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This thesis offers a contribution to ongoing attempts to rethink human inhabitation of the earth in light of the Anthropocene. Adopting an autoethnographic approach to research as a process, the thesis takes its reader on a journey that begins with a recognition that we're living on a damaged planet and ends with the idea of scarred landscapes. Through a 3-day field encounter with Ithaca, Greece, I reflect on the problematic idea of landscape as a wellspring for identity, arguing that understanding landscape as a site of existential inhabitation offers an impossible promise of a recovery of a primordial self. I find the experience dissatisfying and question the role of sentimentality in landscape research. I use this field encounter as a springboard to build the scarred landscapes concept from three ingredients: (i) rupture, (ii) suture, and (iii) scar. I argue that research interested in embodied landscape practices must consider the question - how do you find direction when no direction makes sense? Drawing on my fieldwork training in aerial arts for 5-months, I consider ideas of verticality and embodiment as one response to this question. I argue that the practice of intentional falling provides insights into how to survive 'moments of crisis'. Thinking through ideas of lines and holes, I show how we might move-with and through descent and how we might learn to co-exist with decline, precarity and the challenge of 'not knowing'.

The question if climate is real is occasioned by a discrepancy between the increased certainty that climate change is being experienced and the impossibility of experiencing climate (change) according to the very framework which provides the basis for this certainty: climate science. I trace this discrepancy back to a question of realism: What sort of realism is necessary in order to make sense of experiences of climate and its changes? In this thesis, I develop a phenomeno-logical realism as a response, which dispels the false dichotomy between 'objective' scientific knowledge and 'subjective' experience. I do so along three main lines of argument: (i) I turn to the first use of 'phenomenology' in Anglo-American geography, namely in Sauer's Morpholo-gy of landscape. By reflecting on what occasioned Sauer to turn to phenomenology, I identify a precedent for my question "Is climate real?" in the history of geography. Informed by the theo-ry Sauer draws on, I develop a Sauerian phenomenology beyond what Sauer himself wrote; an incipient phenomenological realism in geography. (ii) I go on to turn to the origin of the very concept of climate itself, namely the Ancient Greek term klima [κλίμα]. After highlighting the latent, abstract nature of klima, the traces of which extend into our present-day scientific under-standing of climate, I undertake a counterfactual etymology. I (re-)construct a concept of climate that might have emerged based on a different Ancient Greek term: hora [ὥρα]. Through a geo-graphical reading of Plato's dialogues, I develop a first phenomenological account of climate and its changes. Turning to Aristotle's work on Metaphysics, I go on to give further shape to a phenomenological realism by reflecting on what sort of 'thing' or 'being' climate is. Finally, (iii) I situate my own phenomenological approach in the history of phenomenology in geogra-phy. I argue that the introduction of phenomenological theory into human geography as a reac-tion to positivism has led to a subjectivistic or anti-realist understanding of phenomenology. Hence, my doctoral project is both to account for the experiential reality of climate and its changes and, by example, to detail an alternative geographical approach to phenomenology. I conclude with a re-reading of Husserl's later work, informed by the phenomenological chal-lenges climate presents one with. In summary, the question if climate is real is not merely philo-sophical. What one takes to be real inevitably shapes how one makes sense of experience and what is deemed to be possible in the future. Much public discourse around climate change in-formed by climate science is increasingly concerned with the narrowing down of reality in or-der to instil a sense of urgency. Here, a phenomenological approach promises to open up new ways of making sense of living in a changing climate.

This thesis explores the 'becoming' of mineral resources in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, and the role that geoscience knowledge and bodily-material relations play in that process. Mineral resources are assembled through a diversity of practices and knowledges which enable their identification, bounding and circulation within global economies. Existing literatures have explored the circulation, valuation and demands for commodities largely from a cultural perspective. In response, this thesis presents another approach which focusses on the relations between geological materials and the bodies and emotions of scientists and citizens. This is done by drawing on literatures from cultural and resource geographies and science and technology studies. The 'becoming' of resources is examined at three sites. First, this thesis follows the production of geological bedrock maps (which are the first step in finding minerals) by applying ethnographic methods of shadowing geologists working both in the office and field in the NWT. There, the movement of geologists through geological spaces and their enchantment with geological materials are shown as being crucial to the production of geoscience knowledge. This contributes to our understanding of the significance of bodily material relations in the production of geoscience knowledge, which has been unrecognised in existing resource geography literatures. Second, this thesis digs into how a mineral potential map (MPM) was created for part of the NWT with the intention of supporting an all-season road to the Arctic coast in Nunavut. There, using interviews with economic geologists and comparisons with industry best-practice guidelines, a critique about how well the MPM allows us to understand what minerals lie underground is delivered. As a result, existing literature on volume and resource accounting is developed with nuanced understanding of how geological materiality challenges resource accounting methods, and the mechanisms geoscientists use to counter this. Third, this thesis explores a site where geoscience materials are used by the Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) within a public engagement context to improve a community's receptiveness to mineral resource development. There, the thesis shows how the GNWT applies a public deficit model and utilises geoscience materials to try to 'educate' community members and influence their emotions around the extractive industry. The GNWT is shown as siting the problem of resource development mistrust not as an issue of the government's communication and engagement technique, but rather as one of public ignorance and mistrust in science. As a result, existing literature on public engagement, materials and emotions are developed.

Exploring post-conflict landscapes is both complex and controversial in heritage studies. Where the past is still a part of living memory, the act of remembering and forgetting means that even amongst those that largely agree on what occurred, there will still be discrepancies and disagreements. This poses challenges for those studying legacies of past conflict. Rather than promote an 'authorised' account of the past however, there is scope to adopt more inclusive approaches to address risky and contested heritage. This thesis does this by using Deep Mapping as a holistic approach to explore and understand complex and contested pasts in the field of (post-)conflict archaeology. Deep Mapping is gaining wider currency in the humanities, and especially digital humanities, as scholars struggle to view and analyse the 'digital deluge' of data increasingly available to them. However, Deep Maps and Deep Mapping has been largely ignored by archaeologists despite its potential to handle complex, multi-vocal history. This may in part be due to the fact Deep Maps remain under theorised and methodologically diffuse. To this end, this thesis provides the first detailed exploration of what renders a map 'deep', by tracing the concept of Deep Mapping and defining and developing a transferable methodology to assist in the research of post-conflict landscapes. The methodology is formed through combining landscape archaeology, oral histories, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). With an empirical focus on the archaeologies of former World War II military airfields in Northern Ireland as well-founded exemplars, key findings of the research include Deep Mapping's potential for aiding academic enquiry into complex and controversial landscapes by enabling a framework which incorporates past, present and future knowledge and understandings. The thesis explores Deep Mapping methodologies through three steps, starting first with creating a GIS-based series of landscape layers from historic and modern maps, aerial imagery, and archaeological evidence, then secondly drawing on local oral histories, and thirdly, integrating these to create an interactive, deeper mapping experience. The thesis contributes more widely to questions in conflict archaeology, historical and cultural geography, critical cartography, and landscape studies. The result of this thesis is a fully documented, multi-faceted, series of exemplar Deep Maps based on the unique and important history of Northern Ireland military airfields over time, a literature review reflecting the current state-of-the-art in the application of Deep Maps, and a nuanced and further developed methodology which presents the opportunities and challenges of using Deep Maps in scholarship and as way of sharing complex material holistically.

This thesis aims to understand how post-capitalist life is made possible in eco-communities and how it might travel beyond them. I do so with a view of uncovering attempts at thinking and doing differently in ways that may guide us in the Anthropocene (Clark, 2011: 162, see Gibson- Graham and Roelvink, 2009; Haraway, 2008; Povinelli, 2011; Tsing, 2015), whilst simultaneously responding to calls to study such sites in further depth as potential 'niches' with lessons to help address the excesses of capitalism and the associated climate crises (Litfin, 2014; Pickerill, 2017). I have conducted an ethnographic study of three eco-communities in Southwestern France and Catalonia in a broadly comparative vein and have drawn on the disparate body of literature around post-capitalist transformations and eco-communities on one hand, and more-than-human and non-representational geographies on the other. I have worked to address five gaps in the literature on eco-communities, namely, a lack of attention to embodiment and affect and to everyday material practices, their more-than-human constitution, their contribution to economic transformations, and finally, their endurance over time. I argue that repetitive, more-than-human affective relations along with moral-political convictions are crucial to understanding how post-capitalist transformations come about, especially when examining how affective relations and moral-political convictions emerge as motivations, how they are cultivated and passed onto to others, and how difficulties in doing so might arise over time. I have laid out this central argument in four space-times of transformation, that is, the variegated space-times of motivational experiences to move to an eco-community, the building of post-capitalist commons on site, the transformative potential of economic practices in and beyond the sites and finally, the endurance of post-capitalist practices over prolonged periods of time.

Traditional approaches to reportage illustration in the UK are defined by what we can see. Rather than the classification of subject matter as visible or invisible, this thesis explores a scape 'describing a wide view of a particular type' (scape, n.d.) of visibility relating to the geographic, cultural, and historic appearances of the deserted medieval village of Northeye. Forming part of the Ramsar wetland Pevensey Levels, East Sussex, this transformative landscape has become a vehicle to critically respond to Embury and Minichiello's definition of the reportage illustrator as 'a particular kind of visual journalist, capturing the dynamics of unfolding events through their artwork. Reportage combines sketching the appearance of the scene as well as striving to understand and communicate a story through visual language.' (Embury and Minichiello, 2018, p. 1). Positioning illustrative documentary as interpretive through multi method approaches to visual inquiry, this response is informed by fields of thinking originating from archaeology, cultural geography, and heritage studies. By conducting an expanded practical exploration of time, matter, and movement in relation to Northeye, the intersection of illustration and adjacent humanity disciplines is formalised in this thesis as a key contribution to knowledge in place research. It is described here as an area of hybrid practice 'graphic humanities' and consolidates a methodology for image making as both knowledge generation and communication. The thesis and resulting creative artefacts intend to bring illustration research into discourses surrounding heritage, identity, and place engagement in culturally underserved locations. By offering diverse ways of visualising the world, illustrators can define a distinct function in research environments and bring much needed knowledge and debate to the challenges, ethics, and impact of visual representation across professional, pedagogic, and public territories.

What might it mean if extinction doesn't last forever? This thesis grapples with that question through the case of the bucardo, an endemic subspecies of ibex from the Pyrenees, Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica. The bucardo has long been an emblematic feature of the Pyrenean landscape. Hunting drove it to near extinction by the start of the twentieth century. The Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido was founded in 1918 in part to protect the bucardo, yet despite conservation efforts, the population did not recover. The last bucardo - known internationally as Celia - died in 2000. A few months before her death, she had been captured, and a frozen tissue sample was used to create a clone. In 2003 a cloned bucardo was born in a laboratory in Zaragoza. The animal died seven minutes later, yet the cloning is widely celebrated as the first 'de-extinction'. This biological intervention unsettles numerous epistemological assumptions regarding extinction, nature, and death. In 2014, the bucardo's story was further complicated when ecologists in the French Pyrenees released a different ibex subspecies (from central Spain). Today, these ibex occupy the same ecological niche as the extinct bucardo, raising related questions about the authenticity of ecological recovery. Combining approaches from more-than-human and spectral geographies, I draw on extensive ethnographic and historical fieldwork in Spain and France to theorise haunting as an ecological event. I consider the various spectral lives of the bucardo in the Pyrenees, variously mourned, cloned, and replicated. I explore how different groups of people understand the bucardo's extinction, cloning, and the release of related animals as ecological proxies. The bucardo exemplifies an emergent, liminal state between the previously discrete binary of extinct and extant, which I call 'de/extinction'. Celia's ghosts unsettle and complicate the categories of presence/absence, life/death, and extinct/extant.

This practice based interdisciplinary research combines photography with cultural geography to explore how contemporary international neo-nomadic countercultural identity is manifested, reinforced and maintained through customised vehicles used as homes, and other forms of makeshift self-made dwellings situated in a remote mountainous region of south-east Spain. Large format analogue photographs made in the field act as the primary source of reference and conduit through which the construction of countercultural identities are examined and explained. Theories concerning place, space, material culture and home provide a framework to approach, deconstruct and interpret the photographs to offer alternative perceptions of countercultural identity. In deliberately excluding people from the colour photographs, using diffused lighting conditions and a system that enables seeing fine details, the intention is to encourage critical evaluation without the distraction of a physical human presence. Photographs are discussed to demonstrate how place, space, and materiality contribute to the construction of a countercultural self, and provide ways in which people can indicate otherness. Analysing dwellings and habitats I draw out differences in countercultural identities. The thesis also considers how neo-nomadic countercultures can hold on to historic identities, or adapt and evolve when transposed to a foreign country. Reflecting on certain objects and materials that connect the counterculture to the industrialised world, I consider some possible contradictions and inherent paradoxes of attempting to escape the dominant society, while being entangled in it and dependent on it for survival. The purpose of this research is to contribute to the questioning and understanding of current neo-nomadic countercultural identity, through intersecting aesthetically and conceptually considered photographic practice with cultural geography and arguing for their capacity to enrich each other as a means of producing alternative understandings and progressing geographic and photographic knowledge.

This thesis assesses the impact and legacy of the medieval monastery on the historic landscape up to the present day, examining both physical topography and how landscapes have been perceived and experienced; exploring not only what mark has been left, but also what embedded memory, recognising that the stories about landscape are as important as material evidence. A hypothesis that the topographical legacy of monasticism has remained a central element (though often hidden or unseen) underscoring the genius loci of the places looked at is explored, examining how this has influenced landscape evolution, experience and remembrance. Monastic estates have traditionally rarely received comprehensive attention from landscape archaeologists and historians, and few studies have attempted to track the subsequent evolution of these estates beyond the Dissolution within the context of their monastic antecedents. The research questions of this project are addressed through the detailed examination of landscapes associated with several monastic houses in the southern Welsh Marches and the tracing of their later progression. Adopting an interdisciplinary and multi-layered approach, a core emphasis on topographical change and continuity is supported by an examination of shifting conceptions of cultural value. Consequently, the study interweaves themes which have long dominated historical and archaeological discourse around landscape with a more recent interest in how places and landscapes are perceived, appreciated and codified in both the past and present. The tools of conventional landscape history and archaeology are deployed, combined with approaches more commonly associated with cultural geography to provide a comprehensive analysis - a deep topography - of the perceptions and realities of these complex landscapes. Presented here is a research project which can ultimately contribute to informing decisions on how such landscapes with complex pasts and presents are managed, utilised and presented to the wider public; an urgent need, now more than ever, as competing land-use pressures play out across rural and urban Britain, and the cultural and economic value of 'heritage assets' is increasingly seen to be realised on a landscape rather than a fragmented site-based level.

This doctoral thesis offers an analysis of the affective communities of amateur theatre. This study is motivated by the need to engage seriously with amateur dramatics as a subject of scholarly investigation, and pays particular attention to the spaces and processes involved in amateur theatre-making that are often hidden from public view. Drawing on research conducted with the Settlement Players, an amateur dramatics group situated in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, this thesis details empirical research with the group between the years 2014 and 2016. Specifically, this thesis analyses amateur dramatics as a craft and creative practice. It places focus on the people involved in backstage roles as set builders, set designers and costume-makers, aspects of theatre-making that has often been neglected by theatre and performance scholars. This interdisciplinary study foregrounds the backstage work that happens before, after and around a performance rather than the performance itself, and draws on theatre and performance studies, cultural geography and design theory to analyse the amateur theatre-makers' craft. Three empirical chapters foreground amateur dramatics as a process rather than a product, by paying particular attention to the spatial, material, embodied and technical dimensions of the amateur theatre-making over the thing produced - the play, the theatrical set, the costume. It explores how amateur theatre-makers have the capacity to transform mundane, everyday spaces through the process of their creative 'doings', and in doing so can become biographically bound to them; how amateur theatre-makers fashion workspaces within their homes and in doing so create a space in which they can perform their creative identities, outside of the theatre space; and how processes such as repair and DIY characterise the amateur theatre-makers' craft. This research speaks to debates in amateur studies, to scholars in the fields of cultural geography and design whose interests lie in the processes and spaces of amateur creativity, and to the emerging field of scholarly research into backstage work within theatre and performance.

This thesis examines pain in performance art and, as the subtitle suggests, it addresses notions of bearing witness by examining art practices that cross the boundaries of performance art, social practice, illness, activism, and other forms of confrontation with the male body. Bearing witness takes up ideas of witnessing as 'a collective sensorial practice of listening to bodies' , as well as concerns with 'seeing how seeing takes place,' which allows possibilities of moving beyond an audience's role as witnesses and drawing attention to the very conditions of witnessing itself. To explore these ideas, this thesis analyses the work of three artists - Ron Athey, Martin O'Brien and Ulay - exploring ideas of how witnessing pain operates through three different sites: audiencing, curating and documenting. This analysis demonstrates the creative and political potential that a range of sites and ways of witnessing pain offers audiences, artists, and curators. It explores how pain serves as a critical tool, whether functioning metaphorically, conceptually, or literally, to understand how the body of the artist tells of their most intimate experiences, thus requiring that we once again revisit the place and potency of the body in performance art and its intersections within a range of identities. By considering the work of these three cross-generational artists, and with the varying pain actions they deploy, this thesis extends and develops interdisciplinary work on performing bodies, pain, and witnessing.

Recent calls from progressive, subaltern and postcolonial geopoliticians to move geopolitical scholarship away from its Western ontological bases have argued that more ethnographic studies centred on peripheral and dispossessed geographies need to be undertaken in order to integrate peripheralised agents and agencies in dominant ontologies of geopolitics. This thesis follows these calls. Through empirical data collected during a period of five months of fieldwork undertaken between October 2014 and March 2015, it investigates the ways through which an Indigenous community of the Canadian Arctic, Tulita (located in the Northwest Territories' Sahtu region) represents geopower. It suggests a semiotic reading of these representations in order to take the agency of other-than/more-than-human beings into account. In doing so, it identifies the ontological bases through which geopolitics can be indigenised. Drawing from Dene animist ontologies, it indeed introduces the notion of a place-contingent speculative geopolitics. Two overarching argumentative lines are pursued. First, this thesis contends that geopower operates through metamorphic refashionings of the material forms of, and signs associated with, space and place. Second, it infers from this that through this transformational process, geopower is able to create the conditions for alienating but also transcending experiences and meanings of place to emerge. It argues that this movement between conflictual and progressive understandings is dialectical in nature. In addition to its conceptual suggestions, this thesis makes three empirical contributions. First, it confirms that settler geopolitical narratives of sovereignty assertion in the North cannot be disentangled from capitalist and industrial political-economic processes. Second, it shows that these processes, and the geopolitical visions that subtend them, are materialised in space via the extension of the urban fabric into Indigenous lands. Third, it demonstrates that by assembling space ontologically in particular ways, geopower establishes (and entrenches) a geopolitical distinction between living/sovereign (or governmentalised) spaces and nonliving/bare spaces (or spaces of nothingness).

The repatriation of the human remains of Indigenous peoples collected within a colonial context has been the subject of debate within UK museums over the last 30 years, with many museums now having returned human remains to their countries of origin. Although the repatriation of human remains is often characterised as the 'journey home', there has been a lack of consideration of the physical presence and mobility of the remains and the meanings created as they move through different spaces. This study uses the repatriations from The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS) to Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii as case studies to consider three key areas: (i) the impact of repatriation on museum landscapes; (ii) the journey of the repatriated remains and how this mobility intersects with wider discussions about restitution, sovereignty, identity, relatedness, memory and memorialisation; and (iii) the repatriation archives, how they are thought about by the institutions that hold them and their future potential and meaning within a post-colonial context. Taking a more-than-representational approach and engaging with the materiality, mobility and agency of the repatriated remains and the documentation that relates to them, this study bridges the gap between research considering the approach of museums to repatriation, and ethnographic studies on the meanings of the return of ancestral remains to individual communities. Combining work on museum geographies, deathscapes and absence opens up new ways of theorising and discussing repatriation through understanding the process in terms of the tension between absence and presence, and human remains as being in or out of place. Through engaging with the materiality and agency of the remains and viewing repatriation through a spatial lens, this thesis deals with aspects of the process that have received little attention in previous studies, foregrounding the challenging nature of repatriation for communities, the issues around unprovenanced remains, and discussions about the control, management and meaning of information and data, identifying that a significant legacy of repatriation for RCS is the documentation the museum continues to hold. What the journey of the ancestral remains repatriated by RCS illustrates is the emotive materiality of the remains, and agency that they and the distributed repatriation archive have as actors within social networks. It is therefore proposed that the concept of repatriation as having problematised human remains collections within UK museums is replaced with a nuanced and contextually sensitive understanding that recognises the role of the human remains in social interactions that impact on the emotional geographies of museum practice, and that rather than framing repatriation as post-colonial act that is either political or therapeutic, the return of ancestral remains be understood as part of a process of decolonisation in which there is space for discussion, disagreement and debate amongst all stakeholders.

This thesis examines everyday mapping practices in our digital age. It builds on an eighteen-month ethnographic study of a diverse group of participants, including walkers, cyclists and drivers, leisure seekers, artists, and amateur and professional map makers based in London and surrounding areas. The thesis responds to two primary aims: firstly, it addresses how contemporary mapping practices are embedded in the cultural geographies of everyday life; secondly, it investigates how digital technologies are affecting contemporary mapping practices, and ultimately everyday experiences of place. Drawing from literature on place, digital technology, critical cartography, cartographic practice, and everyday geographies, the thesis brings both an empirical and theoretical contribution to current studies of maps and map users, socio-technical practice and conceptualisations of place. Overall it highlights the tensions, possibilities and limits of our current socio-technical moment, in which digital technologies are becoming more and more intertwined with our everyday experiences of the world, and traditional mapping technologies. The dissertation also makes a specific contribution to ethnographic studies of mapping cultures, as well as ethnographically-informed digital methodologies. Ethnographic materials are framed through the concept of interface, suggesting that contemporary mapping practices can only be understood by unpacking the minutia of everyday life, the relational properties of place and the power of maps. The first of the thematic chapters in the dissertation explores how a theory of mapping interfaces can shed light on how practices of navigation have been affected by digital mapping technology. The second chapter focuses on the practices of map making in both an amateur and professional context. The third chapter discusses the performativity of contemporary mapping practices. The following chapter discusses the conceptualisation of place in the digital age and shows how the intertwinement of digital technologies and everyday practices demands novel ways of thinking about place. The dissertation concludes with policy relevant suggestions as to how we might think about maps and technology when considering work relevant to everyday practice and place in the future.

Industry is attempting to meet its greenhouse gas emission targets by implementing energy efficiency measures. Technological solutions are often employed through the provision of onsite energy generation and improvements in heating and ventilation systems, despite Janda’s (2000) observation that ‘people use energy not buildings’, with the role of employees often overlooked. Researchers have also tended to ignore the important role of employees when examining energy use in the workplace (Andrews and Johnson, 2016). The unique aspect of the thesis is its attempt to address this gap in research by developing a multi-scalar workplace energy culture framework to inform research on energy use in an industrial workplace. In developing the workplace energy culture framework, the thesis argues that current approaches to examining energy use offer little opportunity for application in the workplace. The workplace energy culture framework provides a lens to examine and gain an understanding of the individual and organisational determinants of energy use. In the thesis, it has been operationalised through a mixed-methods case study approach consisting of surveys, interviews, focus groups and observations. Taken together, these provide both theoretical and methodological insights that could be deployed in other settings. BAE Systems is the collaborative partner of this EPSRC CASE award research, and the workplace energy culture framework was initially applied to one of its UK manufacturing facilities before being deployed to inform research on two US sites. An examination of the energy culture at the UK site provides a rich empirical insight into employees’ attitudes towards energy use on the site. It also highlights the various organisational determinants of energy use, such as the physical environment, wider organisational culture, sub-cultures and methods of communication. This thesis details how interventions seeking to improve energy efficiency – such as ISO 50001 – can target determinants of the framework, which can lead to improvements in energy efficiency and change the site energy culture. The study of various sites also provides insights into how energy cultures change with geography.

This thesis empirically investigates three participatory artworks in London, focusing specifically on the encounters and relations they created. Drawing from the geographies of art, geographies of materiality and new materialism, social geographies of encounter, and art theory and history, this thesis argues for a wider understanding of the encounter in Geography, subsequently applying this to the case study artworks. A cultural geography of encounter, it is suggested, is to attend to the complexities of making, mediating, and material relationships involved in participatory art. The first empirical chapter follows a 'nomadic sculpture' around the borough of Tower Hamlets and investigates the type of connectivity and encounters it generated between participants. The second empirical chapter looks at a series of art workshops and investigates the emergence of a collaborative atmosphere that developed within and around the group of participants. The third empirical chapter critically engages with the socio-political relations of creative labour in the production of a socially engaged art project. The fourth empirical chapter draws from the previous case study artwork, but focuses on how gallery assistants played a mediating role between the public and the exhibition. It then turns to the materiality of the exhibition and how this mediated a particular more-than-human public. The concluding chapter draws from across each of the case study artworks identifying and discussing three particular understandings of 'relations' that emerged. Categorised as 'makings', 'mediations' and 'materialities', it uses these as a framework to tie the case studies together and subsequently suggests them as methodological and conceptual tools for future geographical research on artworks that focus on creating encounters and relations.

This thesis presents a multi-sited and multi-scalar ethnography of the processes and practices through which producers attempt to designate food as heritage. Grounded in cultural geography, it adopts a cultural economy approach to addressing concerns within agro-food studies by joining in conversation notions of heritage, place-making and time. By underlining the intrinsic relation between articulations of time and constructions of place, this thesis further maps the alternative geographies of food. It engages with three overarching questions, drawing on research conducted within two heritage-based food initiatives in Mexico and Scotland, both linked to the Slow Food movement. These produce, respectively, a traditional sweet called pinole and 'real' bread. The thesis asks: what objectives are pursued through the heritagisation of food whereby various actors strategically coin foods as heritage? How is time articulated in the discourse of heritage food, and how do heritage food networks and producers understand time as a component of food quality? Finally, what senses of place emerge from the various uses of time as a quality in global, translocal and local heritage food discourses? This thesis explores Slow Food's heritage qualification scheme and the ensuing commodification of heritage food, as well as translocal networks, and practices of 'slow' production. Through empirical engagements it argues that the qualification of heritage foods is multifunctional and that various articulations of time enable small-scale producers to engage with a plethora of socio-economic and political issues. Numerous and at times conflicting constructions of place surface from the discourses woven around these two heritage products and problematise identity formation and narratives of the past linked to producers and communities. This thesis concludes that the constructions of place associated with heritage foods depend not only upon the authority and circumstances of actors articulating a heritage discourse, but also on the scale of the dissemination of that discourse, and on the notions and understandings of time associated with heritage and place.

This thesis aims to develop an intermodal surf travel writing through the exploration of, and engagement with, Haïti’s coastline. Actor-network-theory (ANT) provides the methodological and theoretical framework to explore and explain how the key topics - surf, travel (Haïti) and writing - are brought into productive conversation through translation across persons, artefacts and ideas as an expanding network. Fieldwork is structured and informed by postmodern ethnography as the primary research method of ANT approaches. The entire coastline of Haïti is explored through four research trips, where potential surfing locations are mapped, bringing together my practices as writer, traveller and surfer, theorised through ANT. Engagement with Haïti operates at two levels: the macro level is the rhythm and cycle of anabasis (moving from coast to interior) and katabasis (interior to coast); and the micro level is the activity of surfing and mapping of surf breaks, offering tropes for writing with surfing in mind. The resultant intermodal writing is also a means though which Haïti is both represented and celebrated. The core areas of study - surf, travel (Haïti) and writing - afford equal status (in correspondence with the methodological framework of ANT), as do the roles of geography, ethnography and writing. My holistic approach to research and writing is guided by the literal definition of both geography (‘writing out the earth’) and ethnography (‘writing out culture’). Both the practice based and discursive elements of the thesis also claim equal status. This research attempts to contribute original work to the subgenre of surf travel writing and its critical discourses, and writing on Haïti - each activity drawing on (and making particular contributions to) geography, and an ethnography that explicitly aims to ‘write out’ and celebrate Haïti’s coastscape (coastal landscape, seascape and culture).

This interdisciplinary research is situated within the practice and discourse of locative media at the confluence of art, location and technology. The practice-based research project aims to use the arts to address a crisis arising from rapid redevelopment in a marginal coastal town – Hayle, Cornwall. A recent supermarket build on a prominent Hayle heritage quay led to UNESCO’s threat to de-list the entire Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site, awarded only in 2006. Research builds on recent findings on the link between increased sense of self and community cohesion through connection to heritage and participation in the arts. Media artists, participants and theorists have indicated that locative media experiences can promote connection to landscapes and their histories. However, these claims are unsubstantiated by empirical research to date. This research seeks to redress that through systematic analysis (unusual in the arts and therefore distinct). The main research question posed was: Does locative media allow people to develop a deeper connection with landscape and, if so, how? A smartphone deep map app was created – an evocation of a Cornish post-industrial landscape assembled from audio memory traces, sound and visual images revealed using GPS and the moving body. The Hayle Churks app weaves past and present, absence and presence and digital content into physical place. The Hayle Churks app is a research tool and published creative practice that received a national award in 2014. The empirical data is an original contribution to knowledge. Additional contributions include a timeline – a historical overview of the relationship between locative media art and emerging technologies and a deep map app reference tool for artists. The research explores the role of immersion and embodiment and how recording and listening to audio and voice performance affect immersion. Readers of this thesis are encouraged to access the Hayle Churks smartphone app prior to and during reading.

In 2006 selected Cornish mining areas were validated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Here are found numerous remnants of the mining industry that justified Cornwall’s prominence from the Industrial Revolution up to the close of the last major mine in the 1990s. An essential part of that history is the trade of The Boulton and Watt Mining Company, formed when Midlands businessman Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) joined forces with Scotsman James Watt (1736-1819). This partnership influenced the history of Cornish mining and the whole Industrial Revolution. Traces of their endeavours remain on the Cornish landscape and in Cornish identity. Correspondence between the two men and Cornish mine manager Thomas Wilson (1748-1820) is held at the Cornish Records Office and is available online. Creative work began with these letters, seeking moments, words and gestures to resonate with narratives of the Cornish post-industrial landscape. These narratives were gathered through interviews with locals, tourists, students, mining enthusiasts and those who knew nothing of the Cornish industrial past, and were supported by experience and observation of the Cornish landscape. Poetry written from these sources strives to reflect upon contemporary landscape use and promote cultural ownership and understanding. To this aim, readings of the two collections were given in 2013 and the collections subsequently self-published. Responses to the work show that this project not only promoted Cornish industrial heritage but also prompted recognition of how stories of the contemporary Cornish landscape are intertwined with its history. This project’s partner was the King Edward Mine Museum, Troon, near Camborne, and its aims were supported by the Cornwall Record Office, Truro.

The aim of this research is to account for the life of an industrial site and to show the dynamism of the site by exploring what its trajectory in space and time can tell us about socio-economic and political tendencies occurring during its lifespan. This research will focus on the micro life of a particular industrial site in order to grasp the rhythm of societal change including its cultural and political overtones, and to explore the strategies of transformation of industrial sites in contemporary societies. In addition, this research aims to contribute to a better understanding of the concepts of waterfront regeneration and urban transformation by investigating the life of an industrial site. The objectives of the research are firstly to understand the site life and the rhythm of change of the examined industrial site with the intention of understanding the urban transformation, urban policy and planning. Secondly, to discuss how the site has been transformed, redeveloped and reused through time; and lastly to analyse the roles of various actors involved in the trajectory of the site. In order to support this argument, this research will benefit from inter-disciplinary literature studies. Three main bodies of literature will be put forward; these are waterfront redevelopment, cultural geography, and architectural theory. The dynamic life of the Tophane site in Istanbul is the case study that is analysed in this research. The Tophane site has been, and still is, a very controversial and multi-dimensional site with respect to its use and transformation. Due to its strategic location at the connection point of the Golden Horn and the Bosporus, overlooking the historical peninsula. It has been used for a variety of functions in its history, such as artillery barracks, warehouses, exhibition spaces for the Istanbul Art Biennials, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Arts as well as cruise port. It has been subject to some of the most controversial urban transformation proposals in Istanbul, both regarding the use of the site as well as the bidding processes associated with these proposals. This PhD will cover the different phases of this site's lifetime from the beginning of the twentieth century until 2014 and investigates the crucial roles played by various actors in its transformation and in the resistance to its transformation. The innovative aspect of the dissertation is that it crosses the boundaries of cultural geography and architectural theory. In addition, the original use of research methods such as thick description, actor network theory, controversy mapping and layering aspires to contribute to architectural studies. Furthermore, the focus on the Tophane site in Istanbul aims to expand the geographical scope of both waterfront redevelopment and cultural regeneration literature. The ultimate contribution of the dissertation is to demonstrate how a thorough analysis of the complexity and the versatile nature of a site, including its changing phases and layers, can lead to a better understanding of the macro scale processes that shape the urban environment.

The Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) and the Adelaide Festival, and their associated Fringe Festivals, are large international multi-arts events that focus on artistic excellence and annually imbue their host cities with month-long festive atmospheres. They are also mobilised within tourism campaigns and urban governance strategies to promote these cities as great places to live, work, and visit. In an era of festivalisation, in which festivals have become a popular urban entrepreneurial strategy to promote economic growth, foster social cohesion and civic pride,and advertise positive images of the city, these festivals give Adelaide and Edinburgh a competitive advantage by underwriting their cultural, creative, and cosmopolitan credentials. I argue, however, that beyond a brand identity, these events provide the dominant 'set of core images' (Shields 1991, p. 60), or place myth, that is widely held and circulated about both places and characterises them as Festival Cities. This Festival City place myth has had important long-term cultural effects beyond its instrumentalisation within place promotion and creative cities discourses and is contested by different groups. This study therefore combines cultural geography and theatre and performance studies methodologies to explore how these festivals are necessarily shaped and produced by their host cities, and conversely, how the festivals materially and discursively produce the city in turn. By analysing the festivals of Adelaide and Edinburgh as theatrical events that can be read as performances of the city, I interrogate their conditions of production and reception in order to highlight the competing agendas involved and to contribute to understandings of place in performance. A detailed, comparative analysis of similar events in two diverse geographic, cultural, and socio-political locations, moreover, reveals how global trends intersect with local conditions and highlights the contribution of these events, which were once rare but are now ubiquitous, to the social, cultural, and political life of cities.

People have varied and complex relationships with stone, in its raw geology and in its altered forms. Often, however, in cultural contexts, stone remains in the background, as a taken for granted and unremarkable element of the material world. In this thesis, stone moves into the foreground. The research presented here explores how close attention to those who work intimately with stone can disclose unexpected and absorbing stories. The cultural geologies extracted and presented in this thesis cast light on the diversity of ways in which people relate to, and with, the land; and experiment with a range of different ways in which these relations can be narrated. Set on the Jurassic Coast, in the south west of England, the stone exposures that emerge along the margin between land and sea offer a productive site for developing a cultural geological approach. The limestones, shales and clays are framed, in this work, by the narratives of quarrymen and geologists. The work explores how their particular knowledges are formed, and how they exist within wider historical and ecological understandings. Their narratives bring the stratigraphy to life, and draw attention to the hidden worlds within it. The different priorities and perspectives of quarrymen and geologists are shown to lead in different directions, interweave, or run parallel. The very specific languages and descriptions they employ reveal a level of complexity and richness of detail that is mirrored in the stone. Using an approach that combines close observation and creative practice, this study examines stone at a variety of scales, and in different contexts. The work engages with specific stone types, landscapes, voids, buildings and objects. Processes of working stone through practices of lettering, sculpture and masonry elicit understandings of the material that reach far beneath its surface. The absent spaces of quarries are then explored, showing how voids can be animated with knowledge, and how destructive processes can generate creative potential, when sensitively worked and considered. Lastly, the study draws all these ideas together in a discussion of stone assemblages in buildings, to see how voices from geology and quarrying can foster greater understanding of how buildings were constructed in the past, and how we conserve them into the future.

In 1963, M.H. Abrams suggested that the ultimate source of Wordsworth's poetry is the Bible, and, in particular, the New Testament. This thesis, however, demonstrates the importance of the Old Testament and offers the first extended analysis of Wordsworth's use of Old Testament rhetoric. It examines both his affectionate perceptions of the natural world, and the Biblical recollections that saturate his writing. The purpose is to align two critical discourses - on Scripture and topography - and in doing so, situate Wordsworth's sense of himself as a poet-prophet in both Britain and America. The four chapters are structured topographically (Dwelling, Vales, Mountains, Rivers), and organised around a phenomenological experience of lived space, as expressed in key poems. Close analysis of Wordsworth's poetic language from Descriptive Sketches to Yarrow Revisited reveals the influence of the Bible (and the recent analysis of sacred Hebrew poetry undertaken by Lowth), while the theories of Heidegger and Bachelard provide a conceptual approach to Wordsworth's investment in nature. The epilogue opens questions of Wordsworth's reception in America by exploring the awareness of cultural and physical geography and sense of Wordsworth's prophetic ministry amongst his heirs. The thesis concludes that Wordsworth's extensive recourse to scriptural language and the physical landscape strengthened his claim to be a Prophet of Nature. His poetry self-consciously adopted the universal 'language of men' - that of the King James Bible.

This thesis is about people on the move and what types of collective identities and sensations of belonging they produce and reproduce whilst moving. Through three cases of mobile ethnography with different professional groups - lorry drivers, musicians and politicians - I attempt to ascertain what kind of geographies of belonging guide and structure their daily lives. Each one of the empirical chapters focuses on different aspects of the relationship between mobility and identity, which is then linked with a broader problematic on European mobility. This thesis is a contribution to the field of studies on mobility in the European Union, attempting to demonstrate that European mobility may well be too much of an abstract category - a category that operates under the assumption that more mobility equals more cultural proximity and social togetherness amongst euro citizens - which veils many aspects of the quotidian social realities of many Europeans who are constantly mobile. Crisscrossing the data collected with recent insights from the new mobilities paradigm, I intend to show that everyday, large-scale mobilities contain a diverse array of strategies when it comes to producing and reproducing collective identities. Even though in some cases mobility may create proximity and foster deep sensations of belonging to an imagined European community, the contrary is also happening. Mobilities are not all the same. Mobilities follow different logics, different geographies and different schemes of identity reproduction. European mobility, instead of being an abstract category per se, is actually grounded in very diverse practices that reproduce forms of spatial injustice, the uneven and unequal distribution of power, and the dynamics of immobility that the Union holds in its territory itself. This is what this thesis is about.

Visual records of place remain to a large degree inadequate when attempting to make visible the ephemeral states of consciousness that underlie the damage wrought by brutal regimes, let alone make visible the extraordinary histories and power structures encoded in images and views. This practice-led dissertation examines an emerging critical landscape genre in post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia, and its relationship to specific themes such as identity, belonging, trauma and memory. The landscape genre was traditionally considered inadequate to use in expressions of resistance under apartheid, particularly in the socially conscious and reformist discourse of South African documentary photography. I argue that, as a result of historical and cultural shifts after the demise of apartheid in 1994, a shift in aesthetic and subject matter has occurred, one that has led to a more rigorous and interventionist engagement with the landscape genre. I demonstrate how, after 1994, photographers of the long-established documentary tradition, which was meant to record 'what is there' in a sharp, clear, legible and impartial manner, would continue to draw on devices of the documentary aesthetic, but in a more idiosyncratic way. I show how these post-apartheid, documentary landscapes both disrupt and complicate the conventional expectations involved in converting visual fields into knowledge. I further investigate, through my own experimental documentary work, the ideologically fraught aspects of landscape representation with their links to Calvinist and German Romantic aesthetics. I appropriate and disrupt certain tropes still prevalent in popular landscape depictions. I do this in an effort to reveal the complex and troubled relationship that these traditions share with issues of willed historical amnesia and recognition in contemporary Namibia. Through my practice and the examination of other photographers' and artists' work, this project aims to further a self-reflective and critical approach to the genre of landscape and issues of identity in post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia.

This thesis investigates the injunction to experiment in the social sciences and, more specifically, geography. This is both a geography of certain ways of thinking experiment, and an exploration of how particular strands of geographical thinking are being re-imagined and reworked as experimental under the influence of ideas and practices from within and beyond the discipline. Against the backdrop of recent debates about the status of experiment, it poses a number of key questions about what it means to be experimental, how experimental practices emerge and travel, and how these processes are inflected by the organization and atmospheres of particular sites of experimentation. These questions are addressed through a form of attentive participation at four key sites: The SenseLab and the Topological Media Lab in Montreal, the Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin, and FoAM in Brussels. Based upon these encounters, and drawing upon the work of a range of exemplary experimentalists, the thesis develops the argument that there are new spaces of experiment which are worthy of such examination as part of a renewal of experimentation within geographical thinking. As such, the thesis outlines the logics of these forms of experiment and proposes the notion of ecologies of experiment. It also speculates on the possibilities for re-imagining what constitutes a geographical experiment, foregrounding the necessity of reactivating experiment as an ongoing ethos that needs careful cultivation and tending.

This thesis explores how the art world negotiates what contemporary African art means, in the context of the international contemporary art system and in relation to the histories of Western perspectives on Africa. Using conceptual and methodological approaches drawn from cultural geography, it examines the field of contemporary African art, foregrounding the terms of negotiation framing contested geographical imaginations and ideas of Africa. The research considers curatorial practices, exhibitions, art institutions, networks and the wider art infrastructure as an arena in which geographical concepts and categories are formulated, debated and contested in relation to contemporary African art. It draws on interviews with artists, curators, gallerists, collectors and scholars, as well as ethnographic fieldwork conducted in institutions and at art events, to unpick the idea of 'contemporary African art' as a working category and conceptual frame. It reveals tensions running through the field hinging on questions of categorisation, scale and location, the geographical dimensions and implications of which are currently under-explored. The conclusions argue for the importance of geographical awareness in debates around contemporary art from Africa and its shifting position internationally, particularly in the context of globalising trends in the art world and beyond, which engender complex geographies of mobility, identity, belonging and opportunity. The thesis also highlights the relevance of debates around contemporary African art for geographers, proposing new directions in research on art within cultural geography.

The thesis that follows is interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together the fields of contemporary archaeology, cultural and historical Geography to explore the changing landscape of the Dean Forest and Wye Valley National Forest Park. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Forest of Dean was a significant industrial region, a landscape dominated by pitheads, tramroads and railways, coal mines, ironworks, and quarries. However, the twentieth century saw the radical transformation of this landscape, from industry to leisure. In the chapters that follow, it is aspects of this landscape transformation that are examined through the lens of non-representational theory, as each chapter explores the questions: what might a ‘more-than-representational’ approach to contemporary archaeology look like? And, what can archaeological perspectives offer in terms of the development of non-representational theory? Starting from the premise that contemporary archaeology is not just about the recent past, but about how we engage with the past from the perspective of the present, this thesis focuses upon those barely perceptible echoes from the past that have the power to move us in unexpected ways. As such, it examines not just the legacy of the past in the landscape, but its capacity to generate affective registers, to evoke and to unsettle. It develops a distinctly archaeological approach to considerations of materiality and time within non-representational theories, placing an emphasis on matter, memory and haunting, absence and presence. It focuses on new temporalities arising from the time of the ‘event’, new materialisms that are ‘more-than-representational’, and new ways of performing and practicing the archaeological.

The thesis discusses the development of nineteenth century responses to the United States. It hinges upon the premise that travel writing is narrative and that the travelling itself must therefore be constructed (or reconstructed) as narrative in order to make it available for writing. By applying narratology to the work of literary travel writers from Frances Trollope to Henry James I show the influence of travelling point of view and writing point of view on the narrative. Where these two points of view are in conflict I suggest reasons for this and identify signs in the narrative which display the disparity. There are several influences on point of view which are discussed in the thesis. The first is mode of travel: the development of steamboats and later locomotives increasingly divested travellers from the landscape through which they were travelling. I concentrate on Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain travelling by boat, and Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James travelling by rail to examine how mode of travel alters travelling point of view and influences the form of travel writing. The second is the frontier: writing from a liminal space creates a certain point of view and makes travel not only a passage but a rite of passage. I examine travel texts which discuss the Western frontier as well as the transatlantic frontier. As the opportunity for these frontier experiences diminished through the spread of American culture and developments in travel technology, so the point of view of the traveller changes. A third point of view is provided by European ideas of nature and beauty in nature. The failure of these when put against American landscapes such as the Mississippi, prairies, and Niagara forms a significant part of the thesis, the fourth chapter of which examines writing on Niagara Falls in guidebooks and the travel texts of Frances Trollope, Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony Trollope, Twain and James. Other points of view include seeing the United States through earlier travel texts and adopting a more autobiographical interest in travelogues. In the final chapter the thesis contains a discussion of the nature of truth in travel writing and the tendency towards fictionalisation. The thesis concludes by considering the implications for truth of having various travelling and writing points of view impact upon constructing narrative out of travel.

Art forms create representations of peoples and places. It can expressively convey their culture and identity. Many scholars have described culture and identity as processes rather than ‘things’, and these processes are affected by forces from within and outside a community. Tanzania’s unique and complex political and social history provide a space to analyze the effect of these forces on the representation of a community’s cultural identity. Production companies, creatives, and those in power influence identity and how the Tanzanian culture is portrayed globally and globally. Questions that investigate who is being represented, how they are being represented, who the representation is for, and who is doing the representing, are key. A qualitative discourse analysis was used to examine the images from ten Tanzanian music videos from the BonogFlava genre. Questions regarding power structures and history were used as the starting points to analyze the music videos. Subaltern and post-colonial studies provided foundational theories and methods in analyzing cultural identity and national culture of a post-colonial Tanzania. Images presented in the selected music videos present a classed, heteronormative, and masculine Tanzanian culture. This thesis is not meant to present the absolute truth about cultural representations in Tanzanian music videos, but instead provide a perspective on how to qualitatively research cultural identity in visual media while maintaining a reflexive position.

Commemorative landscapes are spaces that have a symbolic meaning to a group of people and are often identified by a government or by a local community. These landscapes act as “symbolic conduits” to both express and legitimize interpretations of the past, though geographic interpretations are largely limited to the American South and Europe (Alderman and Dywer 2012). This research seeks to better understand landscapes of commemoration and memorialization in Nebraska, specifically how memories of the West and pioneers are constructed and represented within heritage and history institutions. Applying methods in geography, public history and digital humanities, this research considers both physical and digital spaces in sense of commemorative places. Critical perspectives are used to deconstruct common museum exhibit narratives of white supremacy, misogyny, and racism. This thesis features three case studies: schoolhouse museums primarily present an idealized hyperlocal world of yesteryear. Digital spaces have become as important as physical ones, particularly in fostering community support in times of crisis. The majority of museums in the state commemorate European-American pioneer history, though challenges to these traditional narratives are becoming more common place. Advisor: Rebecca Buller

This research examines a) the rise of the human microbiome scholarship, b) the ways in which geographical thinking and methodologies could enhance this increasingly important line of inquiry, and c) the dangers of over-relying on this relatively new area of research. Advancement in computer technology brought about by the turn of the 21st century helped microbiologists and bioinformatics scholars to shed light on the vast ecology that covers different surfaces of the human body. During this period, microbiologists became aware of the importance of the surrounding environment in the creation and maintenance of the human microbiome. When trying to examine the extent to which environmental factors including locality influence the human microbiome, microbiologists inadvertently have used geographical techniques without engaging with their theoretical underpinnings. As a result their geographic analyses have been suffering from fallacies of spatial inference. Not only does this research enumerate those fallacies, but also present certain methods to sidestep them.Findings demonstrate that geographers and geographical techniques can provide fruitful insights for microbiologists. By moving beyond fallacies of spatial inference, scholars can examine the composition and function of the situated human microbiome one that is influenced by a socioeconomic structures present in everyday life. Using a political ecology framework, this research also highlights the dangers of over relying on the human microbiome paradigm. By connecting the rise of bioinformatics, precision nutrition and functional foods, to the exponential growth of fermented foods sales and consumption, this study shed light on important problems including the systematic erasure of traditional knowledges.

Abstract: The places of northwestern British Columbia, and the Indigenous and settler peoples who find work, build homes, establish communities, and sustain culture in these places, are often perceived as peripheral or overlooked, existing on the edge or outside of the notice, care, and understanding of the people and places seemingly at the centre of national or global significance. When attention is turned to northwestern British Columbia, it is often to report on issues related to the legacy and ongoing work of settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land, including missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, particularly along the infamous Highway of Tears; the successes and failures of the federal and provincial governments to respect Indigenous rights and title, such as in the landmark Delgamuukw-Gisdaywa court case; and First Nations’ acts of resistance, like the Unist’ot’en Camp, to resource transportation or extraction projects on their territories that they have not consented to. In this project, I turn to the work of writers and poets in northwestern British Columbia who portray and examine in their writing what it means—and what it could mean—for both Indigenous and settler peoples to call the same land home. In particular, I argue that the poetry and literary nonfiction of settler poet, essayist, and cultural geographer Sarah de Leeuw constructs creative narrative maps that unsettle readers from the certainty they might have in the success of settler colonialism. Additionally, her creative representations of personal experiences in the distinct physical and cultural geographies of the region call for reorienting ourselves in the way we think about and move through northwestern British Columbia so that we might envision other ways—potentially decolonial ways that respect Indigenous rights and title and dismantle settler privilege—of living, working, profiting, and building futures in these places. Each chapter in this dissertation takes up a significant theme in de Leeuw’s collections of literary nonfiction, Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 (2004) and Where It Hurts (2017), and her long poem, Skeena (2015), and locates my critical close reading of the texts at the intersections of scholarly and public dialogues, especially as they are unfolding in British Columbia, related to reconciliation and decolonization, settler colonialism, and literary cartography as a form and methodology of creative writing and reading practice. As the literary writing and culture of northwestern British Columbia continues to flourish and to grow its readership, I hope this critical analysis of the work of one of its emerging authors meaningfully contributes to and highlights the ongoing opportunity for examining the ways in which settler stories about the places they call home can collaborate in the work of creating and sustaining a more just world.

William Shakespeare’s works are widely regarded as the pillar of English literature in Western society. An understanding of Shakespearean literature is a form of symbolic or cultural capital, and a lack thereof signals that a person is uncultured, uneducated. However, in his own time, Shakespeare was not so highly regarded. To fully understand the evolution that Shakespeare and his works have undergone, one must consider the modern memory politics that reify the contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare in the Western world at liex de memoire (places of memory), which are shaped by the tumultuous sequence of historical movements that formed Shakespeare’s image. The Globe Theatre is a powerful place where the writer’s memory is actively curated to cement his legacy into a cohesive narrative. This narrative is selective by nature, unable to include all aspects of Shakespeare’s history. To fetishize means that a person, idea, or narrative, is first objectified, then given power as a fixed object of fascination. This fetishization also solidifies its reputational politics. As a fetishized object, any nuance is stripped away, and we are discouraged from understanding the inner workings of how it is reified and normalized. Because of this fetishization, a simple, unproblematic narrative is created. My main research question concerns the fetishization of Shakespeare, and the role that the Globe Theater plays in retelling, performing, and normalizing this fetish. How and to what extent does The Globe fetishize Shakespeare to create one narrative? To what degree is the modern Western gender and sexuality binary– the strict division of male versus female based on genitalia, and the attraction to the ‘opposite’ gender– upheld or critiqued? How is race and class portrayed at The Globe? I address these questions in a discourse analysis that explores how the Globe’s Research Bulletins, Such Stuff podcast, YouTube channel, and social media work to create and spread this fetish, as well as how this fetish both critiques and upholds ideas of gender identity, sexuality, class stereotypes, and racial biases. I conclude this thesis with suggestions on how the Globe might move forward to incorporate more diverse views to leverage this fetish as a means of social progression rather than repression.

This thesis is about encounters with the experimental sonic arts—be that with ‘experimental’ styles of music or non-musical forms of sound art—and how those disorienting, ungrounding experiences expose the shortcomings of the ideas we habitually hold about ourselves. Intersecting with conceptually diverse claims in cultural geography that dispel the image of the human individual as something altogether separable from the wider processes of the social, material world, my intervention, following Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza, is to argue that how we as humans generally perceive the world proves an inadequate frame of reference for understanding it. The thesis proposes an expressionistic style of thought that operates beyond humanist frames of apprehension and that therefore inevitably unsettles the self-evidence of what we know of ourselves. The thesis proceeds in relays between encounters with the sonic arts and theoretical abstraction in an attempt to think expressionistically about human experience in three registers: desire, temporality, and incorporeality. Working through these registers, the thesis extends outwards from a core problem of ‘inadequate ideas’ that I take from Deleuze and Spinoza, finding resources in the work of Henri Bergson and Félix Guattari that allow me to extract different ideas about what it is to be human today from encounters with performances, recordings and installations. In bringing to expression imperceptible forces that animate our thoughts and actions—whether that be our passional impressionability, the unthought memory circuits that entrain us, or the immaterial universes of reference that orient us in the world—the thesis advocates for a style of thinking that is unapologetic in its challenge to the humanist conceits of social scientific research. Moreover, in aiming beyond the foreclosures of thought effectuated by inadequate ideas, the thesis makes the claim that thinking differently is an ethical task revolving around careful attention to the life force of ideas: how thinking differently about the beings we are produces different ways of going on in the world.

This thesis examines the ways Indigenous migrants in Los Angeles (LA) have created places of life through the formation of farms and decentralized gardens. The South Central Farm (SCF) was one of the earliest examples of food sovereignty in LA led by Indigenous migrants. I conduct a history of the life of the SCF from 1992 to 2006 and conceptualize food sovereignty for Indigenous migrants as rooted in practices of autonomy, care, and transmission of traditional knowledge. After the farm was demolished in 2006, I turn to the ways the spirit of the SCF lives on in the formation of decentralized gardens as a response to lack of food and land access. Repurposing empty lots, backyards and sidewalks for communal gardens, Indigenous migrants continue cultivating food communally. I draw on archival material, oral histories, and contemporary interviews to argue that Indigenous migrant placemaking creates life-making, life-giving, and life-affirming places. Utilizing abolition geographies and placemaking as frameworks, I show how these places make life through the cultivation of food, give life back to the land through regenerative practices, and affirm the lives of Indigenous migrants who care for the land and each other. I suggest that at the center of these placemaking strategies is the struggle for fresh food, land to grow it, and autonomy.

Sites of Humanism: Intimate Encounters Within Black Feminist Geographies explores Black women’s creation and engagement with places and spaces. In particular, these selected essays consider Black women’s ability to turn oppressive or constraining structures, systems, and theories of knowledge into what Dr. Ashanté Reese calls, spaces of “containment but not confinement.” The collection begins by reflecting on two Black geographical frameworks of the human problem, W.E.B. Du Bois’ Veil/veil and Sylvia Wynter’s demonic. I consider material accounts of these racialized geographies in The Souls of Black Folk and Harriet Ann Jacobs’ slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The piece closes by reading Saidiya Hartman’s use of critical fabulation in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as an aspect of the demonic grounds, and a site of opportunity for an important epistemological break for our understanding of the human. The next essay analyzes Black exploitation in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Film offers a level of visibility that is reminiscent of Western geographic practices that privilege seeing as knowing. Additionally, photographs of two Black women are included in the film, yet there are not any Black women characters. The film reminded me of the demonic, and I wondered what did it mean for these photographs to be included, and could they be read oppositionally? The final paper posits that the Humanities have an integral role in imagining being human anew. In particular, the novel is a medium of possibility. Its form can reach the conceptual crevices and excesses that lie beyond our epistemic boundaries. I read Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts as an ushering in of Sylvia Wynter’s demonic.

This thesis explores human and environmental movement and mobility in various Italian volcanic zones. Places and sites are typically thought of as stable, locatable in a specific location, pin-pointable. Places are not generally considered “mobile.” Stromboli, Italy and other volcanic sites force the ethnographer to reconcile a certain tension between movement and place. Volcanic sites are worlds that are materially and socially constituted through movement. How tectonic plates move creates volcanic activity, how lava moves up and out of the volcano transforms the landscape, and how people move to, from, around, through, up and down the volcano creates a volcanic social world. How do humans navigate this environment, and how does the environment agentially present itself as a force to be circumnavigated? Movement and mobility serve as a framework for theorizing human social relations with their environment and other non-humans. Thinking through mobility captures the unique limits and affordances that volcanic environments offer to their human, plant, and animal residents. Scholars differ on whether or not we can call a landscape “alive,” “lively,” or “vibrant.” This thesis argues that the answer to this question is based in observations about movement. That we can, in fact, locate agential capability in the way that a subject moves. The ability to move is the condition for agency.

Paris emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a newly restructured city, after Baron Haussmann’s massive architectural project redrew the urban map to favor a bourgeois lifestyle. Wide boulevards, new parks and squares, improved sanitation, and a thriving consumer culture made Paris the cosmopolitan center of Europe. Against this backdrop a multitude of musical milieus flourished, ranging from institutions such as the Conservatoire or the Opéra to the Montmartre cabarets at the fringe of the city, while technological developments gave rise to new modes of sound reproduction and cultures of listening. This rich musical scene has long fascinated scholars, who have approached it through multiple lenses. While the lens of cultural geography would seem a natural fit for a city made newly self-conscious of its spatial properties, however, musicologists have only recently begun to appreciate the insights into rituals of music consumption afforded by a spatial approach. My dissertation engages with the theory of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, as well as that of more recent cultural geographers. I draw from their claim that space is not neutral, but is dynamic and created through social habit. I posit that sound in ¬fin-de-siècle Paris, when performed and consumed through rituals particular to a set of socially generated spatial conditions, assumed a navigational function, charting routes from the socially static interiors to the socially mobile exteriors of the city. In this way, the contingent, moment-to-moment quality of live music fostered a resistance to the mechanistic reproduction that was at times regarded as a threat in the fin de siècle. I focus particularly on mapping, and I argue that, in a landscape dominated by Haussmann’s map, these sounds expressed their own “musical routes.” I focus on four diverse spaces of music consumption as case studies: the Mirliton cabaret in Montmartre, the Bon Marché department store employee concerts, the spaces of nature depicted in Debussy’s music, and the transportable spaces of music technology. My research revises a gap in cultural geography, which has long excluded sound, and I provide a methodological intervention in the use of mapping as a tool. In claiming that it is possible for sound to engage in the act of mapping, I pose ontological questions about what constitutes a map, and what social function music can have beyond aesthetic value.

Throughout the Spanish poetic production of the 20th century, cities have developed a relevant role as a recurring space at the same time as society urbanized and an exodus took place from agricultural areas to the work centers offered by the cities. Since the second half of the 19th century the city has been the meeting place for people from different backgrounds where the poet found, from his exclusive point of view, a new universe to develop in his work. However, the evolution of capitalist society sponsored the poet's transition from an artist to a worker in the service sector, now able to describe the everyday life through that "other voice" that Octavio Paz so well exhibited in his work (Paz 1990). This way, I argue that with the passage of time and the disappearance of the romanticized figure of the poet, writers who describe the daily commute of the inhabitants of the cities emerged among the working classes through a simple style that has come to be related with other transcultural artistic movements such as Minimalism or Dirty Realism. My dissertation studies the representation of the urban working class in three contemporary Spanish poets: Karmelo C. Iribarren, Itziar Mínguez Arnáiz, and Fernando del Val. I analyze their shared poetics of the city with a focus on the omnipresent common objects that seem to represent the urban everyday life. In Chapter One, I develop a conceptual “trialectic” lens through which to approach all three poets based on the convergence of urban studies, the analysis of poetic form in relation to the artistic current of Minimalism, and the imprint that U.S. author Raymond Carver-as both literary persona and style-left on Spain since his publication in translation in the late 1980s. In Chapter Two, I analyze how the processes of gentrification and privatization of public spaces reflect an experience of suffering by the working class in Iribarren's poetry. In Chapter Three, I study gender-space relations as I analyze what it means for working class women to walk the city and occupy public spaces traditionally reserved for men in Mínguez Arnáiz’ poetry. In Chapter Four, I follow Spanish expatriates across the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to explore resistance movements against spatial exploitation that force working classes into geographical oblivion in Del Val's “New York trilogy.” To carry out this project, I propose to analyze the works of these three authors emphasizing not only the common characteristics that each one of them presents but also those that make them unique. With this, I intend to find out the paths Spanish poetry is taking and how this realist-style poetry differs from the realistic trends of "the poetry of experience" and the "dirty realism" so popular in the 80s and 90s. I argue that with the entry of the new millennium and especially with the extensive implementation of neoliberal policies that led to the economic crisis of 2008, there is a boom in the poetry of resistance that seeks to prove that an egalitarian right to the city is more urgent than ever.

The popular British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) show Doctor Who has been airing since 1963, boasting more longevity than any other televised science fiction program. The main character of Doctor Who is simply known as the Doctor, a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who uses a TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension/s in Space) to travel anywhere in space and time, frequently with a human, female companion. Within the show, time is nonlinear and instead of dying, the Doctor regenerates into a new physical form, remaining a Time Lord but appearing phenotypically different from their previous form. For thousands of fans (known as Whovians within the fandom), the show has provided comedic entertainment, emotional support, and intellectual curiosity. Its plotlines are steeped within science fiction/space opera themes of time travel, alien invasion, good vs. bad, justice, love, and robotic innovation. Within these nodes of science fiction exist rich commentary on social themes including, but not limited to, racism, classism, colonialism, animal exploitation, teenage pregnancy, politics and hierarchy, mental illness, and anthropomorphic effects of natural disaster. From a cultural geography standpoint, the show possesses a multitude of points of analysis. This dissertation builds upon a growing scholarship within science fiction geographies, an intellectual branch of geography rooted in cultural and political landscapes, engaging with topics such as alternative histories, technological innovation on the landscape, and invader politics. Thus far, however, little published geographic research has explored the fan geographies of science fiction, which is expressed as the ability of science fiction fans to see the world through a lens of their fandom, dynamically altering their personal geographies. Regardless of the writers’ original intentions, many episodes follow a story arc that may influence viewers’ opinions towards certain social, cultural, and political landscapes, creating a fan geography where Whovians perceive their daily landscapes through a lens of their fandom. Can fan geographies of Doctor Who allow viewers to reimagine their daily geographies through the show’s influence? This dissertation engages with this question to understand how (if at all) Doctor Who fans experience their daily geographies through a lens of the show.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic field research conducted in an eco-survivalist community in central Vermont, this dissertation examines the ideological, philosophical, and political contexts of eco-survivalism and neo-primitivism. In particular, this research focuses on how the practices around which the community coheres––ones commonly relegated to a pre-civilizational past––shape community members’ understandings of past, present, and future human-environment relations. Toward this end, this dissertation explores three primary practices––lithic tool making, animal tracking, and herbcraft––and discusses how such practices are capable of fostering intimacy with, and knowledge of, the world. Through an interdisciplinary, multi-method, and speculative mode of investigation, the findings suggest that while there are many risks––both conceptual and material––associated with eco-survivalist practices, they nevertheless offer insights for addressing present environmental uncertainties and offer a potential set of strategies for navigating future environmental challenges.

Taking Mi Pueblo Food Center, a nineteen-store chain in Northern California, as a case study, this report will examine Latino supermarkets as sites of both cultural preservation and community building and of legal vulnerability and instability, particularly for undocumented individuals and their families. Mi Pueblo is family-owned and founded by Juvenal Chavez, once undocumented, whose model minority narrative has become central to the store’s public image. It offers a shopping environment that transplants an archetype of a traditional Mexican village marketplace into a contemporary American supermarket, resulting in a combination of cultural nostalgia and modern convenience. Mi Pueblo has successfully engaged crossover markets, and has become a significant resource to Latino/a communities. However, its success has also attracted government suspicion and scrutiny: in 2012, following a mandatory Immigration and Customs Enforcement audit, Mi Pueblo voluntarily participated in the E-Verify program, requiring employees to confirm their employment eligibility and resulting in the loss of 80% of the franchise’s employees. This massive turnover spurred widespread protests, and the switch to fair-wages and documented labor standards led Chavez to file for bankruptcy in 2013. Focusing on media discourses surrounding the food, theming, and politics of the stores, this report examines Mi Pueblo as a stage for dialogue between the management and protestors about the potential for Latino/a activism, sovereignty, and citizenship within a broader context of contemporary immigration politics and undocumented labor economies. Throughout this research, I draw from news articles, blog posts, protest ephemera, and video footage in order to explore Mi Pueblo as site for politics of consumption, cultural preservation, and reform.

This dissertation uses Austin’s two-step country dance scene to examine the construction of the local in American culture. Two-step is a social dance that is central to country music culture in Texas, Oklahoma, and the Southwest. Without a central governing body, the form and social norms associated with the dance vary across dance communities, which means that dancers use two-step to both construct and express their local culture. In Austin, the local two-step scene is a conservative response to neoliberal globalization, which many dancers feel is destroying Austin’s unique identity and culture. Here, the local operates along four interrelated dimensions. As a scene, the local is constituted through the performance of traditional gender roles; as a place, it is preserved and policed via social and structural constraints; as a form of belonging, it is a whiteness that is shaped by the Mexican and Mexican-American bodies and practices that it excludes; and as a scale, it is a terrestrially bound social formation that is inextricable from the global culture it purports to resist. Many cultural theorists emphasize the progressive potential of the local. However, the inner workings of Austin’s two-step scene suggest that the local can just as easily espouse an insular, exclusive politics, even in a supposedly progressive city.