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Widespread concerns about obesity and overweight, have led to a focus on children’s diets, with government responses emphasising family responsibility for the provision of healthy food and for nurturing independent food choices. In parallel, the health promoting school approach attempts to reinforce messages within communities and families. Despite the potential for promoting consistent messages across settings, understanding the interface between families and schools remains limited, with a failure to appreciate the way in which food is embedded within social relationships and contexts. This study aimed to explore the family-school interface. It focused on the recursive interplay between agency and structure, employing ‘practices’ as a way of exploring how agency transforms structure, while also attending to taken-for-granted meanings of food as expressions of the structure. Case study methodology was employed with eleven families across three communities in South Wales to explore the perspectives of parents (n=18) and children (n=18). Audio-diaries together with interviews unpacked tacit understandings behind food practices, which are often difficult to articulate. Interviews with primary school heads and teachers (n=5) explored schools' experiences of family-school interactions. This thesis adds new understandings of the family-school interface, illustrating shifting discourses of control as individuals occupy multiple contexts at different times. These revealed dilemmas in the accomplishment of control: providing children with a balanced diet alongside the practicalities of parental-work, while attending to individualised food preferences. Structure-agency perspectives also uncovered multiple layers of meaning attached to food, emphasising the need to take account of the social context within which control is navigated. Targeted recommendations are considered. For schools, suggestions include improved partnership working with children and parents in order to overcome existing inherent tensions. For families, recommendations acknowledge the wider significance of food beyond nutrition, appreciating the contexts and constraints of family life. Policy recommendations relate to food availability, affordability, and changes to employment structures.

Background:The Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-Revised (ACE-R) is a widely used screening tool for Dementia. Although it is recommended for use in detecting cognitive impairment in people who misuse alcohol (Scottish Government 2007), the ACE-R has not been validated with this population. This study compared the performance of a group of people who misuse alcohol on the ACE-R with published normative data. The study examines whether deficits in ACE-R performance are associated with previous experience of a withdrawal from alcohol, duration of alcohol use and units consumed per week. Methods:Data from 77 attendees at the Alcohol Liaison Service in NHS Ayrshire and Arran who had completed the ACE-R was extracted from an existing database and included in the study. The ALS group ACE-R total and domain scores were compared to those of the original validation control group used by Mioshi et al (2006). Using independent t–tests, differences in overall ACE-R performance and domain performance were examined. Independent t-tests were also used to determine the impact of previous withdrawal on ACE-R scores. Correlation analyses and multiple regression were used to examine relationships between aspects of drinking history (previous withdrawal, duration of use and units consumed per week) and ACE-R outcome. Results:Total ACE-R scores, memory and fluency domain scores were significantly lower in the ALS group compared to normative data (p<0.001) It was not possible compare attention, language and visuospatial domain scores between groups as parametric assumptions were not met and only mean control group data was available. Attendees with a history of alcohol withdrawal had significantly poorer scores on the domain of attention compared to those who had not (p=0.009). They appeared to have lower overall ACE-R scores although this differnce was not significant (p=0.128). This analysis was underpowered. Longer duration of alcohol drinking was associated with lower verbal fluency (r=-0.362), lower memory (r=-0.239) and lower visuospatial (rs=-0.234) domain scores. Units consumed weekly were not significantly associated with any ACE-R domain score or total score. Longer duration of alcohol use and previous withdrawal experience together accounted for 10% of the variance in ACE-R total scores (p=0.02). Conclusion:It is likely that most people who chronically and hazardously misuse alcohol will experience persisting cognitive impairment. The ACE-R appears to be a good measure for the assessment such difficulties in this population. This study suggests that it is not possible to accurately judge the severity of cognitive impairment in people who drink hazardously on the basis of duration of alcohol use and previous withdrawal experience alone. The study has methodological limitations and more rigorous research examining the use of the ACE-R with this population is necessary.

One of the most significant challenges the globalized world encounters is how to build a society that is more at peace with diversity and cosmopolitanism. Further, in a world where highly unequal power relations and a vast plethora of inequalities persist, interrogating and resisting inequalities is key. From this context, this study focuses on interrogating inequalities in addressing an equality agenda highlighting a thesis of belonging; the human need for belonging and security in that belonging and the human right to have these needs satisfied (UDHR, 1948). A thesis of belonging relates to an innate human need for belonging (Maslow, 1943) and it is argued in this thesis that this innate human need for belonging is very important and very much connected to many fundamental human rights which should be driven much more through equality focused social movements and the laws. Clearly, where human rights are not being upheld then action must be taken to uphold them. The research findings of this thesis show the relevance of a thesis of belonging and the relevance of two core theories which have a connection, a marxist theory of racism and a social identity theory of racism. A marxist understanding of racism clearly delineates the inequalities capitalism produces and in this thesis while it is not argued that a marxist understanding of racism alone completely explains all varieties of racism, through a significant number of participants' discourses this thesis shows how capitalism often appears to be a driving force behind discrimination made on the basis of ethnicity. In addition, a significant number of participants' discourses in this thesis also point towards a social identity theory of racism which indicates the significance of what a social group affords an individual where a sense of belonging derived from affiliation and acceptance in group membership provides a feeling of self esteem and security (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Breakwell, 1986; West, 1993, Aboud, 2008). Importantly, Tajfel (1981) emphasises how crucial it is to interrogate the social and economic context of discrimination and so here is where social identity theory relates to a marxist theory of racism.

Through this dissertation, I aim to challenge the limited scope scholars have established for effective life writing. I do so by arguing that nineteenth century scholars and readers alike focused on the bourgeois self while ignoring the lives and writings of working women, viewing them as incapable of producing valuable life writing, and, therefore, denying their creative choices. I examine the life writing of working women writers who constructed narratives which arose from the same conditions that framed their identities as workers. Menial and dangerous occupations, abundant familial/work duties, and poverty limited the available writing models and appropriate topics for working women’s narratives. I, therefore, present a case study for Victorian Working Women’s Life Writing through the writings of Hannah Cullwick, Ellen Johnston, Annie Kenney, and Emma Smith. My analysis focuses specifically on the motivating factors behind the women writers’ production as well as their rhetorical strategies for expression. As I will show, their motivations include asserting autonomy in personal relationships, attaining fame, and promoting political affiliations. Through my analysis, I illustrate the variety of methods utilized in producing their narratives. In this discussion, their use of established literary genres is especially illuminating. With no life narrative models suitable for their life circumstances, working women writers employed literary genres as varied as romance and Bildungsroman. By acknowledging the various physical/societal obstacles for a working woman writer, we can bring these texts to critical light and, through analysis, emphasize their important contributions to life narratives.

The United States has historically been the top receiving country for children adopted from abroad. Since 2004, though, massive changes in sending countries have led to a significant reduction in the supply of adoptable children, and a corresponding decline in transnational adoptions. Not only are there fewer children legally available for transnational adoption, but the types of children available today are markedly different from those that were adopted during the international adoption boom of the 1990s. This shift has created a mismatch between the desires of adoptive parents and the types of children that are most readily available for international adoption. Managing this mismatch becomes particularly challenging without a pricing mechanism—one of the central legitimating factors of adoption is that parents do not pay a price to adopt a child, but instead pay a fee tied to professional services. This dissertation asks: when there is no pricing mechanism to restore the balance between supply and demand, how do organizations and individuals manage parental desire and the shortage of certain types of children? How do the children available for adoption come to be emotionally valuable to the parents who eventually adopt them?To answer these questions, I draw on government reports, in-depth interviews with adoption agency professionals and adoptive parents, participant observation in an adoption agency, and textual analysis of agency promotional materials. I show that perceptions of permanency, racial boundaries, and certainty of placement affect parents’ decisions to pursue transnational adoption over other types of adoption. I then trace the origins of the mismatch between supply and desire to massive changes in policy that constrain the supply of children and the eligibility of certain types of parents. I argue that when confronted with this mismatch, adoption agencies, and the parents they serve, engage in a process of (re)evaluation that recasts previously less desirable types of children as sentimentally valuable. In a transnational adoption economy characterized by shortage, parents must make compromises about the children they are willing to bring into their families, and the shape of these compromises reveals a hierarchy of socially constructed desire. By considering the work of adoption agencies and the experiences of adoptive parents, I show how classificatory schemes, boundary making, morality and emotions operate within this economy. Through the emotional connections that they forge with parents, agency staff carefully frame parental preferences for different types of children, while helping parents feel that their decisions are supported and legitimate.

ABSTRACT This research looks at the topic of agriculture and agricultural processing as a means for rural economic development. The purpose of the study is to determine the feasibility and desirability of a fruit and vegetable processor in Saluda County, South Carolina. A fruit and vegetable co-packer was chosen because of positive community response to the idea, large and growing fruit and vegetable production in the county, lack of fruit and vegetable processing in the county and growing demand for fresh cut and frozen produce. The proposed processor would produce sliced, frozen, bagged peaches during peach season and cut, frozen, bagged vegetables when peaches are not in season. The costs versus the revenues of the proposed facility were estimated to determine its profitability and feasibility. The desirability of the proposed processor was analyzed by examining the potential economic impacts on Saluda County through an input-output model of the regional economy constructed with the software program IMPLAN. Results of the model provided estimates of the direct, indirect and induced effects of the processor. It was concluded that the proposed facility would be both financially feasible and profitable. In addition, the processor was determined to have desirable economic impacts on Saluda County, providing jobs and an infusion of spending across several sectors in the local economy. This research exemplifies the potential for agriculture and agribusiness as a viable method for economic development.