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This PhD investigates the complexities of modern day citizenship for groups on the margins. This thesis is situated within feminist geopolitics and feminist countertopographical literatures and investigates the way in which migrant women understand and in turn practice citizenship. Outlined by TH Marshall in 1950, citizenship in its most basic form is understood as belonging to a community, and having rights and responsibilities within that community. With increased communication and transport technology we have seen a burgeoning of mobility and increased migration around the world. Coupled with the scaling back of the state in the national imagination, we are left with an ever more complicated understanding of citizenship. This thesis is therefore centred on three key elements of citizenship: as belonging to a community, as emotionally laden, and as a practice and performance through the everyday and the mundane. I draw together the literatures on migration, identity and citizenship to investigate what a real, lived citizenship is for female migrants. The thesis focuses on two main case study sites of Cardiff, UK and Singapore. Through these, I examine the different citizenship identities of migrant women, connecting the stories across time and through space. In focusing on two case study sites I examine the context of the individual migrant, seeking to highlight how there may be similarities and differences between different groups of migrant women. This thesis seeks to answer questions of what a modern day citizenship identity looks like: how might citizenship, and a citizenship identity, be seen as something which is at once multiple, complex, situated and dynamic? How can citizenship therefore be relational, tied to specific experiences in, and of, place? Finally, how might this alter future directions in citizenship research?

This research identifies and draws out the complexity of masculinities produced and performed within the military. A common theme amongst academics writing on the military is that a unique set of hyper-masculinised subjectivities are produced and performed through the day to day activities of the soldier; these are considered hegemonic in that they marginalise and subordinates alternative productions of identity. This investigation seeks to challenge the notion of a hegemonic military masculinity by highlighting the intersectionality of these military subjectivities. Although gender is a key factor in coming to grips with the notion of being a soldier, empirical material collected emphasises how it is co-constituted by other social constructs such as class, able-bodiedness, and heterosexuality. Equally this research identifies the various spaces and temporalities in which these particular identities manifest. These various spaces provided an everyday, deeply symbolic and affective reservoir for the production of memories, bleeding past and present, as well as the future, into each other.

This thesis outlines how architecture can be considered as an accumulation of plausibility. The term plausibility is used herein to mean what architecture is understood to be capable of, and what architecture‟s limits are understood to be. In-depth archival analysis is used to discuss such understandings from three noted architects, Charles F. A. Voysey, Charles Holden, and Berthold Lubetkin. Additionally, in-depth interviews have been undertaken with those people who currently live or work in the buildings that these architects designed. Consideration is given to the reasoning and analysis that the architects applied to the question of a building‟s plausible capability in terms of how future inhabitants and inhabitations could be affected by their efforts. The reasoning and analysis of inhabitants is similarly drawn upon in order to detail their consideration as to how and by what means it is plausible for them to be influenced by the architecture of the buildings they experience. A consistent onus on plausibility, and a concurrent understanding that plausibility is produced through an analytical capacity of both inhabitation and architectural production, is reiterated throughout, aiming to demonstrate that the inhabitation of buildings is a potentially proficient field in terms of the analysis that inhabitants can bring to their experiences, a property often overlooked by the geographical literature on architecture, but one which can make important additions to our understanding of what the experience of buildings might involve. A further necessary degree of complexity is added by recognising the time elapsed between the production of the buildings in question and their current inhabitation.

Investigating the (possible) emergence of a ‘New Squirearchy’ in rural England, this research considers the extent of a practical appropriation of the discourse of the country gentleman within the milieu of a specific community in the South East. A process commonly attributed to the middle class, this study engages with those debates on class and class analysis which continue to play out as a key theme in rural studies, and argues for the incorporation of concepts of performance in providing more nuanced accounts of society in the countryside. Drawing on theories of embodiment as developed in the wider disciplines of sociology and geography, and considering them in direct relation to consumption and cultural capital, this research details the existence of the ‘New Squirearchy’ as a discernable community of practise at work in – and dependent upon – the routine operations of other collectives in rural space. Mapping out the movements of those seeking to fulfil the roles and lifestyle historically accredited to the landed elite in detail, this empirically driven enquiry comes out of an intensive tract of in-situ ethnography. Centred on the act(s) of ‘gentryfication’ in the fabric of ‘village England’ and ‘Eamesworth’ more specifically, this story questions the apparent becoming of the ‘New Squirearchy’ through such institutions as the public house, the Parish Council and the village fete.