This dissertation uses in depth interviews and participant observation in order to understand an important contemporary subculture: anarcho-punks. The research was done in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between the years of 2006 and 2012. The overarching theme that connects the different chapters of the dissertation together is a focus on the ways in which the identification narratives of participants are ethical in nature, meaning that the narrators are working to maintain an ethical sense of self in their narration. In addition, I show the identitarian consequences of the ways in which the hyphenation of the anarcho-punk identification works to both separate and join the two different identifications "anarchist" and "punk." I also show the ways in which identifications are narratively structured. This is done throughout the ten chapters of the dissertation. Each of the substantive chapters focuses on the different narratives used by the participants to understand a particular theme that is important to developing an understanding of the subculture overall. / Sociology

The culture of honor theory proposed by Nisbett and Cohen (1996) addresses the historically higher rates of violent crime in the Southern United States, as well as the disparities that can be observed in the laws, beliefs, and social expectations between the South and other regions. Previous research has reported significant differences between the beliefs of acceptable violence among Southerners compared to non-Southerners; however, no research has been conducted comparing different demographic groups of Southerners. The current study sought to evaluate whether there were observable differences between various demographic attributes such as gender, race, age, educational attainment, political affiliation, prior law enforcement or military experience, and adherence to the culture of honor. It was found that there is a statistically significant relationship between experience in the military/law enforcement and culture of honor adherence, as well as statistical significance between an individual’s political affiliation and adherence to culture of honor beliefs.

The design from the counterculture of the 1960 and 1970s USA is an often overlooked or forgotten part of design and art history (Auther & Lerner 2011, s.XXIX) with the graphic designers of the movement often being portrayed as nothing more than drug influenced amateurs (Kaplan 2013, s.80). This is an all too simple and reductive view on design from this era with its undeniably politically charged and radical messages. This paper therefore aims to examine design from this movement, specifically from the alternative press, to give the reader a deeper understanding of the methods and rhetorical devices used to communicate their messages of resistance and counter cultural values. This is done through a visual rhetorical analysis focusing on the use of tropes as well as a critical discourse analysis examining the messages being created and the subsequent discourses they produce. This results in a conclusion and discussion centered around what tropes are represented in the material as well as how graphic design was used to communicate their countercultural values.

Doing, undoing, and redoing gender debates have established the omnirelevance and performativity of gender. Yet, little is known about the ways that individuals "do" gender in spaces that provide the opportunity for norms to be disrupted, such as subcultures. This study offers an empirical investigation into the performance of gender within the subculture known as EDM (electronic dance music) culture. Using 20 in-depth interviews that were conducted virtually, I analyze the way ravers experience and give meaning to gender within the EDM culture. I find that individuals within the EDM culture can participate in the doing, undoing, and redoing of gender and do so through the embodiment of their subcultural beliefs and ideology, known as PLUR (peace, love, unity, and respect). I argue that the embodiment of PLUR is gendered, and describe the body-reflexive practices that are associated with PLUR.

Same same but different, but still same: Dieser Spruch ist an sich selbst ein Meme und beschreibt gleichzeitig das Thema dieser Arbeit, in der die Wiederverwertung und Neudeutung klassischer Kunstwerke in modernen Formaten und Kontexten behandelt wird. Memes greifen oft visuelle und inhaltliche Elemente klassischer Kunst auf, interpretieren sie aber durch Community-Strukturen neu verändern ihren Kontext. Die Arbeit untersucht Parallelen und Unterschiede zwischen Meme-Kultur und Aneignungskunst, um die Verbindung von Hochkultur und Subkultur zu beleuchten. Dabei werden sowohl die Funktionsprinzipien von Memes als auch ihre Verbreitung und visuelle Ästhetik analysiert. Anhand ausgewählter Beispiele wird aufgezeigt, wie klassische Kunst in die Meme-Kultur integriert wird und welche Bedeutung diese Transformationen haben.

Dong Dong. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-136). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter I. --- Introduction --- p.5 / Chapter II. --- Youth Culture Practiced in Virtual Community --- p.10 / Chapter III. --- "Background, Research Questions and Research Design" --- p.36 / Chapter IV. --- Style of Chinese University BBS Youth Culture --- p.45 / Chapter V. --- Youth Cultural Community as Identified by Style --- p.68 / Chapter VI. --- Resistance within Contexts --- p.84 / Chapter VII. --- Conclusion --- p.108 / Appendix 1 Captions of Postings & Discussion Threads --- p.111 / Appendix 2 Style of BBS Discussion Threads --- p.114 / Appendix 3 BBS Member's Composition --- p.118 / Appendix 4 Personal Reflections on the Film --- p.120 / Appendix 5 --- p.123 / Collective Discussions in Chinese University BBSs --- p.123 / Bibliography --- p.127

He, Xiao. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 196-202). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.3 / Acknowledgement --- p.5 / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.8 / Chapter 1.1 --- Who are the Cosplayers? --- p.13 / Chapter 1.2 --- Why Cosplay? --- p.15 / Chapter 1.3 --- Why Hong Kong? --- p.17 / Chapter 1.4 --- Research Questions --- p.19 / Chapter 1.5 --- The Background of Cosplay --- p.21 / Chapter 1.6 --- Cosplay Events in Hong Kong --- p.24 / Chapter 1.6.1 --- Large-scale commercial conventions --- p.25 / Chapter 1.6.2 --- Cosplay and dôjinshi events held by universities --- p.27 / Chapter 1.6.3 --- Small-scale privately organized photo-taking events --- p.28 / Chapter 1.7 --- How to Get the Costumes --- p.31 / Chapter 1.8 --- Literature Review --- p.33 / Chapter 1.8.1 --- Globalization and Localization --- p.33 / Chapter 1.8.2 --- Youth Subculture and Fandom Culutre --- p.36 / Chapter 1.9 --- Methodology --- p.39 / Chapter 1.9.1 --- In-depth Interview --- p.39 / Chapter 1.9.2 --- Participant Observation --- p.40 / Chapter 1.9.3 --- Media Studies --- p.43 / Chapter 1.9.4 --- Language --- p.44 / Chapter 1.10 --- Outlines of the Chapters --- p.45 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- The Japaneseness for the Cosplayers --- p.48 / Chapter 2.1 --- Emphasis on Japanese Originality --- p.48 / Chapter 2.2 --- Japanese Elements in their Cyberculture --- p.56 / Chapter 2.3 --- High Reputation for Japan --- p.61 / Chapter 2.4 --- "From ""Odorless"" to ""Japanese""" --- p.66 / Chapter 2.5 --- Summary --- p.70 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Cosplayer Cyberculture --- p.73 / Chapter 3.1 --- Cosplayers Online --- p.74 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Public Space --- p.76 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Dark Space --- p.79 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Personal Space --- p.84 / Chapter 3.2 --- The Contradiction --- p.88 / Chapter 3.3 --- A Long-lasting Discussion: Effort or Enjoyment --- p.98 / Chapter 3.4 --- Summary --- p.105 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- "Pretty Girls, Pretty Boys, and Their Audiences" --- p.108 / Chapter 4.1 --- "Pretty Girls, Photographers, and the Other Girls" --- p.109 / Chapter 4.2 --- Pretty Boys --- p.116 / Chapter 4.3 --- Pretty Boys in Love --- p.132 / Chapter 4.4 --- Summary --- p.143 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- The Meanings of Cosplay --- p.146 / Chapter 5.1 --- Mainstream Values and the Education System in Hong Kong --- p.146 / Chapter 5.2 --- Cosplayers as Secondary School-Students --- p.150 / Chapter 5.3 --- The Meanings of Cosplay: Four Cases --- p.157 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- "Te's Story: ""I'm going to work in art and design""" --- p.157 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- "Tsu's Story: ""I mustn't let my parents knew that I'm cosplaying""" --- p.166 / Chapter 5.3.3 --- "Story of a Mother: ""I want to let her try anything that interests her""" --- p.171 / Chapter 5.3.4 --- "Saki's Story: ""Cosplay is just an interest after all'" --- p.175 / Chapter 5.4 --- Summary --- p.179 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.181 / Chapter 6.1 --- A Review of the Chapters --- p.181 / Chapter 6.2 --- Comparison with Previous Studies --- p.186 / Bibliography --- p.196

In the course of 20th century, various subcultures became important part of our society. They were formed by mutual belief and shared interest in values often dissonant to those of majority. This paper describes larp community, fellowship that creates and organizes theatre- like role playing sessions. Live action role playing is about establishing new fictional worlds and retrieting legendary tales with main focus on joy experienced during the game. A radio documentary "Fenomen larp" (i.e. Phenomenon LARP) complementing this paper provides detailed insight. Main goal of the work is to put together the overview of the means of communication within larp community with accent on zines, webzines and Facebook. It also describes the way mainstream media covers the topic and what is the public opinion towards larp together with content analysis of texts published in "Pevnost" (i.e. Citadel) magazine. In appendix there are photographs from documentary shooting, interview with Helena Jiskrova (creator of Common sign social network) and overview of media outputs on larp in Czech Republic during 2014.

This diploma thesis aims to describe and explain the phenomenon of the community radio broadcasting. Despite the fact, that this sector has not been implemented in the Czech media system to supplement the dual system of public and private stations, broadcasting of this type does exist. As a subject of my case study I chose the internet radio StreetCulture as I consider it to be a unique example within the Czech media market. StreetCulture proves its specificity with a very wide range of contents. It acts as a platform for a large number of different communities and it also interconnects the participants within the public space StreetBar. The analytical part of the thesis investigates how this radio station fulfils four basic dimensions of community media as defined by the media theorist Nico Carpentier: community aspect, alternative aspect, civil aspect and rhizomatic aspect. For each of these specifics I tried to demonstrate how it relates to the StreetCulture radio station concerning both the organization and content of the broadcast and how it is reflected in various non-broadcasting activities of StreetCulture. The aim of this study is not to draw general conclusions which could be applied to other community stations in the Czech Republic. It rather offers a detailed insight into the...

Intéressée par la situation sociolinguistique de notre pays d'origine, la Pologne, où l'argot carcéral finit par pénétrer dans d'autres sociolectes, nous nous sommes aussi intéressée au cas français en vue d'explorer la même question. Pour ce faire, notre étude a été réalisée dans deux milieux de référence, à savoir celui des détenus d’une part et celui des non détenus d’autre part. Dans le cadre de la méthode d’enquête sociolinguistique nous avons soumis à ces deux milieux de référence un questionnaire comportant un ensemble choisi d’argotismes carcéraux. Notre travail de recherche nous a permis d’examiner la fiabilité du lexique recueilli et de confirmer l’existence d’une pratique langagière essentiellement carcérale, ce qui nous amène à définir la spécificité de l'argot des prisons utilisé dans un cadre carcéral. Par ailleurs est étudiée la perméabilité de la langue familière française au vocabulaire argotique carcéral, ce qui aboutit à mettre au jour les fonctions remplies par l'argot des prisonniers en milieu carcéral. De plus, la confrontation des deux publics permet de dégager les similarités et les différences dans les résultats, ainsi que d'établir une correspondance entre leur profil social et leur pratique linguistique. / The interest in the topic arose by dint of inspiration drawn from observing a sociolinguistic situation in my native country, Poland, where prison slang proves to permeate other sociolects, in particular youth slang, which turned out to be an excellent point of departure for embarking on a similar survey in France. The research was carried out in two different groups: prisoners and non prisoners. Within the framework of a sociolinguistic study, both of them were requested to complete a questionnaire containing 40 units of prison slang vocabulary. First of all, the research was designed to examine the reliability of a selected lexicon and to confirm a genuine prison slang usage in this particular environment. Furthermore, the paper was supposed to define the degree of permeability of the French colloquial language to prison slang vocabulary as well as to shed some new light on different roles played by this specific language within a prison community. Moreover, the comparison of two groups' performance revealed important similarities and differences and brought to light the correlation between social and linguistic variables.