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This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

Purpose – This paper proposes a new procedure for measuring affective responses during social interaction using facial thermographic imaging.

Methodology – We first describe the results of several small pilot experiments designed to develop and refine this new measure that reveal some of the methodological advantages and challenges offered by this measurement approach. We then demonstrate the potential utility of this measure using data from a laboratory experiment (N=114) in which we used performance feedback to manipulate identity deflection and measured several types of affective responses – including self-impressions and emotions.

Findings – We find warming of the brow (near the corrugator muscle) and cheek (near the zygomatic major muscle) related most strongly to emotion valence and self-potency, with those whose brows and cheeks warmed the most feeling less positive emotion and less potent self-impressions. Warming in the eye area (near the orbicularis oculi) related most closely to undirected identity deflection and to positive self-sentiments. Positive self-views and strong identity disruptions both contributed to warming of the eyes.

Implications – The rigor of contemporary sociological theories of emotion exceeds our current ability to empirically test these theories. Facial thermographic imaging may offer sociologists new assessments of affect and emotion that are ecologically valid, socially unreactive, temporally sensitive, and accurate. This could dramatically improve our ability to test and develop affect based theories of social interaction.

Purpose: This project examines both the media practice of covering perp walks and the discourse of perp walks as performative rituals, with the goal of understanding how grounded practice shapes meaning.

Methodology/approach: This project combines ethnographic observation and interview research to explore the grounded experience of perp walk participants, including journalists, law enforcement, and defendants.

Findings: The analysis suggests that perp walks are constructions that serve the interests of the state and that their resulting images are not neutral documents. Visual journalists are managed by law enforcement through embodied gatekeeping in practice and experience pressure from newsrooms to capture a particular moment. Defendants report feeling violated because they are unable to control the discourse of their recontextualized image.

Research limitations: As a qualitative-research project using a non-representative sample, the study results cannot be generalized, but they instead offer a rich understanding of embodied practice.

Originality/value: Because this study offers the subjective perspectives of three sets of stakeholders, including journalists, law enforcement, and defendants, it offers a unique and in-depth analysis of perp walks as media ritual.

David Punter and Glennis Byron note how the Gothic novel has been divided into two categories: the ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Gothic. Where the former emphasizes violence and ghosts, the latter focuses on female representation and the disavowal of the supernatural. The Hollywood Gothic films of the 1940s can be said to translate this aspect of the Female Gothic onto the cinema screen: Rebecca (1940), Gaslight (1944) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947) all feature narratives stressing the haunting nature of domestic spaces but there are no actual ghosts present. Robert Zemeckis’s What Lies Beneath (2000) breaks this convention. The film clearly draws on the Female Gothic lineage, situating Claire as a Gothic heroine, and yet there is an important difference: the supernatural is now an integral – and acknowledged – part of the story. This chapter explores this twenty-first century change, arguing that whilst the inclusion of the supernatural can be said to break with previous definitions of the Female Gothic, What Lies Beneath’s depiction of a ghost actually re-imagines and re-emphasizes the concerns at the centre of this tradition: the dramatization of marital and domestic experiences; an interrogation of feminine perception; and the reality of male violence against women.

What are the consequences of urban life in an ethno-nationally contested city? How do everyday practices confront municipal strategies that attempt to control such urban situations? Focusing on urban life in which daily negotiation of ethno-national differences occurs, this chapter considers the nuances of urban politics and the use and meaning of the urban space, i.e., the micro-politics and the social dynamic of place-making, and their role in the struggle for urban citizenship in an ethno-nationally mixed city. Discourse analysis and ethnographic encounters define the annual Holiday of Holidays festival in the Israeli–Palestinian neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas as integral to Haifa's strategy for promoting itself as a site of coexistence. The neighborhood serves the entire city in that its “Arab” urban space has become the emblem of that coexistence. This manipulation by the municipality is, however, not reinforced by urban regeneration and heritage management of the local Palestinian community. Nonetheless coexistence discourse is also employed by the residents themselves, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of the role of urban space in promoting the city, as well as of concepts of local identity and citizenship.

Much scholarship has looked at how radical politics and its symbolism are framed and distorted by the mass media, while less attention has been devoted to how the symbolic imagery of violence and death is used in activists’ self-representations. This chapter provides one such alternative angle by probing how “visual protest materials” are creatively used in activists’ own videos to pass on stories of communion and contestation.It interrogates how activist video practices mirror the continuum between physical places and mediated spaces in political activism by analyzing a thread of videos circulating on YouTube that commemorate people who have died in connection with three protest events across Europe, putting on display the “spectacles of death” punctuating each of these events. The analysis draws on social semiotics, in particular the work of Barthes (1981) and Zelizer (2010), to examine how death is used as a visual trope to signify the ultimate prize of taking to the streets. This chapter suggests how agency and meaning travel back and forth between offline and online spaces of activism. Engaging with some implications of this interplay, the chapter argues that, in the quest to document truth and induce realism and immediacy, tensions between fact and fiction emerge in the creative appropriation and remixing of images. Finally, it demonstrates how the cityscape is recruited to document and dramatize the spectacle of death as part of a larger struggle for semiotic resources within the protest space and over media representations of social movements more generally.

Members of an organization facing change often struggle to adapt and may create new routines. Drawing on insights from a case study of bariatric robotic surgery, the authors illustrate how a new ecology of space transforms the ostensive and performative aspect of a routine during the introduction of a new technological artifact. The authors discuss two types of space: experimental and reflective. The authors show that the reflective space through debriefings enables practitioners to discuss the new patterns of interdependent actions. Practitioners explore the different aspects of the performative struggle with new artifacts and try to integrate new actions and delineate the boundaries of this change during experimental performances. The findings of this study throw light on the role of the reflective space in addition to the experimental space in routine change, and suggest that socio-material ensembles can produce opportunities for reshaping routines.