Lithuanian dumps’ waste pickers are poorly studied group in our population. Therefore in the dissertation presented research is the first study of waste pickers as a social group in Lithuania. The research, introduced in this work, was devoted to explore way of life of people working in Kariotiškės dump in the context of waste pickers mode of life. The paper reveals nature of waste picking as a social phenomenon, deals with the historical, economic and social context. On the grounds of visual ethnographic study, carried out in 2006-2008, empirically is reconstructed way of life of people working in Kariotiškės dump. It addresses the following issues: work and earnings, the daily life and household, leisure, social organization, health and mortality, adjustment to the closure of dump. Thesis discloses way of life links between people working in Kariotiškės dump and other countries waste pickers and concludes that both Lithuanian and other countries waste pickers’ way of life is not a random set of patterns of daily life, but an expression of a specific waste pickers’ subculture. / Lietuvos sąvartynuose dirbantys atliekų rinkėjai yra menkai tyrinėta mūsų visuomenės grupė. Tad šioje disertacijoje pristatomas tyrimas yra pirmas atliekų rinkėjų kaip visuomenės grupės tyrimas Lietuvoje. Disertacijoje pristatomu tyrimu buvo siekiama ištirti Kariotiškių sąvartyne dirbančių žmonių gyvenimo būdą atliekų rinkėjų gyvensenos kontekste. Darbe atskleidžiama atliekų rinkimo kaip socialinio fenomeno prigimtis, aptariamas istorinis, ekonominis ir socialinis jo kontekstas. 2006-2008 m. atlikto vizualinės etnografijos tyrimo pagrindu empiriškai rekonstruojama Kariotiškių sąvartyne dirbančių žmonių gyvensena. Nagrinėjami tokie jos aspektai: darbas ir uždarbis, kasdienis gyvenimas ir buitis, laisvalaikis, socialinė organizacija, sveikata ir mirtingumas, prisitaikymas prie sąvartyno uždarymo. Disertacijoje atskleidžiamos Kariotiškių sąvartyne dirbančių žmonių ir kitų šalių atliekų rinkėjų gyvensenos sąsajos ir prieinama išvados, kad tiek Lietuvos, tiek kitų šalių atliekų rinkėjų gyvensena yra ne atsitiktinis kasdienio gyvenimo įpročių rinkinys, o specifinės atliekų rinkėjų subkultūros raiška.

This thesis is concerned with mobile mapping practices in Sydney and Hong Kong. Since the development of mobile media technology, there has been widespread proliferation of geo-locative, quasi-cartographic mapping practices in which people use applications (apps) on their mobile phones to narrate and navigate their way through urban spaces. This has raised questions within scholarly communities about the impact that these new technologies are having on everyday practices and everyday lives. As such, this thesis seeks to contribute to a growing field of knowledge surrounding the transformation of wayfinding, navigational and spatial mapping in the wake of these developments. Focusing an empirical investigation in two post/colonial cities - Sydney and Hong Kong - it draws on ethnographic, archival and geographical data in order to situate mobile mapping in an everyday context. Building upon Foucault's work on order (2002b), knowledge (2002a) and discipline (1995), this thesis seeks to address the issue of power-knowledge relations within and without mobile mapping practices as political and generative contestations over the meaning of space, the potentiality of practice and the indeterminacy of the past. It does so by considering an over-arching discourse of cartographic reason, best articulated by Farinelli (1998) and Olsson (1998) as a rationalist, universalist and geometrical approach to spatial understanding. Moving beyond the Cartesian interpretation of cartographic reason, it argues that in an increasingly digitised and monadic world, analyses of cartographic discourse must expand into an investigation of the role of Leibnizian binary systems, universal characteristics and elasticity. As such, this thesis engages three heuristic lenses - space, technology and people - with which to understand the empirical material from different perspectives. It argues that digital mobile mapping practices can be understood as expanded and transformative descendants of the rationalist, universalist and scientific impulses that have characterised cartographic reason since the Enlightenment. However, where continuity can be traced across many different cartographic and mapping practices, as the power of cartographic reason continues to reassert authority and territorialise space and knowledge, equally, the contestations which where borne of initial and early colonial encounters continue to generate contestation, conflict and hauntings.

abstract: To understand the visual culture and art education practices within three ideologically distinct kindergartens, I employed an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing tools from the fields of art, education, anthropology, literary theory, visual studies and critical social theory. Each of the three schools was considered to be the "best" of its kind for the community in which it resided; TBS was the original bilingual school, and the most Westernized. It was set in the heart of a major city. The second school, OBS, operated from an Islamic framework located in an under-developed small transitioning suburb; and the last school, NBS, was situated in Al-Jahra, an "outlying area" populated by those labeled as bedouins (Longva, 2006). The participants' attitudes towards art education unfolded as I analyzed my visual observations of the participants' daily practices. I have produced a counter-hegemonic visual narrative by negotiating my many subjectivities and methods to gain new knowledge and insights. This approach has provided a holistic understanding of the environment in each site, in which attitudes and practices relating to art education have been acquired by the community. Operating from three different educational paradigms, each school applied a different approach to art education. The more Westernized school viewed art as an individual act which promoted creativity and expression. In the Islamic school art was viewed as an activity that required patterning (Stokrocki, 1986), and that the child needed to be guided and exposed to the appropriate images to follow. In the bedouin school, drawing activities were viewed as an opportunity for representing one's individual story as well as a skill for emergent literacy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2012

Science centres have been identified as an important resource in encouraging teenagers to choose higher education in science and technology. This is of interest to society, since there seems to be a problem in getting sufficient numbers to do so. And accomplishing this is sometimes described as a fatal question for a nation’s future prosperity and development. Still, there is an international trend where teenagers fail to visit science centres.   Through research, little is known about what is interesting or useful to the public, as well as how to reach those who are ‘unengaged’. Considering teenagers as exponents for what distinguishes today’s society makes their apparent unwillingness to participate in science centres interesting to study with regards to what culture, history and ideology these centres were initially produced. Hence, from this point of view, what is missing in science centres that would make them interesting for the young people of today?   Many studies of learning in science centres have come to focus on visitors who visit voluntarily and how well the embedded messages in the exhibits have been acknowledged by these visitors. This study focuses instead on teenagers who are reluctant to participate in science centres, with their perspective of science centres as the point of departure, specifically what kind of social activities are formed in their encounters with science centre exhibits. This encounter is regarded as an encounter between the two different practices of the science centre and the teenagers. The applied theoretical perspective is mainly assembled from socio-cultural theories of learning.   This research is a microanalytic study of five teenagers who were equipped with video cameras and asked to film a visit to the local science centre, Teknikens Hus. The films were later discussed in a focus-group interview consisting of the teenagers and the researcher. Visual ethnography provided the theoretical framework for this research design.   The results showed that the teenagers want to use exhibits to have the authority of interpretations and the possibilities to contribute to the meaning of the activity. At the same time, they want to use the exhibits in a way that the activities become places for developing social identity. To negotiate the meaning of the exhibits there is a need for an openness that may be constrained by too inflexible and limiting exhibit designs. This pattern is described as two different forms of participation in the exhibits; ignoring or extending the intended meaning of the exhibits. Meaningfulness also demands a closeness created by connections between the exhibit and the user’s personal experiences. This pattern is described as two different ways in which the teenagers identified the exhibits; exhibits which they dissociated from or to which they had an ongoing relationship. Providing a space for negotiation seems crucial to inviting teenagers into opportunities of meaningful experiences, even more significant than any specific physical feature in the exhibit.   The teenagers’ agenda, in which forming practices where they can express themselves and contribute to the meaning seem to be very important, appears not to be greatly enabled by science centre exhibits. In this situation they learn to not participate. Science and technology represented in this matter show a ‘ready-made’ world that they cannot change. The missing link in learning in science centres is here described as the part of the meaning making process where the teenagers get to re-negotiate the meaning of the activities in the centre and use the exhibits as tools to accomplish this.

Favelas are Brazilian informal housing settlements that are areas of concentrated poverty. In Rio de Janeiro, favelas are perceived as areas of heightened criminal activity and violence, and residents experience discrimination, and little access to quality education and employment opportunities. In this context, hundreds of non-formal educational arts and leisure programs work to build the self-esteem and identity of youth in Rio’s favelas as a way of preventing the youth from negative local influences. The Morrinho organization, located in the Pereira da Silva favela in Rio, uses art as a way for the local male youth to communicate their lived reality. This study used a visual critical ethnographic methodology to describe the way in which the Morrinho participants interpret living in a favela. Seventeen semi-structured interviews with young men aged 15 to 29, the feature-length documentary film on the organization, 206 researcher produced documentary style photographs of the Morrinho artwork, and the researcher’s field notes were analyzed. Truth claims, ways of seeing as communicated through words and actions, were induced through a cyclical process of reconstructive horizon analysis that incorporated the societal context and critical theory. The participants communicated their concerns about life in a favela; however, they did not describe their societal positions in terms of complete marginalization. They named multiple benefits of living in Pereira da Silva, discussed positive and negative experiences in school, and described ways they circumvented discrimination. Morrinho as an organization was described as an enthralling game and a social project that benefited dozens of local youth. Character development was a valuable result of participation at Morrinho. The Morrinho artwork communicates a nuanced vision of both benevolent and violent social actors, and counters the overwhelmingly negative dominant characterization of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. This study has implications for an inclusive critical pedagogy and the use of art as a means to facilitate a transformative education. Further research is recommended to explore terminology used to refer to favelas, and perceptions that favela residents have of their experiences in public education.

Mobile phone technologies are transforming how young people think, work, play and relate to each other. However, a central concern for the thesis is that education policy and practice far too often resembles an industrial model that is standardised, mechanistic and linear and that rarely reflects the informational, dynamic and creative lives of young people. In particular, the educational project fails to connect with the way young people use their mobile phone technologies to multi-task, connect, and create content at a precipitous rate. This thesis focuses on the ways in which mobile phone technology is now a significant influence in the way young people develop a sense of self, and a sense of identity and agency that permeates the way they engage with education. The specific research questions that follow from this are: how are young peoples’ identities shaping the meaning and use of mobile phones within (im)material culture? How is the relationship between identity and the creation and use of social space being defined through mobile phone technology? And, taken together how might these processes of identity development influence the way the educational project develops in the future? This thesis addressed these aims by conducting a visual ethnographic study over three years, using participation observation in a sixth-form college in the UK that included video interviews with seven college students. The research has produced a conceptual framework that documents a number of key findings that include: (a) the mobile phone has an immediate symbolic value to young people providing signals about the user’s identity, or presentation of the self; (b) the mobile phone also helps facilitate the performance of lived experiences and is actively part of assisting in various forms of agency. (c) The mobile phone enables a constant flow of (re)presentations of young people that reflects a fluidity of identity that characterises key aspects of contemporary social life. Finally, (d) the mobile phone also supports and enhances the maintenance of social space through the maintenance of social groups and also crucially, the feeling of being oneself. The main conclusion drawn from this research is that too often education systems overlook that fact that learning for young people is typically, and inevitably, personal and yet at the same time located in connected, information-driven environments that are predisposed to digital technologies. Therefore, this research argues for educational policy makers and practitioners to think creatively about how to develop education in ways that fundamentally support young people in their (re)construction of a personalised landscape for learning through their mobile phone technologies.

This work takes as its starting point the idea that awareness and understanding of the complex nature of relationships, among people and the natural and built environment, is of crucial importance against the background of the ongoing environmental crisis. The author explores how holding art workshops can contribute with specific knowledge about this complexity. In early 2020, the author held art workshops in the South African port city of Durban, in a gallery area adjacent to a park. Qualitative methods, including ethnography and visual methods, were put to use in the study which developed from this project. The stages of fieldwork, processing and analysis are described in detail. The study’s posthumanist theoretical framework draws in insights from Arts-Based Environmental Education and Art Education for Sustainable Development, as well as current thinking about design and creativity. These ideas, together with the choice of methods, facilitated an awareness of correspondences, or productive similarities, among elements from the workshops and the surrounding area. Noticing correspondences like these widened the project’s focus to include informants, groups and stories from the edges of the field, and opened up possibilities for relating local insights to larger concerns. The study considers how holding art workshops can provide opportunities for research into environmental, educational and social issues. It concludes with a discussion about how thinking about complexity can be productive within the field of Art Education.

No description available.

Focusing on the everyday lives of middle-class English families in a medium size town situated in the Midlands, this doctoral thesis contributes to anthropological debates on the topics of human agency, time, domesticity, mothering, and kinship. Organized upon the idea that cultural models of time are inextricably linked to understandings of agency (Greenhouse 1996), the thesis links Moore s (2011) post-vitalist theoretical framework and the work of Foucault (1990, 2000) on ethical practices, with Gershon s (2011) critique of neoliberal agency . The concept of ordinary agency is proposed for situating everyday actions as significant actions that contribute to social transformation. Three cultural models of time are identified spontaneity, anticipation and family time and the types of ordinary agencies that they engage are described in three dedicated chapters. The first chapter discusses the theoretical framework of the thesis. The second chapter addresses methodological issues, and discusses the methods that the author developed during her ethnographic fieldwork for looking at people s relationships with time. The third chapter addresses the time mode of spontaneity, presenting ethnographic examples of digital media use at home, and introducing theoretical tools for situating the forms of agency engendered by spontaneity. The fourth chapter looks at the time mode of anticipation in relation to mothering, motherhood and care. This chapter is accompanied by a video component, titled Mum s Cup and situated in the appendix of the thesis. Based on material that the participants filmed in solitude, for a self-interviewing with video task, Mum s Cup is a visual point of departure for theorising the Mother-Multiple ontological position that is described in chapter IV. Alongside providing a visual ethnographic lever for endorsing a theoretical concept, the video project also reflects on the relationship between the researcher and the participants, a relationship that, for various reasons (some related to length limitations), is not fully described in the textual corpus of the thesis. Discussing two types of domestic sociality, the fifth chapter looks at family time and at the forms of agency engendered by the idea and by the experience of having a family-style lifestyle (Strathern 1992), and it draws on, and contributes to, bodies of literature on English kinship. The last chapter addresses the context of the research which is an interdisciplinary project looking at domestic energy consumption ; it situates the position of the author in relation to the domestic sustainability agenda and to debates on interdisciplinarity, and it formulates ideas about possible applications that the anthropological knowledge gained by the author through her research could have in relation to the context that originally framed and facilitated the research.

Denna studie syftar mot att få ytterligare kunskap om lingvistiska landskap i en skolas miljö genom att undersöka hur flerspråkighet gestaltas i fysiska miljöer. Undersökningen har gjorts i en skola i norra Sverige och byggs upp av det sociokulturella perspektivets föreställning om språkets betydelse gällande elevers individ- och kunskapsutveckling. Vidare har skolan plats för cirka 700 elever, vilket har medfört att undersökningen koncentrerat sig på miljöer för elever i årskurs F–3. Studien ramas in av visuell etnografi som handlar mer om en kunskapsproduktion snarare än att endast samla in data. Totalt producerades 53 fotografier från skolans lingvistiska landskap som har stöttats upp av skriftliga fältanteckningar. Kombinationen av visuella och skriftliga fältanteckningar har använts för att skapa bredd i materialet. Den visuella etnografin är beroende av hur bilden används och tolkas för att synliggöra betydelser inom flerspråkighet. Därmed användes kvalitativ innehållsanalys med en konventionell ansats. Detta medförde att koder, etiketter och kategorier växte fram ur data. I det resultat som framställts visar det lingvistiska landskapet indikationer på fokus, underförstådda budskap och tankesätt om flerspråkighet. Studien påvisar att det växande forskningsfältet lingvistiska landskap kan medvetandegöra värdefull information om språkliga och sociala aspekter med bäring på elevers lärande. / This study aims to get further knowledge about linguistic landscapes in a school's environment by examining how multilingualism is shaped in physical environments. The study was conducted in a school in northern Sweden and is based on the socio-cultural perspective's idea of the importance of language regarding pupils' development both in terms of identity and knowledge. Furthermore, the school was built for about 700 pupils, which has meant that the study concentrated on environments for preschool class to year three. This study is framed by visual ethnography, which focus more on a knowledge production rather than just collecting data. The material consists of 53 produced photographs from the school's linguistic landscape combined with written fieldnotes. Likewise, the visual ethnography depends on how the image is used and interpreted to make visible meanings in multilingualism. Thus, qualitative content analysis with a conventional approach was used. This meant that codes, labels and categories emerged from the data. In the results presented, the linguistic landscape shows indications of focus, implicit messages and ways of thinking about multilingualism. The study shows that the growing research field of linguistic landscapes can raise awareness of valuable information about linguistic and social aspects based on pupils' learning.