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Despite a wide-ranging literature on the ‘post-neoliberal’ shift in Bolivia post-2006, there has been limited attention to women’s working lives. Furthermore, literature on urban indigenous women’s work in Bolivia, as with the Andean region more widely, has centred on highland women’s work as (informal) market venders and traders, while lowland indigenous women as economic subjects have been largely invisibilised. Through a qualitative case study with Guaraní and other low-income women in peri-urban Santa Cruz de la Sierra, this thesis explores how lowland indigenous women have been incorporated as economic citizens during this ‘process of change’. Through a feminist political economy perspective, the thesis adopts an assemblage lens to interrogate how intersectional labour market stratification is reproduced or shifting. Developing the concept of the ‘gender-ethnic assemblage of labour’, the thesis argues that despite new women’s rights legislation, development planning continues to marginalize and misrecognise (low-skilled) women’s labour and the gendered work of social reproduction, with implications for the persistence of unequal gender norms around work and limits to women’s substantive economic citizenship. Yet, Guaraní women are further disadvantaged in comparison with other low-skilled women given the specific socio-spatial and material configuration of labour in the peri-urban area and city. Unlike other diverse peri-urban women or the paradigmatic highland market vender of the Andean literature, Guaraní women are generally not traders or street venders, but often work in casual, paid labour. This uneven assemblage encourages the circulation of racialised representations of Guaraní women as new forms of gendered ethnic-class differentiation are set in place. Despite new equalities legislation reducing the worst direct racist abuse, subtle forms of (embodied) status distinctions persist, highlighting reconfigured ‘power-geometries’ of ethnicity and race at work through misrecognition. However, the new legislation has resulted in some limited compliance with women’s labour rights and possibilities for decent work. Furthermore, an important shift in citizen-subjectivities has taken place, symbolically challenging entrenched forms of colonial-patriarchal-classed power, with material effects for women’s agency. Despite limited opportunities for collective action, Guaraní women exercise constrained agency at work through some ambiguous acts of economic citizenship.

This thesis has developed out of a desire to document the voices of a sample of publicly active yet unheard British Muslim women. In the face of widespread negative narratives around Muslim women particularly, it communicates the concerns of 'women who were not oppressed' (van Es, 2017:5). In addition, it explores how these proactive and engaged women have built salient, hybrid identities. The methodological approach taken by this thesis has favoured issues pertaining to the individual rather than the institutional, and has explored 'beneath the surface' forces in a focus on 'lived Islam'. In addition, in applying participatory feminist methods to research the lives of religious women, the thesis has instituted a novel approach to the study of Muslims. The arguments presented here found a theoretical home in the works of Saba Mahmood (2005), championing the alternative agency constructions of religious women, and Tariq Modood (2005, amongst others), in his scholarship around British Muslims (and other minorities) on the national scene. Furthermore, the frames of postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha (2004) are employed to describe the hybridity of space and identities that respondents exhibited. This study reports the significance of religion in the lives of these women, and the particular finding of an observed trajectory in their lives, leading to a greater desire to mix with non- Muslims. With this unique combination of strong religious belief and spirited agency, these 5 women have been able to uphold core aspects of their identity in a secular society, while also successfully contributing to that very society. The social contributions, integration and interaction of these women can be seen as examples of engaged citizenship, showing possibilities for a pluralist, postsecular society in which minorities and their contributions are valued. In highlighting how these women disrupt stereotypes, this thesis makes a significant contribution to academic discourses seeking the accommodation of religious individuals in otherwise secular spaces.

This thesis surveys a Sufi tarīqa that has a wide and expanding outreach in the British context and globally. The key aim of this thesis has been to represent and privilege the life histories of some British women in this tarīqa. The methodology utilised in the study is an ethnographic inquiry into the women's lives using the life-history approach. The research involved following the lives of six women across the country and from all walks of life to provide a nuanced and rich picture of life in the ṭarīqa in Britain and its global connectivity. The conceptual framework deployed engaged the work by Saba Mahmood (2005) on agency and piety, her critics and arrives at its own position. Post-colonial and diaspora studies were used for analysis on identity and integration, namely those by Homi Bhabha. Global Sufism and Sufi revivalism are also relevant theories for understanding the missionary activity of the Sufi ṭarīqa and its ability to remain relevant in the modern world. Islamic and Muslim feminist discourses are also examined against the women's narratives in order to represent and privilege the feminine voice in the tarīqa. The study reports that the Ba' Alawī ṭarīqa was selected by the women mainly due to the charisma of the shaykhs, who display a warm, gentle and emotional orientation, particularly towards women. The alignment with a traditional Sufi order is problematised and it is shown that the women in the thesis share diverse perspectives on feminism and empowerment. Present day injustices and marginalisation of Muslim women show that they experience two patriarchies, the first from mainstream British society and secondly, from that of Muslim men. An alternative conception of Muslim masculinity is, thus, called for in this study.

This study explored the lived experience of six participants who were professional black British women of Jamaican heritage, born in the UK to Jamaican parents of the Windrush Generation. To date, there has been little research within the field of counselling psychology into black existence in the UK. The aim of the research was to make known how the lived experience of these Windrush daughters shaped their relationship with their self and others as illustrated by their relationship to work and achievement. This was a qualitative study from an existential phenomenological perspective, using the critical narrative analysis method (CNA). Two semi-structured interviews were undertaken to capture the participants' narratives. The participants' narratives were analysed using critical theories, in particular, black existential philosophy. Analysis of the findings showed that early experience of racism led to self-hatred. However, the 1970s black consciousness movements led many to adopt a new black identity, although others remained conflicted. For all, there was a realisation that their individual worth was linked to the value of all black people. Work and achievement became the means to demonstrate their value and that of all black people. The implication for practice is to recognise the unique tension between the self and other for black women such as these, and that their existence can only be understood through the lens of black existential philosophy.

At the heart of this thesis are two organizations; Inspire in Britain and Brigade de Mères in France, battling Islamic fundamentalism and gender inequality; and five life stories of 'secular' Muslim women working alongside them. While these women are widely recognized and celebrated among 'elite' circles in the west, they have been largely dismissed by postcolonial feminist scholarship as uncritical mouthpieces for their respective states 'anti-ISIS' agenda. Despite the controversy surrounding these women, this thesis is an attempt to fully engage with such voices rather than avoiding or dismissing them. Its main aim is to examine the challenges and complexities of their engagement in activism, the ways in which discourses of race, gender, religion and ideology have shaped the terms of this engagement and their efforts to make their narratives intelligible to themselves and to others. Data was collected through ethnographic involvement; narratively-informed life story interviews, semi-structured qualitative interviews and documents, and reflexively interpreted using narrative methods. The first section examines the work undertaken by the latter two organizations. The second draws on narrative analysis to explore life stories and journeys to activism. The third explores the ways these women position themselves, their politics and their work within the wider socio-political and historical contexts they are embedded in. The final section investigates the narratives these women draw on when talking about their activism and the circumstances under which these narratives were constructed. In light of the geopolitical factors at play since the early 2000s; 9/11 and the subsequent 'War on Terror,' the emergence of ISIS, the crisis of national identity and the rise of right-wing politics, the narratives of these women reveal contradictory pressures. Islamic fundamentalists see the activism of these women as a western imperialist project that does not engage with the reality of Muslim women. Postcolonial feminists valorise 'religious' agency as an indigenous alternative to western secularism and therefore dismiss their efforts. Neo-orientalists continue to position them as the 'other.' And in the name of respect and tolerance of 'other' cultures, sections of the left see them as Islamophobes. In reality, it seems that these ideological poles instrumentalize Muslim women's emancipation for the sake of attacking each other while allowing little discursive space for women themselves to articulate their positions. Intrinsically, this thesis aspires to map a 'complex' image of Muslim women's activism that encourages alternatives and bridges the current binary constructions of Muslim women as either victimized or fully liberated.

This thesis explores the subjective constructions of white working class young women in the UK. It is comprised of school-based case studies; analysis of demographic questionnaires, focus groups and 13 interviews with white working class 14-15 year old girls. The research is qualitative; applying quantitative analysis which places the cohort within the national demographic context. A review of relevant educational history and current policy is provided alongside existing research findings addressing gender, racial and socio-economic marginalisation within education and wider society. White working class identity is identified through social stratification tools and theorised through alignment to feminist and social justice arguments. The thesis is feminist post-structuralist; performative subjective discursive construction is applied. Respondents’ experiences are articulated within a neo-liberal gaze and the individualisation premise offers a counterpoint to post-structural subjectivity. Both approaches are necessary when conceiving of respondents’ subjectivities. Respondents share their familial, educational and social contexts alongside their personal, educational and professional trajectories. The findings here depict respondents inhabiting a ‘post-equality of opportunity’ ‘post-feminist’ age, resulting in a pseudo-meritocratic world view even when classed, gendered and raced trajectories emerge. Individualisation leads to self-responsibility prevailing in respondents’ explanations, even against the backdrop of material, social and educational barriers. Ambition is described but this is often not enabled by the realities of their lives. Neo-liberal classed, gendered and raced versions of feminine identity emerge from socio-political, media and policy rhetoric. Demonised depictions of working class femininity and motherhood sit at odds with the strong working class women respondents often cite as heroines. Middle class feminine identity is understood though respondents’ perceptions of futures which are acceptable and respectable. Discourses oscillate between the narrow versions of personhood on offer. Respondents discursively resist negative versions of working class identity. However they also simultaneously reinforce them, securing themselves positions of safety under a neo-liberal gaze.

British Muslim women are frequently represented as lacking power and oppressed in public debates. This thesis argues that current power theories fail to understand these women’s power. Against this background, this thesis argues that power is culturally and contextually informed. Power is understood as relational, following previous social psychological research. The thesis examines how British Muslim women understand, experience and perform power. It provides a qualitative-methods examination, drawing on social representations theory (SRT) and identity process theory (IPT). The methodology is based on data triangulation. First, this research explores the British media representational landscape around these women’s power from national, local and ethno-religious newspapers, adopting SRT (Study 1). Despite a prevalence of representing power as making choices, these women’s choices are depicted as problematic or no-choices in dominant representations, which represent them as lacking agency. Contrastingly, minority representations portrayed these women speaking out and celebrating their success. Then, 21 semi-structured interviews were conducted with British Muslim women of three age groups to examine, adopting a phenomenological approach to power, their experiences of power in their everyday lives (Study 2). Unexpectedly, the thematic analysis did not reveal fundamental different accounts of power, participants mainly invoked individualised accounts of power (e.g., autonomy), despite their collective orientation (e.g., helping others), following their religious beliefs. Furthermore, participants barely mentioned their collective identity and power. Their presentation as active women was interpreted as strategic and part of a collective effort to contest their negative representation. The analysis also highlighted generational similarities and differences across groups. In light of this unexpected results, to explore further collective power experiences, 21 semi-structured interviews with British Muslim women about their social engagements were conducted (study 3). The thematic analysis revealed a shared understanding of collective power as brining change in society and within themselves. Participants engaged in processes of (re)definition of their collective identity and religion, coming together and building collective efficacy. This thesis shows how British Muslim women understand, experience and perform power combining Western and Islamic values. Furthermore, how they are actively contesting their (mis)representation collectively through identity presentation processes. These results imply that in order to increase our understanding of these women’s power, research should reflect on the social contexts, their identities and the meanings attached to their power relations. The findings and methods reported here suggest that adopting a phenomenological approach to examine power makes a substantial contribution to social psychology of power.

This research examines how gendered entitlements and obligations in the household, alongside socio-cultural practices, contribute to the vulnerability of women to poverty. In particular, this research focuses on the experiences of female-headed households in the context of an ecologically fragile rural community. Located at the intersection of feminist and poverty and development theory, this inter-disciplinary study offers new insight into the feminisation of poverty thesis; a topic that remains underexplored in the context of rural communities. The vulnerability of women to poverty is interrogated through a multi-dimensional asset accumulation framework, comprising an amalgam of gender, assets, vulnerability and empowerment. This framework facilitates the examination of both the structural and socio-cultural realities of the livelihood strategies of female-headed households, in ecologically fragile communities. Koraro village, Ethiopia was chosen for this study as it represents a small village routinely exposed to adverse environmental conditions, set in a wider context of a struggling sub-Saharan economy. The methodological approach is qualitative, involving an ethnographic study of women’s life in Koraro village including, in-depth contextual interviews, observations, and photographs of daily household activities. Consistent with a qualitative approach the data was grouped and analysed thematically. Findings show that the livelihood strategies of female-headed households are shaped by their capabilities to accumulate and mobilise sufficient appropriate assets. Evidence suggests that female-headed households are continuously renegotiating with institutionalised male authority for access to essential assets as well as their social participation within the wider community. In these socio-cultural relationships, the entitlements of women are subordinated to the socio-cultural entitlements of men. Further, the gender division of trade place women in transient market spaces, forcing the engagement of women in the informal economy. The analysis reveals women using dynamic livelihood strategies, especially interdependent relationships between female-headed households in order to garner assets and social status. Still, female-headed households seem to be more vulnerable to nutrition and health deprivation and poor social well-being. The research contributes to the gender and development discourse, offering a new and hitherto unexamined perspective to the feminisation poverty thesis, focussing on the social processes that engender vulnerability of women in ecologically fragile rural communities.

The main objective of this thesis is to capture, describe, understand and articulate the ways in which Muslim women view and interpret crime, deviance and moral dilemmas in contemporary society. This study will evaluate the contrasts and overlaps between religious ideologies, cultural values and secular norms in relation to Muslim women’s comprehension of moral dilemmas which involves prohibitions in Islam. The present study will also capture how Muslim women formulate living law, how they come to the knowledge of what informs their perspective about crime, how they react and respond to crime and deviancy and how they interpret moral codes, which draws on the concept of legal pluralism. This will involve the discussion of how Muslim women interpret religious and secular norms in Britain which will result in the comprehension of what is central to their daily lives. The theoretical framework that will be adopted to anchor the current project is legal pluralism and living law. The current project draws on the renewed interest in ‘living law’ as originally espoused by Eugen Ehrlich. Ehrlich recommends that to better comprehend how respondents live their everyday life under the living law, then an in-depth study should be conducted that will allow a clearer comprehension of how respondent’s view their surrounding environment, social behaviour, habits and how moral codes are interpreted. The current project embraces a qualitative approach, by using 30 semi-structured interviews to explore and capture Muslim women’s interpretations and views in response to moral dilemmas, crime and deviance in contemporary society. This sample is comprised of a range of Muslim women in the UK that self-categorised themselves to be less adhering Muslims and more adhering Muslims.

Despite the increased number of interreligiously married Muslim women, especially in Western countries, the phenomenon remains overlooked. This research aims to highlight interreligiously married Muslim women's untold stories and to examine their experiences of being part of an interfaith marriage. The research illustrates that Muslim women's interfaith marriages are seen as prohibited and unconventional by many Muslim scholars and communities, and they view this prohibition as a subject that is closed for discussion due to the traditional scholarly consensus supporting it. However, some contemporary Muslim scholars have started to discuss Muslim women's interfaith marriages and argue that the rule and consensus regarding these unions should be re-evaluated considering the ways in which society and gender roles in today's marriages are changing. Using qualitative interviews with intermarried Muslim women, this study examines the impact of the families on Muslim women's decision to marry a non-Muslim, how they deal with the religious differences in the family and the impact the interfaith union has upon their religiosity. The research reveals that 'love' is the main reason behind the Muslim women's decision of interfaith marriage. The findings also indicate that while interfaith marriage does not directly impact Muslim women's religiosity, community pressure and negative perceptions of their marriages have curtailed Muslim women and their children's relationship with the Muslim community.

Much of the work on lower caste communities asserts continuities in caste moralities and disadvantages, despite other forms of economic and social upliftment. Mobility is commonly conceptualized as the attainment of tangible outcomes and caste emerges as the main axis for lower caste negotiations with mobility. In contrast, the present study attempts to move beyond objective measures of mobility and explores the operation of mobility as an ideal and aspiration for modern spaces outside the village. In particular, this study examines the ways in which young women from a predominantly Ad-dharmi (upwardly mobile Dalit group in Punjab that have historically worked with leather) village in the Doaba region of Punjab create belonging and access to middle class culture and mobility. Based on ethnographic data, collected over eleven months I seek to answer: How do young women from upwardly mobile Dalit families construct and negotiate access to middle classness? The study finds young women’s transition to middle classness is defined by their interaction with migration, education, consumption and marriage. Young women pursue different ideas of middle classness, based on their family’s economic positioning and culture. Their claims to middle class status and spaces outside the village is based on their negotiations with gender norms and cultural expectations tied to the rural and urban space. In producing mobile and respectable identities, young women give rise to new constructions of appropriate femininity and demonstrate the cultural transitions involved in mobility. At a discursive level, young women associate stereotypes attached to their caste identity with lower class and lower caste others. Thus, caste identity becomes subsumed and channelled towards the project of class mobility in discourse but caste continues to be reproduced through marriage practices.

This research discusses the affective economy in the lives of Black Brazilian women who live in the United Kingdom. I use ‘affect’ as part of what circulates in the ways identifications and social encounters happen situated in particular standpoints (lugar de fala). To understand the weaving process of expressing and identifying Blackness and being Black, I centred the voices of Black Brazilian women as participants in conversations during the fieldwork. Along with their voices at the centre, Black feminist and decolonial literature established the epistemological framework for the ‘ethnographicness’, ethics of caring and discourse analysis deployed in this research. The concept of coloniality of power has a relevant connotation in the ways that oppressions have been naturalised and legitimised at the institutional level. The British Racial Contract has a particular affective economy in such coloniality of power when Black Brazilian women make use of institutional services or in their daily process of making home. Herstories reveal that oppressions, agency and liberation are lived individually and also shared by the commonalities that resistance and coloniality of power enact. This shows that the affective economy disrupts binary understandings of how Blackness and being Black means. Instead, it complicates the narratives and the analysis of multiple possibilities of performing Black and Blackness, using dis-identifications processes (being Amefricaladina) as a systemic denial of the place that coloniality allocated to Black women.

This research aims to analyse Islamic feminist practices and writings in the contexts of Algeria and Saudi Arabia. To answer the question of how Muslim women practice or write about Islamic feminism in these contexts, the level of analysis moved between the microcosm of women's writings I chose as case studies to the wider macrocosm of their contexts; these local contexts are also effected by global events such as globalisation, 9/11 and the 'War on Terror'. My contribution to the literature of Islamic feminisms is that they should be considered within an intersectional framework and analysis where religion and religious identification or practices of religiosity are part of many experiences of women's realities akin to race, gender, sexuality, and class; each effects and is effected by the other. This view helps us escape binary oppositions and categorisations and address the issues of multiple marginalisation or discrimination that women endure in the name of religion. Intersectional Islamic feminisms appreciate the complexity of women's lives, identities and experiences, and the complexities of their contexts by showing the diversity of women's voices and world-views that would challenge feminists and nationalists' master narratives. More importantly, intersectional Islamic feminisms enfold a critical stance that constantly reflects on their own positions to avoid essential categorisations, or marginalisation of other positions. I showcase this theoretical framework of Islamic feminisms through focusing on two cases from Algeria and Saudi Arabia. The constructed Islamic feminisms of my chosen case are also broadened and challenged by bringing other women's voices into the debate and thus revealing a spectrum of Islamic feminisms that is far from dichotomous and more in dialogue, even if not always direct. It was crucial in these contexts to develop a critical stance whilst simultaneously building on a richer conceptual definition of Islamic feminism's theorization and practices.

This thesis is based on the care and career experiences of mid-life (ages 45 - 65) women engaging in paid employment alongside informal caring of dependent adults. It was carried out within the context of a growing 'social care crisis' in the wake of depleting social and healthcare resources and government policies encouraging people to 'care for their own', alongside policies to boost the employment of older workers. Calendar interviews with 30 mid-life women with experience of caring and paid employment in Leicester and Leicestershire were conducted between June and December 2016. This research took place within the interpretive paradigm, with the aim of hearing from women about their experiences in their own voices. The study draws upon three intersecting areas of literature and theory around concepts of work, careers and caring, to make sense of the women's experiences. As a result, the study reveals key themes: the negative and positive impacts of caring on formal career trajectories; changing perspectives on concepts of work and the notion of care as 'work'; understandings of career, and the emergence of care as an 'unexpected career', which helps in conceptualising women's careers. The study contributes empirically by generating further knowledge and understanding of caring and career, particularly as there are limited existing qualitative studies in this area. Through analysis of the careers of participants, a typology of women's formal careers affected by caring and a typology of informal caring careers were developed, providing frameworks for the study of women's careers. The thesis identifies the notion of women's polymorphic careers, demonstrated through the development of a new model of women's formal and informal caring careers. It also offers recommendations for both policy and practice. This includes greater support from local and national government, provision of information and training to carers. It is also important for workplaces to understand the moral and business case for supporting working carers, having clear policies which are structured, with consistent support but also flexible enough to be personalised to individual circumstances. Furthermore, line managers should be given training, support and time to engage with their employees and to understand all aspects of their development. Finally, the thesis concludes with areas for possible future research incorporating further longitudinal study, different participant groups, and applying the model to different contexts.

This thesis is concerned with understanding women’s emancipatory struggles and efforts to challenge their secondary status in Iran, but with reference to other Muslim societies in the Middle East. To explore the possibility of women’s emancipation in Iran, the thesis focuses on, firstly, the position of women in relation to the forces of capitalist modernisation and Islamisation; secondly and more importantly, on women’s main convictions and inner-conflicts, and how these are shaped by those forces. The thesis thus seeks to grasp the structure and dynamics of women’s subjective field and to identify distinct subjective patterns which would constitute different responses to their situation. The thesis is divided into two parts: first, a literature review throws light on different crucial aspects of women’s lives and possibilities for transformation in Iran and other Muslim societies in relation to the forces of capitalist modernisation and Islamisation. While showing the richness and growing sophistications of an expanding field of study, the literature review also pointed out to a few significant lacunae or gaps in current research. Two such gaps stand out and are of the greatest relevance for this thesis, namely, the fact that the issues of women’s emancipation and subjectivities are missing in most studies of Muslim women, as these studies tend to overwhelmingly focus on women’s (often imposed rather than self-attributed) identities and on the anti-Western or anti-Islamic aspects thereof. The second part of this thesis, a field study, seeks to fill in some of those gaps, particularly those concerning women’s subjectivities and struggles for emancipation. In-depth semi-structured open-ended interviews with twenty-two Iranian women in Tehran from different social classes and backgrounds were conducted. The interviews, based on an interview guide designed so as to capture crucial aspects of women’s subjective dispositions and strivings for emancipation, immediately brought out the critical importance of the opposition, missing in most studies, between capitalism and emancipation, and enabled the development of a two-dimensional framework based on two central oppositions: capitalism vs. emancipation on the horizontal axis or dimension, and modernity vs. tradition on the vertical one. A more in-depth analysis of the interviews through the lens of the new framework allowed the identification of four main subjectivities carried by women and explain their emergence in terms of interaction effects between the four subjective determinations defining the framework (capitalism, modernity, emancipation and tradition): Islamist subjectivity, a statist form of religion in strong opposition to emancipatory feminism, the subjectivity of desire for the West, a fascination for individualism and a Western lifestyle and a denial of tradition, traditionalist subjectivities, a strong tendency to preserve all forms of traditions particularly religion and nationalism, and emancipatory subjectivity, although the latter only appears in this study in the form of modern emancipatory aspects and elements (with equality at their core) rather than a full-fledged ‘emancipatory subjectivity’. Thanks to this form of analysis we have come to understand that women’s movements in Iran are more oriented towards ‘tackling Islamisation’ than ‘seeking equality’ or ‘challenging patriarchy’. It is on this basis that the thesis draws two of its main conclusions: firstly, that the opposition between capitalism and emancipation should be not only taken into account, but a major basis for any future studies on Muslim women; and, secondly, that the struggle against Islamisation cannot be separated from the struggles against social inequality and patriarchy.

This is a study of class and gender in everyday life on a housing estate in the Midlands. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a pub on the estate, it looks at how identities are constructed in the negotiation of work, relationships, children, and local ‘officials’. It considers how social and cultural capital is formed against the odds and against a widespread pathologising of those struggling to get by. It presents a detailed and contextual understanding of (white) working class identities in the context of neo-liberalism. In doing so, it questions standard sociological accounts of class as well as the official discourse of public policy which represents disadvantage in terms of ‘responsibility’ and ‘aspirations’, while ignoring structural disadvantage.

This qualitative research, situated within the interpretivist paradigm, draws on educational journey narratives of 31 British women of Bangladeshi (10), Indian (11) and Pakistani (10) (BIP) heritage. It aims to give space to the individual voices of women who have been homogenised, marginalised, and often silenced, within the educational mainframe. All the women whose stories form this thesis had some of their compulsory education within the U.K. As BIP heritage, my own story is included. The narratives were explored using a combined grounded theory, and Bronfenbrenner model (1979) approach which allowed for multiple and layered themes to emerge. Through unstructured interviews the women explained the complex ways in which they negotiate identity and belonging within 'white' eurocentric educational institutions, whilst operating within the patriarchal confines of izzat (loosely translated as honour). Izzat was enforced through the watchful gaze of the baradari (community) and equally, alongside socio-economic status, impacted on how education for girls was viewed, and enabled by families. Education led to the two trajectories of employment and marriage; all three of which, were influenced by the four pillars (agency, attitude, access and knowledge). Educational success enabled better marriage prospects, and I argue is an integral part of the dowry ('wealth' given by bride's family to the groom's family). Previous research has used intersectionality to understand disadvantage, such as institutionalised racism and sexism. However using izzat as a facet of intersectionality, to inform understanding of the context within which BIP heritage female students may be operating is new. I argue izzat should be used as a lens to enable practitioners to have more nuanced pastoral conversations. This thesis makes a unique contribution to knowledge and to the educational studies field as it offers valuable insights into how izzat weaves with other dimensions adding to the marginalisation of BIP women.

This thesis is about the changing lives of Muslim women living in a not so out of the way place. Though on the geographic margins of India, at the fringes of the state of West Bengal, the Hindu goddess-named village they call home has become increasingly connected. In recent years their verdant, jungle isolation has been stripped away by fresh tarmac, mobile phone signal and the formerly shadowy yet increasingly assertive presence of a global Islamic reformist movement. The lives of a diverse group of women in this village of Tarakhali are drawn together to ask what it is to be a Muslim woman here, at this time. Female personhood is understood as something constructed through the skilful navigation of myriad forms of everyday violence. This deft handling of tension and contradiction gains strength and significance as women experience this moment of incorporation and the accompanying transformations. The fundamental role of Islam in shaping their understandings is explored through charged encounters with the conservative Tablighi Jama’at and the increasingly unpredictable and violent interactions with the supernatural. As conceptual and actual spaces are opening up for women, how they enter the labour market and engage (un)productively with microfinance is explored, as is how they transcend village, gender and social boundaries to become “seen” by local bureaucracies. Finally, the impact of this moment of discord in which some beliefs and experiences clash with others is drawn into focus, as this is how it shapes the way in which these women envisage a future both here on earth, and in the hereafter.

This thesis presents an ethnographic study of the experiences of singlehood within the Malay Muslim society in Malaysia. The study focuses on never-married women over the age of 30, past the normal marriageable age. Singlehood is regarded as a 'glocal' phenomenon. In other words, while the phenomenon is happening globally within modern societies, the experiences of singlehood are locally constructed. The experiences of singlehood are also gendered, where singleness among women is generally regarded negatively compared to men. This study attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How do Malay Muslims experiences singlehood at the societal level (macro level)? (2) How do never-married Malay Muslim women define their identities at the individual and interactional levels (micro level), within the family, at the workplace and as Muslims? (3) How are Malay Muslims' experiences of singlehood similar to, or different from, other socio-cultural contexts? In terms of data collection methods, in-depth interviews, participant observation and textual analysis were utilised. Analysis of the public discourses in Malay language newspaper articles and a Malay movie revealed that at the macro level, singleness is perceived as a 'problem' and single women are considered as having 'deficit' or 'incomplete identity'. However, at the micro level, analysis of the in-depth interviews using bases of identity as a framework revealed a mismatch between the public discourse of singlehood and the actual lived experiences of single women and their immediate environment. Evidently, the study participants were not passive subjects, but were rather active agents who creatively negotiated 'complete' identities within their families, at the workplace and as Muslims. Generally, the Malay Muslim experience of singlehood corresponded with the global trends in terms of the contributing factors towards the emergence of the phenomenon, and the common stereotypes attached to single women. However, further examination of the lived experiences of the study participants demonstrated that aspects of Malay culture (such as the concepts of jodoh [soulmate granted by God at the perfect time], langkah bendul [jumping the ledge], and mandi bunga [floral bath]), and Islamic teachings (such as dosa and pahala [God's punishment and reward], rezeki [sustenance], ikhtiar [effort] and redha [acceptance]) were the basis of the attitude and behaviour of never-married women within the context of the Malay Muslims in modern Malaysia.

This thesis is a history of women’s involvement in rugby league between 1880 and 1970. It shows that whilst women were traditionally excluded from playing rugby league, they were involved in the game, as supporters, volunteers and organisers. Women were also the mothers, wives, sisters or daughters of men who played or administered rugby, and were thus involved in the sport at the most personal level, providing a reservoir of unpaid labour to support their menfolk, but also suffering when injury or retirement from rugby reduced the family income. The thesis demonstrates that women have been an integral part of rugby league from its earliest days as a spectator sport in the north of England. This research explores how women found the space to assert their right to a role within rugby league and to derive their own enjoyment from it. It argues that women’s relationship with the sport was exceedingly complex and often appeared to be contradictory. Women volunteers were pushed into traditional supportive roles in their clubs yet used their position to exert influence and some power over those clubs. Working-class women were able to mark out areas of authority in their families and communities by working independently within rugby league’s patriarchal framework. This thesis asks whether their involvement in rugby league reflects women’s social, economic and political status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, by exploring women’s lived experiences and foregrounding overlooked measures of success, also reassesses the questions asked by historians of sport. Feminist in its methodology, the thesis also strives for intersectionality in terms of class and other formative relationships, such as age, geography, economy and cultural identity. It shows the depth of experiences of women involved in rugby league and offers a new way of understanding how women engaged with sport.

Migrant women in Greece are not often seen as independent, active agents. A prevailing tendency to focus on men and families among academic researchers and policymakers alike, renders them largely invisible. When it comes to African women, however, processes of gendered racialization operate to make them also hyper-visible in stereotypical ways: as oppressed wives and mothers, uneducated domestic workers, and sexualised and/or dangerous Others. In a country in which national identity and belonging are strongly racialized, African women have long been subjected to processes of legal abjectification. In recent years, austerity, high unemployment and increasing anti-migrant sentiment have intensified their vulnerability in multiple ways. This thesis explores some of the more neglected aspects of economic crisis and migration in Greece. A feminist ethnographic enquiry that goes beyond traditional depictions of victimhood and dependency, it engages with the often hidden and complex lives of real women. Adopting a translocational analysis that considers women's agency within contexts of social relations and structural power, the research illuminates how participants experience and respond to processes of legal abjectification and gendered racism in their everyday lives. Women are shown to deploy a variety of tactics aimed towards securing livable lives in terms of both material conditions and social intelligibility. They cope, adapt, negotiate and resist, often using - and sometimes disrupting - the modes of recognition available to them. The research illustrates how, in contrast to perceptions of them as 'bodies out of place', women create a sense of belonging in Athens. They do so not only through everyday home-making practices, but also by collectively mobilising to claim rights, counter processes of marginalisation and challenge who can and cannot belong.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the migration of Polish citizens within Europe, especially post EU accession. There is, however, little research on the movement of such migrants further afield, especially in the context of individualised lifestyle migration. This thesis is based on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation/participation with Polish women living in United Kingdom and New Zealand/Aotearoa. Using Butler’s theory of performativity and Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to self-presentation I consider how class, gender and ethnicity intersect, and how they are expressed in Polish women’s behaviour in two very different geographical, socio-economic, cultural and political environments. My data show how Polish women’s femininity and gender practices change in a response to their different social location in both New Zealand and the UK, and how these are affected by varying levels of social inclusion of women, Poles and migrants in both these countries. My findings demonstrate that although in both NZ and UK Polish women feel more included as women, in the UK their ethnicity and migration status locate them in a lower societal strata. Further, in NZ Polish women felt more included as women, Poles and migrants, and the way they performed gender and ethnicity did not require ‘resistance practices’ to counteract ethnic and class stigma. I also show how discourses of migration to both these places are rooted in the history of the Polish-English and Polish-New Zealand relations, and inform the way Polish women narrate their experience. As I use an intersectional approach in both methodology and theoretical framework, the focus is on the intersecting nature of my respondents’ social identities, and the way their migrant experience is classed and gendered. Although my work is anthropological/sociological in its approach (ethnography) and subject (e.g. focus on class), I also draw on my background from crosscultural and social psychology (e.g. the work of Hofstede) to broaden the theoretical perspectives traditionally adopted in migration studies.

The Islamic veil has become one of the most controversial sartorial items of the contemporary milieu and an ultimate symbol of unwanted British otherness. Fuelled by political and media preoccupation with the subject, the resentment towards Islamic veiling is grounded in partial and often erroneous representations of a ‘veiled woman’ as on the one hand being a passive victim of patriarchal oppression and on the other hand being an active threat to British security and identity. Based upon a two-year multi-sited ethnographic study, this thesis contests such static images of the veil. By deploying ethnographic interviewing, participant observation and an analysis of the British mainstream press, social media, policies and artistic representations, it explores veiling as experienced by British Muslim women from diverse backgrounds. The central focus of this work is to accentuate the various implications that veiling carries for the everyday lives and identities of Muslim women in Britain. This thesis places a special emphasis on exploring intimate sentiments for veiling: the very reasons for adopting the hijab as well as perceptions of spirituality, modesty and beauty. Arising from these different and often contradictory perspectives held by Muslim women, the veil is not perceived as a rigid structure that is imposed on an individual. It is rather viewed as an altering, hybrid and antagonistic concept that is largely dependent on personal negotiations and appropriations. Whilst emphasising the role of female agency in shaping the semiotics of the veil, this thesis simultaneously examines how personal values, meanings and social relations are shaped by broader social, political and religious discourses regarding the veil. This thesis thus critically observes how and when the Islamic veil appears in fashion, pop culture, art, public politics, legal rhetoric and the media and the ways in which such representations influence Muslim women themselves. Subsequently, the ever-transforming meanings of the veil are observed at the intersection of conflicting processes, shaped by representations, British and European political dynamics and the women themselves. Acknowledging such divergent forces, ethnographic accounts are contextualised within the macro perspective of British society and its practical challenges. This thesis, hence, aims to contribute to the field of anthropology of religion, gender, fashion and citizenship with a timely case study. Close-up ethnographic accounts and anthropological contextualisation of the topic moreover offer a profound insight into the public polemics regarding the place of the Islamic veil in British society, with the issue being rethought from an emic perspective of women who continue to be conspicuously absent from public discourses on the subject.

By using clothing practices, the thesis illustrates how we become Black Muslim women in relation to a multitude of objects, bodies, gazes and spaces. This contributes to research within critical race studies on the performance and production of racialised bodies across different spaces. Specifically, the thesis asks what analytical tools can be developed to understand how Black Muslim women negotiate presentations beyond a fixed categorisation of our beings and how clothing practices highlight different experiences of being Black Muslim women across a multitude of spaces. This extends work on the territorialisation of the body, emotional and affective geographies, performativity and material culture, as well as visual studies through phenomenological readings of race. Building these fields through the lens of Black Muslim stylisation illustrates how centring Black Muslim women in Britain provides the opportunity to develop new and critical knowledges on the co-production of different bodies, gazes and spaces within Social Geography. I explore how we perform our beings through the use of clothes journals and semi-structured interviews (based on Black feminist dialogue) with 21 Black Muslim women in Manchester and Sheffield. These methods (along with the research design and analysis) speak from and build upon a wider ethical commitment to reflexively build knowledge with Black Muslim women, and to challenge spaces of knowledge production and legitimisation that have excluded and/or objectified this diversity of beings across different spaces. To highlight these experiences of being, there are three analytical tools that come in and out of focus throughout the project; comfort, layering and visibility are developed within the interludes running between the empirical chapters. Meanwhile, the empirical chapters expand on our beings as shifting in relation to our presentations across three spaces (home, prayer and work). Home clothing illustrates how boundaries around the body shifts as we interact with different bodies (and boundaries) in and around the home. The clothes used for prayer speaks to the relationship between layering and prayer’s brief (and racialised) temporality: even after the material layer used for prayer is removed, the performance of prayer remains part of our overarching beings. Finally, I use work outfits to think through the clothing practices used to ‘fit’ into (i.e. negotiate visibility within) different spaces. By framing this thesis through the geographies of Black Muslim women, I extend research on how bodies are produced and shift across different spaces. This highlights different experiences of being across a multitude of spaces, and challenges a homogeneous and static reading of Black (and) Muslim women as Other to a white Self.

This thesis examines the role of Muslim women in the implementation of ethno-religious minority policies in the UK from 2001-2014. Using Muslim women as a case study, I aim to understand how this relationship works in practice and whether the role played by Muslim women is symbolic or substantive. Also, I attempt to explore whether the engagement between the government and Muslim women has increased since 2010, with the change in the government from New Labour to the Coalition. Last but not least, the representative claims of the women involved in the policy process is examined to determine the legitimacy of the whole process. Specifying the ‘decentred’ theory of policy making, I employ a ‘hybrid’ approach to policy implementation and take further insight from ‘Saward’s (2006; 2009) ‘representation’ theory to answer the aforementioned questions. The theoretical framework helps me to justify the three level analysis, e.g. national, local and individual case studies. Using evidence from the documentary analysis and in-depth elite interviews, I highlight the positive role of non-elected Muslim women in the implementation of policies towards the Muslim community. The particular importance of the thesis lies in the way I apply the ‘decentred’ government’ approach and the ‘hybrid’ model of policy implementation to appreciate how Muslim women and local actors can ‘twist’ national policy to suit local needs. The empirical findings on how women approached engagement through Prevent, and how local actors negotiated a ‘grey space’ to pursue more locally appropriate approaches, are both significant interventions in the wider debate on Prevent and its implications for Muslim women’s and state-Muslim engagement.

My thesis focuses on indigenous women’s intersectional resistance in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea, from the onset of Spanish colonialism until the present day. Resistance has received scant academic attention and is under-theorised. The gendered aspects of resistance are even more deeply in shadow. Furthermore Spain’s former African colonies are themselves often ignored in Hispanic Studies. Taking these gaps as a starting point, I query, in this thesis, the relationship between gender and resistance to oppressive regimes. I focus on constructions of gender and how they influence both the tactics of resistance that women employ and the punishments dealt to activists. I also look at how women’s participation in resistance activities challenges hegemonic gender norms. Drawing on Spanish government colonial archives and fieldwork conducted in Equatorial Guinea, the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria and the occupied zone of Western Sahara, and amongst the Saharawi and Equatoguinean diaspora in Europe, I argue that not only is gender central to understanding resistance to dictatorial regimes and colonialism, but also that scholars of authoritarianism must consider gender when assessing how such regimes maintain power. Secondly, I contend that globally hegemonic constructions of gender and particularly of ‘gender equality’ are essential to the international geopolitics that allow the continuation of the Obiang dictatorship in Equatorial Guinea and the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.

Kuwait has changed dramatically over the last 50 years and simultaneously the world has changed in terms of economic and financial factors, globalization, technology, and religion. These changes have implications for the lives of women in terms of a range of factors such as clothing, relationships, sexuality, childhood, and parenting. This thesis aimed to explore how women make sense of themselves in the context of this changing world taking three different perspectives. In line with this, three inductive empirical studies were carried out in Kuwait using open-ended in-depth interviews as the methodological tool and thematic analysis as the analytic approach. Reported meaning making experiences were shared on culturally sensitive topics providing new insights to contribute academically in this under-researched field. Study one explored taboo issues related to the women’s sexuality and relationships (aged 19-27). The aim was to examine reasons as to why young Muslim Kuwaiti women engage in pre-marital sexual relationships and how much their modernized thoughts influence their personal desires even if they are aware of the consequences in societal norms and rigid restrictions. Results indicated that women engage in romantic relationships and continuously feel the need to “balance” between their secretive personal sexual desires and the Islamic Sharia law of Kuwait. Having relationships in this changing world creates issues around sexual guilt. This creates tensions and implications for women including “a clash” of their two selves when managing two identities. Study two involved a sample of unmarried Muslim Kuwaiti women (aged between 22-55). The aim was to understand the causes of the increased rates of divorce and spinsterhood in an Islamic context that stigmatizes single women. Results indicated that women demand to remain single for reasons such as the demand for independence in their patriarchal context and the desire for new marital expectations. Being unmarried in this changing world creates cultural rebound effects explained in women’s senses of social and family pressures, clothing, sexual liberation, and the Kuwaiti feminist roles in today’s changing world when transgressing taboo. Conflict is created when choosing between being socially invisible because their desires for “women’s independency” is neglected in Kuwait, or being socially visible in a “negative light” for choosing to remain unmarried within their Islamic context. Yet still, they are not willing to give up their independent identities in order to fit in with traditional or marital expectations. Study three looks at the views of religious, traditional, and modern Muslim Kuwaiti mothers today and their relations with their children, specifically in raising daughters (aged between 5-13). The aim was to explore socio-cultural patterns of change allowing a richer understanding of Muslim Kuwaiti mothers in current generations in comparison to the past. Results indicated that mothers are continuously normalizing cultural taboos and social stigmas in terms of emotional and intellectual aspects. Tension was apparent when reflecting on the veil, education, and social life in a changing world. The mothers did face some challenges by living in an “old” traditional space, yet in a “new” modern time. With that, they desired stronger daughters (with a future that does not mirror theirs). Overall, this thesis shows that living in a changing world in Kuwait challenges women’s identities when reflecting upon social identity approach and self-categorization theory. This creates tension of self and identity. Women when describing their sexual relationships, being unmarried, or bringing up their daughters experienced a sense of clash of self and identity when balancing between desired selves and social identities.

The debate regarding whether or not Islam is inherently discriminatory towards women is endless. Even though the Quranic verses emphasize equality between man and woman and the supremacy of human dignity, the interpretation of the Islamic texts related to women are often influenced by the values of patriarchal societies resulting in discriminatory practices against women in many Muslim countries worldwide. The Convention of the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is often referred to as the ‘women’s bill of rights’ as it is the first international legally-binding document that specifically deals with all areas related to women’s lives. This convention is believed to aim at achieving equality between men and women in every field and supports women’s access to equal opportunities in the political and social spheres trying to overcome the social and cultural obstacles that might exist so they can have full rights in areas of legal rights, education, employment, healthcare, politics and finance. However, the implementation of this convention in Muslim societies remains as an ineffective remedy to the problems of women due to a number of reasons mainly related to lack of real government will and strict social and religious values. Like most Muslim countries, Bahrain has ratified the CEDAW while putting reservations on its main articles, leaving the convention without any real effect. Bahrain is a Muslim state that is small in population but serves as a good representation of the dilemma that Muslim societies experience in general, which is their eagerness to adapt to modern values whilst clinging at the same time to their religious roots. This thesis studies the Bahraini society in terms of its application of the CEDAW and the legislations related to women in different fields by giving a special focus to the controversial issues in Islam that hinder a full implementation of the CEDAW. This research has taken the challenge of investigating the situation of women rights in Bahrain and its compatibility with the international laws. Through using a research strategy based on questionnaires and interviews with different stakeholders, the thesis was able to present the views the society in Bahrain holds about the situation of women and the challenges facing women hindering them to further develop their situation. The outcomes of the work undertaken will put recommendations to improve the situation for Muslim women as states or concerned stakeholders should not rely only on trying to fully apply the CEDAW, but should work towards renewing the religious mindsets, create social awareness, and have a genuine political will to achieve equality. In a nutshell, the main target for change is to work essentially towards making a change that comes from within.

This thesis argues that the strategic use of popular media texts and their technologies are reflective of how the Japanese women I interviewed are able to explore new and diverse cultural practices, reaffirm those practices they are familiar with, and offer a forum from which to confidently construct and contest personal and social boundaries. Everything in life changes, but the fact that we are social beings embedded in social networks remains the same. Media practice changes too, as do the purposes to which it is put and how it meets the needs of the user. Media use remains constant in the lives of my interlocutors, despite the changing technologies and the changing circumstances of their lives and their families. Because of its quotidian nature, media practice supports the continuous formation of the Japanese self and it encourages particular expressions of agency. This thesis is also a direct response for the need for an agenda of research that increases our understanding of how media aids in the production of self and subjectivity.

Muslim women constitute almost half of all European Muslim parliamentarians, yet they are typically framed as oppressed or as a threat to European values. Simultaneously, although France and francophone Belgium are seen as similar, there are significant disparities in the levels of Muslim political representation in each case. The introduction outlines the rationale behind studying the principal motivations, opportunities and barriers to Muslim women’s political participation in France and francophone Belgium, and also the basis of studying the role of ‘European Islam’, political opportunity structures, secularism and Muslim women’s dress. The second chapter details the research design and methodological approaches applied in the study. Via the in-depth comparative analysis of each context and its norms, along with data derived from semi-structured qualitative interviews with Muslim women who participate in politics, the subsequent chapters present findings related to the nature of Muslim women’s political participation in France and francophone Belgium. Chapter Three details the expressed motivations derived from experiences, Islamic and European values, discusses their desires to participate in political projects that will benefit the wider society and groups with whom they socially identify, and how this leads to the Muslim women pursuing diverse political engagement. Chapter Four explores the role of contextual norms and political opportunity structures in shaping and contributing to the distinct disparities in the nature of reported opportunities for political participation encountered by Muslim women in the two cases. Chapter Five details the obstacles to participation posed by Muslim women’s dress in France and the emergence of such patterns in Wallonia. It also outlines the barriers to Muslim women’s political participation linked to Islamophobia, racism and gender. The concluding chapter brings together the principal conclusions of the study, namely the similar faith related motivations to pursue political engagement expressed by the Muslim women who participated in this study, the increasingly similar barriers to political participation faced by Muslim women presented by norms surrounding Muslim women’s dress in the two cases. The study also details the different effects of the political opportunities on the nature of political roles occupied by Muslim women in France and Belgium. Finally, the thesis highlights the remarkable resilience and consistent determination of Muslim women in the two cases.

Muslim family members constitute a significant migration flow to the UK (Kofman et al., 2013). Despite such observations, this form of mobility is under-explored in geographic scholarship on migration. Accordingly, this thesis examines the subjective experiences of migration of a small group of Muslim women, who migrated either with or to join their families in Scotland. Participant observation, focus groups and the life narratives of eight women are used to gain an in-depth understanding of both the reasons for and the consequences of migration for this group of Muslim women. In addition, this thesis examines the role of a secular community-based organisation in supporting migrants in their everyday lives. Drawing on conceptual approaches to migration, this study reveals diverse and complex motivations among participants in “choosing” to migrate. Far from “victims” or “trailing wives”, participants privileged their children's needs but also the possibility to transform their sense of self through migration. The study draws attention to the struggles of daily life in Scotland where, bereft of extended family, the synchronisation of migration with childbirth resulted in some participants enduring years of isolation. Such struggles resulted in changes in the home, with husbands providing both physical and emotional support. The experience of migration affected the women's religious identities, providing solace as well as a way to assert belonging in Scotland by drawing on Islamic theology. The community-based organisation provided a “safe space”, bridging the secular and non-secular and offering women the chance to socialise, learn and volunteer. The study shows that volunteering provided not only a way into paid work but also shaped women's subjectivities and home lives. However, the re-direction of national government funding towards “Muslim problems” threatens to undermine the organisation's ability to continue to meet the local needs of Muslim migrant women.

As part of the British government's Prevent strategy following the July 2005 attacks in London, Muslim women were engaged and empowered as allies to tackle violent extremism. This empowerment greatly improved the social and economic status of Muslim women in Britain. However the primary objective, to prevent the escalation of violent extremism, was not achieved. Furthermore, the way in which Prevent was implemented significantly damaged relations between those who were involved in the strategy and those who were excluded. The overarching research question was: 'How has the role of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim women in British society changed from the period 1995 to 2010 as a result of the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks and the government's Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) strategy or Prevent agenda?' This, and a number of sub-questions, were examined using a mixed methodology approach, which included information drawn from academic literature, open source reporting and journalism, as well as surveys, interviews and focus group discussions with British Muslim women. The study concludes that Muslim women took advantage of the opportunities offered to them by the British government as part of the Prevent strategy, not particularly with the intentions of preventing violent extremism, but more because their progression was an assertion of their own human rights. However, during this time, many Muslim institutions were being ostracised by the government because of their Islamic school of thought, older Muslims and Muslim men were excluded, and Muslims experienced resentment from non-Muslim communities that had lost their government funding due to the exclusive focus on the Muslim community. The findings of this study imply the need for further research into some of the issues highlighted above, also advocating the commissioning of an urgent review of the British government's Prevent agenda, to include the policies that conflate Islam and violence.

The basic rationale of this research was to identify as many relevant factors and issues as possible that have enabled Sierra Leonean women emerging from a brutal civil/rebel war in Sierra Leone to develop resilience( “To spring back into shape” –Oxford English Dictionary) and Adversity-Activated Development(AAD) as they resettled, integrated and became part of their new communities. Their resilience enabled them to adapt successfully in the face of threats and disaster into a new society, environment and community in the United Kingdom (UK). This was despite the fact that they had endured many different types of adversity, including sexual and psychological violence during the civil/rebel war in Sierra Leone. The research examined various relevant and contributing factors, including personal, professional, family and community circumstances, status, attitudes, religious belief systems, social networks as well as behaviours. It also investigated the unique way that Sierra Leonean refugee women (a) experienced adversity (connected with the civil war in Sierra Leone), (b) addressed adversity at different stages (e.g. during the war, their flight, their transition through various, countries, refugee camps and also during their final phase of resettlement in the UK), and (c) integrated into their new communities. This research is based on the theoretical framework developed by Papadopoulos who: (a) Mapped out the four stages of the refugee experiences, i.e. Anticipation, Devastating Events, Survival and Adjustment (Papadopoulos, 1999), and (b) Differentiated the range of responses to adversity by using the Trauma / Adversity Grid that includes not only the negative responses but also the retained positives (i.e. resilient dimensions) as well the new positives that were the direct result of being exposed to adversity, that he termed Adversity-Activated development (AAD). (Papadopoulos 2004, 2007). The research followed a qualitative research methodology and took into account a gendered perspective on the views and personal experiences of Sierra Leonean refugee women living and working in the United Kingdom (U.K.). The data was collected through in-depth interviews, semi-structured questionnaires, group meetings and individual sessions with the participants, who are all Sierra Leonean refugee women living and working in the United Kingdom (UK). These participants had all been granted full refugee status. They were given time to complete questionnaires and they were also interviewed about their life histories using the heuristic method, theory and approach. This allowed the participants and the researcher to experience self-awareness and self-knowledge throughout the research process, while understanding the phenomenon of the factors that led to the resilience of these Sierra Leonean refugee women. Particular attention was paid to understanding the cultural framework (the use of traditional and cultural values and practices), coping mechanisms and capacities, integration and participation of these participants as well as to the wider psychosocial dimensions of their experience and how these women were able to adapt successfully to a completely new unknown environment, integrating and resettling into new ways of life in the United Kingdom (UK) despite all their traumatic experiences. The research also investigated the multidisciplinary nature of the care of refugees in general and how this relates to some of the specific issues affecting refugees, including their socio-economic development, human rights, cultural and traditional disorientation and dislocation, and sought to connect these to the loss of home, personal identity and community for refugees. The research is extremely topical, especially right now at this very moment in time when the world is facing an unparalleled crisis with migrant and refugees streaming into more developed countries, particularly in Europe. This refugee crisis created a lot of emotional responses in everybody, it touches the sensitivities of people, some react with fear and horror that their safe countries will be invaded by unruly and uneducated refugees that would burden their already economically stretched countries and others react with compassion wanting to open up their homes and welcome these troubled refugees who had to flee their unsafe countries looking for places of refuge. What happens in these situations, people see the refugees as a threat, as an additional burden and they cannot possibly see that these people may be in a position to help their host country and enable it to thrive. This research has shown that these Sierra Leonean women that came to the UK following the horrors of the civil war in their country certainly they did not prove to be a burden on the UK. On the contrary, they not only survived and supported each other but they also thrived and contributed to the development of the local communities where they settled. Therefore this research can be used as a proof that there is no justification to bring all the refugees under one umbrella and consider all of them as a burden to the host country. What this research also shows is that it is important to allow refugees tell their own story and help them digest their experiences and identify the various factors that contributed to them being able to survive and thrive.

Non-sexist writing guidelines have been produced since the middle of the 20th century but often cause controversy. Taking only one aspect of such language reform, the feminisation of agentives, the present study aims to compare two similarly-structured, grammatically-gendered languages, French and Spanish, with regard to the visibility of women in the print media. After reviewing research that shows the use of masculine gendered agentives can induce, or reinforce, stereotypes which obscure female agency, prior studies of feminisation are classified by methodology and data source showing that little previous research has taken advantage of corpus techniques to analyse naturally occurring data, nor is there a significant body of contrastive research comparing feminisation strategies across languages or across countries with the same language. The collation of a cross-continental and cross-language corpus of media references to named people is therefore proposed and executed to allow both quantitative and qualitative analysis of naturally-occurring feminisations (or, indeed, their absence). Using electronic techniques, a corpus of over 5,000 references to named individuals was collated from press websites in France, Spain, Canada and Argentina. The form of the agentives referring to women was compared to strategies suggested in the UN-produced guidelines on gender neutral language, for French and Spanish, and discrepancies were classified. Classification of the agentives’ morphology was also made, to assign a 'predicted' base gender to each agentive. Quantitative and qualitative analyses performed on the data then drive the discussion of similarities and differences in feminisation strategies, across the chosen languages and countries. The study shows that prestige agentives cause feminisation difficulties across both languages, independently of morphology, whilst also identifying issues that are specific to one language group or one area. Possible reasons for both the similarities and differences are suggested and in turn suggest areas for further research using similar, corpus-based techniques.

Women's activism in the Arab world started in the second half of the 19th century. Arab women have since been voicing and publishing their views, rejections of status quo, and demands for social change. Recognizing their activism and feminist articulations is necessary for a more informed understanding of Arab women, and calls attention to their often omitted presence in history's memory. The aim of this narrative, auto-ethnographic inquiry is twofold: to explore the history of Arab women's activism in Egypt and Lebanon; and to re-present and engage with the voices of five pioneers born in the 19th century, Aisha al-Taimuriya (1840-1902), Zaynab Fawwaz (1846-1914), Huda Shaarawi (1879 -1947), May Ziadeh (1886-1941) and Malak Hifni Nasif (1886-1918). Through poetry, the inquirer constructs a narrative understanding of the history and lives of the pioneers from the perspective of a contemporary Arab woman. She engages in an imagined poetic dialogue with the pioneers, and searches for parallels and contradictions between their lives and experiences, and what has transpired a century later. She juxtaposes life in the Arab world between the 19th and 21st centuries, exploring the consequences and struggles for Arab women who continue to be deeply submerged in patriarchal values and interests. The inquiry examines the extent to which articulations of activism in the 19th century have liberated Arab women today. This narrative inquiry 'gives voice' to a small repertoire of Arab women's powerful, though often absent, voices. It draws on contemporary experiences and observations that can lead to a public space where collective self-awareness and change in the status of Arab women can continue, or in some cases begin. The research neither seeks nor claims any definitive answers regarding women's status in society. Rather, by inquiring narratively into the pioneers' voices, the research contributes to a more rounded and grounded understanding of Arab women's position in contemporary society. In so doing, and in the tradition of feminist research, the inquirer contributes to unveiling the lives of these pioneers, and allowing the reader to hear the echoes of their appeals to society.

This thesis aims to explore how older (60-87 years) South Asian migrant (SAM) women anticipate and approach old age and ageing experiences across the life course. It draws attention to the ways in which older SAM women construct and (re)negotiate gendered roles across the intersections of gender, ethnicity and age in order to sustain quality of life. In addition to subjective experiences of the life course, this thesis examines how older SAM women (re)negotiate collective cultural identities in the place of migration and settlement. A qualitative feminist constructionist approach, utilising a transnational life course perspective, has guided the theoretical underpinnings for this research. Moreover, a two-part method has been used, presenting a multi-sited ethnography and life course interviews. Data elicited from the study included ethnographic observations, an ethnographic interview, a reflexive research and observation diary and 16 in-depth life course interviews. The study analysed data using thematic analysis and elicited themes via a thematic analysis network. In this research, key findings reveal that older SAM women’s experiences of age and ageing intersect with gender roles, responsibilities and obligations that are in turn influenced by positions of authority across the matriarchal hierarchy. Gendered roles, such as, the daughter, wife, becoming a daughter-in-law and mother, mother-in-law and older woman are influenced by cultural values and norms overlaid by patriarchal ideologies. Furthermore, thematic readings show that older SAM women construct, (re)negotiate and access cultural identities in the place of migration through culturally prescribed scripts themed around gender, family and a migrant identity in order to publically display and sustain loyalties to a past homeland, across the life course. Methodological findings indicate that in order to produce ethical research it is important to recognise the spaces in which the researcher and participant negotiate boundaries, as the researcher’s identity does effect the research process. Recommendations from this research suggest that in order to gain a better understanding of older SAM women’s experiences of old age and ageing, a multi-dimensional theoretical approach to age is required. Moreover, this approach needs to take into account the fluid and overlapping constructs of transcultural, transnational and translocational positionalities which additionally embrace insider/outsider binaries.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Liverpool's world-wide transport links, and its close proximity to Ireland, rendered it a most convenient - if not always the most welcoming - destination for large numbers of female migrants. Therefore, the initial purpose of this study is to compare the migration experience of Irish women who settled in Liverpool between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, to examine whether that experience changed over time and, if it did, to establish the nature of that change. Beginning with an examination of the perception of the Irish by their British neighbours, and how extremely high levels of settlement in Liverpool shaped attitudes there, exploration is made of the way these attitudes were reflected in that city's treatment of Irish migrants. Secondly, consideration is given to expressions of prevailing ideology surrounding women's role within the home and in the wider society, that the influences and pressures that were brought to bear upon Iirsh women - in Ireland and in Britain - might be examined. Thirdly, examination is made of the economic climate in Liverpool, particularly in connection with female work opportunities, which set the scene for examination of employment trends amongst female migrants. The scale of the Irish presence in Liverpool, and its impact, coloured local perceptions for many years, the sense of and alien 'other' in their midst frequently errupting in expressions of resentment and hostility. Meanwhile, attitudes towards women - in Ireland and in Britain - saw society seek to control them through the imposition of social, moral and economic restrictions, and penalize those who stepped beyond these perameters. Moreover, Liverpool's over-reliance upon maritime commerce, rather than manufacturing, presented women with few opportunities for gainful employment. Those available were very often low status, poorly paid, and confined to a narrow range, yet underemployment amongst men in Liverpool rendered women's earnings an essential part of family incomes. In response, Irish women moved into occupations less popular with locally-born women, and made them their own, becoming particularly noted as street vendors and domestic servants. Indeed, the steady stream of female migrants willing to work in domestic service ensured that it remained a major field of female employment in Liverpool far longer than in other parts of Britain, even during the Second World War. In the process they created a tradition of working mothers which drew criticism from those in authority, and the attention of social reformers. Migration changed the lives of these women, it changed the country they left, and it changed the city that became their new home.

This thesis is an invitation to investigate social issues in times when technologies are a social construction that is very much taken for granted. Who is in front of the screen and what it means to individuals can be easily overlooked, particularly when the subject is migrant women, part of a minority. When people shape and appropriate a technology the relationship is not unidirectional; their interpretations and practices also forge their transnational experiences as there are no standardised migrant experiences, nor standardised uses of technology. Hence it is crucial to problematise the users and to deconstruct the social and cultural context of their appropriations. Therefore by challenging domestication theory and applying it to users who are part of a transnational arena, with this thesis I investigate which concepts and rationale of this approach are useful for deconstructing the role of technologies in the lives of migrant women. The questions that guide this thesis are how the internet gains a place and a meaning by being appropriated in a transnational home, and how this influences women’s daily experiences. The theoretical contribution is firstly to bring together notions of internet appropriation in everyday life with those of the transnational literature and migration, and furthermore to contribute by tackling aspects of digital inclusion and how disadvantaged populations appropriate technologies from a cultural standpoint, highlighting the relevance of their condition as migrants with transnational links. Therefore I provide an ethnographic account of migrant Latinas in vulnerable conditions in London, and their internet experiences, by following a qualitative methodology that incorporates in-depth interviews with thirty-seven women and participant observation in two community centres as well as five participants’ households. The main conclusion is that although their levels of digital engagement and degrees of technological expertise were dissimilar, the internet was present in all their discourses and had an important role in their migrant situation, either by enabling them to continue their consumption practices and communications, and/or by empowering them to be part of this technological stream for the first time. Notwithstanding that there is not just one aspect which is responsible for how they construct their internet, their migration status and vulnerabilities enriched the approach by contributing to depicting their everyday, social and cultural context. Therefore the properties these women perceived were strongly connected with their current needs and interests as immigrants in a marginalisation stream. From a theoretical standpoint the main gap in understanding migrants’ domestication of technologies was the scant attention paid to both their cultural appropriation and the nuances of their hybrid context, as well as to spaces of belonging and digital location going beyond geographical limits. This was pivotal in the creation of cultural meanings, and of the context within which the technologies were (re)appropriated.

Background: Intimate Partner Violence affects an estimated one in four women in their lifetime. The negative consequences on wellbeing as well as economic impact demonstrate the importance of finding ways to alleviate this widespread concern. An opportune time to intervene is in adolescence as people start forming romantic relationships. This is particularly pertinent with girls who often experience more harm from abusive relationships. Aims: To evaluate whether a bibliotherapy approach, using the book ‘Twilight, True Love and You’ (Deacon 2011), was effective in altering beliefs about romantic relationships that underlie dating abuse in adolescent girls. Methods: A cluster-randomised trial design was used. Eight A-level Psychology classes from different schools were randomly allocated to the control or intervention group. Participants were 16-19 year old females and those in the intervention group received the book. Measures were completed at baseline and follow-up (eight weeks) and included indicators of agreement with romantic myths, knowledge of warning signs, violent-tolerant attitudes, behavioural intentions and reported dating abuse. The intervention acceptability was also explored. Results: Participants in the intervention group were significantly more likely to disagree with romantic myths after the intervention, (p=. 02; Cohen’s d=45), although this effect was not significant after adjustment for clustering. No significant differences between groups were found for knowledge of warning signs, violent-tolerant attitudes or behavioural intentions. Participants in the intervention group reported significantly more ‘controlling behaviour’ after the intervention compared to the control group (p=. 003, Cohen’s d=. 95 for individual analysis & p= 03, Cohen’s d= 1 after adjusting for clustering). Over half the participants read at least half the book indicating acceptability. Conclusions: The bibliotherapy approach was acceptable to the participants. The intervention did not demonstrate clear effects on the study variables but there was some indication of change in attitudes regarding romantic myths and identification of controlling behaviours in relationships.

Through an autoethnographical approach, and interviews and participant observations with forty women who migrated from Japan during the past two decades and are now living in Northern Ireland and the Republic, this thesis documents the dynamic subjectivities of individual migrants: the ways in which their emotions, perceptions and memories are formed by specific globalising forces and the peculiar dynamics of transnational families. The following questions have been considered: (1) what prompted these women to leave Japan and migrate to Ireland! Northern Ireland?; (2) how did they make adjustments to the cultural and physical distance between their own and their husbands' home country?; (3) in shifting social settings and cultural contexts, how did they recreate a sense of belonging?; and (4) how were their subjectivities shaped and reshaped in changing relationships and emotional involvements with families 'here' and 'there'? In examining these questions, this study reconsiders two themes that have been central to contemporary studies of migration, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism: the role of global imaginary in shaping people's perceptions of places as loci of possibility (or lack of possibility); and shifting and situated senses of belonging. Some theories of affect, emotion, acculturation, and perception are also applied in order to explore the links between individuals' subjectivities and social-cultural forms.

The thesis argues that never-married gentlewomen dissociated themselves from negative and ubiquitous stereotypes of the old maid by focussing on their gentility rather than their marital status. By demonstrably fulfilling the familial and social roles which belonged to their sex and rank, and by representing themselves in terms of approved genteel feminine virtues and conduct, they located themselves in networks of social reciprocity which extended from household and family into the wider social sphere. In doing so they confounded popular caricatures of mature unmarried women as selfish parasites whose failure to marry and procreate drained the resources of their natal families and undermined the nation’s strength. The thesis focuses on a number of case studies drawn from the extensive collections of family papers in the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. Several of these never-married women were kin by birth or marriage, and their correspondence illustrates the reach of their relationship networks, their status, and influence. Their personal and, in some cases, published writing shows how they used ideals of gentility and associated language to support the familial and social positions they claimed. The thesis chapters examine the relationships they forged, and the resulting influence they were able to exercise, by considering them variously as members of households headed by male kin, as heads of their own households, and as familial patrons. While never-married women are increasingly the subjects of research, the lives of never-married gentlewomen remain under-examined. Yet gentlewomen, habituated to writing as an essential social skill, have left a wide range of sources by which their management of social status and singlehood can be assessed. This thesis shows some of the perspectives opened up by study of these sources.

Native American women played a key role in negotiating relations between settler and Native society, especially through their relationships with white men. Yet they have traditionally languished on the sidelines of Native American and colonial American history, often viewed as subordinate and thus tangential to the key themes of these histories. This dissertation redresses the imbalance by locating women at the centre of a narrative that has been dominated by discourses in masculine aspirations. It explores the variety of relations that developed between men and women of two frontier societies in eighteenth century North America: the Creeks of the Southeast, and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia. This dissertation complicates existing histories of Native and colonial America by providing a study of Indian culture that, in a reversal of traditional inquiry, asks how Native women categorised and incorporated white people into their physical and spiritual worlds. One method was through ritualised violence and torture of captives. As primary agents of this process women often selected, rejected or adopted men into the tribes, depending on factors that ranged from nationality to religion. Such acts challenged contemporary Euro-American wisdom that ordained a nurturing, auxiliary role for women. However, this thesis shows that ‘anomalous’ violent behaviours of Indian women were rooted in a femininity inculcated from an early age. In this volatile world, women were not shielded from the horrors of war. Instead, they became one of those horrors. Therefore, viewing anomalous actions as central to the analysis provides an understanding of female identities outwith the straitjacket of the Euro-American gender binary. With violence as a legitimate and natural expression of feminine power, the Indian woman’s character was far removed from depictions of the sexualised exotic, self-sacrificing Pocahontas or stoic Sacagawea. The focus on women’s violent customs, which embodied several important and unusual manifestations of Native American femininity, reveals a number of jarring behaviours that have found no home within colonial literatures. These behaviours included sanctioned infanticide and abortions, brutal tests for adolescents, scalp dancing and death rites, cannibalism, mercenary wives and sadistic grandmothers. With limited means of incorporating such female characteristics into pre-existing gender categories, the women’s acts were historically treated as non-representative of regular Indian lifeways and thus dismissed. Colonial relations are therefore analysed through an alternative lens to accommodate these acts. This allows women to construct their own narrative in a volatile landscape that largely sought to exclude those voices, voices that challenged dominant ideologies on appropriate male-female relations. By constructing a new gender framework I show that violence was a vehicle by which women realised, promoted and reinforced their tribal standing.

This study focuses on Malay Muslim academic women in dual-career families in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, Malaysia. I conducted semi-structured, in-depth face-to-face interviews with ten married academic women, five single female academics and three single male academics, while ten husbands of the married women were interviewed via email. The context in which modern Malay Muslim women operate is a complex one. On the one hand, Islam and the Malay adat (customary law), constructed as central to the ethnic identity of Malay Muslims, prescribe specific gendered expectations for women and men in both the private and public spheres. On the other hand, the state and global competition demand that women participate in the economy as well as in broader societal contexts. I explored how my respondents strategised in both employment and family life within the boundaries of their identity as Malay Muslim women. My study emphasised central aspects of Malaysian modernisation in relation to women, namely: education, employment, marriage and family, as well as family and working responsibilities and coping strategies. I found that access to education and the acceptance of women in employment had led my participants to pursue careers. With a recognised educational and career background, they had a degree of independence within marriage and in the formation of a family. After marriage, all these women had to abide by the accepted norms of gender, accepting their secondary position within and outside the family. At the same time, they revealed the importance of support networks in terms of family members, spouses and government policies, as well as being dependent on other women’s reproductive labour (e.g. childcare centres or domestic helpers), in helping them to balance their family and career commitments. I argue that the women had some autonomy based on their education and employment, but this remained a subordinated category. Complications arose because the women still needed to manage and negotiate their position within their identity as Malay Muslim women and the patriarchal system ingrained in their culture. While Malaysia’s drive for modernisation has improved women’s lives, it has not radically transformed the patriarchal order.

This thesis explores the dynamic social networks, economic development and cultural continuity of the female members of the diasporic Greek community of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In an effort to address a gap in gendered and regional Greek Canadian community studies, this study utilizes the intersection of gender and place through time for a defined social group, as it investigates the development of diverse social and economic relationships in addition to forms of cultural communication. Using an ethnographic approach, this study attempts to understand the lives and interactions through time, which constitute the social and economic networks and define the identities of the female members of the Halifax Greek community. Approximately forty people, mainly women, who indicated participation or membership in the Halifax Greek community, were recruited for life history interviews, while informal unstructured conversations or interviews were conducted with additional participants during participant observation. The participants ranged in age and represented both migrants and subsequent generations. This approach to fieldwork, conducted intermittently, provided an opportunity to witness and acquire diverse data on various community events and aspects of daily life. Moreover, with ethnographic engagement, the way people, particularly women, negotiated their identities across time and space was considered. The study supports the greater agency of post-World War 11 Greek female migrants in the decision-making process of their migration and rejects their migration as consequential or secondary; their shift from sponsored to sponsors facilitated further migration for co-ethnics of extended kin networks and their status as co-breadwinners was essential to the well-being of the Greek migrant family units. Socioeconomic networks have shifted from highly gendered and ethnic networks, initially established out of necessity to ones defined by individual preferences and needs, which do not discard the significance of kin and ethnic connections in their entirety. Concerns for cultural continuity persist for the dynamic community as they continue to redefine their unique hyphenated Greek-Haligonian identity, much like the Halifax donair delicacy, a variation of a Greek dish, influenced by characteristics of Halifax.

This thesis looks at how ‘the Muslim woman’ is produced in social policy discourses in the UK. It is a qualitative study based on interviews, observation and interpretive analysis of policy material. It focuses specifically on initiatives to empower Muslim women in order to combat terrorism which formed part of the UK’s Preventing Violent Extremism Agenda (Prevent). In January 2008 the National Muslims Women’s Advisory Group (NMWAG) was established and Local Authorities were encouraged to fund projects aimed at ‘empowering Muslim women’. The thesis begins by situating the research within a wider policy framework. At the national level it relates to debates on community cohesion, Britishness and multiculturalism; at the global level it relates to the UK’s involvement in the ‘war on terror’. The research examines local inflections in how the initiatives worked in practice, considering the impact of diversity within diversity. A key objective of these initiatives was to ‘give the silent majority a stronger voice’. The thesis considers the extent to which this objective was achieved, particularly in relation to the establishment of NMWAG. Through an analysis of the initiatives overseen by NMWAG it considers how empowerment is conceptualised and, therefore, also by definition, disempowerment. It suggests that empowerment is positioned as individualised in the form of neoliberal meritocratic aspiration. At the same time, however, it is collectivised in relation to religious affiliation; Islam emerges both as a source of disempowerment and as a potential solution. The thesis argues that these initiatives have worked to privilege religion at the expense of other salient axes of difference, particularly those embedded in socio economic and regional variations. Moreover, this privileging constitutes part of a broader gendered anti-Muslim racist rhetoric. Finally the thesis argues that deconstructing the trope of ‘the Muslim woman’ and attending to the differences between Muslim women opens up the possibility of building solidarities across religious boundaries and harnessing an “alternative politics of recognition”.

This thesis is about young second-generation Somali women in London who, in recent years, have begun to practise Islam. Based on over 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it investigates their everyday experiences of piety in a range of contexts across London. I argue that an analysis of these young women’s pious pursuits needs to account for the connections between the broader socio-political and economic context, and the affective, embodied, discursive, and cognitive dimensions of ethical self-fashioning. First, I demonstrate how these young practising women are drawing on forms of knowledge derived from the Islamic discursive tradition, liberal discourses and Somali history. I explore how these women’s ethical changes are initiated by current shifts in policies and discussions around the failures of multiculturalism, which have brought into sharp focus the questions of what it means to be Somali, Muslim, and British. Second, by extending a Foucaultian understanding of ethical change, I approach their practise of Islam by analysing the forms and means through which these young women imagine novel relations to themselves and to others including kin, friends, potential husbands, and God. I contrast these women’s experiences with those of the first-generation in order to trace historical changes. An ethnographic investigation into their everyday lives in a range of contexts beyond Islamic places of learning, reveals the multi-constituted, relational, and constantly shifting nature of the practising self. Ultimately, through the concept of hope I investigate the forces that animate these young practising women’s quests and account for their continuous, albeit fragmentary and often incoherent, attempts to transform themselves. This analysis moves beyond the anthropological literature on Islam and piety, which prioritises coherent, discursive traditions and often bounded models of piety. It further offers a challenge to current public and political representations of Muslim women in the UK, which tend to problematize Islam. Young practising Somali women, this thesis reveals, are intervening within, and transforming these contemporary debates around the Muslim subject.

Muslim women in Scotland have been largely absent from research and literature concerning Islamic communities in Britain. Using empirical data consisting of 37 in-depth interviews and five focus groups across three research sites, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, this study analyses the everyday lives and experiences of Muslim women in Scotland. This thesis opens up the nuanced ways that Muslim women practice their faith, refashion their interpretations of Islamic dress while also directing social and domestic interactions. I bring together a series of chapters which investigate how there is a growing awareness, sensitivity and acknowledgement of political and social changes led by Muslim women. I also draw attention to the struggles of Muslim women as they endure on one hand the patriarchal cultures and strict adherences born out of authoritarian interpretations of religion and, on the other hand experiencing and managing a number of social and political misrepresentations. Furthermore, the study highlights how Muslim women formulate and practice multi-layered and multi-dimensional identities alongside their experiences of community cohesion. Simultaneously, I discuss how they consider religious racism in a world dominated by negative depictions of Muslims and Islam. Using a qualitative approach, the study reveals a number of intricate abstractions that view Muslim women under a microscopic lens, reformulating and reconstructing their social and personal identities to encourage a debate on the role of faith in everyday belonging, becoming empowered through the concept of Hijab practice and speaking about the disharmonies which exist within Muslim communities. I argue that Muslim women are becoming more ‘risk-aware’ (Haw, 2009), have created spaces of responsiveness through local-level activism and are continually contributing and working to represent themselves socially, economically and politically in a post-devolved Scotland, actions that often to undetected in wider debates and discussions about Muslim women in Britain today.

This thesis concerns the contexts and choices associated with the wearing of the hijab in Britain, beginning with the impact of events such as 9/11. For many in the West, the hijab has become perceived as a symbol of Islam and as a result hijab wearing women who were living in Britain were identified as being connected with those who had carried out the 9/11 attacks in the United States. There was evidence from this research that there was an increase in first time hijab wearing, particularly in those between the ages of 25-39, however, 9/11 had not been directly responsible for this increase, but the higher profile of Islam due to the attacks had encouraged the women to find out about the religion for themselves and the rulings that related to them. Sales of the hijab have increased along with a more defined Islamic fashion consciousness and a desire by the women to wear what they regard as Islamic dress. This feminist standpoint research, although carried out by a white, non-Muslim from a middle-class background gave the women the opportunity to talk about their lives and explain the wearing or non-wearing of the hijab. A number of related themes were identified: Religion/religious community; Education; Family and friends; Clothing industry/fashion; and 9/11, although the thread that ran through all of these themes was the notion of choice. The women described wearing or not wearing hijab as their choice, although some had more influence from others. When choice theory was examined in relation to the wearing or non-wearing of the hijab it could be seen that although rational choice theory, lifestyle choices, family, habitus and individualization could tell us something about why the women made the choices they did, it was the interplay between individualization and tradition that gave the most accurate explanation as to why these women were making their choices. These theories did not tell the whole story however, and the conclusion discusses a reinterpretation of the Islamic teachings occurring in Britain with the women interpreting the Qur'an and the religious texts for themselves before arriving at their own conclusions as to what they should be wearing. This reinterpretation is driving the changes in behaviour for many Muslim women in Britain.

Despite a proliferation of research on Islam and Muslims in the media, very little work has focused on Muslim women, a much-debated social group that clearly merits special consideration. More specifically, no studies have approached the topic with any comprehensive methodologies, certainly not from a critical linguistic perspective. The overall aim of this thesis is therefore to investigate how Muslim women are represented in the BBe News compared to Arab News, as major 'Western' and 'Muslim' news sources respectively. The textual analyses are based on two purpose-built corpora, the BBCC (1.9 million words in 3,269 articles) and the ANC (2.2 million words in 3,111 articles), comprising all available articles mentioning Muslim women in the two news organisations' web sites from 2001 to 2007. Drawing on theory from critical discourse studies, the research employs analytical tools and concepts from the Dialectical-relational, Socio-cognitive, Discourse-historical, and Sociosemantic approaches to critical discourse analysis. These are combined with corpusbased methodologies to investigate linguistic patterns associated with Muslim women across thousands of texts in each corpus. The analysis therefore stands apart from previous studies in two respects. The first is its exhaustive approach to identifying a wide range of salient as well as underreported issues related to Muslim women in news discourse. The second is demonstrating a more integrated approach to conducting the quantitative and qualitative analyses that uniquely enhances the synergy between critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Findings suggest that Muslim women's representations are largely restricted in terms of regional coverage. Semantic macro structures related to conflict and crime are more prevalent in the BBC than Arab News. Muslim women in Arab News also appear in a wider range of contexts reporting their achievements and concerns in areas such as education, business and employment. Another contrast manifests itself in the way the two news sources construct the religion of Islam, especially in the context of women's rights where religious and cultural practices are often conflated. The hijab is a nodal discourse surrounding Muslim women in both news sources, but it was statistically more prominent in the BBe and its discourse prosody was more negative than in Arab News. The function of the hijab as a descriptive feature in some texts is often unclear, raising serious questions about its relevance. Overall, the representations of Muslim women are often problematic. Western 'liberal' narratives supported by 'evidence' from 'moderate' Muslim voices tend to be preferred in the BBe's reporting, especially with regard to the hijab. This results in a marginalisation of a majority of female Muslim voices. A number of recommendations are made for journalists to avoid recurrent misrepresentations of the experiences, hopes and concerns of different Muslim women. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, Muslim women, BBe, Arab News, media, newspapers, online news