lieu à) et l’anthropologie (le fait d’avoir lieu, individuel et collectif) chacune étant récursivement l’une dans l’autre et toujours inscrite dans un temps localisé, se joue sur un plan « syntaxique ». Car, si la spatialité est une langue qui nous habite avant toutes les autres, ce qui m’interroge ce sont les propriétés structurelles et structurantes propres à certaines notions - telles la « limite », le « seuil », la « mesure », le « paysage » - qui l’expriment, les significations qu’elles peuvent prendre dans différents contextes, et les possibilités de sens qu’elles peuvent ouvrir et proposer pour repenser notre rapport aux autres et au monde. / By first introducing some biographical markers, I shall seek to clarify and explain my specific research approach and reveal the paths and bifurcations that led me, from my initial architectural training, to feel the need to get closer to anthropology. In other words, how the need arose to create a resonance between a “know-how”, considered practical, technical and related to the operational, and a “knowledge”, considered more theoretical. Architecture is considered here as “an instrument of measure” and a “sum of expertise”, that is to say, a mode of knowledge of the world that is broad and dynamic, at the same time “integral” and “integrating”, and hence capable of affecting existence as a whole. Confronting the natural environment to organize societies’ space and time – which is the very essence of this discipline – requires that we constantly take measure of the changes that this organization induces, again and again questioning the meaning of this constant reciprocity. In the essays gathered here, the encounter between architecture (the fact of giving rise to) and anthropology (the fact of taking place, both individually and collectively), both of which are ultimately and always inscribed in a localized time, is situated on a “syntactic” level. For, if spatiality is a language that inhabits us before any other, what I question are the structural and structuring properties specific to certain notions that express this – such as the “limit”, “threshold”, “measure”, “landscape” –, the meanings that they may take in different contexts, and the possible meanings that they can open up and propose for us to reconsider our relationship to others and the world.