This research study explored the meanings attributed by migrant Arab Muslim women to their experiences of childbirth in the UK. The objectives of the study were: • To explore migrant Arab Muslim women's experiences of maternity services in the UK. • To examine the traditional childbearing beliefs and practices of Arab Muslim society. • To suggest ways to provide culturally sensitive care for this group of women. An interpretive ontological-phenomenological perspective informed by the philosophical tenets of Heidegger (1927/1962) was used to examine the childbirth experiences of eight Arab Muslim women who had migrated to one multicultural city in the Midlands. Three in-depth semi structured audiotaped interviews were conducted with each woman; the first during the third trimester of pregnancy (28 weeks onwards), the second early in the postnatal period (1-2 weeks after birth) and the third one to three months later. Each interview was conducted in Arabic, then transcribed and translated into English. An adapted version of Smith’s model of interpretive phenomenological analysis (Smith 2003) together with the principles of Gadamer (1989) were used to analyse the interview data, aided by the use of the software package NVivo2. The analysis of the women’s experiences captures the significance of giving birth in a new cultural context, their perception of the positive and negative aspects of their maternity care and the importance of a culturally competent approach to midwifery practice. Six main themes emerged from analysis of the interviews: ‘displacement and reformation of the self’, ‘by the grace of God’, ‘the vulnerable women,’ ‘adaptation to the new culture,’ ‘dissonance between two maternity health systems’ and ‘the valuable experience’. These themes reflected the women’s lived experiences of their childbirth in the UK. The implications for communities, institutions, midwifery practice and further research are outlined. The study concludes that in providing culturally competent care, maternity caregivers should be aware of what might be significant in the religious and cultural understandings of Arab women but also avoid cultural stereotyping by maintaining an emphasis on individualised care.

This thesis explores the dynamic social networks, economic development and cultural continuity of the female members of the diasporic Greek community of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In an effort to address a gap in gendered and regional Greek Canadian community studies, this study utilizes the intersection of gender and place through time for a defined social group, as it investigates the development of diverse social and economic relationships in addition to forms of cultural communication. Using an ethnographic approach, this study attempts to understand the lives and interactions through time, which constitute the social and economic networks and define the identities of the female members of the Halifax Greek community. Approximately forty people, mainly women, who indicated participation or membership in the Halifax Greek community, were recruited for life history interviews, while informal unstructured conversations or interviews were conducted with additional participants during participant observation. The participants ranged in age and represented both migrants and subsequent generations. This approach to fieldwork, conducted intermittently, provided an opportunity to witness and acquire diverse data on various community events and aspects of daily life. Moreover, with ethnographic engagement, the way people, particularly women, negotiated their identities across time and space was considered. The study supports the greater agency of post-World War 11 Greek female migrants in the decision-making process of their migration and rejects their migration as consequential or secondary; their shift from sponsored to sponsors facilitated further migration for co-ethnics of extended kin networks and their status as co-breadwinners was essential to the well-being of the Greek migrant family units. Socioeconomic networks have shifted from highly gendered and ethnic networks, initially established out of necessity to ones defined by individual preferences and needs, which do not discard the significance of kin and ethnic connections in their entirety. Concerns for cultural continuity persist for the dynamic community as they continue to redefine their unique hyphenated Greek-Haligonian identity, much like the Halifax donair delicacy, a variation of a Greek dish, influenced by characteristics of Halifax.

The number of women entering professional and managerial jobs globally has increased over the past thirty years. However, only a small percentage of texts within feminist and organisational theory specifically address the lives and experiences of professional and managerial Black African women within the workplace and family life. As such, many organisational and social research questions in this area remain unanswered. This thesis examines the work and family lives of professional and managerial Black African women living and working in Johannesburg and London. It explores how such women with relatively similar colonial histories, cultures, career and professional backgrounds handle their complex social positioning. This complexity, as discussed in the thesis, is created mainly through the way in which identity characteristics such as gender, race/ethnicity and class intersect and impact on these women when working in an environment where they are in a minority and viewed in some instances as ‘space invaders’. The impact that these complex social categories, combined with the influences of culture and history, have on their identities as career women, mothers, wives, partners and daughters is also examined. As Black African women with careers in major cities on opposite sides of the globe, these emerging and transnational elite Black African women remain a rarity and hidden gem to most – making them unique both in the workplace and in communities. In London, they are not only minorities within the UK population but minorities in their role as professional and managerial women within the corporate private sector. In Johannesburg, although part of the majority population in the country, they still remain minorities within the professional and managerial circles of that country’s corporate private sector. The method I use to gather data is the Life History approach which allows me, the researcher, to reveal my participants’ individual views and interpretation of their own work and family life experiences. I do this by conducting semi-structured interviews as a means of collecting their ‘life stories’. These stories told by Black African professional and managerial women reflect their views of reality. Through a form of Life History analysis, this mode of enquiry further reveals the importance of acknowledging difference when implementing government and organisational policies that combat barriers brought about by corporate practices and cultural attitudes within the workplace and society as a whole.

This study draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with seventeen partnered mothers in Newcastle upon Tyne. All the study households contained a full time wage earner and had an income between 60 and 85% of the national median household income. The aims of the study were: 1) to establish how interviewees managed life on a limited income, both financially and emotionally 2) to investigate how this was connected to sources of household income, negotiations with their partner, and personal beliefs about money and gender 3) to discover how these women experienced and understood their own material deprivation and their role as household financial managers. Previous studies of intra-household income have looked at the whole population or those on benefit, but mothers in this income bracket had never been studied before. Moreover, after a decade of tax credit reform and women-into-work policies significant changes in the financial circumstances of this group of households seemed likely. An approach which placed the lived experience of the interviewees at the centre of the study was taken, rooted in the feminist qualitative tradition. A new method for revealing the material deprivation of individual household members was also pioneered. The key finding is that women in this income group were likely to be materially poor, although living in households officially defined as ‘not poor’, and the way they related to their money is similar to poor women in previous studies. This resulted both from the general inadequacy of household incomes and from the way resources were distributed within the household, with women often at the bottom of the spending hierarchy. Contrary to the findings of most previous studies, women did not ‘tag’ certain streams of household income, such as reserving Child Benefit for children; instead they ensured children were protected from material deprivation by their own sacrifices, sacrifices not always shared with their male partner. The lower the household income, the more likely this was to happen. Other findings include widespread desire to undertake paid work if it fitted around caring responsibilities, a marked decline in the proportion of household income from male earnings, a strong tendency for the mother to be the sole manager of household finances and therefore the carrier of resulting stress, and a powerful discourse that men could not be trusted with money which further increased women’s burden of worry. The women interviewed had a high level of financial skill, demonstrating many strategies to make money stretch further, but usually resources were simply inadequate to meet all household needs. Policy recommendations recognise the vital importance of tax credits and argue for increasing household incomes through supporting good quality paid work that fits with caring responsibilities. It is argued that better measurement of intra-household income distribution is also needed. The cultural issues underpinning the unequal burden of self-sacrifice within families are harder to tackle, but some suggestions are made.

La présente recherche développe une double démarche : l’analyse des effets de la globalisation du genre par des politiques qui se veulent universelles en s’imposant à différent-e-s acteurs/actrices et les réactions de ceux/celles-ci, particulièrement celles des organisations féminines locales, dans la façon d’adapter ou de se réapproprier ces prescriptions internationales. Il s’agit de rendre compte de la manière dont le genre en tant que catégorie d’intervention publique parvient à se déployer d’une part dans les programmes d’aide au développement des pays financeurs et d’autre part dans les pays du Sud. Une analyse multi-niveaux est donc menée, tant au niveau des politiques et programmes de la coopération allemande, que de l’état tchadien puis du PRODALKA. Des projets et politiques visant à l’empowerment économique et politique, mais aussi la lutte contre les violences faites aux femmes ou des réformes du code du statut personnel, sont-ils vraiment mis en oeuvre ? Peut-on repérer des effets du PRODALKA sur les conditions de vie des femmes mais aussi concernant leur reconnaissance par les hommes ? Pour répondre à ces questions, la recherche, à la fois qualitative et quantitative, s’appuie sur une enquête auprès de 310 femmes et sur une vingtaine d’entretiens formels et de plusieurs autres non formels auprès des personnes intéressées par cette thématique dans le cadre d’un programme bilatéral de développement économique tchado-allemand. La thèse montre que peu de progrès ont été rendus possibles par l’intervention du PRODALKA, bien que certaines femmes aient vu leurs conditions améliorées. En effet, les projets menés ont peu tenu compte des besoins des femmes ou des relations de genre à cause d’une posture de neutralité postulant que toute action menée dans la société profite à tous les groupes sociaux sans exclusive. Ils relevaient plutôt des actions de type « intégration des femmes dans le développement telles que celles qui étaient menées dans les années 1960 et ont été critiquées par l’approche « genre et développement » qui a proposé des outils théoriques et méthodologiques qui auraient pu éviter les erreurs commises. / This research offers a dual approach: it offers firstly an analysis of the consequences of gender globalization, through the application of policies meant to be universal, which are imposed to different participants. This research also looks at the reactions of these participants, particularly local women’s organizations, and the ways in which they adapt or appropriate these international prescriptions. We mean to uncover how gender, as a specific category in the field of public intervention, spreads out, on the one hand, in development aid programs coming from funding countries, and, on the other hand, in developing countries. A multi-level analysis has thus been conducted, which looked at cooperation policies and programs supervised by Germany, at the application in chad and at the PRODALKA project. Are policies and projects aiming at economic and political empowerment or reforms of the code of personal status really being implemented? Can the impact of the PRODALKA project on the living conditions of women and their recognition by men really be measured? In order to answer these questions, this research, which is both qualitative and quantitative, relies on a survey conducted with 310 women and on a several formal interviews and several non-formal interviews with individuals involved with this topic, within the context of a bilateral program of economic development between Germany and chad. The thesis will show that not a lot of progress has been made by the PRODALKA project, although some women have witnessed an improvement of their conditions. Indeed, the projects carried out have not really taken into consideration women’s needs or gender relations because of a posture of neutrality which implies that any type of action carried out in society benefits all groups, without exceptions. Those projects consisted more in actions aimed at integrated women in development, such as those that were conducted in the 1960s. Those types of actions were criticized by the « gender and development » approach, which offer theoretical and methodological tools that could have been used to prevent some of the mistakes that were made.

This thesis aims to explore how older (60-87 years) South Asian migrant (SAM) women anticipate and approach old age and ageing experiences across the life course. It draws attention to the ways in which older SAM women construct and (re)negotiate gendered roles across the intersections of gender, ethnicity and age in order to sustain quality of life. In addition to subjective experiences of the life course, this thesis examines how older SAM women (re)negotiate collective cultural identities in the place of migration and settlement. A qualitative feminist constructionist approach, utilising a transnational life course perspective, has guided the theoretical underpinnings for this research. Moreover, a two-part method has been used, presenting a multi-sited ethnography and life course interviews. Data elicited from the study included ethnographic observations, an ethnographic interview, a reflexive research and observation diary and 16 in-depth life course interviews. The study analysed data using thematic analysis and elicited themes via a thematic analysis network. In this research, key findings reveal that older SAM women’s experiences of age and ageing intersect with gender roles, responsibilities and obligations that are in turn influenced by positions of authority across the matriarchal hierarchy. Gendered roles, such as, the daughter, wife, becoming a daughter-in-law and mother, mother-in-law and older woman are influenced by cultural values and norms overlaid by patriarchal ideologies. Furthermore, thematic readings show that older SAM women construct, (re)negotiate and access cultural identities in the place of migration through culturally prescribed scripts themed around gender, family and a migrant identity in order to publically display and sustain loyalties to a past homeland, across the life course. Methodological findings indicate that in order to produce ethical research it is important to recognise the spaces in which the researcher and participant negotiate boundaries, as the researcher’s identity does effect the research process. Recommendations from this research suggest that in order to gain a better understanding of older SAM women’s experiences of old age and ageing, a multi-dimensional theoretical approach to age is required. Moreover, this approach needs to take into account the fluid and overlapping constructs of transcultural, transnational and translocational positionalities which additionally embrace insider/outsider binaries.

Native American women played a key role in negotiating relations between settler and Native society, especially through their relationships with white men. Yet they have traditionally languished on the sidelines of Native American and colonial American history, often viewed as subordinate and thus tangential to the key themes of these histories. This dissertation redresses the imbalance by locating women at the centre of a narrative that has been dominated by discourses in masculine aspirations. It explores the variety of relations that developed between men and women of two frontier societies in eighteenth century North America: the Creeks of the Southeast, and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia. This dissertation complicates existing histories of Native and colonial America by providing a study of Indian culture that, in a reversal of traditional inquiry, asks how Native women categorised and incorporated white people into their physical and spiritual worlds. One method was through ritualised violence and torture of captives. As primary agents of this process women often selected, rejected or adopted men into the tribes, depending on factors that ranged from nationality to religion. Such acts challenged contemporary Euro-American wisdom that ordained a nurturing, auxiliary role for women. However, this thesis shows that ‘anomalous’ violent behaviours of Indian women were rooted in a femininity inculcated from an early age. In this volatile world, women were not shielded from the horrors of war. Instead, they became one of those horrors. Therefore, viewing anomalous actions as central to the analysis provides an understanding of female identities outwith the straitjacket of the Euro-American gender binary. With violence as a legitimate and natural expression of feminine power, the Indian woman’s character was far removed from depictions of the sexualised exotic, self-sacrificing Pocahontas or stoic Sacagawea. The focus on women’s violent customs, which embodied several important and unusual manifestations of Native American femininity, reveals a number of jarring behaviours that have found no home within colonial literatures. These behaviours included sanctioned infanticide and abortions, brutal tests for adolescents, scalp dancing and death rites, cannibalism, mercenary wives and sadistic grandmothers. With limited means of incorporating such female characteristics into pre-existing gender categories, the women’s acts were historically treated as non-representative of regular Indian lifeways and thus dismissed. Colonial relations are therefore analysed through an alternative lens to accommodate these acts. This allows women to construct their own narrative in a volatile landscape that largely sought to exclude those voices, voices that challenged dominant ideologies on appropriate male-female relations. By constructing a new gender framework I show that violence was a vehicle by which women realised, promoted and reinforced their tribal standing.

Muslim family members constitute a significant migration flow to the UK (Kofman et al., 2013). Despite such observations, this form of mobility is under-explored in geographic scholarship on migration. Accordingly, this thesis examines the subjective experiences of migration of a small group of Muslim women, who migrated either with or to join their families in Scotland. Participant observation, focus groups and the life narratives of eight women are used to gain an in-depth understanding of both the reasons for and the consequences of migration for this group of Muslim women. In addition, this thesis examines the role of a secular community-based organisation in supporting migrants in their everyday lives. Drawing on conceptual approaches to migration, this study reveals diverse and complex motivations among participants in “choosing” to migrate. Far from “victims” or “trailing wives”, participants privileged their children's needs but also the possibility to transform their sense of self through migration. The study draws attention to the struggles of daily life in Scotland where, bereft of extended family, the synchronisation of migration with childbirth resulted in some participants enduring years of isolation. Such struggles resulted in changes in the home, with husbands providing both physical and emotional support. The experience of migration affected the women's religious identities, providing solace as well as a way to assert belonging in Scotland by drawing on Islamic theology. The community-based organisation provided a “safe space”, bridging the secular and non-secular and offering women the chance to socialise, learn and volunteer. The study shows that volunteering provided not only a way into paid work but also shaped women's subjectivities and home lives. However, the re-direction of national government funding towards “Muslim problems” threatens to undermine the organisation's ability to continue to meet the local needs of Muslim migrant women.

La recherche que nous menons tend à interroger la domination masculine et l’égalité des sexes en tant que sujets conflictuels au sein de la société turque. Cette domination soumet la femme au père puis au mari, ainsi qu’à tous les hommes de son entourage. Les étudiantes féministes laïques et kémalistes considèrent que cette domination trouve ses origines dans le Coran qui encouragerait la soumission des femmes. Les étudiantes féministes islamiques stipulent que c’est la tradition et les multiples interprétations du Coran qui expliquent la domination masculine. De plus, la laïcité est également en tension chez ces groupes d’étudiantes. Les étudiantes laïques et kémalistes craignent de voir disparaitre le principe de la neutralité inscrit dans la laïcité, au détriment d’une Turquie devenant de plus en plus religieuse. Les étudiantes islamiques, quant à elles, critiquent ouvertement la laïcité qui serait source de discrimination et surtout responsable de l’inégalité entre les sexes. Les deux groupes d’étudiantes féministes ont vécu des expériences qui influencent leurs représentations sociales et leurs comportements, qui seront analysés à travers ce travail de recherche. / In our research, we aim at understanding the reasons of male dominance and gender inequality; a conflictive topic within Turkish society. This dominance imposes the women to obey firstly to their father and then to their husband, as well as all the men around her. Feminist students that also define themselves as secular and “Kemalist” consider that this dominance find their roots in the Quran, which would encourage female submission. As to the Islamic feminist students, they point out that tradition and various interpretations of the Quran may explain this male dominance. Moreover, secularism is also a cause of tension between Kemalist and Islamic students. The Kemalist students are afraid that the principle of neutrality that is a part of secularism will disappear, at the expense of a more religious Turkey. On the other side, Islamic students criticize secularism, as the origin of women segregation and responsible of the inequalities between genders. Indeed, both feminist students groups have distinct experiences that influence their social perceptions and behaviours, which will be analysed through this research work.

Sierra Leone is in transition to peace and development, from a previous decade long civil war. Educated Muslim women appear to have a great deal of expression, interest and passion to offer the process. The study investigates the new emerging social sub group of professional Muslim women in Sierra Leone society and explores their views and experiences of identifying and attempting to overcome the burdens of patriarchy, oppression and exploitation perpetrated by religious, social and cultural beliefs. The research and thesis consider in what ways these women and their views ‘fit’ in or challenge society and their perceptions of the potential they have as models to impact on the lives of Sierra Leonean Muslim women nationwide. Using feminist influenced research practices in order to focus on the stories and voices of these women, the study contributes to the growth of knowledge related to the emergent changing roles and perceptions of Muslim women in present day Sierra Leone. This qualitative and interdisciplinary research develops a critical focus and deliberately combines literary sources in an informative context, with feminist research methods of interviews and focus groups on issues of gender equality and empowerment. Through the interviews and focus group discussions conducted, the research portrays the perceptions of the emerging social sub group of professional Muslim women, a cross section of grass-root Muslim women and a selection of male Muslims regarding empowerment, knowledge, culture, independence and oppression. These are also illustrated as the ways the participants embrace the concept of feminism and adapt it by drawing on their Sierra Leonean, Islamic, cultural and social traditions. The research examines the various ideologies that stifle the growth of Sierra Leonean Muslim women from their perspective and it analyses the strategies used by the professional women to tackle the oppressive and repressive customs and stand up against patriarchy. It was discovered through the findings that the research gives an insight into the determination and the conviction of professional Muslim women in advocating for social change and in making their voices heard. As an outcome, it is evidenced that this emerging social sub group of Muslim women appear to be inspiring self-development moves and changes not only among the uneducated grass-root majority, but in the fold of their Muslim men-folk, resulting in a visible impact of self development and self empowerment among Sierra Leonean Muslim women.