title: A Real (Wo)man's Beer: gendered spaces of beer drinking in New Zealand

authors: Hardy, Nicole Amy

subjects: beer

abstract: This thesis examines the ways in which rural, national, and urban spaces become gendered through the practices and representations of beer drinking in New Zealand. 

Critical social theory combined with feminist poststructuralist debates on identities provides the theoretical framework for this research. Two focus groups with Pākehā beer drinkers aged between 18 - 30 years old were conducted; one consisting of six males and the other consisting of six females. Critical textual analysis was also undertaken on five beer advertisements representing the most popular beer brands in New Zealand; Tui, Lion Red, Waikato and Speight's. 

Three points frame the analysis. First, I examine rural and national gendered identities associated with beer drinking. New Zealand's beer drinking cultures are constructed within rural discourses of masculinity. There is not a single masculinity present in New Zealand's beer drinking cultures, rather there are multiple and conflicting masculinities. I suggest that through the need to constantly perform their identity, men create a rural hegemonic masculinity that is both hard, yet vulnerable. I argue that the femininities constructed within these spaces are used to enhance and further enable the hard, yet vulnerable, rural masculinity.

Second, within urban spaces of beer drinking - such as the office, nightclub, clubrooms and home - homosexuals, metrosexuals and women are 'othered'. These identities are defined in relation to the hegemonic norm - 'Hard Man' masculinity - in negative ways. Furthermore, some women perform a hyper masculine identity in order to be included in these beer-drinking spaces.

Finally, I examine the ways in which hegemonic gendered identities in rural, national and urban spaces may be resisted and subverted. I use contradictions from my focus group participants to unsettle the 'Hard Man' masculinity of New Zealand's beer drinking cultures.

text: A Real (Wo)man's Beer: gendered spaces of beer drinking in New Zealand This thesis examines the ways in which rural, national, and urban spaces become gendered through the practices and representations of beer drinking in New Zealand. 

Critical social theory combined with feminist poststructuralist debates on identities provides the theoretical framework for this research. Two focus groups with Pākehā beer drinkers aged between 18 - 30 years old were conducted; one consisting of six males and the other consisting of six females. Critical textual analysis was also undertaken on five beer advertisements representing the most popular beer brands in New Zealand; Tui, Lion Red, Waikato and Speight's. 

Three points frame the analysis. First, I examine rural and national gendered identities associated with beer drinking. New Zealand's beer drinking cultures are constructed within rural discourses of masculinity. There is not a single masculinity present in New Zealand's beer drinking cultures, rather there are multiple and conflicting masculinities. I suggest that through the need to constantly perform their identity, men create a rural hegemonic masculinity that is both hard, yet vulnerable. I argue that the femininities constructed within these spaces are used to enhance and further enable the hard, yet vulnerable, rural masculinity.

Second, within urban spaces of beer drinking - such as the office, nightclub, clubrooms and home - homosexuals, metrosexuals and women are 'othered'. These identities are defined in relation to the hegemonic norm - 'Hard Man' masculinity - in negative ways. Furthermore, some women perform a hyper masculine identity in order to be included in these beer-drinking spaces.

Finally, I examine the ways in which hegemonic gendered identities in rural, national and urban spaces may be resisted and subverted. I use contradictions from my focus group participants to unsettle the 'Hard Man' masculinity of New Zealand's beer drinking cultures.

year: 2007

title: Parsing Technology-entanglement for Thick-things: The Complication or Complexity of Media and Technologies

authors: Nicholson, Shaun

subjects: Digital media

abstract: Can an interpretive framework untangle distributed forms of technology-enabled media? The thesis develops an interpretive framework to provide an antidote to reckless imaginations that privilege concealment and encourage explanations of technology-enablement as social or automagical. The framework is a response to Latour's call to modify explanations given simply as 'social' and Kittler's observation of software as an unrecognizable layering of linguistic extensions. 

The interpretive framework is developed from successive encounters with technology-enablement associated with a particular geospatial use of Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality that accesses photos embedded with geospatial information depends on multiple distributed technologies ranging from smartphones to satellites. This contemporary form of technology-enabled media is demonstrated by a Panoramio geospatial layer of tourist photos accessed using the software product Layar. The encounters are with an image collection, WIFI router, 3G cellular data network, iPhone, geospatial location service and Layar. These enabling technologies have been gathered and inspected for human and nonhuman agencies during project encounters that followed an ethnographic approach. A dialogue with technology practitioners informs the analytical engagement with Augmented Reality to provide an alternative vocabulary for theoretical access to those vastly distributed and indescribable technology-enablers.

The framework is developed through successive propositions. The encounters pursue the trajectory of a digital image from a technology-enabled visual representation that can be created or consumed with ease to distributed image collections that operate as a contemporary site of interoperability. Photos are transformed in proposition 1 from a visual surface to a realm of specificity that is a stratified and expansive construction of exchangeable data. The second proposition establishes technologies as constructed from atomic building blocks that are combined in either complicated or complex formations. The second proposition asserts that it is necessary to distinguish between complication and complexity. Propositions 1 and 2 are extended by a debate between respective positions of an extremely flat ontology and an expansive materialism represented by Bryant, Barad, Latour and Bennett. The flat ontology is rejected and a thick account of things is asserted as a position that better accounts for the entanglement of humans and nonhumans interoperating amongst a synthetic ecology of media technologies. The third proposition is that the technology-enablement of media is a complicated or complex form of technology-entanglement. The thesis demonstrates this interpretive framework before concluding with a ‘how-to’ that guides researchers adapting this methodology for their own projects.

text: Parsing Technology-entanglement for Thick-things: The Complication or Complexity of Media and Technologies Can an interpretive framework untangle distributed forms of technology-enabled media? The thesis develops an interpretive framework to provide an antidote to reckless imaginations that privilege concealment and encourage explanations of technology-enablement as social or automagical. The framework is a response to Latour's call to modify explanations given simply as 'social' and Kittler's observation of software as an unrecognizable layering of linguistic extensions. 

The interpretive framework is developed from successive encounters with technology-enablement associated with a particular geospatial use of Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality that accesses photos embedded with geospatial information depends on multiple distributed technologies ranging from smartphones to satellites. This contemporary form of technology-enabled media is demonstrated by a Panoramio geospatial layer of tourist photos accessed using the software product Layar. The encounters are with an image collection, WIFI router, 3G cellular data network, iPhone, geospatial location service and Layar. These enabling technologies have been gathered and inspected for human and nonhuman agencies during project encounters that followed an ethnographic approach. A dialogue with technology practitioners informs the analytical engagement with Augmented Reality to provide an alternative vocabulary for theoretical access to those vastly distributed and indescribable technology-enablers.

The framework is developed through successive propositions. The encounters pursue the trajectory of a digital image from a technology-enabled visual representation that can be created or consumed with ease to distributed image collections that operate as a contemporary site of interoperability. Photos are transformed in proposition 1 from a visual surface to a realm of specificity that is a stratified and expansive construction of exchangeable data. The second proposition establishes technologies as constructed from atomic building blocks that are combined in either complicated or complex formations. The second proposition asserts that it is necessary to distinguish between complication and complexity. Propositions 1 and 2 are extended by a debate between respective positions of an extremely flat ontology and an expansive materialism represented by Bryant, Barad, Latour and Bennett. The flat ontology is rejected and a thick account of things is asserted as a position that better accounts for the entanglement of humans and nonhumans interoperating amongst a synthetic ecology of media technologies. The third proposition is that the technology-enablement of media is a complicated or complex form of technology-entanglement. The thesis demonstrates this interpretive framework before concluding with a ‘how-to’ that guides researchers adapting this methodology for their own projects.

year: 2016

title: Audiences, referees, and landscapes: Understanding the use of Māori and English in New Zealand dual language picturebooks through a sociolinguistic lens

authors: Daly, Nicola

abstract: When non-dominant perspectives are represented in children's literature, it is labelled multicultural, and this form of literature has much potential for altering existing power structures in society. Bishop (1990) first introduced the metaphor of multicultural children's literature offering the possibility of windows - an opportunity to see into others' worlds; mirrors - an opportunity to see your own world being reflected back; and glass sliding doors - an opportunity to step into a world through a book. However, to date, any exploration of the extent to which language diversity contributes to the representation of non-dominant perspectives in multicultural children's literature has been limited, and the use of sociolinguistic theories to frame and theorise such explorations almost non-existent.

text: Audiences, referees, and landscapes: Understanding the use of Māori and English in New Zealand dual language picturebooks through a sociolinguistic lens When non-dominant perspectives are represented in children's literature, it is labelled multicultural, and this form of literature has much potential for altering existing power structures in society. Bishop (1990) first introduced the metaphor of multicultural children's literature offering the possibility of windows - an opportunity to see into others' worlds; mirrors - an opportunity to see your own world being reflected back; and glass sliding doors - an opportunity to step into a world through a book. However, to date, any exploration of the extent to which language diversity contributes to the representation of non-dominant perspectives in multicultural children's literature has been limited, and the use of sociolinguistic theories to frame and theorise such explorations almost non-existent.

year: 2017