The marketisation of education in England began in the 1980s. It was facilitated by national testing (which gave objective and comparable information to parents), and by the New Public Management (which introduced a posteriori funding and competition among providers). Now a new complementary phase of marketisation is being introduced: personalisation, whose intellectual provenance is in marketing theory. Conceptually, personalisation is imprecise; practically, at this stage, its intended effects within schools may amount to no more than a new legitimatory rhetoric which (...) leaves pedagogy and the curriculum little changed. (shrink)

Drawing from de Certeau, in this thesis I investigate graffiti and street art as part of the everyday visual landscapes. The city of Stockholm has gone from zero tolerance towards all forms of street art to now including the art form as a strategy for creating a so-called attractive city. In this thesis, I aim to examine street art and graffiti in relation to Stockholm´s mobile landscapes. The theoretical framework builds on mobility and landscape theory. I argue that if we (...) are to better understand the world we live in, the concepts of mobility must be understood both in terms of its physical and social implications. Using a qualitative approach, interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic methods have been used to gather data. By analysing discourses and statements by artists, officials, and housing companies, I demonstrate how graffiti and street art moves between different expressions in Stockholm. Furthermore, I discuss the perspectives of artists who are engaged with their bodies to produce the visual landscape we live in, and how their bodily mobilities affect the outcome of the landscape of Stockholm. I argue that there is a paradox between mobility and immobility in the use of street art to create safe environments. The positioning of these concepts as opposites reveals how Stockholm stad and housing companies use the mobile in graffiti and street art, to create something static, attachment to place. This thesis thereby contributes to the societal and academic debate concerning mobility and the understanding of how the visual landscape is created. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)