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Abstract People who are homeless are portrayed to be a distinct type of ‘homeless person’. Within scholarly research literature, their state of homelessness has been presented as informative of who they are. On both an individual and collective level, people without homes are ascribed with identities on the basis of their homelessness. Their voices and perspectives rarely contribute to broader knowledge about who they are as people. As such, the imposed ‘homeless identity’ has the consequence of positioning them as ‘other’ than the ‘normal’ people with homes. Using an ethnographic approach, this study aims to understand the day-to-day lives and identities of people who are homeless. Approximately one hundred people who slept and interacted within inner suburban Brisbane’s public places participated in this research. To learn about how they lived and who they saw themselves as individuals, I observed them, socialised with them, engaged them in informal conversations and formal interviews. This approach to fieldwork, conducted over a six month period, provided me with the opportunity to witness diverse aspects of daily lives. Further, the ethnographic engagement enabled a consideration of the ways people enacted and displayed different aspects of their identities across different social and physical places. For the individuals who participated in this study, there was a stark distinction between how they lived, on the one hand, and the type of people they identified themselves as, on the other. They were comfortable describing their lives in ways that deviated from what they saw as the ‘mainstream’, but at the same time, they aligned themselves with this ‘mainstream’. Research participants expressed a strong view that their experiences of homelessness did not offer any purchase in explaining who they were, and how they thought about the world. The public places in which they lived were perceived as problematic. Public places were dangerous and the site of unwanted interactions. Although living in public places meant that interactions and friendships with other people who were homeless was a reality, these interactions did not constitute a ‘homeless collective’. More fundamentally, however, living in public places meant having no legitimate places, and having limited capacity to control day-to-day lives. The participants in this research articulated stereotypical notions of what home meant to them – home was a physical structure, a house. Similarly, home was a solution to their lives as homeless. Their constructions of home can also be seen as symbolic of their aspirations to find their ‘place’, and engage in the ‘mainstream’ society they feel disconnected from. While public places were associated with limited control over daily lives, the people in this research also exercised agency in enacting different aspects of their identities. Mediated by the social and physical constraints within their environment, they displayed an awareness of social expectations and emphasised elements of the self to achieve specific ends. Identities matter. An understanding of the identities of people experiencing homelessness, from their perspectives, can contribute toward the development of homelessness practice and policy responses. A distinction is made between solving problems people may have and solving homelessness. In terms of the latter, the thesis concludes that the provision of ‘normal’ housing and the availability of support, as distinct from mandatory engagement with case management, is the most appropriate response to the needs of the people who participated in this research.

Transnational adoption generates ample controversy both within and outside the adoption community. In recent times transnational adoption made international headlines following a wave of ‘celebrity adopters’ and calls to airlift children for overseas adoption from the economically disadvantaged nation of Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake on 12th January 2010. Some see the practice as being about ‘rescuing’ orphaned children, while others argue that it is parent-centred, intrinsically racist and represents a form of Western colonialism. Igniting such fears is the fact that transnational adoptions both in the past and at present, typically involve Non-White children from mostly Non-Western developing nations and adoptive parents of predominantly White, Western backgrounds. 
 
 This thesis is based on research conducted from 2005 to 2010 among 35 transnationally adoptive parents who reside in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The key question explored is: What impact does transnational adoption have on the lives of adoptive parents and their own sense of identity and belonging? In answering this question I consider the ways these parents legitimise, define and explain the role of being ‘suitable’ carers of children adopted from overseas, with a particular focus on the racial, cultural and ethnic dimensions involved. This includes how they imagine, reconstruct and integrate aspects of adoptees’ birth heritage into their family lives. 
 
 The distinct feature of this thesis is that most existing adoption research in both Australia and overseas is overwhelmingly focused on the lives of adoptees and many of these studies are often conducted by researchers who themselves are White adoptive parents. This study represents an interesting contrast as it focuses on transnationally adoptive parents, written from the perspective of someone adopted from Vietnam into a White Australian family. 
 
 The theoretical framework chosen to guide my research draws upon sociological studies on the family, on migration including cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, and issues of diversity such as critical race theory and studies of ethnicity. Such scholarship is well suited to explain the challenges adoptive parents face in building families who do not share blood ties or the same racial, cultural, ethnic and national backgrounds. The methodological approach is inductive, reflexive and employs multiple methods to generate qualitative data. This thesis is organised around three main stages across the participants’ life course: before, during and after they have adopted. The findings were that most parents grew up in predominantly White environments, with many identifying as patriotic Australians in childhood before developing more cosmopolitan dispositions in adulthood. Most chose to adopt after struggling with issues of infertility but also claim to have been influenced by their interest in other cultures. However, in the process of adopting, the participants display frustration with the government’s adoption assessment process, which they viewed as highly bureaucratic and expecting an unfair level of cultural knowledge concerning adoptees’ birth heritage.
 
 Despite these frustrations, all the participants were observed to attempt to integrate various ‘culture keeping’ and symbolic ethnic practices into their lives in the lead up to adopting as well as after their adopted children joined them. A number also develop transnational ties to adoptees’ countries of origin, such as sending financial remittances to surviving birth relatives and making return trips there. These combined activities and processes are observed to have a transformative effect on transnationally adoptive parents’ constructions of identity resulting in a shift from many identifying as being ‘just’ Australians to co-identifying with the ethnicity of their children or even describing themselves as ‘world citizens’. 
 
 At the same time, most participants did not appear to have a significant level of understanding how issues of ‘racial’ and cultural privilege shape and complicate their lives as Whites raising Non-White children in predominantly White environments. This includes lacking robust strategies to challenge forms of racism that can undermine their own status as ‘real’ parents and their adopted children identities. As such, I conclude that further attention needs to be given to exposing and challenging how issues of race shape the lives of White transnationally adoptive parents and their ongoing efforts to be ‘suitable’ carers of Non-White overseas born children.

Abstract The present study analyses the role of women in the Roman Catholic Church and the main question addressed is: “How do women construct and maintain an adult Catholic identity in the light of social, political, economic and religious changes?” In order to answer this question I began with grounded theory which enabled me to locate my research in the everyday lives of the study participants. In the course of the research I made a methodological shift to an institutional ethnographic approach in order to better understand the women’s lives as Catholics. One of the major tenets of an institutional ethnographic approach is that in modern bureaucratic organisations the authority and instructions of institutions and organisations are carried via the texts they produce. These texts can be written texts or they can be videos, film, etc. Because they carry the authority of the institution or organisation texts have the power to shape people’s lives and co-ordinate their everyday activities with multiple others, without, however, wholly determining them. In common with other major organisations the Roman Catholic Church is a large, worldwide organisation which relies on the texts it produces to carry its instructions and authority into the homes, churches and personal lives of its members. The greatest production of written texts by the Catholic Church in the modern era took place at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). While many feminist scholars have dismissed the Council proceedings as saying very little about women in particular, I argue that the Councillors’ writings in several major texts have strongly and specifically impacted the lives of contemporary Catholic women. Consequently, while all the texts produced by the bishops at the council can be considered of interest to practising Catholics generally, in this study I have chosen to focus on texts that related to issues that have proved to be of particular interest to the participants of this research study: the role of the laity in the church, Mariology and marriage. In order to carry out the research involved in this study I interviewed thirty women in Australia and thirty women in Ireland between the ages of 55 and 19 years of age. The Australian women immigrated to Australia during the years 1970 and 1997. All of the participants had been baptised into the Roman Catholic Church as babies and they all underwent a similar socialisation process growing up in Ireland.

Abstract People who are homeless are portrayed to be a distinct type of ‘homeless person’. Within scholarly research literature, their state of homelessness has been presented as informative of who they are. On both an individual and collective level, people without homes are ascribed with identities on the basis of their homelessness. Their voices and perspectives rarely contribute to broader knowledge about who they are as people. As such, the imposed ‘homeless identity’ has the consequence of positioning them as ‘other’ than the ‘normal’ people with homes. Using an ethnographic approach, this study aims to understand the day-to-day lives and identities of people who are homeless. Approximately one hundred people who slept and interacted within inner suburban Brisbane’s public places participated in this research. To learn about how they lived and who they saw themselves as individuals, I observed them, socialised with them, engaged them in informal conversations and formal interviews. This approach to fieldwork, conducted over a six month period, provided me with the opportunity to witness diverse aspects of daily lives. Further, the ethnographic engagement enabled a consideration of the ways people enacted and displayed different aspects of their identities across different social and physical places. For the individuals who participated in this study, there was a stark distinction between how they lived, on the one hand, and the type of people they identified themselves as, on the other. They were comfortable describing their lives in ways that deviated from what they saw as the ‘mainstream’, but at the same time, they aligned themselves with this ‘mainstream’. Research participants expressed a strong view that their experiences of homelessness did not offer any purchase in explaining who they were, and how they thought about the world. The public places in which they lived were perceived as problematic. Public places were dangerous and the site of unwanted interactions. Although living in public places meant that interactions and friendships with other people who were homeless was a reality, these interactions did not constitute a ‘homeless collective’. More fundamentally, however, living in public places meant having no legitimate places, and having limited capacity to control day-to-day lives. The participants in this research articulated stereotypical notions of what home meant to them – home was a physical structure, a house. Similarly, home was a solution to their lives as homeless. Their constructions of home can also be seen as symbolic of their aspirations to find their ‘place’, and engage in the ‘mainstream’ society they feel disconnected from. While public places were associated with limited control over daily lives, the people in this research also exercised agency in enacting different aspects of their identities. Mediated by the social and physical constraints within their environment, they displayed an awareness of social expectations and emphasised elements of the self to achieve specific ends. Identities matter. An understanding of the identities of people experiencing homelessness, from their perspectives, can contribute toward the development of homelessness practice and policy responses. A distinction is made between solving problems people may have and solving homelessness. In terms of the latter, the thesis concludes that the provision of ‘normal’ housing and the availability of support, as distinct from mandatory engagement with case management, is the most appropriate response to the needs of the people who participated in this research.

Disability advocates in the twenty-first century have frowned upon the practice of institutionalization in disability services, yet many people with intellectual disability continue to be institutionalized in other settings such as correctional facilities. The prison system is a difficult environment for people with intellectual disability to negotiate, and they may find themselves victimized, segregated and isolated with very few resources to survive the experience. Incarceration may present a temporary solution to preventing anti-social behaviour in society. However, for offenders with intellectual disability, it often fails to address their criminal behaviour or the social context from which the behaviour emanates. Policy and practice in the disability service sector needs to develop further awareness of the needs of people with intellectual disability who come into contact with the criminal justice system as offenders. Similarly, correctional systems need to expand their knowledge base on the habilitative and rehabilitative needs of prisoners with intellectual disability in order to better address the issues that may arise from their incarceration. This exploratory qualitative study gathers the life stories of ten ex-prisoners from Queensland correctional facilities who have been labelled as having an intellectual disability by the service systems they have accessed. It utilizes an interpretive, social constructionist framework to understand people’s experiences. Life stories were gathered from in-depth interviews with participants over a prolonged period of time and supplemented by contextual information provided by six practitioners from disability, mental health and ex-prisoner services. The stories of three participants with intellectual disability were analysed through the holistic lens of a narrative approach and all ten stories were analysed thematically, providing an aggregate picture of all participants’ experiences. The findings of this thesis indicate that participants in this study had personal needs to belong, to feel competent and for others to see their criminal activity as an unfortunate but very human response to difficult circumstances. These needs were not always met within the prison environment and many participants struggled to feel safe in such a context. There were many pre-prison characteristics of participants that influenced their adaptation to prison, and they were also subjected to a series of degradations such as enforced isolation, frequent strip-searching, verbal and physical assault. However, these factors were not always constructed as negative or significant experiences by participants, and were often counterbalanced by perceived benefits to prison life such as friendship, food and reprieve from community living. These constructions of their experience highlight the vulnerability of this group within the prison environment and the failure of 2 the system and broader society to address core issues for people when they returned to the community. Significant disparities were also found between the philosophies of disability service support and the correctional enterprise. This study has indicated the urgent need for cross-agency collaboration in addressing the needs of people with intellectual disability. The thesis makes a contribution to both doing research with people with intellectual disability and to understanding their experiences of incarceration. The voices of people with intellectual disability have long been overlooked in research because it was assumed they could not express their views or because researchers did not have appropriate research approaches. It is only recently that some writers have captured the viewpoints of people with intellectual disability in academic discourse, but there has been little work done with prisoners and ex-prisoners with intellectual disability. Researching the experience of imprisonment with people with intellectual disabilities also presented unique ethical and methodological challenges. This thesis covers ethical issues such as informed consent, incriminating disclosure, self-determination and veracity and bias in life story research. It also develops knowledge in this area regarding recruitment, communication practices, and dissemination of findings. Overall, the study provides a nuanced account of life inside prison for people with intellectual disability. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of inclusive research with people with impaired capacity and to criminological research in this area.

Abstract The present study analyses the role of women in the Roman Catholic Church and the main question addressed is: “How do women construct and maintain an adult Catholic identity in the light of social, political, economic and religious changes?” In order to answer this question I began with grounded theory which enabled me to locate my research in the everyday lives of the study participants. In the course of the research I made a methodological shift to an institutional ethnographic approach in order to better understand the women’s lives as Catholics. One of the major tenets of an institutional ethnographic approach is that in modern bureaucratic organisations the authority and instructions of institutions and organisations are carried via the texts they produce. These texts can be written texts or they can be videos, film, etc. Because they carry the authority of the institution or organisation texts have the power to shape people’s lives and co-ordinate their everyday activities with multiple others, without, however, wholly determining them. In common with other major organisations the Roman Catholic Church is a large, worldwide organisation which relies on the texts it produces to carry its instructions and authority into the homes, churches and personal lives of its members. The greatest production of written texts by the Catholic Church in the modern era took place at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). While many feminist scholars have dismissed the Council proceedings as saying very little about women in particular, I argue that the Councillors’ writings in several major texts have strongly and specifically impacted the lives of contemporary Catholic women. Consequently, while all the texts produced by the bishops at the council can be considered of interest to practising Catholics generally, in this study I have chosen to focus on texts that related to issues that have proved to be of particular interest to the participants of this research study: the role of the laity in the church, Mariology and marriage. In order to carry out the research involved in this study I interviewed thirty women in Australia and thirty women in Ireland between the ages of 55 and 19 years of age. The Australian women immigrated to Australia during the years 1970 and 1997. All of the participants had been baptised into the Roman Catholic Church as babies and they all underwent a similar socialisation process growing up in Ireland.

Abstract People who are homeless are portrayed to be a distinct type of ‘homeless person’. Within scholarly research literature, their state of homelessness has been presented as informative of who they are. On both an individual and collective level, people without homes are ascribed with identities on the basis of their homelessness. Their voices and perspectives rarely contribute to broader knowledge about who they are as people. As such, the imposed ‘homeless identity’ has the consequence of positioning them as ‘other’ than the ‘normal’ people with homes. Using an ethnographic approach, this study aims to understand the day-to-day lives and identities of people who are homeless. Approximately one hundred people who slept and interacted within inner suburban Brisbane’s public places participated in this research. To learn about how they lived and who they saw themselves as individuals, I observed them, socialised with them, engaged them in informal conversations and formal interviews. This approach to fieldwork, conducted over a six month period, provided me with the opportunity to witness diverse aspects of daily lives. Further, the ethnographic engagement enabled a consideration of the ways people enacted and displayed different aspects of their identities across different social and physical places. For the individuals who participated in this study, there was a stark distinction between how they lived, on the one hand, and the type of people they identified themselves as, on the other. They were comfortable describing their lives in ways that deviated from what they saw as the ‘mainstream’, but at the same time, they aligned themselves with this ‘mainstream’. Research participants expressed a strong view that their experiences of homelessness did not offer any purchase in explaining who they were, and how they thought about the world. The public places in which they lived were perceived as problematic. Public places were dangerous and the site of unwanted interactions. Although living in public places meant that interactions and friendships with other people who were homeless was a reality, these interactions did not constitute a ‘homeless collective’. More fundamentally, however, living in public places meant having no legitimate places, and having limited capacity to control day-to-day lives. The participants in this research articulated stereotypical notions of what home meant to them – home was a physical structure, a house. Similarly, home was a solution to their lives as homeless. Their constructions of home can also be seen as symbolic of their aspirations to find their ‘place’, and engage in the ‘mainstream’ society they feel disconnected from. While public places were associated with limited control over daily lives, the people in this research also exercised agency in enacting different aspects of their identities. Mediated by the social and physical constraints within their environment, they displayed an awareness of social expectations and emphasised elements of the self to achieve specific ends. Identities matter. An understanding of the identities of people experiencing homelessness, from their perspectives, can contribute toward the development of homelessness practice and policy responses. A distinction is made between solving problems people may have and solving homelessness. In terms of the latter, the thesis concludes that the provision of ‘normal’ housing and the availability of support, as distinct from mandatory engagement with case management, is the most appropriate response to the needs of the people who participated in this research.