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This thesis presents a sociological inquiry into the meanings that families bereaved by suicide attach to the suicide of a young man. Through in-depth interviews and an email based focus group, this study explores families' attempts to understand how and why their loved one chose to end his life. Whilst interviews and focus group discussions were centred on the life and death of the young man, it became clear that the narratives of the bereaved were as much tales of themselves as they were tales of the deceased. The narratives of the life and death of the young man are only ever reconstructions from the relative's perspective. Therefore the research developed a broadly dual focus. It begins by exploring the families' constructions of the young man's life and death before moving on to look the experiences of the bereaved and their (reconstructions of themselves and their families. A social constructionist approach was adopted in order to explore the most significant discourses in helping families make sense of their loved one's death. This thesis shows how the discourse of mechcal-psychiatry was especially salient in their attempts to reach an understanding of their young man's suicide. In particular, families either resisted, or appealed to its dominant construction of suicide as showing signs of mental illness. In addition, the meanings and understandings attached to the young man's death were highly sophisticated attempts to negotiate blame to establish who was responsible for their loved one's death. Importantly whether families appealed to or resisted the dominant medical-psychiatric discourse - the salient point in all the families' constructions was the need to place responsibility outside the family. Moreover, suicide is a devastating death, often leaving families feeling isolated and stigmatised. As such, this thesis also chronicles the families' experiences of being bereaved by suicide their attempts to manage such a profound disruption in their own lives.

Regeneration is a ubiquitous feature of the contemporary British state. Research, despite devoting much time to exploration of outcomes and effects, so far has neglected the mechanisms of the process itself. This thesis addresses this by charting developments in two marginal English coalfields over a period of 25 years. The coalfields provide a convenient site for the investigation of regeneration as they offer multiple critical sites and exhibit in particularly acute forms the effects of changing relationships between the central and the local state and thus exemplify the wider relationships between the state, the market and the locality. The choice of the coalfields in North West Leicestershire and East Kent as case studies was informed by their position in the coal mining industry at the beginning of the period of its major restructuring, the then recent evaluation on the recovery of the coalfields (Beatty et al., 2005) and their location in relation to national "identity" projects (e.g. the National Forest). The thesis employs the extended case method as outlined by Burawoy. On the basis of extensive archive research of local government documentation, semi-structured interviews with policy makers and civil society actors and a 6-month observation period in the Kent coalfield an understanding of regeneration as a multi-dimensional social process is delineated. Through the use of Bourdieu's notion of the field and different forms of capital (1984, 1986) the thesis offers an examination of regeneration as a sequence of contests in the economic, social and symbolic repositioning of localities in the social space. The combination of Bourdieu's and Burawoy's concepts allows exploring the systematicity of the regeneration process through the lens of place. It thus provides a framework for the analysis the spatially and temporally contingent outcomes of (1) processes of legitimisation, (2) the production of specific sets of social relations and (3) the operation of symbolic power in the context of different regeneration regimes.

The twin aim of this thesis is to (1) enlarge the field of girl studies at a conceptual level, to as to include the non-western girl, and (2) to develop a detailed case history of the girl in Hong Kong.  In order to identify what is distinctive about the everyday life of these girls I focus on three areas of experience – sex education in secondary school, made-for-teens romance films and teenage lifestyle magazines.  Particularly, I highlight how the questions of ethnicity, tradition and religion play a greater part in the everyday life of girls in Hong Kong than they do in the life of the girls considered by Driscoll's study.  It is the major claim of this thesis that girl studies as it is presently practised is western-centric and its outlook needs to be broadened to include the non-western world.  The significance of this thesis lies in the findings of the various form of heterosexuality in different social fields, which provides different space for girls to live in the present.  However, this thesis also finds out that the argument of the non-correlation between the female body and the constitution of femininity is not sufficient to the conception of girlhood.  This is because, as this thesis has indicated, the concept of Hong Kong girls cannot get rid of the shadow of the theories of modern subjectivity, in which the construction of the girl is in opposition to, or defined otherwise than, the mature, independent woman. In a long run, it is important to strengthen the power of 'becoming' in the construction of the concept of the girl in gender studies and cultural studies.

This thesis is based on a three-fold project analysing, firstly, the discursive configuration of popular Korean time management texts, secondly, the parameters of their production and political economy, and finally, their audience rec.