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Well siblings of adolescents with mental health difficulties often fall risk to becoming the "forgotten family members" (Bowman et al., 2014, p. 269), yet they have an increased vulnerability to developing psychological difficulties (Barnett & Hunter, 2012). Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an illness that frequently develops in adolescence and is regularly found to elicit powerful emotions, consequently having an overwhelming impact on the family system (Dimitropoulos et al., 2009). Moreover, changes that occur during adolescence can play a critical role in shaping psychosocial and neurobiological development (Kim, 2021). However, research surrounding the experience of siblings into adulthood is sparse. The present study addresses this gap in the literature and offers insights into the lived experiences of adults who grew up with a sibling suffering from AN during adolescence. The data was collected through individual, semi-structured interviews of six participants over the age of 25. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis shed light on the following themes: Position within the Family, Fracture and Separation, and How do we address it? The study emphasises the need for including siblings in AN treatment and recognizing their experiences to provide appropriate trauma-informed support, education, and interventions.

This thesis aims to provide an in-depth and trans-genre analysis of depictions of love and desire between women in Italian literature between the end of the fourteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth centuries. One of its aspirations is to deconstruct and discredit the belief in the invisibility and impossibility of desire and affection between women in early modern Italian literature. This thesis, therefore, argues that discourses on attraction and love between women are more frequent and multi-faceted than previously acknowledged. Furthermore, it demonstrates that writers use the motif of woman-woman love to provocatively engage with their audience for a variety of reasons (such as erotically titillating their voyeurism or provoking their laughter) as well as to convey a multiplicity of messages, spanning from criticism of social and religious moralism to the defence of women's dignity.

Homework is a near-universal practice in UK primary schools (Medwell & Wray, 2019), principally studied from the perspective of what it may add to academic outcomes (H.Cooper et al., 2006; Jerrim et al., 2019; Ozyildirim, 2021). Limited research considers homework as a practice within the home, particularly viewed from the perspective of mothers, who are often the parent most closely involved in its support (Hutchison, 2012; Mandell & Sweet, 2004; Warton, 1998). This thesis uses theories of mothering to understand gendered homework labour from the individual standpoints of eight mothers. Setting out to explore what shapes mothers' constructions of primary homework and their homework support role, I adopt social science portraiture to interpret data gathered using repeat interviews, video of mother-child homework interactions, and stimulated reflections. I apply a matricentric feminist lens (O'Reilly, 2016, 2019), understanding the participants' experiences as shaped by their social positioning as mothers, combined with a Gestalt-informed analysis approach which recognises individual psycho-socio-biographical experiences. The portraits within this thesis highlight maternal homework practices and perspectives, and are important as both diverse, individual narratives and indicative of mothering patterns and wider phenomena, including mothering scripts, the socio-biographical construction of mothers' support and the role of mother-child relationships in shaping homework behaviours. The role of emotions in maternal responses to homework, including devotion, protection, loss, anxiety and guilt, is revealed discursively and through visual data. The findings locate mothering within homework practices, as well as homework practices within mothering, leading to the development of a new concept in homework research: motherisation. This concept highlights the maternal role in homework, the socio-biographical and psycho-social influences on maternal constructions of homework, mothering's embodiment within homework support, and mothers' agency in the development of homework practices. Fundamental to motherisation are mothers' emotional investments and emotion drivers. The act of agential motherisation makes homework, and homework support, characteristically different to schoolwork. This thesis argues that homework support is a complex social and relational practice, shaped by mothers and mothering, and enacted as emotion care work. This new interpretation of homework, as a relational dimension of mothering, challenges its dominant framing in policy, practice and research as 'simply' an educational tool, suggesting it can also be understood as a relationally situated and embodied, lived experience for mother homework supporters, over which they have some agency.

This thesis explores whether an enterprise education competition (EEC), promoted as best practice vehicle of entrepreneurial education (EE), may have gendered outcomes in terms of differential impacts upon women participants, given mixed findings relating to the efficacy of EE for women which is considered to relate to the acknowledged masculine construction of entrepreneurship. Thus, this thesis investigates the influence of an EEC on the entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), entrepreneurial intentions (EI) and perceived gender barriers to entrepreneurship of STEMM women early career researchers (ECRs). Of novelty, the theoretical framework draws upon Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), from the career literature, which captures the socio-economic influences of perceived gender barriers upon entrepreneurial career intentions, while also exploring the predispositions of men and women EEC participants. Underpinned by a critical realist methodology, a quantitative study of 120 pre- and post-surveys of men and women participants, followed by 45 semi-structured interviews of women participants, were undertaken. The quantitative findings suggest that EEC participation removed the gender gap in: (a) perceived stereotype threat, (b) perceived networking difficulty and (c) perceived ability related to entrepreneurial finance and cost estimation. However, following EEC participation, women participants continued to perceive high barriers in: (a) sex discrimination, (b) childcare-work conflict and (c) a lack of role models and mentors when compared to their male counterparts. In addition, the EEC deterred self-confidence in ESE of women participants who perceived a high barrier in stereotype threat. Despite this, evidence from the qualitative study suggests that the EEC programme still reproduced unintended gendered outcomes for some women participants, particularly in: (a) perpetuating the stereotypical masculine stereotypes of an entrepreneur, (b) reinforcing perceived conflict between childcare and work-life of a woman entrepreneur as well as (c) highlighting a negative image of STEMM women entrepreneurs.

Women in Georgia face gender inequality in many aspects of their lives. While academic studies often concentrate on structural oppressions, women's experiences of everyday manifestations of gender inequality are absent from academic scholarship. Women have a space to discuss these topics only among friends and closed Facebook groups. This thesis is concerned with how women experience and respond to gender inequality in their everyday lives in urban Georgia, specifically in urban public spaces and at home. It critically engages with Western-dominated literature about space, place, and gender and explores how women are oppressed or liberated in and through these spaces. In this research, I draw on the qualitative data that emerged from the interviews with 42 women and participant observations that I conducted in the three largest cities of Georgia - Tbilisi, Batumi, and Kutaisi. Using thematic data analysis, I explored how women experienced the gendering of home and urban public spaces and how contemporary gender ideologies in the country (namely, post-socialist and contemporary neotraditionalist) influenced this process. The thesis argues that both home and urban public spaces can be sites of, on the one hand, oppression and, on the other hand, contesting, challenging and negotiating gender hierarchies. It shows the variety of ways in which women in Georgia respond to everyday manifestations of gender inequality and how they often have the potential to destabilise gendered power relations.

The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to our understanding of the fertility transition, the unequal opportunities in access to education and the long-term persistence of social status in twentieth-century Colombia. The thesis has two parts. The first part presents a detailed empirical perspective of the rapid Colombian fertility decline including results at the national, sub-national and individual-level. Using full individual-level census data, the results show that before the fertility transition fertility norms differed in the country because of the different historical legacies. But by 1964 fertility started falling simultaneously across all regions and fertility halved almost everywhere in only 25 years; the only exception was the indigenous communities that did not undergo a fertility decline during this period. This sudden decline suggests that a technological or cultural shock could explain the decline. However, the findings confirm that knowledge and access to family planning did not bring about a faster fertility decline. I provide new stylised facts for the long-run relationship between female education and fertility. At the individual level, the relationship between education and fertility holds strongly. However, at the national and sub-national level, fertility decline cannot be explained by the direct effects of education as fertility fell continuously in all educational groups since 1965. The second part of this thesis provides new evidence on the unequal access to education and presents a long-term view of social mobility using surname-based methods. The results show that contemporary patterns of social exclusion in education are rooted in the colonial past. However, the long-term effects of the colonial past have been uneven. While the historical elite reinvented itself, and some have been slowly losing their elite status, indigenous and Afro-Colombians have been trapped with scarce possibilities to move upward. The results also reveal low social mobility and a segregated marriage market with high levels of homogamy at the top and the bottom of the social ladder.

Professional women's football is receiving unprecedented attention, with live and television spectator records, sponsorship deals and media recognition reaching new heights. Despite this exponential growth, financial restraints, limited resources, and the permanent shadow of the men's game ensures that there are still many barriers faced by players trying to develop a career in women's football. Psycho-social and cultural challenges alongside reduced opportunities, limited exposure to competitive environments and minimal research in the female game has resulted in a lack of players successfully transitioning into senior teams. This thesis aims to develop an understanding of the cultural and psycho-social constructs of women's football and identify how these influence player experiences of the Junior to Senior Transition (JtST). A multi-method longitudinal design (inc., interviews, observations, ethnography, voice notes and reflective diaries) allowed for lived experiences of the JtST to be captured. JtST (n = 36). JtST. Study One utilised semi-structured interviews with academy staff (n = 6) and successfully transitioned first team players (n = 3) to examine perceptions of the Thematic Analysis identified key themes and common experiences across participants. Study Two adopted ethnographic principles (over a period of 25 months) to examine whether emerging issues from Study One manifested within the current academy environment, and how these influenced preparations for the Study Three provided a narrower, ethnographic lens to centre upon a reduced concentration of players to examine the specific JtST that players experience (n = 17). The data for Studies Two and Three was thematically analysed throughout the collection process and represented through the use of Creative Non-Fiction and Vignettes (n = 4 for Study Two, n = 6 for Study Three). Three key findings were identified across the thesis. Firstly, the academy environment has a multi-purpose nature, in that it is required to support players with their football, educational and holistic development. As such, a large range of individuals with many aspirations exist within one environment that lacks organisational structure and coherence. Secondly, the JtST equires movement between the junior, academy and senior, first team environments. Players survived within phases of uncertainty and isolation (i.e., 17-21 years) with, at times, poor and confusing communication, limited understanding, guidance and advice aligned to their individual development. Players struggled to manage and enjoy the JtST experience. Finally, the role of the academy coach (i.e., developing 16-21-year- old players with diverse educational and vocational aspirations, football technique, psycho-social characteristics, skills and behaviours aligned to various stages of maturation) is an increasingly demanding job. The focus of the academy coach, and supporting staff, cannot be solely to develop players for the first team, rather it must be to develop well-rounded individuals in football, education and proficiencies such as communication, identity development and psycho-social skills. Collectively, the results identify the limited ability for clubs to respond to the desire for more homegrown players, with the organisational structure of the academies being identified as hindering the ability for players to transition. Whilst a small number of talented players make the transition successfully, this is rare, with many opting to transition to lower league senior teams, or transitioning out of football altogether, due to the limitations and restrictions of the current development pathway.

The year 1995 marked a new chapter in Russian family law. Following a chain of political events that shook the young Russian state's legal landscape, the Family Code 1995 was enacted. The new progressive law codified certain aspects of assisted reproduction, more specifically, surrogacy. Despite the Soviet Union's intrusiveness into private life, its successor state, Russia, seems to have attempted to shift 'from paternalism to "rights-based" approach.' (1) Russia (2) became one of the most liberal states as regards to procreation. Not only has the state proactively legalised surrogacy, its attitude towards the parties' reproductive arrangements may be described as almost a laissez-faire. The Code explicitly allowed the intended parents to legally enter into a surrogacy arrangement, with minimum oversight from the government. This development was followed by further liberalisation in the area of surrogacy in 2012 when commercial surrogacy was legalised. Considered against the tendency of the state policies to interfere with private decision-making, these developments are at their best paradoxical. The research seeks to critically appraise the Russian surrogacy law and uncover the influences that could have shaped such a liberal approach considering the factors, such as increasing availability of assisted reproductive technology, the state's biopolitical agenda and the view of the media.

This thesis explores the reconciliation challenge working mothers encounter, examining how contemporary cultural ideals, shifting feminist discourses and the digital environment mediate working mothers' negotiations of and affective responses to social inequalities on, through and beyond Britain's largest parenting website Mumsnet. It enquires into the way that the popular imagery of work-family balance and female success is lived by women that are primarily being addressed by ideals of balanced femininity. The study employs and develops a feminist affective-discursive approach, and draws on 29 in-depth interviews with users of Mumsnet and 85 online discussion threads posted to Mumsnet's forum. By juxtaposing online and interview accounts, both of which visibilise inequalities in the private-domestic and the public-work realms, the research paints a complex and detailed picture of the ways in which such forms of injustice are discussed and navigated by female working parents across the online-offline sphere. The research examines the discursive landscape of working mothers and its affective modes of inequality as a way of locating the ways in which emotion and broader cultural currents such as neoliberalism, feminism and individualism are involved in the constitution of maternal working subjectivities. It shows how, in the context of a revitalisation of feminist ideas, gender inequalities at work are no longer 'unspeakable'. Yet, as the affective-discursive approach elucidates, such injustices can still be difficult to address in the face of gendered incitements to manage such and other structural inequalities individually by constructing their own and their children's inner dispositions, rather than the social conditions in which they live, work and parent, as sites of change. Highlighting both the possibilities and limitations of online communication, expression and emotion, the research also sheds light on the way that women with children negotiate particular gendered injustices through the digital space. Through an analysis of the complexion of anger, connectivity and feminism on and beyond Mumsnet, it reveals how digital affordances, conventions and site architecture structure virtual engagements with domestic forms of inequality, and pays close attention to the kind of affective subjectivities that come into being on Mumsnet, including the 'raging Mumsnetter' and the 'angry wife'. These were found to operate in complex ways in women's on- and offline talk, and are theorised in view of their ambivalent consequences for the potential of the digital, and the performances of rage this environment facilitates, to politicise and challenge the wider structures underpinning inequalities both at home and at work. This thesis, by drawing on both interview and online accounts and employing feminist, cultural sociological and digital theories, offers understandings about the offline and online lives of working mothers, and about the relationship between feminism, sense-making about gender inequalities and the digital.

In this study, I examine the presence of Kenyan women in the film industry through the lens of postcolonial African feminism. Situating the study in this theoretical framework heightened the awareness that ideologies of womanhood and struggles against gender oppression intersect and cannot be analysed without considering the contextualisation of womanhood. Postcolonial African feminist theory reflects that issues that affect women in each place and time are different (former colonies and western regions). This study explores and uses the afro feminist lens to analyse the responses by Kenyan women filmmakers to comment on filmmaking in Kenya. The film industry offers an important arena where manifestations of African feminism can be explored, as espoused by the women filmmakers in this study: Matrid Nyagah, Jinna Mutune, Ng'endo Mukii, Wanuri Kahiu, Judy Kibinge, Dommie Yambo-Odotte, and Anne Mungai. By adopting a qualitative research design using face-to-face semi-structured interviews, I examined the filmmakers' career paths, motivations, perceptions, challenges, and barriers to getting into and remaining in a male-dominated industry. The thesis reveals that the level of Kenyan women's representation in the film industry on the global scene was proof that the women were empowered, competent, talented, and able to tell their stories through their lived experiences. The study also identifies barriers and challenges that impede their reach to a wider audience. Key among them were the lack of proper film schools in Kenya that teach the requisite content, the ongoing patriarchal system, the lack of defined film culture, a lack of a government policy on film, lack of government support, lack of funding, and poor marketing and distribution channels, among others that seem to truncate the full potential of women in the film industry. I argue that Kenyan women filmmakers have excelled, given an excellent account of the stories they tell from their lived experiences. These filmmakers' films not only deal with women's issues, Africa, war, famine, disease, and the girl child alone but also seem to focus on neo-feminism (as defined by Obioma Nnaemeka) and tackle subjects on sexuality, female emancipation, mother-daughter relationships, HIV/AIDS, drugs, science and technology, postelection violence and terrorism. Neo-feminism offers space for women filmmakers to work alongside men since it advocates for negotiating with them to achieve hard ideals. The study found that though women in the Kenyan film industry did not agree they were working within a feminist framework, they objected to the western attitude toward feminism. It is also found that whereas some of the women filmmakers trained locally, the training they received abroad contributed to their being better filmmakers. Indeed, the Kenyan film industry has offered mixed signals as regards supporting its women filmmakers. While the government has faltered, the women filmmaker's grit and sense of purpose have helped them stamp their presence in the film industry both locally and internationally. Also, the study revealed that despite the important role women filmmakers play in the film industry, there was a lack of support from the government. However, family members continued to provide both financial and emotional support to the women filmmakers to live up to their dream. In addition, the lack of a national film policy to regulate the film industry meant that gender was not mainstreamed in it. Women filmmakers continue to negotiate for space through their passion, supporting and mentoring each other, recognising other women's efforts in the industry through film awards and establishing funding opportunities specifically for women but also for men.

As elsewhere in the world, in the past three decades, Peru has seen a decline in the hegemony of a political praxis characterized by Western modernity. In place of primarily logocentric and discursive operation of power, non-discursive ways of doing politics based on embodied performances have become more visible. Among other social movements, trans women's political struggles are exemplary of this shift and their embodied aesthetic-political practices in their quest for challenging the current "terms of recognition" (Butler 2004) heralds a political-culture transformation. My intention is to elucidate how politics is being understood and how it is being practiced in a southern context, where discursive politics based on logos that aim to build a rational ethic begin to be replaced by non-discursive practices that appeal to other languages, particularly the body. This politics does not appeal to a logo-centered ethic, but rather to an aesthetic ethic where aesthetics is essential to the constitution of action. The thesis analyses the tension that exists between the desire for recognition of the identity of trans women and the recognition of the other (family, friends, neighbours and society in general), where this tension generates adverse and, in some cases, perverse situations in the lives of trans women that lead them to live precarious lives. However, as the analysis unfolds through the chapters of the thesis, we observe that trans women are both vulnerable and capable of resistance. In other words, vulnerability and resistance happen simultaneously. Prostitution is the space they find to reproduce their material life, and at the same time, to be able to live their gender identity without restrictions. This thesis shows how the vulnerability and precariousness of trans women coexist with modes of feminist agency, resistance and resilience, as well as with proposals for political action to change sensitivities of a modern/colonial, heteropatriarchal and a cold-hearted society towards diversity. This research represents a contribution to the feminist and decolonial debates on aesthetics and politics, which recognizes that politics is embedded in aesthetics, whether creating new meanings, new places, or making possible new imaginaries. These changes lead us also to new sensibilities through transgressive acts which seek positive recognition of diversity and claim the entitlement to full citizenship. The research also contributes to the struggles of people who have been, and still are, considered "less than human". As such, I thank the trans women who participated in this research, because that make it possible to show something hopeful for the country. The fall of modern politics allows us to recognize that the ways of doing politics in Peru are changing and bringing to the forefront forms of political action that are considered subaltern or premodern. In that sense, this way of doing politics, which historically reconnects actions and practices of doing politics that have been made invisible by the single history, might go someway towards healing the colonial wound and the politics of oblivion.

While climate-induced displacement appears to be on the increase, relatively little is known about the long-term lived experiences of those who are directly impacted by disaster and displacement. This thesis focuses on the lived experiences of displacement resulting from Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008. It seeks to advance a better understanding of the everyday ruptures generated by the cyclone, as well as of the absorption of, negotiation with, and resistance to these through the daily lives of affected people. The thesis adapts Lefebvre's work on everyday life and builds on its feminist theorisation as a means to reflect on the experiences of uncertainty and disorder in this context. Specifically, using the rhythm analysis approach, the thesis provides insights from different vantage points regarding the ways in which the survivors reorientate their bodily, social, and emotional rhythms in response to the ruptures introduced by the cyclone into everyday life. Based on the narratives of cyclone survivors, the main argument of this thesis is that the impact of the disaster formulates an ongoing process of reconfiguring post-Nargis everyday life. While illustrating the immediate and destructive dimensions of the cyclone, the thesis thus also sheds light on long-term and habitual aspects of the crisis that become deeply woven into the everyday lives of survivors. Importantly, the thesis also shows how the process of rebuilding everyday life is gendered, not only in the sense of the differentiated impacts and negotiations of women and men, but also in terms that problematise stereotyped gender roles.

The present dissertation titled "Family plots: bio-medical discourse, gender, and familial/marital relationships in the modern Greek fiction of the 1920s and 1930s" consists of three chapters and is designed as a wide-ranging comparative study of bio-medical themes and concepts (degeneration, eugenics, and biological determinism), gender issues (domestic and social life, education and work, and sexuality), ties between family members and spouses, as well as parental figures in Greek family narratives published between 1920 and 1939. As such, the thesis examines and compares the various ways in which the fictional texts under consideration discuss the aforementioned issues; while also exploring the extent to which fiction from this period interacts with bio-medical and feminist discourses, as well as with contemporary cultural and legal shifts, and the various ways by which it acknowledges the realities of the interwar historical background.

This thesis examines subjective experiences of Polish women migrants in the UK. Since the Accession 8 (A8) of the European Union in 2004 the United Kingdom has experienced one of the largest migration movements from the new member states. Post 2004 the UK has been a common destination for Polish migrants. Currently Polish women migrants in the UK outnumber their male counterparts. Substantial scholarship on the Polish A8 migration to the UK has been undertaken, nonetheless personal experiences of Polish women migrants are still in need of further research. The aim of this thesis is to fill this gap and offer new insights on everyday lived experiences of migration through the eyes of the migrant herself. Combining autoethnography, life story interviews conducted with different generational cohorts of Polish women and fictional texts on mobility as well as secondary data, this thesis explores the complexities of everyday experience of migration in relation to migrants' social identities, gender, notions of home and belonging as well as legacies of the post-socialist past. Migrant stories in this thesis are linked with experiences and meanings of migration, but also migrants' feelings and imaginations, opinions, views, and memories. The thesis purposes a multi-layered, polyvocal and complex reflection on subjective experiences of migration. Thus, offers an account of everyday migration experiences which is personal, local and political therefore aware of both discourse and larger socio-cultural and geopolitical panorama, whilst highlighting its dynamic, fluid and complex character.

This thesis investigates how marketisation and internationalisation in English Higher Education shape and reshape gender and feminist knowledge production. Feminist and gender knowledge production finds itself in an ambiguous position in English universities: simultaneously held up as progressive, inclusive and 'global' yet threatened by ongoing funding cuts and restructurings, by border controls and Prevent policies. To explore these tensions, I propose a theoretical approach to the marketisation and internationalisation of Higher Education that accounts for the production and regulation of difference at the intersection between political economy and epistemology. I present data from interviews with academics working on gender, feminism and queer studies, supplemented with analyses of public and internal-facing university documents and archival research. Situating contemporary feminist and gender knowledge practices within the history of universities demonstrates that there are longstanding interactions between the political economy of universities and the regulation of difference. I argue that the way in which feminist and gender knowledge production is shaped by marketisation and internationalisation follows a logic of recognition, representation and regulation which combines a selective inclusion of difference with the disavowal of ongoing racialised and gendered violences. I show that this logic selectively rewards some forms of feminist and gender knowledge and even, at times, those who produce it. Rewards are often symbolic and only accorded in line with market logics, creating structural barriers that mean those who are already marginalised are increasingly less likely to be able to produce feminist and gender knowledge. Harking back to a pre-neoliberal university or a 'purer' feminism does little to displace the structural violence of both. Drawing on abolitionist feminism, I make the case for a feminist imagination against and beyond the university, which uses the tools of feminist epistemology to think and act from its material location in relation to universities and state.

Introduction Personality changes following a brain injury, such as the lack of expression of emotional warmth, can cause significant difficulty in the partner relationship, The loss of emotional warmth has been found to have high correlation with relationship discontinuity (Yasmin, 2019; Riley et al., 2020), yet limited research has attempted to understand the connection between the two. The aim of the present study was to explore in greater detail how partners experience changes in emotional warmth, and specifically to explore how they impact on the couple relationship. Method Seven participants (all partners of persons who had experienced a brain injury) were recruited via the charity Headway. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant. Interview transcripts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Findings Participants reported a range of changes in emotional warmth. Not all participants described changes in all behaviours, with some reporting that warmth from their partner was still experienced in some areas. Two superordinate themes were generated with four subordinate themes in each in relation to the impact these changes had on the partner relationship and how participants coped with these changes. Conclusions The findings support previous research that emotional changes are detrimental to the partner relationship and offers some understanding into how these changes impact on the relationship and how partners cope with these changes. In terms of clinical implications, more awareness needs to be given to these changes in clinical practice, both in terms of assessing them and offering support for managing them.

This thesis was completed as part of the Clinical Psychology Doctorate programme and includes three chapters. Chapter one is a meta-analysis examining the current literature on the prevalence rates for perinatal post-traumatic stress disorder following childbirth. Chapter two is an empirical paper exploring Black women's experiences of pregnancy and birth from a qualitative stance. Chapter three comprises of a press release for both papers, conveying findings in an accessible manner.

This thesis examines the participation of British feminist socialists in the Irish socio-political movements in the first two decades of the 20th century. It investigates the extent to which British feminists' intervention in the Irish feminist, labour, and pacifist movements was motivated by maternalistic imperialism. I consider if socialist women's commitment to international class struggle protected them from reinscribing and perpetuating imperialist power dynamics in their efforts to provide solidarity with Irish activists. This thesis places British and Irish individuals and organisations within a history of Irish nationalist resistance to British rule, and contextualises the relationships within debates concerning the 'Irish question' of the early twentieth century. It brings, for the first time, scholarship on imperial feminism and early socialism into dialogue, creating a new methodology with which to understand gendered political solidarity across colonial borders. This thesis demonstrates how the separate historiographies of Irish and British suffrage, and of suffrage and labour movements has marginalised women and obscured important connections between the various movements as well as omitted the ways in which imperialism impacted transnational solidarity. The chapters are structured around flashpoints: the first chapter is centred on the pre-war suffrage movement (1900-1914), the second chapter focuses on the 1913 Dublin lockout, the third chapter is structured around the 1916 Easter Rising, and the fourth chapter is focused on the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). This structure allows for an assessment of changing perspectives toward Irish nationalism, imperialism, and the British Empire during moments of high tension between Britain and Ireland. The thesis ultimately argues that British women had been politicised within a context in which feminism was intimately bound up with imperialism, and this had a profound impact on their ability to work with and for the cause of Irish women's political rights, Ireland's sovereignty, and the Irish labour movement.

This PhD by Publication focuses on the representation of motherhood on 'quality' American television and how that is intrinsically linked to women's political and economic oppression in society. Although this study focuses on contemporary television series, it is grounded in a history of how motherhood has been theorized, its cultural positioning and how this informs the representations of maternity, motherhood and mothering in quality American television drama. Arguing that, in order to understand how patriarchy subjugates women, we need to expose the way patriarchal norms related to motherhood work as, while 'we know that difference exists, ... we don't understand it as constituted relationally',1 I propose that cultural attitudes expressed through televisual representations betray a deep-rooted misogyny that ties women to their reproductive potential thus impacting their positioning in society, their employment prospects and a lifetime's wage prospects. With so many meshes of ideological carriers at work, I conclude that it is urgent to bring them into consciousness and wield that knowledge politically.2 My work brings what is invisible into discourse, what is unconscious into consciousness and teaches us much about the ingrained attitudes of a neoliberal western patriarchal society, how it views motherhood and the impact that has on women in society more broadly. My original contribution to this field acknowledges 'quality' television's soap opera roots, and, by analysing series from a feminist perspective, shows that much can be revealed about the patriarchal unconscious, how it views its mothers and how women are inevitably linked to their reproductive potential.

Against a background of women's widespread under-representation at executive level, publicly subsidised arts organisations in the UK have collectively, as a sector, appointed equal numbers of women and men at executive level. This thesis uses qualitative, semi structured interviews with 63 executives, chairs and headhunters from across the sector to bring a deeper understanding of the factors at play in this unusual gender parity. It is argued that the UK publicly subsidised arts sector's atypically non-homophilous instrumental networks include effective mentoring between men and women, and which feed into genuinely formal recruitment and selection methods alongside open advertising and selection decisions based on agreed criteria, contribute to this parity. At the same time, increasingly widespread flexible working practices include co-executive positions and working patterns that can accommodate executive responsibilities alongside childcare and other caring activities, the majority of which are still undertaken by women. These factors combined seem to provide the conditions that have enabled this sector to achieve gender parity at executive level sooner than other sectors, particularly those in which homophilous networks play a central role in discrete, unadvertised executive appointments in ways that disadvantage women. However, the UK publicly subsidised arts sector's relatively low executive pay levels, and its remaining intersectional inequalities of gender, race and class, are noted as important context to this gender parity since there is some indication that the gender pay gap persists, and the advantage extended to white, middle-class women has not yet been extended to all women. By focussing on arts organisations, this thesis provides a unique empirical contribution to studies of executive gender inequality. By uncovering a link between inter-organisational collaboration, and openness towards sexuality which allow for men and women to mix professionally without judgment, it also expands on current theories about how homophilous and non-homophilous networks can be formed.

This thesis focuses on the consequences of armed conflict on family-related outcomes. Whilst remarkable efforts have been devoted towards documenting conflict-caused excess mortality, tracing and forecasting migratory responses to war, demographic research has dedicated less attention to events occurring around the family domain in and after wartime. Yet, the family remains a fundamental component of population dynamics, and a crucial institution for individual well-being, community resilience and post-conflict social stability. This thesis addresses this knowledge gap in three empirical Chapters. Each examines the consequences of exposure to armed conflict on aspects of family formation, including fertility and marriage, and issues of family violence. Particular attention is given to experiences of conflict violence in early and young life, understood as key developmental stages and critical periods for later life outcomes. The research questions are examined in the context of the armed confrontations that characterised the former Soviet space, with emphasis on Azerbaijan and its conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. The first paper focuses on childbearing transitions. Using birth history data and demographic methods, it retraces fertility trends and patterns in Azerbaijan and examines how these have changed since independence and in relation to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The paper finds that, while conflict exposure had little influence on aggregate fertility trends, it affected differently the transition to different parities. In specific, it shows that exposure to war is associated with a higher risk of transitioning to the average parity level in the population, that in the Azerbaijani context is the second birth. It further documents 'promoting' effects on fertility after the loss of a child during the conflict, suggesting risk-insurance and replacement mechanisms as responses to traumatic conflict events. The second paper addresses the question of whether armed conflict influences the other component of family formation, i.e., the timing of marriage. In particular, it examines female teen marriage dynamics in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in Azerbaijan. Exploiting spatial variation in conflict violence and a cohort specification that accounts for the risk of marrying in teen ages iii before and during the war, the paper provides suggestive evidence of declines in adolescent unions for the cohorts longest exposed to the conflict and highlights the role of displacement as a plausible driver. Yet, it also finds that conflict only leads to marriage postponement and is associated with theoretically adverse union characteristics, including wider spousal age and educational differences. This opens questions on how war may influence family intimate relationships. The third paper turns attention to this aspect and asks whether exposure to violence at young ages is correlated with women's adult experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). This is the first study to integrate theoretically and empirically literature on the long-term consequences of warfare and the scholarship on the determinants of IPV. Expanding the spatial reach of the research to all ex-Soviet states that experienced armed violence after independence (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and Tajikistan), and exploiting cohort and geographical variation in conflict exposure, it finds that women affected by conflict in childhood have an elevated probability of being IPV victims, particularly of physical and sexual abuse, compared to not-exposed peers and older women. Analyses of potential pathways show no relationship between war exposure and changing marriage market conditions, or attitudes towards IPV in women. Conversely, men exposed to war in late adolescence (16-19) are more likely to condone violence against partners. Further, women's childhood exposure to conflict correlates with having a violent father. Altogether, the findings advance our theoretical understanding of family formation processes in times of conflict as well as of the long-term consequences of war may have on other forms of violence that hinder family functioning. They are also policy-relevant and serve as inputs for the design of strategies that can foster family well-being and welfare in post-conflict Eurasia, the development of prevention programmes in conflict-prone areas in the region and timely responses where conflict violence is ongoing, like in Ukraine.

This thesis presents an empirical analysis of the influence of regional institutions on the social and economic inequalities through crises and policies changes. It is organised into four independent chapters. Chapter 1 investigates how an indigenous government institution affect contemporary economic development. Government institutions have long been known as critical drivers of growth. However, it is still unknown whether the institution is resilient after experiencing large political shocks. Using the textual data from government records, we examine how differences in local government quality in Imperial times determined current differences in economic development. Chapter 2 focuses on government institutions' role in explaining performance differences in pandemic prevention. Current research so far has primarily overlooked linking institutions to social outcomes. How institutions react to public health crises has attracted minimal attention. We collected and combined the Black Death's mortality rate and duration data with the location of autonomous cities to study whether a greater degree of autonomy could have allowed cities to react effectively after the pandemics. Chapter 3 moves beyond public-order institutions to study the persistent economic effect of the private-order institutions. We used historical administrative data, the Statistics of Agriculture and Commerce, to digitalise the conditions of the chamber system of China in the 1910s. To measure contemporary business performance, we rely on the Firm Registration Database, which systemically documents start-ups' emergence since 1975. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we identify cities heavily permeated with the historical chamber system as enjoying more entrepreneurs and flourishing with innovative performances when the market economy reopens. Our instrumental variable strategy has also verified these results. Chapter 4 investigates the influence of culture. Within the background of son preference, we discuss how the family planning policy distorts a couple's decision-making about childbirth. Under natural conditions, parents satisfy potential son preferences by giving birth until a son is born. However, with restrictions on family size, the cultural preference for sons can no longer be smoothed out by adding additional children. Parents may practise prenatal and postnatal discrimination against daughters, lowering their probability of survival relative to sons. Drawing on the natural experiment of the Two-Child Policy, we examine whether inconsiderate policies could further trigger the dark side of a backward culture.

'Anti-gender' actors constitute a loosely connected network of mobilisations with a transnational dimension. They seek political goals through their opposition to common feminist and LGBTQ+ issues, including sexual and reproductive rights, gender-based violence legislation, same-sex marriage and adoption, and progressive sex education at schools. However, not all anti-gender actors defend the same issues; furthermore, these movements do not occur in isolation but are mostly part of wider neoconservative and (far-)right movements with often authoritarian aims. In this thesis, I provide an in-depth qualitative account of anti-gender mobilising in the Spanish context, based on extended empirical research carried out over a period of nine months in Madrid and beyond. During my research, I spent significant time at different types of events - including seminars, conferences, demonstrations, and film screenings - as well as carrying out in depth interviews. Given the ethical implications of doing research with groups towards which the researcher harbours a personal dislike, I provide a detailed reflection on what I argue is a crossroad between ethics and safety. In light of my findings, I commence by unpacking the Catholic framing of an opposition to gender and sexuality via references to 'nature' and 'tradition', as well as argue that behind such oppositional practices there lies an aim to preserve the 'traditional' family. I then analyse how Spanish anti-gender movements interact with other exclusionary narratives and suggest that the Spanish Right turns toward a monopolisation of nationalism at the hands of the (far-)right to construct an enemy within. Shifting then to the role of affect, I suggest that anti-gender actors create collective moods of anxiety, love and hate through an appeal to both nostalgic contemplations of the past as well as a temporality of decay projected into the future. I conclude that Spanish anti-gender actors generate a national rhythm that dictates what is both morally acceptable, 'traditional' and in the 'interest' of the nation.

In this thesis, I use the ubiquitous yet often overlooked space of the bathroom as a lens through which to explore the ambivalent social and cultural position of a range of women - from the aging, penniless spinster to the suburban housewife - in the early twentieth century. Enmeshed within a complex discourse of social and moral anxieties, bathrooms are bound up with questions of class, age, gender and sexuality, and, as such, are key sites of meaning and importance for women and women's writing. Offering valuable insight into the bathroom's own overlooked place in literature, this thesis generates new readings and rereadings of a myriad of narratives by and about women within the context of historically specific discussions of women's identity, access to public and private space, and their sense of belonging or existing in modernity. Building on a growing body of research from the fields of material culture, social history and literary studies, I investigate the different ways that access to everyday bathroom spaces across the urban and domestic spheres played into women's lives. By examining several unique bathroom spaces - the cafe and restaurant lavatory, the hotel bathroom, the shared lodging-house bathroom, the middle-class family bathroom, and the therapeutic bathroom - this thesis demonstrates why, and the ways in which, a focus on the bathroom in the early twentieth century is of particular relevance and interest. This thesis forms a survey of how a plethora of key spaces within the city and the home - all broadly defined as bathroom spaces - are written into the literature of this period, and, by merging cultural histories and literary representations of specific bathroom spaces, offers fresh readings of women's experience of and place in modernity.

This thesis is about the making of female technology entrepreneurs in Ghana. Ghana is a fascinating case study that reveals a paradox: the digital economy and digital entrepreneurship hold great potential for women, yet in unlocking this potential, they face severe inequalities. The acceleration of digital entrepreneurship in Ghana is driven by a convergence of factors including, inter alia, the government of Ghana's push to promote and expand Ghana's digital economy, increased focus on and funding of local start-ups by global Venture Capital (VC) firms, and entrepreneurs responding accordingly. This thesis explores the nature and characteristics of Ghana's exponentially shifting but little-understood digital landscape in Ghana, with a special focus on the experiences and personal narratives of a cohort of successful women entrepreneurs. This thesis reveals how class and gender inequality intersect in Ghana, and how the impacts of government policies are socially embedded. The experiences of Ghanaian women tech entrepreneurs challenge and help us rethink dominant frameworks for understanding gender, finance, entrepreneurship, and technology. This thesis focuses on the trajectories of 21 female digital entrepreneurs as they navigate challenges to achieve success. This opens three key themes for investigation. The first theme is the notion of success as a social fact. The second theme is inevitably the space of digital entrepreneurship. But what kind of space is it? And how is it situated within the wider field of entrepreneurship and business in Ghana? As compared to North America, Europe, and Asia, relatively little has been written about the digital economy across Africa, and in Ghana in particular, and so my research fills this empirical gap. In addition, I demonstrate, through my research, how the digital economy while often understood as a virtual space, is embedded in social relations, and how these social relations are in some ways distinctively Ghanaian but are also part of and are affected by global flows. The third theme is about women's experiences and the importance of also situating and contextualising the lives and narratives of the women who are presented in this study. I look at how women tech entrepreneurs operate along the intersections of gender, class, race, and nationality in a digital economy which is simultaneously local and global. To analyse these themes, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a four-and-a-half-year period between July 2016 and December 2020, examining female entrepreneurial experiences in Accra. My research situates these 21 entrepreneurs in the context of the economic, political, social, institutional, familial, and cultural factors that enable and sometimes hinder digital entrepreneurship. It also identifies the unique gendered challenges faced by these women. Taken together, this thesis provides a grounded account, drawn from my ethnographic work, of the defining elements of digital entrepreneurship in Ghana and its intersection with gender. Each chapter challenges and nuanced themes in the public discourse on the digital economy. This thesis also contributes to the ethnography of women entrepreneurs in Ghana. This thesis also makes more general contributions to the debate on the digital economy in Africa. My examination of the digital imaginary and the state not only draws on the broader debate on digital discourses but is also an attempt to understand the wider social, economic, and political processes involved in the transformation of the digital economy in Ghana. The reconfiguration of the digital economy in Ghana has revealed that global financial flows are a fundamental aspect of the way the current development of the country is reconfiguring forms of social differentiation, the relations between the state and its citizens, and the way entrepreneurs are positioning themselves locally and globally. In this regard, my study of the digital economy and female technology entrepreneurs in Ghana can provide a point of comparison for future investigations of those other social and economic terrains that are contributing to the re-organisation of the economy of Ghana.

For over a decade, research has indicated that sexual violence amongst the student population is a sizeable and persistent problem. At present, however, there exists little research concerned with students' attitudes towards sexual behaviour, heterosexuality, and socio-sexual norms more broadly. This thesis begins to fill this gap. This thesis investigates what student attitudes towards sexual violence are in within elite university communities. Then it considers how we can best understand these attitudes in relation to existing socio-sexual norms pertaining to gender and heterosexuality. Finally, it explores the possibilities these attitudes bring in the context of bringing about behavioural change in the elite university environment. Using quantitative data from students across 24 universities and qualitative data generated from fieldwork within three elite university communities, this thesis argues that current understandings and theoretical frameworks found in existing literature over-simplify the problem of sexual violence in universities. It demonstrates the ways in which student attitudes and behaviours are complex, fluid and context specific. It highlights complicated relationship between gendered behaviours and attitudes which has been missing from existing scholarship and current preventative training measures undertaken by institutions. Importantly, it does not seek to provide a new theoretical framing for understanding sexual violence in these communities, but rather highlights the impossibility of utilising a single framework to understand, tackle and prevent the problem. Instead, it advocates for scholars, institutions, and future preventative training measures to account for the nuance and complexity of the attitudes collected and lived experiences of students within the elite university community. The thesis concludes by offering an alternative way of approaching sexual violence prevention in the university context. Although it does not offer a detailed blueprint, the thesis makes clear that elite institutions could, with long-term investment and training provisions driven by student voices and experiences, bring about meaningful behavioural change.

This thesis examines portrayals of homes and gardens in magazines, advice books, public health discourse and government propaganda in mid-twentieth-century Britain, analysing representations of healthy domesticity inside and outside the home, and in transition between the two. Taking an environmental perspective, it explores the implications of the association of housewives with hygiene and care for choices in shopping, the home and the garden. Vegetables were regarded as essential to health yet might still have soil on them. Waste, when converted into compost, was seen as a component of healthy soil, yet whilst in the process of decay had associations with risk to health. This thesis explores the tensions between two different understandings relating to health, namely that fresh vegetables grown in soil were nutritious, and that germs might hide unseen in dirty soil and might pose a risk if ingested. It attends to alternative voices advocating a cyclical and local approach to waste management and vegetable production but argues that they did not significantly impact the dominant cultural association between housewives, the indoors, and hygiene. Chapter one demonstrates how considering soil in the domestic space connects perspectives from multiple disciplines. Chapter two explores the construction of boundaries in the domestic space, between the indoors and the outdoors, the clean and the dirty. Chapter three focuses on the procurement of vegetables, analysing choices that were made between different purchasing options, and domestic growing in the garden or on the allotment, assessing how far concepts of protection from germs influenced these choices. Chapter four explores waste, both as rubbish and as sewage, and the ways in which practices were influenced by the construct of the ideal hygienic home. This thesis thus makes a significant contribution to histories of domesticity, gender and the environment that can inform current debates relating to climate breakdown.

This thesis examines the mediated emotional experiences of rural elderly grandparents born before the 1960s. Against the backdrop of state-led neoliberal modernisation since the 1980s, it asks how the rural elderly experience their family life emotionally, whether and how the media culture has structured such experiences, and what is the significance of such emotions for the elderly, their families and, more widely, for China's uneven modernity. To answer these questions, I conducted a 10-month ethnography in two rural villages in Enshi, China between 2019 and 2020, including live-in studies with selected families. This study found that the rural elderly's willing sacrifice and sense of inferiority in the family are connected to the feeling of (eating) bitterness. Such a bitter structure of feeling has historical significance for this generation and has been reinterpreted through the media content they engage with, allowing them to live life meaningfully in deprived conditions. Moreover, under persistent patriarchal and increasingly neoliberal structures that systemically disadvantage rural households, the media that perpetuates new norms, scripts, and expectations has been actively appropriated by different genders and generations within the family. Such mediated processes play a crucial role in structuring the family dynamics within the three-generational household. These processes tend to engender highly classed and gendered intimacy, distance, and tension between the elderly and the younger generations, often leaving the elderly with grievances, guilt, isolation, disappointment, and a faint sense of hope. By examining the politics and formation of the elderly's structure of feelings in relation to media, I argue that China's modernization is largely enabled by and at the expense of rural elderly's 'cruel optimism'. In this regard, this study contests and contributes to the largely depoliticalised realm of Chinese family sociology by reintroducing power. It also contributes to media scholarship from the vantage point of the less (but increasingly) media-saturated region of the Global South. By the same token, it advances current theorisations of modernity, particularly individualisation. Through attention to a marginalised and understudied group - the rural elderly in China - this study advances the idea of an 'imagination of modernity from below'.

This thesis aims to challenge the accepted historical narrative developed by classical scholars on mid-Victorian classical burlesque, which they describe as a demotic form of entertainment encoding politically subversive meanings in terms of gender. The first section challenges the assumption that classical burlesque authors had politically radical beliefs in relation to the issue of gender. Despite their Bohemian lifestyle, the analysis of memoirs, novels, comedies, and farces written by classical burlesque authors, as well as the satirical representations of gendered social types in magazines like Punch and Fun, illustrate that their degree of political involvement was limited. The second section of this thesis claims that classicists have interpreted classical burlesques merely as written scripts, thus neglecting the comicality embedded in performances. The acting styles, use of cross-dressing and linguistic conventions of classical burlesque are analysed as elements which enabled the achievement of comic effects in performance and undercut the serious significance of the characters' verbal claims. The third section of this thesis questions the alleged demotic appeal of classical burlesque despite the lack of sufficient evidence. It argues that a considerable portion of the burlesque public may have been composed of upper- and middle-class young gentlemen, who lived a 'fast' and mildly dissipated lifestyle. Ultimately, this thesis offers an historical investigation which aims to re-instate the centrality of classical burlesques as comic performances which satirised the conventional mid-Victorian gender paradigms, without seriously endorsing the need for reform, and without aiming at indoctrinating their audiences, whose background may have been more privileged and conservative than classical scholars have acknowledged.

This research explores perceptions of legitimacy and professionalisation within HR and the extent to which these are underpinned by gendered assumptions. In understanding legitimacy and professionalisation as gendered concepts, consideration is given as to how this impacts the HR occupation. Through 55 semi-structured interviews with HR practitioners, this research explores how perceptions and experiences regarding legitimacy and gender have shaped understanding of the HR occupation. The thesis findings and discussion are structured around three key concepts: legitimacy, professionalisation, and gender. This research explores the pervasive legitimacy challenges within the HR occupation and the ways in which HR practitioners have largely/apparently embraced the rhetoric of HR as a commercial and strategic organisational function. HR is positioned in an uncertain space whereby professionalisation is indeed desired, but there are clear barriers to the achievement of occupational closure. The HR occupation is subject to gendering and HR practitioners are seeking to distance themselves from feminised constructions of the occupation. This research shows the way in which gender is interwoven with legitimacy and professionalisation in HR. With commerciality and strategy underpinned with notions of masculinity, legitimacy and gender in HR are seen as inextricable. The findings of this research contribute to the relatively small stream of academic literature exploring gender in HR and how this may play into longstanding issues around legitimacy and professionalisation. This study offers a novel insight into the micro-level perceptions of gender in HR and how these shape understandings of the occupation. This research furthers our understanding as to the gendered tensions HR practitioners experience with regards to the credibility of the function, by showing how the dominant theme of commerciality in the HR occupation has the potential to valorise masculinity in HR whilst still masking the gendered underpinnings within the function.

Women's cinema has been the focus of much of the scholarly discussion that has developed feminist film criticism. However, theorists have not treated the concept of 'feminist film' in much detail, and previous studies of feminist cinema have not dealt with the possibility of male filmmakers doing feminist filmmaking. This thesis argues that the gender identity of directors who can make feminist films is not fixed and addresses the neglected aspect of male directors presenting feminist perspectives through cinema. Along with the focus on cinematic representations of gender, this thesis also analyses the roles played by sociocultural context, history, ethnicity and sexual orientation in capturing feminist representations on film. Adopting an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, combining feminist film theory with cultural studies, gender studies and film theory and philosophy, this study conducts a close reading of All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999), Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1991), Summer Snow (Ann Hui, 1995) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) - Westernised and Hong Kong films made by directors with different genders (male and female) between 1990-2000. By situating these films and directors in a transregional, transcultural or intertextual context, this thesis indicates that feminist film in contemporary times is not only about the on-screen representations of female identities or experiences, women's oppression and strength but also revelations about how hegemonies regarding gender, race, class and culture impact on the social identities and lives of individuals. The films discussed here show that film feminism or feminist filmmaking is not merely a one-dimensional discussion of gender but a dynamic process - in theoretical and practical manners - that intersects with different sociocultural issues in a diverse environment.

This thesis is a search for female agency, unrecorded in theory and in history. My enquiry is also a bid to recover, through Shakespeare, the performative presence of the Victorian actress, Ellen Terry, hovering on the threshold of women's emancipation and our modernity. The lost female presence she represents is, I suggest, a gap in our Western social and political narrative, and in the philosophical investigations of personhood that have occupied thinkers since G. W. F. Hegel.

Background: Traumatic childbirth can cause ongoing distress, often called birth trauma. Such distress can affect women, their partners, and the couple relationship. Good quality couple relationships are important to the well-being of individuals and the wider family. Aims: This thesis aimed to investigate the impact of birth trauma on the couple relationship and associated requirements for birth trauma support. Methods & Results: The thesis aims were addressed through four pieces of research. Two systematic reviews and meta-syntheses to investigate: (1) the impact of childbirth related PTSD or PTSS on the couple relationship (n=7); and (2) the impact of becoming parents on the couple relationship (n=12). These reviews reported a range of impacts on the couple relationship with some similarity in themes across reviews. However, the impact of birth trauma was perceived more negatively. Two empirical studies were conducted: (1) a survey of UK healthcare practitioners (n= 202) investigated assessment and observation of birth trauma and related support; and (2) interviews with UK parents investigated their experiences of the impact of birth trauma on the couple relationship and associated support needs (n=18). Empirical studies reported that barriers exist to accessing birth trauma support for the couple relationship, that current support is limited in effectiveness, and enhancement of dyadic support is required. Thesis findings were synthesised into two proposed models: (1) the impact of birth trauma on the couple relationship; and (2) the birth trauma support required by the couple relationship. Discussion & Conclusions: Thesis findings suggest that birth trauma can have a negative impact on the couple relationship. However, some report that birth trauma can strengthened the relationship. Current support for birth trauma is limited with little evidence of effectiveness. Thesis findings indicate how birth trauma support for the couple relationship could be enhanced. Implications for research and practice are considered.

Militaristic masculinity and material culture in the armies in India, 1840-1900 This thesis explores Anglo-Indian military men's engagement with 'militaristic masculinity', a form of masculinity identified by imperial historians as hegemonic in Britain and India from the mid-nineteenth century. Associated with traits like bravery, daring, and militarism, physicality, resourcefulness and authority, militaristic masculinity was seen to be exemplified by soldiers adventuring and conquering in colonial contexts. Existing literature on militaristic masculinity has focused overwhelmingly on its representation in nineteenth century periodicals and adventure novels. However, there has been very little examination of militaristic masculinity outside of the pages of adventure fiction. This reflects the dominance of cultural histories in masculinity studies, and is also due to a mutual 'lack of interest' between military and imperial historians. This thesis, in contrast, integrates imperial and military history to study how Anglo-Indian men subjectively experienced and embodied this masculine identity. It shows how the militaristic masculine ideal identified in cultural histories was negotiated, constructed, and performed by those who were thought to be its exemplars: soldiers. Specifically, it focuses on the lives of British men, hereafter referred to as Anglo-Indian men who served in the army that was known as the East India Company army (prior to 1861) and thereafter as the Indian Army (1861-1957). By focussing on these men as gendered subjects, whose identities were forged in the messy realities of colonial life, my thesis adds a vital social history dimension to the existing cultural history research on militaristic masculinity. Historians of masculinity have called for greater focus on how masculinities are 'inhabited by individuals'. This thesis explores this by showing how men articulated militaristic masculine identities in the context of colonial India. I engage with Anglo-Indian men's experience with militaristic masculinity through a focus on material culture: the objects, clothing, weapons and equipment that men used and surrounded themselves with during their military service. Material culture methodologies have become popular tools for historians seeking insight into the lived experience of people in the past. Engaging with the material world of Anglo-Indian soldiers provides insight into a militaristic masculinity rooted in everyday interactions and experiences. Through three main chapters that explore Anglo-Indian looting, domestic management, and army uniforms, my research contributes new depth to the study of militaristic masculinity not only by providing insight into how the ideal was interpreted and negotiated by military men in India, but also by demonstrating how men's subjective experiences of the identity often departed significantly from its popular representations. I also show the importance of interactions with women and men from groups identified as the 'martial races' in shaping the articulation of this masculine identity. In doing so, my work embeds the construction of this identity firmly within the power structures and ideologies of an imperial setting, and, specifically, a military setting. It therefore provides a counter-point to existing metropolitan-centred analyses of the ideal. By demonstrating how analysis of military men can enrich our understandings of gender in colonial India, my thesis demonstrates the value and necessity of integrating imperial and military methodologies in order to understand the dynamics of colonial identities and societies.

This doctoral thesis is composed of three parts. Chapter One is a Systematic Literature Review exploring the current literature on understanding experiences of resilience in adult refugees. Using Thematic Synthesis data three main themes were identified: Individual Power, Never Truly Being Alone and The Bigger Picture. The findings demonstrated adult refugees drew upon internal resilience, as well as familial and community support to overcome the challenges they faced. Maintaining their determination was a strategy utilised to improve the lives of future generations and their families. Gender differences in relation to resilience were discussed, including differences in upholding gender roles. The Systematic Review provided practical and policy related recommendations. Chapter 2 is a qualitative research study that explored the experiences of refugee mothers who have travelled to the United Kingdom (UK) with their children. Using an Interpretative Phenomenology Approach (IPA), semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed. The findings identified three superordinate themes including: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Building Resilience and The Child is Priority. Mothers described the traumatic experiences they endured, that resulted in making life altering decisions. They drew upon internal resilience, as well as external sources, including their families and organisations. The mothers took their roles extremely seriously through doing whatever it took to look after their children, even if the cost was to themselves. This study provided practical and policy related recommendations. The final chapter, Chapter 3, is a reflective paper exploring my own experiences of conducting this doctoral thesis, using the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) model to help guide my reflections. It highlighted my values and why I was drawn to this research subject and discussed external and internal barriers faced. It also highlighted how the process of carrying out the research has influenced me both professionally and personally.

High levels of unmet need for contraception in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are alarming and contribute significantly to maternal and child morbidity and mortality. This thesis describes the implementation of a six-country initiative aimed at setting up services providing postpartum family planning (PPFP) counselling and postpartum intrauterine device (PPIUD) insertion for those consenting across 48 referral hospitals. The countries involved included Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Tanzania. Six published works are included. The first study analysed complications rates from PPIUD across all countries at the six-week postnatal follow up visit. Complications such as infection and perforation were minimal and expulsion rates were similar to when the intrauterine device (IUD) is inserted as an interval method in non-pregnant women (3%). Task shifting to nurses and midwives was safe, with no increase in complications reported. In the second study, analysis of four out of the six countries looked at which factors influenced women's decision to accept the method through quantitative analysis of exit interviews. Repeated counselling in the antenatal period was the only factor that increased uptake across all countries with each country having particular associated factors pertaining to their context. Uptake of PPIUD was initially very low in Nepal. A third study was designed using qualitative methodology to understand how women made their decisions regarding consenting for PPIUD and which factors influence that choice. Subjective norms were found to have a strong influence. It was suggested that community agents known as Female Community Health Volunteers (FCHVs) could help modify this. Strategies were altered to allow for greater involvement of FCHVs. The fourth study used mixed methods to find that formal training increased FCHV's knowledge, their counselling of women and consequently PPIUD uptake. The fifth study looked at sustainability of this strategy. Using a mixed method approach the study found that after one year FCHVs were able to retain their knowledge and were active in counselling on PPFP/PPIUD albeit to a lesser extent than immediately post intervention. Following implementation of the initiative through donor funds, the issue of sustainability of services through local governments became increasingly important. Information on costeffectiveness of PPIUD in LMICs was lacking. The sixth study therefore looked at the costeffectiveness of services in Bangladesh and Tanzania as well as cost savings to the health system were these services to be expanded nationally. In both countries, services were highly cost-effective with national rollout saving more funds through aversion of associated morbidity and mortality related to unplanned pregnancies than it would cost to roll out. In conclusion, the six studies form a cohesive group of research that expands the knowledge on PPFP/PPIUD in LMICs. They demonstrate that implementation of PPFP/PPIUD services was successful, cost-effective and highlighted the importance of: considering contextual realities when devising counselling strategies, using task shifting to increase access and the value of involving community agents. The sustainability of initiatives such as this one and the move to upscaling however remain a challenge.

Through a series of case studies that explore Black women and femmes' curation of, presence within, and engagement with digital visual cultures, this thesis illustrates how digital diasporic intimacies have been created, shared, and sustained on social media using affective processes of visuality. It brings together cecile emeke's former YouTube-based web series strolling (2014-16), Renata Cherlise's Instagram-based archival project @BlackArchives.co, a range of Influencer selfies uploaded onto Instagram with the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic, and a genre of cartoon memes which have been remixed (edited) with Black femme aesthetics, to argue for the importance of visual culture for building diasporic communities and forming diasporic identities on social media. At the centre of this project is the term digital diasporic intimacy, which I use to describe moments of joy, expressions of imagined kinship, and practices of solidarity mediated by the Black diaspora on social media. Focusing on how these visual mediums resonate, create, and engage diasporic intimacies, I consider how tensions, friction, and disagreements expressed on social media also underpin the creation of online communities and can be a practice of diasporic identity negotiation too. This project is underpinned by a methodological framework of Black Feminist Thought and Black feminist theories of visual culture and diaspora. It emerged from my own social media experiences and behaviours, and so I weave autoethnography throughout this thesis to reflect on my relationship with diasporic identity building both online and offline. Thus, as a wholly Black feminist project, I use intimate and intuitive methods to couple my own experiences of interacting with this digital material, with visual and discourse inquiry informed by Black Feminist Thought, to understand how Black women and femmes have curated visual moments for digital intimacy. Altogether, this project draws from my personal experiences to explore how digital diasporic intimacy, presented through visual cultures, can facilitate the construction of Black diasporic (other)worlding. This timely and experimental project contributes to the rapidly growing field of Black digital studies, as well as the fields of Black studies, studies of visual cultures, and diaspora studies to consider how digital blackness has been imagined and mediated by Black visual content creators and engagers. It addresses a gap in literature of Black digital studies as it centres visual cultures and takes a diasporic approach to discussions of digital blackness. Furthermore, the methodology I have employed is an intervention in the British field of digital studies as it challenges how we can discuss and engage with social media.

This study investigates the lived experiences of Black parents caring for a child with autism. Their experiences were examined alongside familial, contextual and systemic contexts that intersect to influence parents' psychological wellbeing. The study expanded upon Corbett and Perepa (2007) who investigated cultural influences in autism and Heer, Rose and Larkin's study (2012) on contextual factors that influence Black and minority ethnic parents of children with learning disability. Since then, there has been minimal research on the role of culture on Black parents' experiences of autism, so this study aimed to begin to address this gap in research. A qualitative approach was adopted using in-depth interviews with participants across England and a hermeneutic phenomenological method provided breadth and depth of findings on experiences from an often-marginalised group of people at the intersection of race, gender and disability. Following an ecological framework, the research findings identified factors at individual (i.e., mothers as primary caregivers, isolation), community (cultural beliefs and cognitive dissonance, lack of autism knowledge, stigma) and structural levels (institutional racism in education, housing; lack of cultural sensitivity during and after diagnosis) that negatively influenced parents' experiences of autism and their wellbeing. An intersectional lens provided insight of how multiple identities converge in various contexts. The findings revealed that in addition to challenges associated with autism, Black parents experienced distinct and nuanced difficulties associated with race, culture, gender and socio-economic status. Parents' multiple and intersecting identities shaped their experiences of autism and their psychological wellbeing in the face of racism, unequal division of labour and oppressions from structural barriers in the home, community and organisations in wider society. The findings of the study showed that mothers' primary caregiving role negatively affect their quality of life (isolation, financial hardship) and psychological wellbeing. Culture influenced gender roles and perception of autism, which impacted the family structure and subsystems. However, mothers recounted the valuable nature of their coping strategies including spiritual beliefs, cognitive appraisal and resilience. This study revealed the multi-level intersection of race, culture, gender and disability and provides relevant information for mental health and social practice, policy, and research.

Motherhood is widely believed to be an important factor slowing down the career progression of academic women, hence explaining the so-called "gender pay gap". In Chapter 1, we present a novel database that combines an original survey of women working in the UK higher education sector with data on the occupational maternity benefits offered by academic employers. This allows us to track childbearing experiences and employment histories simultaneously. We offer a portrait of academic mothers in the UK, and of how their experiences have evolved over the years. We also carry out an empirical analysis of the determinants of leave uptake, showing that women's employment status and family arrangements impact the types of maternity leave - paid or unpaid - being taken. In Chapter 2, we investigate different dimensions of the motherhood penalty in UK academia, using our data. Being a mother does not impact salaries, yet slows down career progression. While exhibiting higher satisfaction rates towards the work environment, mothers are more likely to perceive their retribution as unfair with respect to male colleagues. We then explore factors mitigating the motherhood penalty: more generous maternity provisions are found to be associated with higher salaries. The same holds for longer childcare hours, and for an even distribution of responsibilities within the household. We also highlight the importance of a supportive work environment for mothers' careers and wellbeing. Taken together, our findings suggest the necessity of a multi-faceted policy response to the motherhood penalties. In Chapter 3, we explore more in detail the impact of motherhood on the productivity of academic mothers. Depreciation in productivity and broadly defined "human capital" associated to career breaks has in fact been found to be an important channel, especially in high-pay sectors, for the so-called "motherhood penalty". We then investigate the relationship between motherhood, generosity of maternity pay and productivity. Our findings consistently show the existence of a motherhood penalty in productivity (but not in the quality of the output), and a robust, positive link between more generous maternity pay, i.e. more weeks with full salary replacement, and academic productivity, in terms of quantity and quality of research output, in the short-, but also in the long-term.

This thesis studies three topics in political economy and development economics as summarized below. Chapter 1: we examine whether bureaucrats with fixed salaries obtain high private returns. We digitize the financial disclosures of elite bureaucrats from India and combine this novel data with web-scraped career histories to estimate the private returns to public servants after bureaucratic reassignments. Employing a difference-in-differences event study approach, we find that the annual growth rate is 10% higher for the value of assets and 4.4% higher for the number of assets after a bureaucrat is transferred to an important ministry with the power to make influential policies. Exploring the underlying mechanism, we document that the results are consistent with an explanation based on the rent-seeking behaviours of bureaucrats. The increase in assets is higher after reassignment to important ministries that are more prone to corruption and is higher in more corruption-prone states. Bureaucrats working in their home states accumulate more immovable assets after the bureaucratic transfers. Previous experience in important ministries continues to contribute to the asset accumulation of bureaucrats. These findings add new insights to the conventional view on the incentives in bureaucracies by showing that bureaucrats may also face high-powered incentives in the form of private returns. Chapter 2: how did the 1918 influenza pandemic affect female labor force participation in India over the short run and the medium run? We use an event-study approach at the district level and four waves of decadal census data in order to answer this question. We find that districts most adversely affected by influenza mortality saw a temporary increase in female labor force participation in 1921, an increase that was concentrated in the service sector. We find suggestive evidence that distress labor supply by widows and rising wages help account for this result. Chapter 3: what determines the prevalence of family firms? In this project, we investigate the role of historical family culture in the spatial distribution of family firms. Using detailed firm-level data from China, we find that there is a larger share of family firms in regions with a stronger historical family culture, as measured by genealogy density. The results are further confirmed by an instrumental variable approach. Examining the mechanisms, we find that entrepreneurs in regions with a stronger historical family culture: i) tend to have family members engage more in firms; ii) are more likely to raise initial capital from family members; iii) are more willing to pass on the firms to their children. Historical family culture predicts better firm performance partly due to a lower vii leverage ratio.

This submission draws together six publications and a covering document to set out an original contribution to knowledge in the field of intercultural communication. Critical attention to cultural norms change has been relatively scarce in this field; the publications gathered here offer insights into desired cultural norms change initiated by groups of underdogs, based on gender and age, notably in Asia and Africa. My publications focus on detailed studies of these underdog groups, exploring the needs and drivers that lie behind their desire for cultural norms change and the subsequent tactics they used to achieve that transformation. The publications include a gender analysis focusing on women farmers in Bangladesh, a technical guide supporting development practitioners in addressing gender issues, a literature review that explores perspectives on leadership in Africa, case studies exploring perspectives on leadership by civic leaders in Nigeria and Kenya and an analysis of a leadership development initiative in Kenya. Following an initial theoretical overview, which outlines the frameworks that help to conceptualise the transformation of cultural norms, the covering document sets out a novel approach to understanding the process of cultural norms change in different contexts. This synthesis demonstrates the value of viewing culture as a diverse mosaic within societies. The larger society imposes cultural norms on sub-groups, or underdogs in my studies; power imbalances cause some of these norms to be to their disadvantage in reaching their goals, which in turn provides them with an incentive for change. To achieve cultural norms transformation, grassroots bottom-up actions and external dedicated support ideally need to be combined. I propose an integrated transformation model that promotes change through a transformation approach that is based on the dynamic interplay of agentic and communion dimensions of the interpersonal circumplex. The combined research thereby generates a new conceptual framework for understanding cultural norms transformation driven by underdog groups.

Disasters have disproportionately affected women and girls globally. Limited representation of women in disaster risk reduction related decision-making is one of the main reasons for their high vulnerability. In this background, women's empowerment could create opportunities to represent in decision-making. Especially through empowering women in disaster risk governance could provide opportunities to represent women in disaster risk reduction related decision-making. Nevertheless, no systematic studies are available explaining how to empower women in disaster risk governance. Hence, this study was conducted to propose a framework for empowering women in disaster risk governance. The study was carried out in Sri Lanka within the disaster preparedness system. The high disaster profile and the lower level of women's empowerment were the reasons for conducting the study in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has been faced multiple hazards over the period and predicted an increasing trend of future hazards. Furthermore, the present women's representation in decision-making positions, including the parliament, judicial institutions, public and private sector organisations, is significantly low compared to the regional and global level. A detailed literature review was conducted around the main concepts and/or theories related to hazards, disasters, women's empowerment, disaster risk governance, and disaster preparedness. After following a systematic and methodological selection process, the study was conducted within the Sri Lankan disaster preparedness system. Accordingly, the study conducted three case studies in selected districts representing their disaster preparedness systems. The research conducted case study interviews using a semi-structured interview guideline. In addition, several expert interviews were conducted for better triangulation of results. The study collected its data at the cross-sectional level and carried out a qualitative analysis in delivering study objectives. Accordingly, the study reveals the importance of women's empowerment in disaster risk governance within the disaster preparedness system in Sri Lanka across case studies and expert opinions. The study also revealed the minimum level of women's empowerment in disaster risk governance within the Sri Lankan disaster preparedness system. Accordingly, the research identified six categories of challenges affecting women's empowerment in disaster risk governance: individual, organisational, socio-cultural, legal and policy, political and job-specific thematic areas. After matching the challenges with the suggestions made by the interviewees, the study proposed four types of interventions to achieve women's empowerment in disaster risk governance. The four interventions are: individual, community, institutional and legislative interventions. The framework was further improved and validated by conducting a focus group discussion. Accordingly, the interventions were further identfied as primary and secondary interventions under each category for effective implementations. Accordingly, the study findings contribute to the theory, practice and policy through this validated framework. Finally, the study contributes broadly in delivering the fifth goal of the Sustainable Development Goals and the second and fourth priorities of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Small business projects are an important aspect of the structure of the Libyan economy. It has recently appeared that there is a real trend towards economic reform and diversification of income sources, apart from the main source of income which is oil. Using human capital theory, this study aims to identify the role played by Libyan women in establishing and developing small businesses and the extent to which such projects contribute to supporting the development process. It highlights the impact of culture and religion as main barriers to Libyan women starting their own businesses. This study uses mixed methods. Ninety-five Libyan female business owners participated in the questionnaire. The results show that there is a lack of follow-up from the financing authorities. There were difficulties and challenges in relation to training, internal and external competition, professional technological management, and materials. Participants in qualitative research state that the main reasons for choosing to run their own businesses are that they give them the opportunity to show their inventions, express their ideas, and display their talents. Some believe that small business projects in Libya enable them to gain access to international markets, owing to their relative advantage and unique traditional peculiarity. Concerning obstacles Libyan women face when establishing their small business projects, participants declare that the obstacles were mainly financial, cultural, there is also a lack of government support and weak infrastructure in all Libyan cities. Women believe that the opportunities to engage in business are enough and available for Libyan women but it needs more care and attention from the competent authorities. This study contributed to the literature through the justification of the phenomenon and the ability to overcome the limitation that women face when starting their own businesses. Moreover, it also fills part of the gap in the literature by identifying the types of small business projects within the Libyan economic sectors that are either neglected or conflated in previous studies. The study has specific implications for researchers and practitioners.

This thesis is the first to explore Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement through the lens of its women editors, as a Black feminist intellectual project that expands understanding of Black intellectual history and Black feminism. As activist-intellectuals, Esther Cooper Jackson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Jean Carey Bond, and other women in the Freedomways collective shaped the magazine's content and editorial outlook in line with their established political viewpoints, and from their distinct intellectual approaches. The magazine was the way that these women sustained their Black Left feminist politics that they had developed in the 1930s and 1940s Popular Front period, crafting it as a platform for leftist women's ideas and analyses of the global freedom struggle that could influence a new generation of feminist activists and writers with whom they built inter-generational relationships. Their politics and intellectualism were grounded in a Black feminist epistemological understanding of lived experience as a criterion for meaning making through which they reconciled theory and praxis, and the personal and political, in their thinking and activism. Experiences acquired through study, activism, and travel shaped their editorship of the magazine that amplified women's activist voices in grassroots reportage, essays, conference reports, travel accounts, art, poetry, and literature. Through editing and writing for Freedomways, they collaborated on a platform that should be recognized for how it has contributed to Black women's intellectual history, highlighting women as writers, journalists, activists, academics, playwrights, composers, and as editors. A Black Left feminism was always at the center of that project, and in print it sustained them and other women as thinkers and activists.

Drawing on a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this study critically investigates teenage pregnancy Discourse. It takes a novel approach by examining the 1999 UK government-produced policy Discourse present within the highly influential Teenage Pregnancy Strategy (TPS), alongside an examination of discourse and identity produced in a series of in-depth, qualitative interviews with 9 women who terminated their pregnancies as teenagers between 2003 and 2015. In light of the negative view of teenage pregnancy within the UK, strategically presented within TPS, as well as the steady increase in incidences of abortion amongst teenagers since TPS' dissemination, this thesis explores the impact of such a negative context on those who were pregnant as teenagers, which continues to affect their identity constructions well into adulthood, with a specific focus on those who chose to terminate their pregnancies. The study argues that the strategic language choices within TPS construct a dominant Discourse of 'teenage-pregnancy-as-problem'; a monolithic 'pregnant teenager' identity focusing on teenage girls as the cause and focus of this 'problem'. This discursively creates and reproduces a hostile and negative environment. Within the 'teenage-pregnancy asproblem' Discourse, the study takes a nuanced, intersectional approach, to show how participants construct their own identities with this dominant negative pregnant teenager identity. The analysis explores identity construction within the context of termination and reflections on real-world experiences within clinical healthcare services and highlights the damaging and lasting role of dominant teenage pregnancy Discourse. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the urgent need for future health communication research to focus on specific teenage pregnancy and termination provisions to contribute to the improvement of teenage pregnancy and abortion experience. It advocates the need for practices that support the sharing of experience whilst concurrently recognising the need for individual patient-centred practice within abortion health care.

This thesis examines women's accounts of the Crimean War to explore the ways that women navigated ideas of femininity in military spaces. It also investigates the relationship between femininity, military space, and British society during the war and its afterlife into the early twentieth century. Rather than treating individuals, such as Mary Seacole, or distinct groups, such as the military hospital nurses, largely separately as much scholarly literature has tended to do, this thesis brings a wide range of individuals, texts, and spaces into dialogue. Drawing on accounts written by soldiers' wives, officers' wives and family, military nurses, and nursing applicants, this thesis follows Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair's approach to the social history of gender relations. It goes beyond considering women's participation in the war in relation to the nineteenth-century ideology of "separate spheres", by considering the diverse networks and discourses that shaped women's lived experiences of the war and their accounts of it. As such, it identifies important interconnections resulting from shared experiences of military spaces and interrogates the nature of individuals' and communities' relationships to nineteenth-century gender ideologies in practice. It also provides insight into the highly subjective nature of women's war experiences, by foregrounding the role that factors such as class, labour, personal relationships, and wider public attention played in shaping these. In a time when ideology dictated that women were suited to private, domestic lives, the Crimean War provided opportunities and spaces for individuals to renegotiate these parameters. Women were able to navigate ideals of femininity, construct roles for themselves in wartime which could bear little resemblance to the feminine ideal, and even find acceptance for doing so, precisely because the war was experienced and constructed through far more complex social and cultural matrices.

This thesis provides an in-depth, qualitative study of Russian-speaking migrant parents' experiences of parenting and state institutions in Finland. The fieldwork for this study was conducted from June 2018 to May 2019, focusing on the capital area and the city of Tampere in southern Finland. This study contributes to migration studies through a transnational framework. Analysing how migrant parents understand and conceptualise parenting in a transnational environment, this study provides new insights to the formation of transnational identities. Moreover, this study investigates the roles of state institutions as a part of this transnational environment, giving the study practical and political implications. The framework of cultural scripts of parenting takes centre stage in this study. Echoing existing research on socio-cultural identities, cultural scripts are understood as flexible models of behaviour, a 'tool kit' from which identities are constructed. Significantly, as a framework cultural script presumes an interaction between the individual, community, and social norms. Rather than straight-forward socialisation from above to a role such as that of a mother or a father, the process is more complex. Individuals become mothers and fathers by taking part in available practices and discourses that define them as such in the eyes of others and themselves. By analysing data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Russian-speaking migrant parents, the research investigates what kind of elements migrant parents draw on to construct their cultural scripts of parenting, including how a good parent interacts with state institutions and uses public services. This study frames parenting as a historically and socially situated cultural product. Russian-speaking migration in Finland is placed into the context of postsocialist migrations. This study particularly analyses how historical legacies are present in the ways in which Russian-speaking parents in Finland describe their relationship. Through the framework of cultural scripts, this study offers an innovative way of analysing transnational identities and practices.

This thesis is an intersectional analysis of gender, religion, migration, and race. It focuses on the experiences of Dominico Puerto Rican women in the context of Intra-Caribbean migration, focusing on their lived religious experiences in this transnational space. I specifically explore their intimate and social reflections on the virgin of Altagracia, as a unifying familiar figure in the new environment that provides comfort for women who have left homeland and reminds women of this devotion in the Dominican Republic. The purpose of this research is to introduce a Global South, Intra Caribbean migratory perspective to current sociological debates on religion and migration (Vásquez 2016, Pasura 2016, Levitt 2009). In this thesis I argue that although many studies about religion and migration focus either on the fixed or hybrid understandings of religion from the Global South to Global North migratory context, this research contends that women develop individualized, situated, and personalized interpretations of religion and spirituality that interconnect with a broader cultural and social interpretations of Altagracia. The thesis provides a contribution to an intersectional analysis of religion, gender, and spirituality, because religion in migration is a subject that has not been central for Social Sciences researchers in this Intra Caribbean context. It explores the relationship between intimate and collective meanings of Altagracia without focusing exclusively on the sociological meanings attributed to her by Catholicism. The research is informed by a feminist methodology, which attempts to address a gap in knowledge around women's experiences of Intra Caribbean migration. The purpose of this methodology is to bring to the spotlight insights of women who live in the areas of San Juan and Canovanas, locations that have not been sufficiently researched. Original primary data foreground the reflections of Dominican migrant women in Puerto Rico on gender, race, religion, and migration. As suggested by the N vivo data analysis software, the data show that Altagracian rituals are connected to the sacred location of Higüey in Dominican Republic and to the colonial history of Catholicism common to the Spanish Caribbean. These rituals and devotions of Altagracia are reproduced, recreated, and re-evaluated with a gendered personal and self-improvement purpose in mind within the transnational space. This thesis contributes to theories of lived religion as proposed by scholars like (Pasura 2014, Jones 2019, McGuire 2016, Hirschman 2004). Its original contribution to knowledge lies also in the enriched understanding of migrant women's lives in the Caribbean and it proposes a new awareness of Intra Caribbean migration and its interconnections with gendered religious transnationalism. The data show that women prioritize everyday interpretations of religion and spirituality before organized religion.

This thesis examines the life and artistic career of Anne Greville (1829-1903), nee Charteris, 4th Countess of Warwick. A thorough examination of the countess's archival papers encourages us to broaden the profile of the female aesthete often presented by scholars. Anne's involvement with many of the key elements of the Aesthetic Movement extends and complicates our understanding of the appeal of Aestheticism across the highest levels of society. Furthermore, her introduction of Aestheticism into Warwick Castle, her ancient home, suggests a rethinking of the geography of the movement and its place within the English Stately Home. The research presented draws from the largely unexplored and under-appreciated Warwick Castle Archive held by the Warwickshire County Record Office. It demonstrates how the archive can be used to probe our assumptions of the type of women that were attracted to new developments in art and design during the second half of the nineteenth century. Such rare surviving documents also increases our understanding of how Aestheticism permeated into the highest levels of society and within significant ancient buildings. By examining the distinctively artistic and aesthetic pursuits of the countess, this thesis will explore the role of female aristocratic aesthetes. The first chapter places Anne within the vast context of Warwick Castle, an important historic building and home to a considerable collection of art, in which women played a significant role throughout the centuries. The second chapter investigates Anne's early experiments with interior design throughout the 1850s and 60s, and how she balanced questions of her own interests alongside taste and fashion. The third chapter probes the significance of Anne's work after the 1871 fire at Warwick Castle, with particular attention to her involvement in redesigning the castle's Great Hall and new Library. The fourth chapter explores Anne's interest in the Aesthetic Movement in relation to interiors, focusing particularly on the roles played by printed materials, photography, family and likeminded aristocratic aesthetes. The fifth chapter examines the countess's aesthetic philanthropy, showing that aristocratic women could act as provincial agents of Aestheticism within pre-existing aristocratic models and traditional institutions such as the charitable bazaar. The sixth chapter focuses on Anne's abilities as a creator of art, highlighting the embeddedness of such women within the Victorian Art World alongside its leading artists and figures. This thesis encourages a revaluation of the role aristocratic women played in the Victorian Art World, broadening and complicating our understanding of the appeal of the Aesthetic Movement in late nineteenth-century Britain.

In Saudi society, the role of women is less compared to men. Male domination constantly remains in various fields and women often marginalised in societies. Saudi women are often portrayed as wearing hijab (veil), being mother and wife. Their involvement is merely limited to family matters, women activities, and social affairs. This study examines the way modern standard Arabic online news of Al-Jazirah of Saudi Arabia and BBC Arabic of United Kingdom represent Saudi women in their news reports between 2010 and 2014. The main aim of this study is to discover how Saudi women are represented in these two prominent online news outlets by analysing the ways language is strategically used by Al-Jazirah and BBC Arabic to portray Saudi women. The study will be conducted in the form of Corpus investigation with data being gathered from news archives and then analysed using AntConc software. The research employs Critical Discourse Analysis approaches of van Leeuwen and Fairclough with the help of Corpus analysis techniques. The study finds differences between Al-Jazirah and BBC Arabic representation of Saudi women at both the textual and discursive levels. Also, the analysis reveals that the two outlets practised group polarisation characteristics. The in-group in Al-Jazirah coverage are the Saudi women and the Saudi authorities; hence the outlet produced hegemonised discourse and sustained the government policies. In comparison, the in-group in BBC Arabic is the women activists who criticise the government policies of women. It is recommended that the future study on the representation of Saudi women in the media inquire further into said problems and limitations, to get into a more comprehensive understanding of media coverage of women in Saudi Arabia. The preliminary result of the study shows that both news institution has a different way of portraying Saudi women according to their political agenda and ideologies. Thus, at the end of this study, the researcher hopes to reveal the representation of Saudi women in BBC Arabic and Al-Jazirah online news over the five years under the reign of King Abdullah.