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Currently, around 55% of graduates who study at universities in the North-East of England remain in the region for work after graduation. However, HESA's Destination of Leavers Surveys suggest that this respectable figure is boosted by a large number of 'local' graduates, who grew up in the North-East and stayed in their home region for university and then work. Meanwhile, around three quarters of the region's graduates who came to the region to study from other areas of the UK leave, either to return home or to live somewhere new. This all means that most of the 'brain drain' from the North-East is being driven by graduates from its universities who originate from elsewhere in the UK. Firstly, through qualitative interviews, my research investigates the extent to which a graduate's socio-economic status can impact their ability and propensity to be mobile, and influences the pattern of graduate retention in the North-East described above. Secondly, I am investigating if and why organisations such as the North-East Local Enterprise Partnership and the NewcastleGateshead Initiative (NGI) believe that retaining graduates is important for regional development in the North-East. Graduates are often assumed to be highly mobile; however this is not always the case. My interviews with graduates have revealed that many self-identified working-class graduates from the North-East feel a sense of frustration with their lack of mobility, brought about by certain obligations and restrictions which can be linked to their economic, social and cultural capital. Meanwhile, for those graduates who originate from elsewhere in the UK, social networks and job prospects, amongst other issues, are pulling them back home or fuelling their desire to move somewhere new.

This thesis explores the rise of the muscular male body as an objectified, sexualised and desired embodied state in contemporary society. The study delves into consumer experiences of the lived masculine body and its representations. This is of importance when considering the increased visibility of the male body in media and the implications on male consumers and male body image transformation. A rich insight is provided into the way in which marketing discourses of the idealised muscular body are interpreted by individuals and used to define masculinity and an idealistic masculine self-concept. This offers important insights into under-developed male consumer research knowledge. The research adopts an immersive ethnographic approach using access to a fitness club and twelve male participants embroiled in regular exercise routines. As a result, a compelling data set of observations, personal narratives and my own experience of building a muscular body are presented and analysed in this thesis. The research yielded deep, meaningful findings related to the muscular body as an agent of the self with regard to defining the self-concept and setting a desired identity. Furthermore, the process of sculpting muscularity was perceived as a masculinising process with weight training methods and other weight trainers seen as bearers of authentic masculinity. The research presents a number of original contributions that enhance understanding of male embodiment and the value of physical body capital informing male consumer research and outlining implications for self and identity research. I argue the relationships around body image expectations, norms and ideals are complex and formed through self-concept perceptions, nuanced power dynamics and how the natural body reacts to cultural norms and expectations. The research findings demonstrate a need to go beyond social conceptualisation assumptions and consider individualistic agendas, the natural/biological masculine body and body identity motives in contemporary culture. The study comprehends the power of physical capital in helping to achieve other forms of capital and masculinity affirmation. Important contributions are developed in relation to the gym habitus as a safe haven for masculine males to play out interpretive masculinity beliefs. Such insights provide an enhanced understanding of how males are combating threats to traditional masculinity and to shape the masculine-self in order for the 'macho' spirit to live on. The research builds upon the cultural meanings of male fitness as a body constructing scene to showcase self-identity and superior masculinity. Additionally, the desire to obtain social and cultural capital through the muscular body is analysed to provide novel insights into a consumer movement shaping male consumer lives both culturally and physically.

This thesis explores how older men use metaphors to express what it is like to live through extreme periods of long-term unemployment. These metaphors are viewed from a phenomenological, embodied perspective, based on the theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as an appeal to recognise lived experience that is not reflected in the dominant discourse which blames unemployed people for their own situation. This lived experience is evoked through a rich depth of experiential material drawn from one year's ethnographic research with unemployed men undertaking supervised job search in a deprived area of Newcastle, England. Within this context, the central metaphor of death is understood to originate in disciplinary practices, which are interpreted via the theories of Michel Foucault as attempts to homogenise the long-term unemployed as deviant and thereby in need of control. The men's stories of being treated as animals, meat, corpses and scum add to existing analyses of death as a metaphor for unemployment. Interpreting these metaphors by drawing upon the concept of social death provides an understanding of how the long-term unemployed are framed as being at the bottom of, or outside, the social order. Contrary to existing conceptions of social death as applying to only the most extreme circumstances, this thesis supports the men's expressions as indicating social death as they are not recognised as worthy of reciprocal recognition from employers and Jobcentre workers. The men resist the negative character finalisation inherent in these practices through 'fun', which is understood via Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnivalesque as allowing them to temporarily tear down the social hierarchy by ridiculing the official perspective on unemployment. The significance of this study is that it addresses a recognised gap in research regarding jobseeker resistance.

In this thesis, I examine the role of culture-led urban regeneration within a traditionally staid public institution, the public library. The theoretical framework charts the terminology associated with culture and its incorporation within urban regeneration frameworks including theories and concepts such as commodification and aestheticization. Recognizing Williams (1961) classic thesis on the existence of three versions of culture, I chart recent theories which examine culture that is more democratic and participatory. Work by Sacco (2011) is of relevance here, particularly his models of culture. I subsequently chart the literature around community participation and then incorporate Lefebvre's (1991) writings on space to serve as a theoretical frame for the subsequent research. I empirically investigate the role that culture has played within the redevelopment of the City Library in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England through a case study analysis and involved a triangulation of methods to allow for a theoretically rich analysis. Firstly, a documentary analysis of public library documentation is carried out consisting of national, local and City Library documents, to contextualise the library within the institutional networks in which it operates. Secondly, interviews with library officials was undertaken to determine how activities and programmes offered, allowed spaces for democratic opportunity. I further expand this by geographically mapping all partners with whom the library works offering these activities. Finally, I conduct a rhythmanalysis of the public library to determine the geographical relationships and networks of the City Library within the city. I conclude by expanding on the implication of this for public libraries more generally as a cultural institution. I discuss the implications of the library as an anchor institution for city development. I also contrast existing literature by arguing that culture-led regeneration within public libraries can be diverse and transformative for users offering emancipation within a complex and fragmented urban space.

The interrelationship between art and urban space organised under the banner of the Creative City requires further critical attention. Framing artistic practice as instrumental in urban regeneration often occludes the multiple, diverse practices that it encompasses, and the numerous urban spaces that are quietly and incrementally in the process of 'becoming.' Current research has not yet formulated a specific descriptor for artistic interventions in urban space that is attentive to the multiple diverse practices yet succinctly surmises the phenomena. As a response, this research introduces the concept of the interstitial as both a physical aspect of urban planning, but also a conceptual tool to think about the relationship between self and place. This thesis explores the interrelationship between art and urban space evident in the experimental practices, materialities and infrastructures of artist-run interstitial spaces; the (often) temporary reclamation of derelict or disregarded urban space for creative 'meanwhile' use. Drawing from ethnographic data collected across the artist-run interstitial spaces in East Pilgrim Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, this research demonstrates that artistic practice within interstitial space has the ability to 're-write' the Creative City script through a re-orientation to artistic practice that is not ameliorative to urban ills, but allows for attempts to 'dwell differently'. However, whilst the interstitial allows for attempts to dwell differently, these attempts are mediated by the literal and metaphorical concretization of the interstitial. This thesis demonstrates, through the experiences of those living within it, that the interstitial engenders a precarious form of inhabiting the city, an informal set of artistic practices and a makeshift approach to building space. It is mobile and also fixed, ephemeral as well as enduring. It restates that we must explore forms of regeneration that keep cities complex, but incomplete. The gap between the lived city and the city that exists in our imaginations is immense; yet the inventive artistic practice that thrives in the interstices could, and should form the connective tissue between the two.