Dismantling mantelpieces : consumption as spectacle and shaper of self in the home.

This thesis is an exploratory study of contemporary British mantelpiece displays. Located within anthropological/sociological literatures of the meaning of home, identity and material culture, it opens up the 'focal point' of the domestic interior to scrutiny. This familiar 'homely' space is a strangely invisible presence within the house. Ethnographically-informed interviews reveal its role in the ordering and categorisation of domestic time, space and objects; also family and gender relations. By transforming this taken-for-granted space into matter out of place, ongoing practices of memory, family and home are interpreted as internalised cultural categorisations. The perspective of gift theory reveals frictions between traditional practice and current conflations of self and taste, home and family, in a mass of proliferating materials. Focusing on the mythopoetic gendering of the gift and the house, I show how the mantelpiece is a structuring structure in an order of artefacts including the house and displayed objects. There is a 'gap' in-between the tangible, visual and audible properties of mantelpiece displays which can show the immortal ordinary society of premodern mythopoesis and ordering of power relations. The syncresis of home, memory, family and women is past-oriented and exclusionary, compressing and disguising 'being' - domestication of the body - as 'knowing'. The study employs multi-modal collection methods, such as postal questionnaires, in- depth qualitative interviews, visual data including a longitudinal autophotographic project, Mass-Observation Archive material and architectural histories. Data are analysed from differing perspectives, including narrative/biographic accounts, emergent themes, innovative visual interpretation and historiography/archaeology. Presentation of findings addresses the 'crisis of representation' by using text, photographs and sketches in a bound thesis, a CD-Rom and a website. Using sociological imagination thus problematises everyday processes of 'doing' both social membership and social enquiry. In conclusion, I suggest future multi-dimensional enquiry into the 'gaps' in social/architectural fabric

Synthetic sociology and the 'long workshop': How Mass Observation ruined meta-methodology

The paper focuses on the relations between Mass Observation Reports, and the contemporary sociological valuing of articulacy, salience and coherence in participants' accounts. This is linked with a critique of sociological literariness, to question how participants' words are transformed into 'data' for research productions. The aims are threefold. First, to show how research participants' contributions have valuable attributes that do not always fit neatly into conventional analytic frame. Second, to highlight how 'awkward' data challenge the literary conventions of sociological production. Third, to illustrate how critical reflection on a particular form of vernacular poetry can inform the poetics and politics of sociological methodology. By addressing Mass Observation's inconvenient materiality, its peculiar temporality and its diverse content, the paper considers how these unsettle the notion of 'data'. Critically engaging with Charles Madge's and Humphrey Jennings' notion of Mass Observation as 'Popular Poetry', I then consider how Whitman's vernacular epic, Leaves of Grass, has been woven into the cultural biography of the U.S. By drawing an analogy between Mass Observation's 'Popular Poetry' and Whitman's democratic poetics, I ask how a legitimised/legitimising research habitus can change in interaction with such materials, rather than resynthesising itself. Moving on to an ethically difficult film-making project with asylum seekers I argue for methodological architectures that open up plural, precarious, untimely 'anthropologies of ourselves'. A politics of knowledge-making, that acknowledges the 'long workshops' where social worlds are crafted, can then materialise

Dismantling mantelpieces : consumption as spectacle and shaper of self in the home

This thesis is an exploratory study of contemporary British mantelpiece displays. Located within anthropological/sociological literatures of the meaning of home, identity and material culture, it opens up the 'focal point' of the domestic interior to scrutiny. This familiar 'homely' space is a strangely invisible presence within the house. Ethnographically-informed interviews reveal its role in the ordering and categorisation of domestic time, space and objects; also family and gender relations. By transforming this taken-for-granted space into matter out of place, ongoing practices of memory, family and home are interpreted as internalised cultural categorisations. The perspective of gift theory reveals frictions between traditional practice and current conflations of self and taste, home and family, in a mass of proliferating materials. Focusing on the mythopoetic gendering of the gift and the house, I show how the mantelpiece is a structuring structure in an order of artefacts including the house and displayed objects. There is a 'gap' in-between the tangible, visual and audible properties of mantelpiece displays which can show the immortal ordinary society of premodern mythopoesis and ordering of power relations. The syncresis of home, memory, family and women is past-oriented and exclusionary, compressing and disguising 'being' - domestication of the body - as 'knowing'. The study employs multi-modal collection methods, such as postal questionnaires, in- depth qualitative interviews, visual data including a longitudinal autophotographic project, Mass-Observation Archive material and architectural histories. Data are analysed from differing perspectives, including narrative/biographic accounts, emergent themes, innovative visual interpretation and historiography/archaeology. Presentation of findings addresses the 'crisis of representation' by using text, photographs and sketches in a bound thesis, a CD-Rom and a website. Using sociological imagination thus problematises everyday processes of 'doing' both social membership and social enquiry. In conclusion, I suggest future multi-dimensional enquiry into the 'gaps' in social/architectural fabric.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

An EPR investigation on reduced Sn centres in SrSnO3 perovskite

The use of the wide band gap SrSnO3 semiconductor in photocatalysis has grown over the last few years, driven predominantly by sustainability given that its constituents are all Earth abundant elements. Using EPR spectroscopy, we elucidate the paramagnetic species present in the material, either intrinsic or photo-generated. EPR measurements confirmed the presence of paramagnetic oxygen vacancies (g = 2.0058) and a defect sensitive to visible light irradiation despite a wide optical band gap of 4.1 eV. This defect was confirmed to be Sn3+ (g = 2.014 and g = 1.994). Its concentration appears to increase with visible light irradiation, suggesting a photo-induced formation associated with electronic transitions from Sn2+ intra-band gap states to the conduction band

Becoming at home in residential care for older people: a material culture perspective

Residential homes encourage new residents to bring belongings with them, so that they can personalise their room and ‘feel at home’. Existing literature on material culture in residential homes views objects as symbols and repositories of home and identity, which can facilitate a sense of belonging in residents through their display in residents' rooms. I suggest that this both misunderstands the processual and fluid nature of home and identity, and conceptualises objects as essentially passive. This article uses ethnographic data and theories of practice and relationality to argue that rather than the meaning of home being inherent in objects, or felt subjectively by residents, meaning is generated through ongoing, everyday interactions between the two. I show that residents became at home by acquiring new things –as well as displaying existing possessions – and also through interacting with mundane objects in everyday social and relational practices such as cleaning and hosting. I conclude that being at home in older people's residential homes need not be so different from being at home at other stages of the life course and in other settings. This challenges conceptualisations of older people's homes – and older age itself – as somehow unknowable and unfamiliar

The Aesthetics of Everyday Literacies: Home Writing Practices in a British Asian Household

This article explores young people's home literacy practices drawing on an ethnographic study of writing in the home of a British Asian family living in northern England. The theoretical framework comes from the New Literacy Studies, and aesthetic and literary theory. It applies an ethnographic methodology together with an engaged approach to coproduction with young people. The article explores three instances of home writing in relation to textiles, gardening, and the experience of racial harassment