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The critical theorisation of sport has drawn on a wide range of social thought. Frankfurt School Marxism, Gramscian influenced hegemony theories, figurational sociology and the works of Bourdieu and Foucault, have all been prominent influences for the analysis of sport. Work such as this fails to place sufficient emphasis on the role of individual praxis, resulting in general conceptualisation, and a failure to account for concrete particularities. In addition, the issue of temporality is largely ignored within the theorisation of sport. This thesis treats the work of theorists influenced by the concept of hegemony as a point of departure from which to rethink the critical theorisation of sport. Having identified a number of problems with the hegemonist position, which stem from a failure to consider the constituting role of individual praxis, the thesis explores the potential of an approach to the theorisation of sport which draws on elements of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. The influence of the early work of Sartre, particularly Being and Nothingness, on the application of his progressive-regressive method to the study of sport is explored. This is followed by an analysis of Sartre's conception of dialectical reason, and an explication of the mediating factors which constitute the 'formal conditions' of social possibility. The progressive component of Sartre's method is explored through an analysis of key aspects of the posthumously published Critique of Dialectical Reason volume two. This includes a study of boxing as a vehicle for the analysis of the notion of incarnation, which, it is argued, is central to the formulation of a synthetic method. The example of boxing is explored further through a detailed outline of a progressive-regressive analysis of the 1974 World Heavyweight title fight in Zaire between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. A regressive analysis of boxing is conducted, in relation to the conditions experienced at the time of the fight. This is followed by a progressive analysis to explain Ali's unique historialisation of his times. The thesis concludes by discussing the implications of the progressive-regressive method for our understanding of the general and the particular, the construction of a synthetic method and freedom and necessity in the critical theorisation of sport.

Communicating and engaging effectively with the public during a public health crisis can save lives, prevent harm and reduce the impact in terms of social and economic costs, as exemplified during the ongoing COVID19 pandemic. This qualitative research focuses upon the approach of UK scientific organisations to communications and engagement with the public about controversial issues of science, using vaccine safety as a case study. Despite widespread public education and engagement policies adopted by scientific organisations in the UK since 1985, academics in science and technology studies (STS) allege that the scientific community does not meaningfully engage with the public and has failed to incorporate social and value concerns into discussions about new science and technologies (Trench, 2006; Wynne, 2014). Using critical theory, I set out to better understand the disconnect identified in the STS literature between policy and practice through interviews with senior communications and engagement professionals and an analysis of science communications materials, including websites, job descriptions and other public documents. Using an analytical framework based upon Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action, I identified key themes within five diverse aspects of communications and engagement practice: context; conduct; content; construction of knowledge; and competence of the participants (the '5Cs'). Based upon this analysis, I argue that the ideal conditions for rational discourse around science are far more difficult to achieve than academic commentators have previously acknowledged, for a variety of cultural, political and organisational reasons. Whilst individuals working in scientific organisations are motivated to engage with the public, they face internal barriers to action as well as a hostile and difficult external environment. A variety of factors are inhibiting co-ordination across scientific institutions and reducing the effectiveness of engagement and communication to the public from reliable and authoritative sources during a scientific controversy. This research provides insight into the underlying and perhaps unacknowledged cultural and social influences that place constraints on the ability of scientific organisations and scientists to engage in meaningful scientific discourse with the public. These observations could inform professional practice as well as provide avenues for further research.

If any concept is subject to the standards of judgement in our human form of life it is the notion of what it is to flourish. Yet what is clear is that in the understandable desire to improve human happiness, well-being, success and satisfaction, researchers often neglect the importance of normativity and context. What researchers are left with is some technical or theoretical, non-normative, concept with the gloss of a normative concept. The problem in the literature is that by technicalizing the concept and dislocating it from its everyday contexts without paying sufficient attention to the dynamic and changeable influence of use, language-games, normativity or occasion-sensitivity, the concept loses its meaning. This is important because of the potential for misapplying the concept in the areas of human knowledge, understanding, education, science and policy. Therefore, the case I make is that the concept demands much greater attention than is currently afforded and this thesis will provide that level of attention. Because there is no finite list of possibilities where someone might be said to flourish, the thesis will aim to strike a proper balance between the clarity needed in order to make sense of the term through connective analyses, whilst also exploring the vital contextual nuances and occasion-sensitivity that give richness, life and meaning to the concept.

The internet has become one of the most popular forms of media within the United Kingdom (UK), and the online sphere has been used prominently by closeted lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning (LGBQ) young people to subvert heteronormativity. Online safeguarding strategies have been developed to attempt to maintain constant control and surveillance over young people. However, these strategies are underpinned by heteronormative protectionist discourses, presenting the participants with challenges when maintaining their concealed online identity. This thesis is original in its examination of the impact heteronormative online safeguarding has on closeted LGBQ young people: what protectionist discourses are embedded into child internet safety guidelines; and how the implementation of these strategies legitimises a heteronormative protectionist framework which creates perceived privacy and safety barriers for LGBQ young people. The thesis uses social constructionism as its overarching theoretical framework, utilising a qualitative approach involving a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of internet safety guidelines, as well as a virtual discussion board and semi-structured interviews with participants. A total of 24 participants, aged between thirteen to seventeen and identifying as LGBQ, were involved in the virtual discussion board, and 5 of them also participated in a semi-structured interview. My research highlighted that heteronormativity was embedded into the protectionist discourses of child internet safety guidelines, relying upon adult-centric perceptions of children's needs. My data has provided crucial insights into the negative consequences of this for closeted LGBQ young people, as current safeguarding practices have failed to recognise their privacy needs. By listening to young people, this research has obtained key insights into the concealment and performative techniques used by the participants to avoid being outed by surveillance strategies promoted within these guidelines. By challenging the exclusivity of adult-centric perspectives and priorities, my data has identified how LGBQ young people prioritise the protection and preservation of their closeted identity when online, whereas adults focus primarily on protection from perceived sexual risks. Consequently, the data from participants has challenged the dominance of adult-centric knowledge currently controlling the online safeguarding agenda, demonstrating how online safeguarding approaches cause young people to feel unable to report internet-initiated abuse because of safeguarding strategies being ideologically incompatible to their circumstances and needs.

Zimbabwean women in Britain have multiple cultural identities and inhabit multiple contested transnational spaces that locate them in contradictory ways. The women then must negotiate these spaces to integrate and function within these spaces. The aim of this thesis is to explore how gender intersects with culture, race, social class, and immigration status in Zimbabwean women’s everyday lives in the diaspora. There is a proliferation of feminist studies on migrant women’s experiences, examining how they negotiate work and family after migration. However, there is limited research on African women diaspora’s gendered experiences and studying them demands African-specific theoretical tools. Current approaches are Eurocentric, use generic theoretical approaches and have viewed the women as passive subjects, formed, and constrained by external forces. This research is a phenomenological study that employs African Feminist Standpoint Theory to explore how the women redefine their cultural identities, and renegotiate their relationships within religious, social, and family spaces. Five group interviews and nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with Zimbabwean women, based in Reading, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Coventry, and Wolverhampton. The study contributes to Gender and Migration studies, by demonstrating how gendered identities are defined and redefined in women’s everyday lives within spaces that have different cultural beliefs on gender and gender relations. Furthermore, the study contributes to African diaspora scholarship and demonstrates the contribution of a colonial legacy on African women in Britain, whose identities, cultures, and economic systems were shaped by colonialism, which reconstitute and reconstruct these identities within spaces of cultural intersection.

Anti-social Behaviour (ASB) has been described as something that cannot be ignored and a real concern for the everyday lives of people. A key issue has been the need to address public perceptions and concerns that a rising tide of ASB is concomitant to a wider societal moral decline. An assumed rising ASB, moral decline and a lack of respect are widespread perceptions. ASB is also thought to have an impact on peoples quality of life. Cogent links have been reported between levels of deprivation and those who perceive ASB as a serious concern in their communities. What factors underpin these perceptions have previously been examined, the aim being to introduce policy-based measures that can tackle both ASB and the perception of ASB. This thesis considers the everyday morality that informs public perceptions of ASB: namely what do people believe it means to be anti-social; what is perceived as everyday morality and how does this relate to ASB; and what role, if any, does everyday morality play in determining the public's perceptions of ASB. The thesis utilizes a qualitative approach involving the use of focus groups and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Nine focus groups were conducted in three locations in the North West of England (Skelmersdale, Rainford and St Helens) selected according to their Indices of Multiple Deprivation score (IMD, 2010) to represent an area of high deprivation, mixed deprivation and low deprivation. A deductive IPA analysis revealed that public perceptions of ASB were grounded in people's own personal experiences of ASB (and those of friends or family). Whether an act was perceived as immoral and anti-social was related to the consequences of the behaviour, the context of when or why it occurred, and public preconceptions regarding their own experiences. Public perceptions of ASB were found to be subjective, and they varied both within and between each focus group location. ASB and everyday morality were perceived to be linked - with everyday morality being perceived as an internal deterrent that may prohibit one from behaving anti-socially. Further clarification is needed to confirm how deeply public perceptions are related to everyday morality but also how this might inform approaches to tackling ASB. It is suggested that everyday morality provides a framework to understand how individuals navigate everyday social situations in public spaces.

In this thesis a new concept called ‘Lexism’ (the Othering and discrimination of dyslexics) is proposed, outlined and defended. The dyslexia debate is currently in a state of deadlock. The origin of this stalemate is not an empirical problem but a conceptual one. The conceptual problems with dyslexia, and the existence of dyslexics, are both recognised, but the contradictions between them remain unresolved. For this reason a philosophical approach (influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle) has been adopted. First, the conceptual foundations are set out to enable the recognition of Lexism as a concept, and to reject the concept of dyslexia whilst recognising the existence of dyslexics. Second, Lexism as a concept, is evaluated, compared and contrasted with what some might consider to be the strongest existing account of dyslexics’ social experiences, that of Riddick’s (2001) social model of dyslexia. Third, the key aspects and features of Lexism as a new concept are set out. The original contribution to knowledge is that Lexism enables us to see that dyslexics are defined by Lexism not dyslexia. Lexism, it is argued, in a certain sense, is comparable to, though not the same as, racism, sexism and homophobia. This enables us break the current deadlock and move away from sterile debates over dyslexia’s existence, to how dyslexics are Othered by a literate society. Lexism raises new and significant implications for the dyslexia debate, but also government policy, educational practice, assessments and reasonable adjustments for dyslexics.

Well-being is increasingly of interest to schools and educational policy makers in the UK and beyond. This thesis is a philosophical and empirical enquiry into the relationship between well-being and education and into the nature of a theory and practice of well-being in educational settings. Well-being, I will argue, is not a single entity or the private possession of an individual; nor is it an add-on or optional extra for educators. It is rather an intergenerational, shared embodied theory and practice, an intrinsic goal of education and an inherent and constitutive part of how we engage in education. Well-being is not something we ‘deliver’ and we may not be able to teach or produce it directly. However, we can attempt to create an environment in which it can occur. I will argue that the qualities of this environment should be the focus of those who wish to promote well-being in education and that teachers need an educational environment which will allow them and their pupils, to be well. Using Arendt’s The Human Condition as a key insight into human ways of being and doing I will argue that well-being, being well, occurs when there is balance between the different activities that humans engage in and a balance in how they engage in those activities. I will also argue that such a balanced environment will serve a key educational function, the containment of anxiety and the containment of love. Theory and practice are indivisible and this theory arose from 13 years of practice in schools as an advisor into well-being in education. I therefore put my own emergent theory into practice by using it to develop a reflective research methodology, contemplative reflection, with which to study a well-being project I co-created and worked with for 13 years, which is called Celebrating Strengths.

This work is an investigation into philosophical method and rational argument in moral philosophy. It makes an original contribution to human understanding, by taking some of the tools and techniques that Gordon Baker identifies in the later work of Wittgenstein, and using them as a way of fending for oneself in an area of philosophy that neither Baker, nor Wittgenstein, wrote on. More specifically, a discussion of some different aspects of the contemporary literature on Dancy’s (2004) moral particularism is used as a vehicle for illustrating how Baker’s therapeutic conception of philosophy offers alternative possibilities for how we can do philosophy, and what counts as rational argument in moral philosophy. I maintain that, by considering some indicative ways in which Baker’s therapeutic approach to philosophy can dissolve, rather than solve, the kinds of perplexities found in the existing literature on Dancy’s (2004) moral particularism, we can liberate ourselves from the traditional/theoretical view of how we ought to do philosophy, and an understanding of rational argument in moral philosophy, to which we need not be committed.

By theoretically framing sportspeople’s drinking within a social identity perspective, this thesis aims to elucidate the social psychological processes underpinning the link between sport group membership and alcohol use. It is argued that focusing on these group-level processes provides theoretically grounded foundations for applied practice. The thesis utilised both quantitative and qualitative methods. Secondary data analyses in Study 1 indicate that athletic identification plays a significant role in shaping alcohol consumption in different sporting contexts. Study 2 examined longitudinally personal and group-based social identities. Results indicated that alcohol consumption increased sports group identification over time, and this identification positively related to wellbeing. In contrast, a personal athletic identity was weakly associated with alcohol behaviours, indicating that there may be utility in harnessing these dual identities when addressing health in sport. Qualitative explorations in Study 3 exposed sport-related drinking as strategic and functional practices that served to provide a positive sport experience at the group-level. To achieve this, the sports group exhibited self-monitoring and regulating influences, whereby members’ alcohol behaviours could both be encouraged or deterred by the wider group. Experimental manipulations in Study 4 sought to examine effects of alcohol consumption and social identity processes between sporting and non-sporting participants. Findings indicate that intoxication exaggerates in-group biases for those highly identified with their group, pointing to a hitherto unexamined interplay between the psychopharmacological effects of alcohol and intergroup behaviour. Overall, the thesis highlights the central role of sport-related identities in defining alcohol behaviours. Its contributions outline how a number of social identity processes (identification, wellbeing, self- and social control) may be drawn upon to address risky drinking among student sportspeople.