Thesis and Research Data Repository Leeds Beckett University
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Paying the Price for Sexual Gratification
No full textWould I be right in assuming the glaring red lights of Amsterdam’s legalised prostitution district would appear in one’s mind when mentioning the phrase ‘sex tourism’? Paying for intimacy and pleasure may seem a bewildering concept for some. Conversely, the iconic destination which is filled with exotic museums, massage parlours and sex shops, attracts 200,000 visitors each year, all travelling with the intention of purchasing a sexual service (Amsterdam.org, 2018).This piece highlights how sex tourism is dependent upon globalisation for facilitating movement within people. Without migration, the sex industry would be limited as individuals from developing countries seek employment within prostitution. Women situated in highly indebted countries have limited access to jobs and therefore sex work is an economic survival option. This work considers how sex traffickers make money off the back of vulnerable women through the commodification of the body (Sassen, 2003). It is recognised that the tourist gaze shadows the harsh reality of sex work and the coercion of women (Urry & Larsen, 2011). Throughout this reflection I will critique how organised crime has made abused and oppressed women a crucial part of the global economy. The bodies of poor women are now a key commodity, which generates billions.</p
Covers: Activating Black Album Covers Through Photography, Moving Image and Live Performance
No full textThis PhD by practice is the result of a series of investigations which have built into a body of work, collectively titled 'Covers'. For the purposes of the PhD examination I have chosen to focus on three iterations of this series which demonstrate different formats of presentation building on the same theme, namely photographs presented in a collective exhibition in New York, a live performance at MAC Birmingham and an installation including video at Nottingham New Art Exchange. Choosing to re-activate images first presented as album covers by funk, soul and dance performers from the 1970s and 80s this series fits into a broader enquiry that seeks to address points of encounter with historical artefacts and situations.
Covers is the focus for this practice-based PhD submission which considers the project’s development from the first photographs in 2008 to its expansion to embrace other media following the start of the PhD programme in 2013. Through a process of re-enactment, that utilizes performance, duration and the body, this research investigation aims to critically interrogate representations of black identity by closely engaging with the visual compositional strategies and the performed poses held in selected album covers. As a performance artist, I have made work that utilises black album covers as a starting point to address issues of how black identity (my own and others) is constructed and understood. This work is contextualized in relation to similar practices of artists Sonia Boyce and Ming Wong.
Throughout the thesis, I examine how the performance strategies used in ‘Covers’ and the project’s existence as a queer spectacle challenge the dominant racial and heteronormative expectations of images of black subjects in popular culture. ‘Covers’ further draws on histories and discourses of radical blackness and queer disidentifications to create a new spectacle that challenges dominant narratives of race, gender and sexuality.</p
Life Is a Game: A Reflection on Self-Surveillance and How It Is Used To Create a Quantified Self
No full textThe Quantified Self can be defined as quantifying our actions and behaviours using numbers by self-tracking. This is used for our own knowledge and to possibly better ourselves. There are countless things which we can track and measure in regards to ourselves e.g. amount of sleep, heartrate, body weight (Lupton, 2016). The Quantified Self relies on individuals finding personal meaning in their personal data. However, the ways in which we may have tracked ourselves before have now been replaced. There are now over 160,000 self-tracking applications and a wide range of wearable devices such as Fitbit, Apple Watch and Samsung Gear (Lupton, 2016).</p
Cameras Turned Inwards: An Enquiry Into Digital Identities and the Legitimisation of Self-Surveillance
No full textGeorge Eastman was the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, in 1888 he successfully elevated photography into the mainstream by manufacturing roll film. All cameras were manufactured with an outward gaze in mind, encouraging the photographer to observe the world around them. The 2003 release of the Sony Ericson Z1010, marked the advent of the front-facing camera, changing the landscape of photography and more importantly, identity.</p
What New Risks Do Women Face in the Information Society?
No full textMichel Foucault is undoubtedly one of the most influential surveillance theorists of the nineteenth century as he exemplified discipline through the panopticon in his publication; Discipline and Punish (1977). Although the panopticon originated from the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Foucault and Bauman incorporate this to understand and analyse the wider society (Farinosi, 2011). The underlying argument is the fact that panoptic principles define any realm demanding instructions, and consciously, these principles are apparent in modern society such as the closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras (Norris and Armstrong, 1999). Although we have witnessed technological innovations far superior to Bentham’s time, the principles of the panopticon are largely unchanged, this is imposed by the smartphone culture encouraging individuals, especially women, to monitor and observe the self to ‘fit in’ on social media (Mc Carthy, 1990).</p
Preface and Editorial
No full textSociology sets out to develop the sociological imagination of those who study it, allowing us to think critically and reflexively about the social world around us and make sense of the relationship between our personal experiences and wider society. This approach to interrogating the world is embodied in this collection of critical reflections written by students on the BA (Hons) Sociology degree here at Leeds Beckett University. The essays in this volume underline both the breadth of the subject and its power to shed light on the familiar and the taken for granted. They tackle a wide range of issues, including the gig economy, online surveillance and the commodification of information, call out culture and Tinder, and the wide-ranging impacts of consumerism. The application of theory as an interrogative and explanatory tool in many of the chapters in this volume demonstrates the central role it plays Sociology.</p
Human Capital and Information in the Society of Control
No full textWhat Foucault (1984) recognised in Baudelaire regarding his definition of modernity was a great movement, a perpetual contingency upon which it's (fleeting) social organization is manifested ceaselessly. That is to say that modern life was that which ferociously enveloped its people in a temporal dizziness and a dissociation from traditions, from the stability of the past and its rigidity. All life was a moment which could potentially pass by faster than our ability to comprehend it.</p
'The Barghest o' Whitby' : (a genealogical study of) death/doom metal music(al) network in Northern England
No full textMetal music has existed in one form or another for about half a century. While the musical
style and the culture started out in a relatively unified way, with the ‘extreme turn’ of late 80s
and 90s, metal culture stratified. Doom metal, being one of the oldest styles in this newly
formed structure, became even more fragmented. Through amalgamations with other music
styles or as further alterations on these amalgamations. I call these styles extreme doom.
Death/doom is such a style. These smaller styles in metal culture have so far been
investigated hierarchically. However, the implication that a hierarchy has is problematic in this
context. Metal music studies is a budding field, so, we need to think more critically about the
way we conceptualise the history of metal academically in these early years. Yet, so far, this
stratification, with its hierarchy, has not been challenged or even discussed in detail.
Scholarship often mentions these so-called ‘sub-genres’ uncritically. In order to challenge this
idea, there needs to be a new model. However, because of the size and breadth of metal
culture, one single work cannot come even close to covering the styles existing today. In this
thesis, I attempt to draw boundaries around only death/doom to propose a way of modelling a
new metal history. To achieve this, I define these newer and smaller styles as marginal styles
using marginality idea of Park. Following this idea, sociology of music comes to rescue with
Crossley’s music worlds. Music worlds, because of its emphasis put on the musical style -it is
central-, is an intriguing perspective to look at the fragmented nature of metal music. A metal
music world is a social construction performed by the participants, including musicians, fans,
engineers, managers, label executives, and the press, around a metal musical style. These
smaller styles, then, become ideal candidates for the application of this theory. This thesis
treats death/doom in such a way using ethnographic, historical, and musicological methods
The optical, the textual, the contemplative approaches in the use of images of painting in cinematography.
No full textThis study investigates three conceptual mechanisms, the optical, the textual, the contemplative approaches, to analyze, repurpose images of painting, in order to generate creative strategies to criticize, re-invent selected elements of the cinematic syntax: the shot, the symbolic denotation of characters, the spatio-temporal linearity of the film sequence.
This study adopts autoethnography as the methodology of the enquiry, an approach that present myself as the active agent of the research to guide the reader in a story, which Ulmer defines as MyStory (Ulmer in Denzin 2014, p. 32). I narrate how I have applied these three methods by transmedialising three images of painting into three short films to illustrate the process through which these methods install a dialectic of gaze, significance and emotion between the practice of the artists and the cinematographer. These images of painting are Edgar Degas's Three Dancers in an Exercise Hall, (1880) Paul Gauguin's Vision After the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888) and Umberto Boccioni's States of Mind III: Those Who Stay (1911).
In the optical approach, through a dialectic of gaze with Degas’s eye I discuss the possibility to re-conceive the choice of the vantage point, the organization of the composition through the temporal interaction of its element anew. In the textual approach, through a dialectic of significance with Gauguin’s moral and political stances expressed in his painting, I discuss how to bring in the cinematographer moral and political stances in a cinematic story through the denotation of the characters.
In the contemplative approach, through a dialectic of emotion with Boccioni’s artwork, I discuss how to trigger the imagining consciousness of the cinematographer through the apprehension of the emotion felt while contemplating Boccioni’s artwork, and how I had to disrupt the spatio-temporal linearity of the film sequence to express in the most effective way.</p
Data Harvesting or Tayloring Our Needs? Life in the Surveillance Society
No full textSurveillance is heavily entwined with issues of power relations; those with power have access to the means to allow for greater inspection and need this information to monitor, control and influence the masses. The political discourses surrounding surveillance fluctuate: sometimes it is viewed as a positive aspect of society which allows individuals’ safety and freedom, and ensures governments can fairly and accurately allocate resources and ensure the functionality of social institutions. At other times surveillance is seen in a negative light wherein government control and forms of legislation are weaponised as a tool of oppression in a system of inequality.</p