BURA Collection:http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/2662024-03-15T07:49:47Z2024-03-15T07:49:47ZThe politics of cultural tourism in Nigeria: People, culture and power in the Calabar FestivalObijuru, Clementina Chibuzohttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/270142023-08-22T14:46:35Z2023-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: The politics of cultural tourism in Nigeria: People, culture and power in the Calabar Festival
Authors: Obijuru, Clementina Chibuzo
Abstract: Cultural tourism has been the subject of numerous academic and policy engagements in the Global North for its broad social, economic, and political functions in cities (Richards, 2018; Du Cross & McKercher, 2020). In the Global South, similar trends are emerging with dynamic patterns of exchange and transformations, yet they have captured much less academic attention so far. This thesis attempts to address the gap by analysing a particular case study in Nigeria, the Calabar Festival. Specifically, the research aims to unravel the dynamic interactions between the state, tourists and local communities as they interact and challenge each other in producing and consuming the festival. Drawing on ethnographic and policy research of the Calabar Festival, I seek to create an enhanced understanding of how cultural tourism can be a force reshaping situated power dynamics by setting the contexts for new relational frameworks that influence the cultural processes of places. The research findings unravel a complex interplay of power relations among the various stakeholders across geographic spaces. The Calabar Festival is a highly politicised event that connects broader local and transnational social and economic development practices and cultural negotiations through tourism. This study offers two original contributions. First, taking Du Gay et al.’s (1997) circuit of culture as a theoretical starting point to understand cultural tourism processes, this thesis develops the neo-circuit of cultural tourism framework and thereby demonstrates how the state, tourists and locals mutually construct destinations’ cultural offerings. Through interaction with each other and the event, these stakeholders are equipped with different power forms, to influence and contest cultural meanings on social and individual levels. Second, by advancing the notion of tourists as ‘modern cultural curators,’ this study highlights the spectrum of curation outside the traditionally restricted system of learnt practices, extending to one formed around more open and reciprocal exchanges. This thesis concludes that the interaction of stakeholders in the tourism circuit and their co-creation of cultural meanings appear to blur the boundaries of established forms of cultural agency, particularly as tourists are currently seen to perform as modern cultural curators. In doing so, the neo-circuit of cultural tourism framework provides a robust framework to understand current cultural conditions better.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2023-01-01T00:00:00ZInstitutional Racism and Militarised Policing: Examining the Wars on ‘Gang’ Crime and ‘Terrorism’Nijjar, Jasbinder S.http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/253052022-10-13T10:52:11Z2021-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Institutional Racism and Militarised Policing: Examining the Wars on ‘Gang’ Crime and ‘Terrorism’
Authors: Nijjar, Jasbinder S.
Abstract: This thesis analyses how institutional racism and militarisation work together to determine the police’s ongoing wars on ‘gang’ crime and ‘terrorism.’ In the years since the landmark Macpherson Report’s (1999) recognition of London’s Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist,’ senior officers and politicians in Britain have regularly reduced racism in policing to a problem of the past. Yet, local (and global) anti-racist resistance demonstrates that racism remains a relation of domination between police and racialised populations. While academic work has considered the systematic character of police racism, and police power as a modality of war, the relationship between institutional racism and militarised policing has not been examined extensively. Thus, this project synthesises both debates through an analysis of key anti-gang and counter-terrorism policies in Britain, to show how the police’s militarised credentials are rationalised through race, and how racism is a formal strategy of police warfare. I argue that policing is a biopolitical institution, where racism and militarisation operate in tandem to oversee the intensified regulation of racially coded communities in Britain.
My analysis shows that post-race logic works to evasively institutionalise black youth as the primary perpetrators of collective criminality, and Muslims as the main embodiments of mass death and destruction. As such, institutional racism in anti-gang and counter-terrorism policing is shown to be difficult to discern, yet profound, plural and relational. This is because it manoeuvres the deceptive capacities of the post-racial, to obscure the construction of both black and Muslim communities as antithetical to the core tenets of Euro-modernity, namely law and order and national security. I contend that this multifaceted, formalised and fabricated production of racially coded populations as anti-modern enemy figures rests on notions of threat, immanency and inhumanity, which rationalises the police’s power to wage everyday domestic war through a coterminous biopolitics of securitisation and disposability. Thus, I conclude by calling for an anti-racism that together scrutinises the politics of racism, commits to collective struggle, seeks to demilitarise, and envisages and builds towards radical socio-political transformation.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2021-01-01T00:00:00ZThe practice of youth empowerment in Qatar: design, implementation and outcomes for state capacity buildingMurtada Al-Hashemi, Mohammed Hashemhttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/238092021-12-23T03:01:02Z2021-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: The practice of youth empowerment in Qatar: design, implementation and outcomes for state capacity building
Authors: Murtada Al-Hashemi, Mohammed Hashem
Abstract: Following the tremulous events of the Arab Spring, Gulf states became unnerved by the prospects of instability triggered by disenfranchised youthful populations. This triggered the need to further develop and implement youth empowerment programmes and policies to engage the youth and to prevent a similar challenge to the political status quo in the Gulf. In Qatar, the state has invested substantially in a variety of youth empowerment programmes and policies which were intended to align the interests of the youth with those of the state. This dissertation aimed at studying and evaluating the outcomes of youth empowerment policies and programmes in Qatar through the lens of Lukes’ concept of power and by applying Discourse Analysis. The research focused on three contextual constraints to build the theoretical framework, namely social, economic and political constraints. The field research involved conducting 69 semi-structured interviews with Qatari youth, senior officials and activists. Thereafter, it undertook a thematic analysis of those semi-structured interviews. A central conclusion of the research is that while youth empowerment is promoted as an instrument of change and transformation for the youth, it often fails to transform generational power relations because youth empowerment is often deployed as a tool of state power that serve and reinforce power relations. However, this does not preclude the possibility of developing youth empowerment programmes that are inclusive for the youth and which provide them with opportunities to express their voice, but which are not necessarily incompatible with the goals of the state. Such inclusive programmes can be developed by focusing on capacity building, encouraging youth engagement in civic life as well as in political dialogue and public affairs. The thesis contributes to the youth empowerment literature by building on the specialist field of inquiry related to youth challenges in cases of extreme economic rentierism and affluence, especially apathy, disenfranchisement, and marginalisation. The study also evaluates the role of youth empowerment programmes as tools of normalizing standards and expectations of good citizenship and analyses their underlying power relations in an attempt to assist in the future potential design of a more inclusive and youth-centric empowerment policies.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2021-01-01T00:00:00ZThe Imagined Museum: Framing Social, Educational and Spatial Roles of Kuwait’s National MuseumAlrashid, Sundus Salehhttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/228552022-06-10T02:00:43Z2021-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: The Imagined Museum: Framing Social, Educational and Spatial Roles of Kuwait’s National Museum
Authors: Alrashid, Sundus Saleh
Abstract: The Kuwait National Museum (KNM) was one of the first national museums to be opened in the Gulf region in 1957 and re-opened in a new purpose-built building in 1983 as a symbol of modernity and Kuwaiti nationalism. The state planned and imagined the museum as a social, educational, historical and cultural destination. However, more than 60 years after its establishment, during which Kuwait was invaded by Iraq and the KNM was looted, the KNM’s core mission can be at best described as being unclear and vague.
The role of a national museum is arguably to represent a country, reinforce national identity, serve as an educational reference for history and act as a social agent that cares about social changes, represents social issues and positively impacts society. Drawing on a detailed case study of KNM, this research explores ‘museum making’ (Macleod et al. 2012) in Kuwait by examining three key roles of a museum in a post-war country: social, educational and spatial (Casey 2003). I deploy Goffman’s framing theory (1986) in relation to museum studies to examine how the museum frames these roles in its communication and curatorial practices and how these impact on individuals’ understandings of the museum. My findings conclude that the museum’s development and practices are defined by ‘absence’: an absence of effective communication strategies, an absence of an engaging educational programme and an absence of a meaningful symbolic design. Applying framing theory revealed that while the three roles are embedded in KNM’s mission and it has the potentials to achieve them, the existent communication and curatorial practices are not effective because of misunderstandings of the social and educational needs of the country and a lack of expertise. The identified ‘absences’ have negatively affected the KNM’s presence as a national narrator and as imagined symbol in the growing cultural scene in contemporary Kuwaiti society. The thesis concludes with suggestions to revive the museum’s presence in Kuwait as a place that actively participates in representing and shaping society.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2021-01-01T00:00:00Z