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Young people who go missing from school through non-attendance is not a new phenomenon and continues to challenge government policy makers and researchers. The research literature in the area has tended to look at deficits either of the young person, parent, school, society or various combinations therein-much of it developed from looking in on their lives as opposed to eliciting the unique views of those who are living those lives. This research project aims to redress this by eliciting the unique perspectives of the young people and their parents on the factors involved, in the young person going missing from school and the issues which this raises for them. It aims to analyse these factors and issues from an ecological and social capital perspective, exploring whether adopting such an analysis can inform an intervention approach to support their route back into education or training. A significant barrier identified was their lack of social capital in relation to knowledge of possible educational options available to them, and a lack of support to help navigate their route back into some form of education or training. Based on this, the researcher adopted a curative approach (Kinder & Kendall, 2005) using the social capital concept of linking social capital as a practical intervention. This involved an intervention with the researcher acting as a linking social tie to bridge the young people back into education or training. The research project adopted a social constructionist perspective and took the form of a qualitative exploratory study, which employed structured discussions and a multiple case study approach (Yin, 2003). The contributors to the research project were a group of young people (n-10), in Year 3 or Year 4 of a Scottish secondary school, who were aged 13 to 15 years. They comprised 6 males and 4 females. Their attendance had diminished to such an extent that school staff felt that they would be unlikely to return to a secondary school. The young people’s parents (n-10) also contributed to the research process. Following the intervention, seven of the ten young people returned to an education or a vocational placement. Implications for schools and professional practice are discussed, as are opportunities for further research.

Heavy-end drug use is a widely studied topic, however much of the research within the field considers the phenomenon from perspectives of individual or social pathology, devoid of any pleasure or meaning-making potential for the user. In order to gain rich understanding of the local heavy-end crack cocaine culture, this thesis utilises a methodology of ‘non-traditional ethnography’ wherein my ‘player’ role as a drug treatment practitioner replaces the traditional approach of ‘insider’ within ethnographic research. This positioning compliments the in-depth interviews which I have conducted with 25 heavyend crack cocaine users from an area of the North East of England. Despite the area being believed to be largely unaffected by crack cocaine, an established and evolving local crack cocaine market was found to exist. The market and distribution networks were found to be extremely complex and multi-faceted and as much a social market as an economic market. In contrast to the image of the ‘powerless addict’, users were found to often be calculated consumers, who had developed sufficient knowledge and skill to negotiate their way around this alternative consumer culture. Indeed, the development of finely honed skills was a key theme throughout the study, resulting in the application of Stephen Lyng’s edgework concept. The development of this alternative conceptual vocabulary is found to have significant implications for understanding heavy-end crack cocaine use and crack cocaine treatment approaches.

Thirteen women composed the life stories that form the basis of this thesis. The women, each with experience of pregnancy before the age of twenty, are connected as mothers and daughters across generations in six white, working class families in a setting in North East England. Their accounts are a medium for exploring intergenerational transmission of values, beliefs and practices relating to young women’s sexual relationships and pregnancies. Current UK policy defines teenage pregnancy as a social problem and a ten-year plan aims to halve the rate of undereighteen conceptions in England by 2010. Despite a substantial body of teenage pregnancy literature, relatively little attention has been given to women’s representations of how they learnt about sex and relationships, began sexual relationships with men, became pregnant and decided what to do next. The research addresses this gap in one UK area. The women’s accounts, produced in biographical narrative interviews, show how professional anecdotes about a cycle of teenage pregnancy ignore historically changing definition of some pregnancies (and by implication, some sexual relationships) as ‘out of order’. This is reflected in a vocabulary shift from ‘illegitimacy’ to ‘single parenthood’ to ‘teenage pregnancy’, with changing stigma and consequences for individual women. Interview data suggest no intergenerational transmission of a message promoting teenage pregnancy, rather the degree to which pregnancy is contingent on circumstance and linked with reproduction of gender and social class positions. Women expressed mixed feelings about becoming a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother “too young”, as well as investment in these social identities. Transmission of information about sexuality and sex has improved across the generations. However, younger women’s accounts indicate that they are still not equipped to discuss and negotiate pleasurable and safer sex within heterosexual relationships. The women were generally positive about relationships with men, and a significant minority referred to the impact of male violence. The women’s accounts illustrate intergenerational exchange of practical (eg childcare) and emotional support, as well as transmission of aspiration for a “good job”, although no transfer of financial wealth.

This thesis provides an ethnographic account of Cape Town’s vibrant underground hip-hop scene. Centering on the social world of rappers or ‘MCs’, this participant observation, conducted over a period of 12 months, draws upon the attendance at over 80 musical performances and dozens of recording and rehearsal sessions, participation as a co-host on a weekly hip-hop radio show, the conduct of 20 semi-structured interviews, alongside sustained and meaningful contact with 67 individual respondents, and the collection of a multitude of relevant documents and creative artefacts. The project argues that the experiences of becoming, belonging and participating as a hip-hop head in Cape Town can be understood by identifying various social processes at work. In this endeavour, the empirical themes of ‘community’, ‘hustling’ and ‘authenticity’, which are key reference points within the culture, are considered. Considerable attention is afforded to the various shifts and continuities in postapartheid social life and their effect on the functioning and structure of hip-hop practice. For instance, while most respondents enjoy unprecedented freedoms and opportunities, the research reveals that hip-hop communities in the city map onto apartheid era racial classifications. These groupings are formed through processes of socialization, identity formation and cooperation, and boundaries are created by the exclusionary mechanisms of differentiation, inequality and discrimination. Membership in these communities largely frame artists’ entrepreneurial activities or ‘hustles’ by determining the type and degree of social and economic capital young musicians can draw upon. This act of hustling is also found to be a highly valued activity that is predominately enacted within the informal economy. The concept of authenticity is shown to be the primary mode of distinction among hip-hop practitioners and is examined as a negotiated performance involving processes of claims making, validation and boundary-formation. Within this unique urban environment, the analysed data unravels a multilayered story, illustrating the variety of experiences involved in being a Cape Town hip-hop head.

This thesis explores the political and social landscape of Burmese women from 1942 to 1962, focusing on three groups of women - writers, fighters, and prostitutes. It finds that although the roles of women - and of these three groups in particular - evolved substantially in this period, women remained essentially sidelined from the main political movements and events. Women fighters were drafted into the army during the latter stages of the war, essentially to undertake propaganda work while the men, the backbone of the resistance against the Japanese, went into hiding. But at the end of the war, the women were dismissed, and came to play no significant part in Burma's armed forces. Many of these women then moved towards the communists: but there again they were sidelined. Burmese women were also discouraged from playing prominent parts in the newly independent Burma's politics, often by women themselves. This period also saw the problem of prostitution become a moral rather than a public health issue. Whereas the British had been concerned to curb prostitution in order to protect British troops and the wider European population, the AFPFL of U Nu saw prostitution as essentially a moral issue and a threat to nation-building. The curbing or eradication of prostitution became crucial in U Nu' s drive to highlight the importance of morality in creating a clean state amidst accusations of corruption on the part of his ministers. Problems of prostitution promoted him to defend morality and more importantly Buddhism. In essence the thesis concerns the conflicts between modernity and tradition in a Burma moving from colonialism into independence, as played out by and for these three groups of women. The modem Burmese woman demanded modem commodities such as cigarettes, nylon fabrics, and contraceptive pills, and business used images of modem women in advertising to capture modernity. But many, both men and women, saw modernity as a threat to nation-building and, more importantly, to the purity of the Burman race and Buddhism.

This research develops a grammar for understanding `consumption' as a metaphor for the agency by which `individuality' is structurated in the contemporary People's Republic of China. The chosen approach holds that: individuality is less a thing-initself than constantly asserted by recourse to social systems of signification, such as language, symbols, and the human relationships formed around these; and that acts of individuation are not only expressions of individual agency, but also immanent in each other as expressions of discourses of social distinction. Where individuation is seen as informed by ontologically prior structures legitimating local cultural practice, this research seeks to demonstrate the interaction of those rules in their articulation, proving the courage of its methodological convictions as a theory of how the social is brought into the political and the political into the social. This is highly topical, because large parts of the literature on China remain heavily inflected by essentialist approaches to culturalism that systematically deny Chinese individuals agency, and more critically-minded literatures have thus far `merely' documented how Chinese individuals struggle to individuate themselves against other agencies, neglecting to demonstrate how individual agency in contemporary China is itself structured. Data is gathered through ethnography and interviews in Anshan City, Liaoning Province, a burgeoning third-tier city, between 2005 and 2009. Empirical informants included: the rural migrant staff of an inner-city restaurant kitchen; the urban workforce of an industrial machine-repair workshop; white-collar private-sector professionals; stateowned-enterprise managers; private entrepreneurs; retired Communist Party cadres; young urban adults; and so on. The data is analyzed for the ways in which symbolic boundaries are drawn and managed through judgements of `taste', `purity', and `worthiness' most broadly conceptualized. This discourse is treated as a synchronic system and disaggregated into eight conceptually-rich categories, each of which is reconstructed in their `internal' and situationally-inflected logics. The research then pursues the `grammar' structuring how individuals make these categories their own - that is, consume them - by dynamically juxtaposing a range of social `fields' as examples of the infinitely various situations where consumption results in diverse but structurally unified outcomes. Thus, where the first analysis demonstrates how practices of individuation are structured, the second demonstrates how structure is individuated in practice. The results not only broach an entirely new way of thinking about the structuration of Chinese individuality and society, but also represent an especially useful conceptual `launch-pad' for engaging Chinese individuals in their consumption.

A frequently quoted phrase from young men about the most important thing regarding fatherhood is expressed as 'being there', Le. being available and accessible for their children especially when their children need them. However, what repeatedly happens with young fathers is that they are separated from, and do not have access to, their children. The purpose of this study was to explore young fathers' perceptions of their experiences as parents and to consider the ways in which they are prevented from fully engaging in this role. A group of young fathers took part in this qualitative study which was informed and underpinned by the theoretical perspective of Symbolic Interactionism. Photography was employed as a medium to assist the initial non-directive, open interviews. This process uncovered themes which were explored in semistructured interviews. This thesis uses Giddens' Structuration theory to investigate the recursive relationship between an individual's agency and the influence of social structures on paternal involvement. The young fathers in this research described recurrent experiences of social exclusion. These repeated experiences revealed a pattern, or cycle, of exclusion which was found to impact on subsequent relationships and their ability to interact with others. The respondents identified that becoming a father could be a turning point in their lives in which they .could break their cycle of exclusion. However, exclusion experienced as a result of becoming a father continued and reinforced that pattern. The cycle of exclusion identified in the lives of these young men appears to playa formative role in their capacity for paternal involvement. It is linked to an external locus of control which in turn impacts negatively on their social inclusion and their ability to become involved fathers. Poor interaction between young fathers and social support is compounded and exacerbated by low expectations and previous negative experience from young fathers and those who interact with them.

This thesis attempts to develop the insights of recent work on identity that has been influenced by poststructuralist theory, and in particular 'queer theory', through an empirical study of the social construction of lesbian genders. I examine sociological work on sexuality, queer theory and feminist work on butch/femme. Lesbian identities are constructed at the intersection of specific discourses, structures and conscious agency. There is a lack of sociological element in queer theory but I am interested in the potential for developing this despite the epistemological difficulties it raises. Queer theory has enabled a radically different way of theorising butch/femme as transgressive queer practice with the potential to reveal the constructed and contingent nature of all gender. The study has involved semi-structured interviews with 31 women who have various degrees of identification with either 'butch' or 'femme'. I identify particular 'interpretative repertoires' in identity narratives and examine the ways in which these are socially located. These findings are used to contest the assertion that community understandings of identities differ radically from the constructionism that is the dominant theoretical paradigm. I outline the construction of specific contemporary butch and femme subject positions and the ways in which these are discursively located in relation to heteronormative discourses. Queer theory offers a way of understanding butch and femme as specific lesbian genders and I argue that the relationship between butch/femme and heterosexuality should be seen as interdependent rather than imitative. The ways in which dominant beauty discourses are negotiated and the possibility of constructing a specifically lesbian aesthetic is examined. I argue that lesbian genders can be subversive of the 'heterosexual imaginary' but that this is context dependent

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