This study examines issues pertaining to the socio-economic integration of immigrants in Greece. Its focus is on two localities of the greater Athens area, Piraeus and Korydallos, and on three immigrant communities: Albanians, East Europeans and Asians. The research is set within the context of debates about immigration and integration, and more specifically within the economic, social and ethno-cultural context of Greece. This approach, which primarily recognises the specific significance of the host country’s structures, perceives immigrants as dynamic actors that develop competition strategies in the context of their own cultural references and sense-making. Through this perspective, it is argued that immigrants develop autonomous individual and/or collective integration strategies, which are largely a result of the bottom-up interaction of immigrants with both the native population and the sociopolitical institutions of the host country, at the local level. This thesis is the outcome of fieldwork research that involved probability quota sampling of 270 immigrants from Albania, Asia and Eastern Europe, interviewed in person using a structured questionnaire, with some room for collecting qualitative data. It examines the level of socio-economic integration of immigrants by applying quantitative methods (construction of the integration index, the use of one-way ANOVA, independent samples t-test and multiple linear regression analysis), and descriptive analysis. The integration indicators include: employment, housing, use of the Greek language, social interaction, social and political participation, self-evaluation of integration, and racism and discrimination. The findings provide an empirical account of the level of integration of immigrants, revealing a significant degree of heterogeneity among communities, a factor that has unavoidably conditioned integration patterns. East Europeans display the highest level of partial integration in comparison to the other immigrant groups. Albanians appear relatively stable at the level of partial integration, while the Asians display a marginal integration pattern. The integration index of socio-economic integration stands at the level of partial integration. The multiple linear regression analysis shows that citizenship, years of residence and educational are significant predictors of integration levels. The empirical findings corroborate the hypothesis of differentiated exclusion in the integration process of immigrants, with the relevant policies leaving room for partial integration only. Furthermore, the study suggests that the limited range of the state’s institutional intervention appears to offer increased space for local and individual micro-processes, confirming that micro-level practices and strategies of the immigrants themselves are the most effective channels in shaping the phenomenon of socio-economic integration.

This thesis examines dominant feminist discourses emerging from liberal media, the academy, and activist networks in contemporary Britain. In particular, it traces stories and representations of feminism’s recent past (from the 1960s onwards) which are constructed and reproduced through these sites, analysing where and how issues related to race and racism are located within - and outside of - such narratives. It is based on empirical research analysing popular, academic, and activist books, newspaper articles in The Guardian and The Observer, as well as interviews with feminist activists and students of women’s and gender studies courses. Given that there is an extensive history of women of colour-led organising in post-war Britain, including an autonomous black women’s movement in the 1970s and ’80s, and the growth at this time of black British feminism both within and outside of the academy, the thesis interrogates dominant narratives which continue to construct British feminism as a story belonging to white women. Drawing on black and postcolonial feminist theory, it analyses the articulations of feminist politics emerging from these sites through an anti-racist lens. It demonstrates that the way the historical narratives are constructed and gain currency has a significant influence on contemporary feminist theory and politics, with whiteness reproduced as the hegemonic lens through which British feminism is understood. The thesis argues that white feminist racism haunts the dominant narrative of British feminism – as something which is repeatedly erased or evaded each time it is brought to view – and it calls for white feminist academics and activists to reckon with the long history of racism and imperialism which has been integral to the British feminist project since its inception.

The submission, comprising nine outputs, ranges from journal articles and a book to a podcast and a radio programme. The accompanying commentary aims to contextualise the submitted work, demonstrate that it constitutes a coherent whole and that it makes a significant, original contribution to the field of cultural studies. The submission and commentary contest the idea that the voice has become less important than text and image in an era that has come to be known as one of 'secondary orality'. The outputs set out to demonstrate that, although metaphorical and narrative meanings of 'voice' have come to displace a sense of the audible voice in popular discourse as well as in many scholarly texts, it remains a prime and powerful modality in both human communication and new technologies. Applying the approach of psycho-social studies to the voice in a novel and original way, the outputs draw on semi-structured interviews, archive research and cultural analysis to argue that, despite the discursive absence of the audible voice, a study of vocality can enrich our understanding of both face-to-face and electronically-mediated communication. The commentary describes the phenomenological orientation of the outputs. Using the interdisciplinary approach of psycho-social studies to explore aspects of the cultural sphere, the submission is thus situated in the emerging strand of psycho-cultural studies: the commentary argues that, despite the methodological problems this throws up, it constitutes a valuable and apt addition to the study of voice. It suggests that gendered ideas of the voice may lead to an essentialism that can be countered by understanding the voice as a medium for the performativity of gender. Challenging the common polarisation of eye and ear and the idealisation of the voice, it traces some ways in which the voice is culturally-constituted, especially the radio and cinematic voice. The appendix documents not only the outputs' origins but also their wide impact.

This study examines the transitions to adulthood of a group of 19 young women of mixed age, social class and ethnic backgrounds, from two adjacent ‘outer-urban’ neighbourhoods in the post-industrial city of Birmingham, UK. It focuses on three distinct, and inter-related, spheres of transition: education and training, employment and independent household formation, including family of origin, housing, couple relationships, marriage and motherhood. Using the concepts of reflexivity, the appearance of choice and intersectionality, the study aims to shed light on the role of individual agency and structural inequalities in shaping the research participants’ (RPs’) life chances. It examines how RPs interpreted their available 'choices', the structural constraints - related to gender, social class and ethnicity - they encountered, and the strategies they employed during their transitions. An intersectional approach illuminates the multiple, co-constituted, ways in which gender, social class and ethnicity operated in RPs’ lives. Using a critical ethnographic research methodology, data was gathered through participation observation at a local youth centre and repeated semi-structured interviews with RPs, over a 20-month period. Additionally, several one-off interviews were conducted with practitioners to build a picture of the context in which RPs lived their lives. The findings indicate that while RPs frequently articulated notions of choice, their actual options were often heavily bounded. Structural constraints related to gender, social class and ethnicity shaped many aspects of their experiences of compulsory and post-compulsory education, the labour market, and transitions from familial dependence to independent households. Despite this, RPs consistently strove to make the ‘right’ choices to achieve positive life outcomes. Although this included remaining flexible in the face of uncertain futures, diverse opportunities, constraints and subsequent strategies were observed along social class and ethnic lines. This study is relevant to sociologists, journalists, policy makers and others interested in the experiences of young women growing up in materially disadvantaged areas, in the context of widening inequality. The findings illustrate that an intersectional approach enables a more nuanced understanding of young women’s transitions to adulthood in the post-industrial city. This makes a compelling case to incorporate intersectional approaches into the study of youth transitions more widely.

Although the prevalent attitude towards infidelity in British society is that it is wrong, 50-65% of couples enter therapy due to problems with infidelity. Past research studies tend to focus on predictors of infidelity to help identify the offending partner’s risk factors. Despite the prevalence of infidelity, and a vast amount of popular literature on the subject, there is a dearth of quantitative research exploring consequences of infidelity for the injured partner. There is only one qualitative study exploring the injured partners’ emotional process following disclosure of infidelity, which is focused predominately on women. In this study, semi-structured interviews were employed to explore the experience of six heterosexual men who were the injured partner in the context of committed relationships. The researcher was particularly interested in the ways these men experienced their partner’s infidelity and the ways they coped with the disclosure of infidelity. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis method was employed in order to analyse the participants’ responses. Based on the analysis of the participants’ account three superordinate themes were identified: The Trauma of Disclosure; Trying to Cope; and Moving Forward. The findings revealed immediate consequences of infidelity for the injured partners such as the emotional impact of the disclosure and insight into the injured partners’ coping behaviours. The study further revealed long-term consequences of infidelity for the injured partners and their future relationships. All participants expressed stigma and feelings of shame associated with seeking professional help. The implications for counselling psychologists’ practice are discussed and suggestions for improving access to psychological therapies. Implications for further research are also discussed.

This study explores the concept of sexual citizenship as it applies to the lives of gay men living in nonmetropolitan areas of Britain, and Ireland. Both countries have undergone dramatic social, legal and cultural changes over recent decades, and have witnessed profound and progressive shifts in public attitudes towards lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Given historical tendencies towards a metrocentric bias in researching gay lives, this study takes place outside the large metropolitan centres of population. It travels to a world of smaller towns, villages and farms. In making this journey, the research aims to understand the life world and experiences of gay men living within these locales. It seeks to explore the dynamics created by the intersection of sexuality and the space of the rural. Crucially it strives to develop an understanding of the nature, depth, and scope, of the men’s sexual citizenship, as it applies within their geographic context. Forty-four men were interviewed: twenty-two in England and twenty-two in Ireland. The study finds that rural men in both countries share similar experiences, concerns and worries. All of the men recall an awakening in childhood and adolescence that they were different from other male age mates, followed by a slow realisation (often resisted) that they could be gay. The study finds that profound social, and cultural changes have been of critical importance to the men, in encouraging many of them (though not all) to begin, the uneven, and continuous, process of coming out, embracing a sexual minority identity, and in doing so, becoming sexual citizens. The study finds clear consensus that the nonmetropolitan context is relevant to the men, especially in how they negotiate their sexual identity. While life outside the cities can bring a number of distinct advantages, such as tranquillity, and a more relaxed pace of life, the men also report numerous challenges which include social isolation, powerful hegemonic narratives around rural masculinity, and a pervasive heteronormative culture. As such, the rural space can be an alienating environment. Nonetheless, these men continue to live in the rural, and by their presence and increasing disclosure, they are changing the cultural narrative of what it means to be gay in the space of the rural, creating rural gay (male) identities, which can appear different from metropolitan gay (male) identities. In many ways, their rural environment creates similar identity characteristics, and limitations, despite their residency in different countries. In assessing the men as sexual citizens, the study takes the opportunity to interrogate the model of sexual citizenship. To this end, it finds the citizenship model of rights and obligations to be seductive and appealing to many of the gay men. However, the study also highlights its exclusionary tendencies, and as its propensity to promote a de-sexualised, de-politicised, and de-radicalised gay identity; tendencies which are exacerbated by the context of the nonmetropolitan, small town, and rural spaces. This research concludes that, while the men may be considered, constitutional sexual citizens, which is an enormous advance from the dark times of the past, there remains a legacy of stigmatization, which helps ensure compromised citizenship on a number of levels. As such, the journey has not yet ended.

The behaviour analysis of individual and group dynamics in closed spaces is a subject of extensive research in both academia and industry. However, despite recent technological advancements the problem of implementing the existing methods for visual behaviour data analysis in production systems remains difficult and the applications are available only in special cases in which the resourcing is not a problem. Most of the approaches concentrate on direct extraction and classification of the visual features from the video footage for recognising the dynamic behaviour directly from the source. The adoption of such an approach allows recognising directly the elementary actions of moving objects, which is a difficult task on its own. The major factor that impacts the performance of the methods for video analytics is the necessity to combine processing of enormous volume of video data with complex analysis of this data using and computationally resourcedemanding analytical algorithms. This is not feasible for many applications, which must work in real time. In this research, an alternative simulation-based approach for behaviour analysis has been adopted. It can potentially reduce the requirements for extracting information from real video footage for the purpose of the analysis of the dynamic behaviour. This can be achieved by combining only limited data extracted from the original video footage with a symbolic data about the events registered on the scene, which is generated by 3D simulation synchronized with the original footage. Additionally, through incorporating some physical laws and the logics of dynamic behaviour directly in the 3D model of the visual scene, this framework allows to capture the behavioural patterns using simple syntactic pattern recognition methods. The extensive experiments with the prototype implementation prove in a convincing manner that the 3D simulation generates sufficiently rich data to allow analysing the dynamic behaviour in real-time with sufficient adequacy without the need to use precise physical data, using only a limited data about the objects on the scene, their location and dynamic characteristics. This research can have a wide applicability in different areas where the video analytics is necessary, ranging from public safety and video surveillance to marketing research to computer games and animation. Its limitations are linked to the dependence on some preliminary processing of the video footage which is still less detailed and computationally demanding than the methods which use directly the video frames of the original footage.

This study of thirty mothers of young children and their respective partners examines the salience of class, gender and local status groups as subjective categories in social identity and attitudes, in order to discover the extent to which people are politically conscious in terms of these three groups. The research was undertaken in Stamford Hill , a poor and culturally mixed inner London district, which is gradually becoming "gentrified".

In the past two decades sexualisation has ascended as a focus for academic, social policy and public debate: central to these debates is concern for children and young people and the significance of sexualised cultural landscapes to feminist politics and women’s social positions. A striking feature of these discussions however, is a lack of empirical, as well as theoretical, considerations of men and masculinities. Men’s accounts, perspectives and experiences of sexualisation have largely been omitted or obscured from contemporary discussions. This thesis widens the parameters of debate to include and to position men as critical agents and stakeholders in the issue. The thesis presents analysis of 154 men’s experiences of, and perspectives on sexualisation, yielded from an online survey and in depth interview process. Of these 154 men, three took part in interviews, eight in both the survey and interviews and 143 the online survey only. The study was guided by two interconnected aims: to explore how men make sense of, and experience sexualisation; and how sexualisation may intersect with ways of being a man. These aims presented two central challenges - researching men, and masculinities and researching sexualisation - both are theoretically, conceptually and practically opaque subjects of study. A woman researching men also presented interesting tangles for research design, specifically for feminist methodologies. As the study advanced the gendered dynamics of the research context emerged as a salient site for exploring forms and flows of (some) men’s oppressive practices, and how men articulate privilege and sustain relations of inequality.

This thesis presents an empirical analysis of a unique data set of 427 men and women who have been charged with criminal offences as a result of suspected involvement in dissident republican activity in Northern Ireland between 1998 and 2014. The charges result from involvement in the four main dissident groups currently active in armed struggle in Ireland namely Continuity IRA (CIRA), Real IRA (RIRA), Oglaigh Na h’Eireann (ONH) and most recently the New IRA (NIRA). Both official Government publications and open source dissident news material was used to create a violent dissident republican personnel database. This database was then used to compare the dissidents with the Old IRA of the Irish Revolution between the years 1916-1923. This study is primarily comparing and contrasting the IRA and how it has changed in 100 years. Conclusions are made on gender and religion, age and marriage and status and class. It contains policy implications for both practitioners and academics on how to counter the contemporary violence of dissidents in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.