This thesis examines how national non-governmental development organisations (NNGDOs) in Ghana have responded to recent changes and on-going uncertainty in their operating environment, particularly the effects of shifting donor funding priorities, the country’s graduation to lower-middle-income status and a subsequent decline in availability of external funding. It is based primarily on data about NNGDOs operating in the health, education and agriculture sub-sectors in the Northern, Upper West and Greater Accra Regions of the country. While academic research on changing aid landscapes has grown significantly in recent years, there is a gap in knowledge concerning how NNGDOs in countries that have recently graduated into lower-middle-income status respond to their changing environment to ensure their sustainability. This study addresses this gap. It addresses two central research questions, one empirical and the second theoretical. First, what different ideas and strategies have NNGDOs in Ghana developed in response to the changing opportunities and constraints arising from their uncertain external environment? Second, to what extent do resource dependency theory, neo-institutional theory and Oliver’s typology of strategic responses explain NNGDOs’ dependency in Ghana? The thesis is informed by a critical realist ontology, and employs a mixed methods sequential explanatory research design. This involved a preliminary qualitative phase (including ten in-depth interviews), followed by collection and analysis of quantitative data and a further qualitative phase. The quantitative phase drew on survey questionnaires administered to fifty-nine NNGDOs. Thirty-two NNGDOs were then included in follow-up qualitative interviews. In total seventy-two in-depth interviews were conducted with NNGDO leaders, donor representatives and government officials. To assess NNGDO responses, the research draws on and critically assesses resource dependency theory, neo-institutional theory and Oliver’s typology of strategic responses, and derives from them an integrated framework for explaining strategic organisational responses to a changing operating environment. Using this framework, it identifies eight main strategies and nineteen tactics employed by NNGDOs to secure their short-term survival and long-term sustainability. These strategies are: i) Resource diversification; ii) Networking and partnerships; iii) Cost recovery; iv) Branding and visibility; v) Conformance to institutional pressures; vi) Strategic planning; vii) Avoidance; and viii) Influence. This analysis highlights how NNGDOs play an active role in responding to their changing operating environment. Their response is also influenced by the emerging discourse of sustainability. But although donors were at the forefront of the sustainability discourse, their actions did little to enable NNGDOs to reduce their dependency on them. The study further demonstrates that organisational responses are not only shaped by resource and environmental factors, but also organisational characteristics including leadership. The changing operating environment encouraged ingenuity among NNGDOs to be creative and active participants of their environment through initiatives aimed at ensuring their sustainability. The thesis shows that NNGDOs’ dependency does not preclude agency given that their leaders make strategic choices in their operating environment. This study therefore questions and challenges a tendency for the NGDO literature to downplay their agency and room for manoeuvre in a resource-dependent environment.

This study engages with the perspectives of British-born female undergraduate students of Bangladeshi heritage with the aim of addressing the following questions:1) How do social class and ethnicity intersect with one another to influence access to and experiences of higher education, and progression to the labour market?2) How do Bangladeshi immigrants’ female descendants construct their identities by drawing on different dimensions of identification, and how is this informed by participation in education?Women of Bangladeshi origins, who have long been considered as ‘problematic’ for their low rates of participation in education and employment, have substantially increased their presence in universities in the last 20 years. Like those of most ethnic minority backgrounds, however, students of Bangladeshi heritage are over-represented in generally less prestigious post-’92 institutions, tend to have lower retention levels and degree grades compared to their white middle-class peers, and lower employment prospects and wages once controlling for qualifications and socio-economic origins. In this study, I draw on in-depth interviews with 21 British-born women of Bangladeshi background in their early 20s, attending undergraduate degrees at a range of differently ranked universities in London. I apply a Bourdieusian lens to the analysis of their narratives, with the intent of exposing the influence on stances and practices of multiple dimensions of social identity such as class, ‘race’ / ethnicity, religious faith and gender. Findings show how these dimensions are interconnected in terms of the material and symbolic resources they give access to. The findings also reveal how they qualify one another in shaping processes of ‘conditioned transformation’ of structural inequalities. In particular, participants’ economic, social, and cultural resources appear to be simultaneously inflected by class, ‘race’/ethnicity, faith and gender. The relation of these resources to the capital that is privileged in the contexts where participants engage contributes to either facilitate or hinder the accumulation of further capital. In doing so, it conditions their capacity to renegotiate material and symbolic positions, and the ‘strategies’ they can adopt.

Romani LGBTIQ people experience specific non-normative (queer) intersectionalities within mainstream, Romani and LGBTIQ communities on multiple grounds, including ethnicity/race, sexuality, gender, class, social status, age, religion etc. The research addresses a significant gap in knowledge by shedding light on an area of inquiry which remains understudied, leading to invisibility and inadequate awareness of needs. The lived experiences investigated herein are regionally diverse, allowing the research to highlight commonly shared experiences of queer intersectionalities. Historically, non-Roma have romanticised and simultaneously vilified Roma, leading to stereotypical essentialist/essentialising representations of Roma, Romani identities and identifications; and resulting in embedding marked essentialist difference at the core of historic and modern negative social valuation of Romani ethnic identity. This thesis argues that the lived experiences of Romani LGBTIQ people pose a fundamental challenge to stereotypical, one-dimensional, homogenising and essentialising representations of Roma. Guided by the research question ‘What are the experiences of Romani LGBTIQ people in and beyond Europe?’, this qualitative research draws on ethnographic principles. It is concerned with investigating and highlighting the experiences of Romani LGBTIQ people; and unpacking, uncovering and exploring the strategies deployed by Romani LGBTIQ people when negotiating multiple ethnic, sexual and gender identities and identifications, oppression, (in)visibility, exclusion, as well as inclusion, recognition, and belonging (or lack thereof) with, in and/or to mainstream societies, as well as Romani and LGBTIQ communities. The fieldwork for this research was undertaken between summer 2015 and autumn 2016. Data was collected in 14 interviews, 2 where participant observation was undertaken. Thematic analysis sensitive to queer theoretical concepts, and to queer assemblages in particular, was used to identify key themes. The investigation contributes to queer(y)(ing) Romani Studies by challenging dominant essentialist, homogenising conceptualisations of Romani identities; and to ongoing discussions about the under-development of sexuality within intersectionality, and the under-development of intersectionality within queer theorising. In order to help generate insight into Romani LGBTIQ people’s queer intersectional identities and identifications, this thesis proposes to employ queer intersectionalities: they allow us to identify and interrogate the workings of interlocking axes of inequality whilst not assuming the supremacy of one axis over the other, hence not re-inscribing marked essentialist difference embedded within and constitutive of social norms, orthodoxies, and binaries. Simultaneously, employing queer intersectionalities benefits understandings of identities and identifications as rhizomic fluid assemblages that are not anchored in the notion of fixed ‘groupness’. Queer intersectionalities thus enable an important reconceptualisation of Romani identities and identifications that dismantles norms and normativities, doing away with marked essentialist difference that has tended to fix and stabilise Romani identities and identifications. The research found that although Antigypsyism — a direct manifestation of whitenormativity — is a key aspect of the lived experiences of many Romani LGBTIQ people that often eclipses other forms of oppression, it is not the only aspect of Romani LGBTIQ people’s experiences. Romani LGBTIQ people experience queer intersectional stigmatisation as both Roma and LGBTIQ due the interlocking negative social valuation of Romani ethnicity, non-heteronormative sexuality and/or non-cis-normative gender identity. These specific queer intersectionalities experienced by Romani LGBTIQ people are inextricably linked to various degrees of ethnicised/racialised, sexed, gendered and queer intersectional (in)visibilities, including hyper-visibility. Romani LGBTIQ people negotiate and renegotiate the boundaries of various degrees of (in)visibilities delineating difference and sameness that one may ‘step in’ or ‘step out of’ depending on how one ‘reads’ a given social setting and on how one is ‘read’ within that context employing the notional spaces of ‘the closet’ and/or passing: key survival strategies that are constituted and reconstituted through social contexts and relationships, including through families and/or communities where both inclusion and exclusion are present. The dimension of gender, particularly with respect to femininity associated with some ‘passive’ gay men (receivers) and (trans)womanhood, is key to the specific queer intersectionalities experienced by Romani LGBTIQ people, especially lesbian women, some gay men, and trans and intersex people. As mediators, bridges, halfies and in-betweens, in response to marked essentialist difference lying at the root of white-normativity, heteronormativity, cis-normativity and patriarchy, some Romani LGBTIQ people seek to create commonality, and indeed, strategic sameness: the notion of a relational use of identities and identifications whereby connections are created across difference for strategic purposes. Strategic sameness is a political strategy of navigating spaces between difference and sameness; as such, strategic sameness does not read through assimilation, conformity and/or normalisation. Operationalised by and through (in)visibilities — and in some cases hyper-visibility — associated with ‘the closet’ and passing, and deployed in a queer way to defy and subvert dominant normativities within which it operates, strategic sameness is a positionality resisting norms and binaries that enables the queer bearer to deploy sameness in order to do away with social norms, orthodoxies and dualisms. Queer non belonging by identification and disidentification is a transgressive, subversive non/counter-normative positionality that some Romani LGBTIQ people may assume when negotiating queer intersectionalities. It enables re-conceptualisations of identities and identifications by identifying with aspects of ethnic/racial and/or sexual/gender identities that are empowering while disidentifying with those aspects that are hostile, restrictive and/or oppressive. Queer non belonging has an important political dimension: espousing a marked (stigmatised) category of identification can be understood as a strategically subversive act undermining key hegemonic systems of oppression: white-normativity, heteronormativity, cis-normativity and patriarchy. This investigation may benefit service providers, civil society organisations, community initiatives and institutions in the area of application and policy recommendations and potentially feed into larger national and transnational policy frameworks.

The thesis is an exploration of the Teaching School programme in Malaysia. The programme was conceived by the policies of the Government of Malaysia, implemented by the Ministry of Education and realized by the teacher training institutions in Malaysia. It is a school programme that is explored in terms of Dewey’s conception of education. In political terms it aspires to be the ‘showcase’ for the teacher training institutions of Malaysia. In addition, for other Malaysia primary schools it is to be a point of reference in their attempts to modernise and increase the quality of primary schools in Malaysia, as a foundation for making the country more globally competitive. In the exploration to be better informed of the teaching school programme under study, the stance of the study is qualitative. It mainly used interviews, observation and the study of policy documents as a means of data collection. The thesis draws upon Schostak and Schostak’s (2008) “Architectures of the Social” framework in researching the range of alternative visions and rationales to analyse and evaluate the differences between the Teaching School on paper and in practice. In sum, by using the “Architectures of the Social” framework the thesis explores the relationships between the Conceptual Domain, the Practical Domain and the Material Domain to provide significant insights into the implementation of education innovations. The key insights focus on the development of the democratic potential of the teaching school as a ‘social architecture’ for schools as a basis for the democratic development of society. It challenges the current practices of schools and argues for a real change towards a more democratic development to create better primary schools in Malaysia. The key to developing schools is the involvement of the ’voices’ of the people in ways that involves a clear alignment between the policy vision at the level of the Conceptual Domain, the interpretation of policy in practice in Practical Domain together with appropriate resources in the Material Domain required to fulfill the potential of the teaching school programme in Malaysia. However, it is argued, the visions are not sufficiently understood, nor are the practical mechanisms and resources for its implementation fully appropriate. Furthermore, the democratic potential of the vision has not been realized. This thesis argues that a way forward is to explore the democratic legacies of Dewey and other progressive educators in the context of contemporary democratic theory drawing upon such theorists as Rancière.

This study examines the impact that a teaching adaptation to the clinical engagement strategy known as the Spirit of Motivational Interviewing had on the attitudes, values and beliefs of qualified nursing students towards their own learning. This Spirit of Motivational Interviewing consists of several constructs (partnership, acceptance, compassion and evocation) and the proposed adaptation for the purposes of teaching is the addition of the construct of self-awareness. In order to qualify and practice as a nurse, the Nursing and Midwifery Council require that the delivery of care is based on the person-centred values of acceptance, respect and empathic understanding. Role modelling has been traditionally used as a way to transmit these values, but the creation of much larger classes as a result of a move by nurse education into universities has made this far more difficult to achieve. The study examines research that suggests the deployment of the person-centred approach of Carl Rogers by educators leads to improvements to a range of outcomes such as motivation, self-esteem, grades, disruptive behaviour and absenteeism. It takes the position that the use of the adapted Spirit of Motivational Interviewing can transform learning, leading to changes to the attitudes, values and beliefs of students so that they become less distorted and prejudicial and more open, expansive and discerning. Participants in the study were a group of qualified nursing students on a substance misuse course, and their teachers. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected. In order to ascertain views about the nature of teaching and learning, interviews were conducted with both nursing students and with teaching staff, and the students were asked to complete empathy questionnaires. Findings from the quantitative data revealed a statistically significant increase in student empathy at the end of the substance misuse module. The qualitative data indicated that the students and nurse teachers interviewed shared similar views about the value of forming collaborative relationships in order to enhance the learning potential of students, and this was best achieved through a process of encouraging and validating student experiences. Students felt that the willingness of teachers to share aspects of themselves was important in relationship formation. Some felt that attendance at the module had moved them in the direction of becoming more person-centred when they engaged with patients and clients. When an adaptation to the Spirit of Motivational Interviewing is used for the purposes of teaching nursing students it seems able to increase student engagement in learning. When self-awareness, partnership, acceptance, compassion and evocation is shown by the teacher and through a process of role modelling and reciprocity by the students, it appears to be capable of changing the attitudes of students to becoming more person-centred towards the care of patients and clients. The study suggests that this teaching approach should be considered by all schools of nursing as a way of transmitting these values.

This study identified the factors that support African Caribbean heritage children in achieving academically. Additionally, it explored and developed an understanding of the interaction between identity and learning and it is hoped contributed to a deeper understanding of the concept of ‘blackness’ through the narrative accounts of African Caribbean heritage individuals’ interactions between their learning careers, identities and wider lives, including the cultural assets mediating learning. Studies of the school experiences and educational performances of African Caribbean heritage children, (boys in particular) have on the whole tended to attribute the rationales for underachievement to cultural factors such as Black masculinity and peer group pressure (Sewell 1997); Black families’ home environment (Driver 1982; Green 1985); structural constraints of school organisation; teacher racism and government policies (Gillborn 1997; Gillborn and Youdell 2000). This study points to the ways in which structural issues in the form of macro and micro-aggression impact African Caribbean heritage children’s academic attainment. A specific contribution of the study has been to address the gap in literature surrounding the academic achievement/underachievement of African Caribbean heritage individuals. The participants’ stories revealed that African Caribbean lives in Britain are not necessarily dysfunctional but are complex, challenging and rich, and should not be viewed simply as deficient but as having rich and useful cultural capital. This study recognises the intersectionality of Black people’s experiences as not only raced but also classed and gendered, both in oppressive structures and in their personification and enactment through the agency of personalities and actions. This complex interweaving of organisation and agency required a theoretical framework that was equally capable of examining the subtleties of these dynamics. As such, this study was enabled through an original hybridity of intersectionality, CRT and narrative analysis.

The study focuses on understanding current pedagogical practices in teacher education, taking into account England's and Kuwait's historical, political and cultural backgrounds. The study emphasises the use of technology and the unique contribution of using multimodal learning in relation to teacher education in Kuwait, and indeed within the Kuwaiti and Arabic literature relating to teacher education. A comparative case study research design was used and in total, 24 teacher educators and student teachers participated in the study. Two types of data were collected in both countries: video recording of lessons in which student teachers training to become primary teachers were taught how to use ICT to support teaching and learning, and interviews with student teachers and teacher educators. The video recording data was analyzed using multimodal analysis, whereas interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings from the multimodal data analysis showed teacher educators in England use more technology and multimodal teaching styles as compared to the teacher educators in Kuwait. The thematic analysis yielded four themes, multiple modes of representation; mixed methods; generation gap; and problems in learning and teacher education. The thematic analysis related to the findings from the multimodal analysis in showing differences and similarities between England and Kuwait with respect to technology and style of teaching. The study has the potential to provide positive information for the teacher educators, student teachers and other faculty members of the College of Basic Education in Kuwait under PAAET (Public Authority for Applied Education and Training). The findings from the study can be used to present PAAET with guidelines that can widely educate teachers in Kuwait about multimodality, integration of technology and teaching methods.

The role of senior academic leaders, specifically at the level of dean, in advancing the quality and performance of university education is an important one that has changed in nature over recent decades to become more managerial. This study explores the nature of this role, and how those who are in it develop their professional identities. It begins from the premise that both the characteristics of the role, and the self-images subsequently generated by deans are culture-specific, a belief held by the researcher as an 'insider' within the Libyan Higher Education context. Consequently, this study undertakes a comparative analysis of the role and professional identity of deans in a Libyan university, and those in a UK university. It adopts a qualitative methodology, using in-depth face-to-face interviews between the researcher, and six deans in each of the two universities. The interview protocol follows the life history approach in which participants are asked to share their stories of their formative years, their early careers, their journey to deanship, their accounts of their roles as deans, and their aspirations for the future. The data are analysed through a three-dimensional theoretical framework which addresses life/career stages, national culture, and the social construction of identity. It finds that culture and politics are influencers of what is expected of a dean as a senior academic leader, and that the daily lives and professional identities of the two research samples can be differentiated as a result of those two factors, since the formative years of all interviewees were similar and hence, the impact of family upbringing is controlled for. The major difference between the role and professional image of Libyan deans and UK deans, is the pressure from Libyan society, politics, and culture, for the appointment criteria in respect of deanships to relate to factors other than suitability for the job. This leads to a situation where Libyan deans are managerial, implementing regulations made by others further up the hierarchy, and generally having no room to 'lead' in the academic sense. Indeed, they are not given any form of leadership training in preparation for deanship which confirms the intended scope of the role. UK deans enjoy greater freedom in the discharge of their deanships, but nonetheless report being over-burdened by managerial responsibilities which they perceive to distract from their effectiveness as leaders.

This thesis interrogates young children's embodied engagements with food and aims to augment knowledge around food and eating. The study is based in a nursery in an area of Manchester, England, known to have high levels of poverty and offers free places to 'disadvantaged' two-year-olds. Moving away from more familiar narratives of healthy eating and promoting a balanced diet in the early years, this research closely examines powerful stories around food, which are usually silenced or overlooked by practitioners or/and the researchers. This work seeks to foreground the affective relationships children have with food in order to understand why some children enjoy eating, whilst for others, it is a situation that is fraught with tension, anxiety and frustration. Drawing from Actor Network Theory, New Materialisms (NM) and Post-humanism, the study turns to the post-humanities, which offer new opportunities, as well as produce particular challenges, in relation to ways of 'being' and 'knowing' in research (Lather and St Pierre, 2013). In the process of assembling two generally quite routinised moments that puncture the nursery day: meal and snack times, my improvised form of 'networked' fieldnotes became attuned to the variety of heterogeneous elements contributing to these complex events, such as chairs, smells, saliva, cutlery, plates, human bodies, ideas, policies, rules, food, video clips, scribbled notes, theoretical and methodological frameworks and my own attempts to engage with food and eating in the nursery. Thus, while thinking relationally and acknowledging the agency of both subjects and objects, attention has been paid to the vast array of entities in circulation and in intra-action in human, more-than- and other-than-human worlds. In this research project, the data, nursery, participants, food, and research processes are all made of, and unmade by matter, materials and discourse, which necessitated a New Materialist methodology. In this post-qualitative study of young children's relationships with food, particular attention is paid to the ways events are produced both in, and from, the relations between subjects and objects in non-stable nursery and other environments. Drawing on a complex network of literature around food and eating, the diffractive analysis of a meal and snack time in a nursery opens up to the ways so many, varied entities, are implicated in a world of symbiosis and becoming, generating interesting opportunities for rethinking early years eating practices.

This thesis examines the development of the Co-operative schools project in England, a school transformation initiative of the Co-operative Group and the Co-operative College, UK. Since 2008, the Co-operative schools project has developed a number of Co-operative school models, which are positioned as a 'values-based alternative' to the controversial Academies programme. The growth of the Co-operative schools project suggests that there is indeed an appetite for 'alternative' and 'values-based' education. However, it is not clear what the Co-operative alternative is or how the values and principles of the Co-operative movement translate to achieve educational transformation in schools. Integral to the design of this project was my role as 'embedded researcher' at the Co-operative College, enabling a unique perspective on the expanding initiative. Through an immersive and exploratory practice of research and reflection, across multiple sites, this study tracks the way in which the initiative evolved as both a feature of, and a resistance to, processes of marketisation and privatisation in education. The research critically examines the rhetoric and strategy of the UK Co-operative movement as it expands into a rapidly changing schools sector. This thesis turns to the political philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) for a theory of co-operation. The key contribution of this research is in the identification of Spinoza's practical philosophy as an appropriate theoretical lens for interpreting and developing the ontological foundations of co-operative education. The research employs the concept of transindividuality, which emphasises the co-operative power of the collective individual. The research demonstrates the way in which Spinoza's collective individual offers an alternative ontological positioning to the competitive and utility maximizing individual of the neoliberal subject. This alternative foundation offers a productive lens through which to reconfigure co-operative education, with wider implications for the reimagination of schools and their communities. The research demonstrates that the Co-operative schools project lacks an adequate theoretical foundation and has engaged in a non-strategic approach of resistance and hope - factors which serve to limit the co-operative power of its schools. The argument concludes that for educational transformation the Co-operative schools project must move beyond the handed-down values of the consumer Co-operative movement, and consider the transindividual power of a fully embodied and locally constituted co-operative pedagogy, involving an expansive and dynamic appreciation of the school community.