The New Mobilities Paradigm (Urry, 2007) and contemporary geographies understand places as sites of movement and flow that are dynamically related to other spaces (Massey, 1994). However religious places are traditionally treated as static or fixed entities and privilege institutional, rather than personal, spatialities of religion. As contemporary sociologies of religion (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005; Davie, 2006) recognise a shift from communal obligation models of social life to an emphasis on personal fulfilment and wellbeing, geographies of religion (Kong, 2010) have also addressed the individual’s spiritual practices and beliefs outside of the ‘official’ institutional spaces of religion. This research examined the interaction between everyday mobilities and personal spiritual practices of Baptist church and Buddhist meditation centre attendees using a mixed methods approach (participant-observation; questionnaires; diary-interviews) to evidence a variety of practices at home, work, recreation and the journeys made between such sites. Local and global flows of virtual, communicative and imagined mobilities in the churches and meditation centres were also identified. Participants were found to thread together a variety of sites on their everyday time-space paths into what I term ‘subjective spiritual geographies’ in which they could engage and maintain their spiritual practices and beliefs. Participants drew upon a wide range of materials and mobilities in both pre-planned ‘strategic’ and improvised ‘tactical’ sets of response to situations and in doing so created critical spaces of contemporary secular, mobilities infiltrated society. The thesis contributes to existing geographies of religion literature by evidencing the personal spiritual practices of the individual as well as local and global scales of religious places of congregation. It builds upon this literature by suggesting the implication of a range of mobilities is a key component in constructing places for spiritual practices and destabilises assumptions of the identity and distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ spaces.

Does democracy lead to less income inequality? The intuition behind this question is simple and appealing: how well does political equality translate into economic equality? Although there are philosophical and theoretical foundations for the expectation that democracy should lead to less income inequality, empirical evidence, especially those from recent studies, has not been very robust. To contribute to the discussion, instead of repeating the analysis with an updated dataset or slightly different coverage, this project introduces several new perspectives to enhance our understanding towards the relationship between democracy and income inequality. Each question below corresponds to one of the chapters included in this research. First, is democracy still a relevant concept in determining income inequality if no direct associations can be found? Secondly, should the effect of democracy be considered from a long-term perspective? Thirdly, can the theoretical foundations of democratic redistribution be strengthened? And finally, should we regard concepts like government spending as a homogenous category and expect uniform effects from them? The answers to these questions can hopefully shine light on the true relationship between democracy and income inequality.

La jeunesse des classes populaires vivant sur les territoires ruraux et désindustrialisés connait un mode "d'entrée dans la vie adulte" marqué par la précarité professionnelle. Cette thèse propose d'étudier les modes de sociabilité et d'accès à l'autonomie de jeunes hommes et femmes rencontrés sur deux zones désindustrialisées situées en région Picardie. En mobilisant des données statistiques et des matériaux ethnographiques, nous montrerons que les obstacles pour accéder à l'emploi stable engendrent une incapacité à formuler des projets d'ordres familiaux, et une impossibilité d'accès à l'autonomie résidentielle et matérielle. Les jeunes se trouvent alors "enfermés" dans le temps présent et sur le territoire proche. Ce dernier apparaît comme l'espace de structuration de modes de sociabilité particuliers, et de formes singulières d'appartenance et d'identité. Les réseaux locaux, particulièrement la famille et les "bandes de copains", vont alors servir d'appuis pour contrebalancer les diverses formes de relégations dont font l'objet les jeunes des classes populaires rurales. Les jeunes femmes trouvent dans les rôles familiaux de substitution ou dans la maternité les ressources pour entamer la construction d'une respectabilité adulte. Les jeunes hommes se centrent, pour leur part, sur les réseaux d'amitié tissés dès l'enfance pour trouver des formes de confirmation sociale. La famille et les groupes de pairs génèrent des formes de reconnaissance sociale et d'identités collectives, induisant une recomposition des visions du "nous" et du "eux" dans les représentations du monde propres à la fraction de génération considérée / Youth of working classes living in rural and non-industrialized areas knows a particular way of «transition to adulthood» strongly marked by professional precariousness. This thesis proposes to study ways of sociability and ways of “empowerment” for young men and women in two non-industrialized areas in Picardy.By collecting statistical information (in areas and job markets) and ethnographical materials (collected from youth and their families or people working in structures for integration or professional training), the obstacles to get a stable job cause an inability to formulate family plans and a lack of material and residential empowerments. The youth get «locked» into the present time and in the local area. Indeed, the latter seems to be like the space in which family and friendly sociabilities develop and where particular forms of social belonging and identity. Local networks like family and “bands of folks” can be a support to counteract at least in part the different forms of relegation the youth of working classes experience. Young women find the resources in alternative family roles or in motherhood to start building an adult respectability (because of the assumption of responsibilities in the family sphere). Young men focus on networks of friendship developed from childhood to find forms of social confirmation. Therefore family and peer groups are spaces where particular forms of social acknowledgement and collective identities develop, resulting in a restructuring of the visions of «us» and «them» in the representations of the world particular to the part of the generation considered.

This thesis is about the emergence, materializations, and transformations of revolutionary subjectivity amongst male Syrian migrant workers in Beirut. It documents how these processes surfaced within, and impacted on, their daily life. On the basis of over twenty-four months of participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and oral history collection, it identifies some of the key mechanisms through which the uprising was experienced and lived out at a distance. For an extended period, Lebanon has maintained a significant population of Syrian migrant workers. Many arrived in Beirut before the first rumblings of the uprising, but when it broke, some temporarily returned to Syria hoping to participate via peaceful protest or, later, armed resistance. Yet many also found space in Beirut, through new communication technology and face-to-face interaction, to take part in the uprising. The often neglected perspective of Syria’s labouring diaspora is critical because, for these ‘rebel-workers,’ the same socio-economic pressures that structured their initial decisions to migrate from the countryside to sell labour power in the city resembles what many have identified as the material foundations for the uprising itself. The study begins with an outline of Syria’s history and its political economy to reveal how the Ba’athist state once achieved a degree of legitimacy amongst impoverished and rural workers. Legitimacy was won with thanks to a system that prevented absolute poverty and rising inequality. When this system collapsed, a major support base for the state fell away. From this foundation, the remaining chapters describe how the journey to ‘rebel’ became variously represented, reinforced and re-made. To reveal how uprisings are experienced at a distance, and how rebel identities form in conditions of displacement, these subjective processes are described in chapters that evaluate, in turn, the nature of populist political language; the role of electronically circulated art objects; the emergence of martyrdom commemoration practices across new media networks; the challenges to maintaining patriarchal gender identity in exile and finally the proliferation of conspiratorial discourse. I conclude that the Syrian uprising was fundamentally populist in nature and thus powerfully explosive, but external structures ultimately determined its transformation into a simultaneously civil and proxy war. While this transformation was at first ‘resisted,’ these revolutionary subjectivities ultimately appeared as if they were beginning to fold into, and reflect, the degradation of the uprising itself.

The Overarching Question How, when and why do migrant people in Hull “display family”, both locally and transnationally? How is display interpreted by the local community and does this have implications for community cohesion? Aims and Objectives of the Study Aim One: To understand how, when and why migrant people in Hull “display family”, both locally and transnationally. Related Objectives: *To understand how migrant families display in the public arena; *To understand if and how migrant “family display” changes with context, for example, in transnational communication, when in the presence of indigenous populations or when in the presence of co-located members of their home area networks; *To understand if and how migrant “family display” changes over time, for example, at different stages in their migration story, if a family member leaves or arrives, or when family children start school. Aim Two: To understand how display is interpreted by the local community. Related objectives: *To explore how indigenous people describe migrant “family display”; *To explore what meaning indigenous people give to migrant “family display”; *To understand what factors influence indigenous interpretations of migrant “family display”. Aim Three: To explore if local community interpretation of “family display” has implications for community cohesion in Hull. Related objectives: *To explore how all families, migrant and indigenous, interact at sites of public “family display”; *To understand if and how individual indigenous responses to migrant “family display” correlate with individual opinion towards migrants in the city.

This thesis provides an auto-ethnographically informed ‘making strange’ of the mise-en-scène of Irish working class domesticity in the North West of England as it was lived during the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s. The liminality of being a child of migrant parents is considered and the interstices of experience and identity in and of England and Ireland, Englishness and Irishness are explored. The first chapter of the thesis draws the reader into the initial frame of reference, the personal childhood ethnography that inspired this wider study, and considers Bhabha’s ‘shadow of the nation’ falling ‘on the condition of exile’ as one context for the development of individual identities. The second chapter examines the ways in which a performance studies approach provides a useful method for interrogating matters of place, personhood and citizenship whilst the third chapter introduces performance theory as a mechanism for exploring the ways in which quotidian and cultural performance have been harnessed as tools of negotiation. These are sometimes resistant, sometimes affirmative and sometimes celebratory acts in the construction of new identities. Ongoing performances reveal the embodied histories of individual performers, shaped in part by culture and memory, masking and unmasking to both construct and reveal layered identities. The fourth chapter, provides the most obvious example of traditional fieldwork, and draws on interview extracts to provide key insights into aspects of the diasporic context, identifying and analyzing the many rehearsal and performance opportunities provided by growing up in Irish households in England, where identities were initially formed, informed, and performed. Bridging the distinction between autoethnography, performance ethnography and the ethnography of performance, this chapter engages in discussion with a range of contributors defamiliarising the domestic mise-en-scène whilst simultaneously recognizing a commonality of experience. These interviews are themselves a celebration of Irish identity performance and form an important bridge between the theoretical framework explored in the opening chapters and the subsequent case studies. The final section of the thesis searches out a mirroring of these processes in the construction of theatrical and mediatised performance – providing opportunities to both utilize and observe performance ethnography and the ethnography of performance. It is suggested that Terry Christian provides an affirmative yet angry celebration in a complex performed response to a complex mise-en-scène. A new reading of Steve Coogan’s work then suggests three modes of performance: first, Coogan the outsider satirises British mores; second, Coogan plays sophisticated games of revealing and masking multiple versions of self; third, a searching and ultimately serious engagement with his engagement with Ireland. The application of a performance theory perspective, in the context of this fraction of the Irish diaspora, reveals a playful and generous spirited approach to complex and serious matters of identity and place in the world – to the ways in which lives are led and meanings made through and for the generation of performance.

This thesis aims at systematically investigating intergenerational class mobility in contemporary China between 1996 and 2006, a period of time that largely overlaps the third decade of the country’s reform era. The study seeks answers to the following questions: 1) to what extent Chinese are found in class positions that differ from their class origins; 2) whether the amount of intergenerational mobility increased during the decade in question; 3) whether China has become a more equal society in terms of social mobility; 4) what are the overall patterns of social fluidity in China; and, 5) how mobility outcomes are affected by work-life mobility and various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, such as gender and the household registration (hukou) background.This research uses nationally representative survey data from three surveys – the Life Histories and Social Change Survey (1996) and the Chinese General Social Surveys (CGSS 2005 and CGSS 2006). I adopt the class structural approach and the EGP (Erikson-Goldthorpe-Protocarero) class schema. Various statistical methods are employed to explore the above issues: descriptive analysis for changes of China’s class structure, absolute rates of mobility and work-life mobility from the first job class to class of destination; log-linear and log-multiplicative analysis for trends and between-group differences in relative mobility; the Hauser-type density levels model and the core model of social fluidity for patterns of social fluidity; and the Stereotype Ordinal Regression Model for multivariate analysis of mobility outcomes. During the decade, China has become a more ‘mobile’ society in an upgraded structural context. While the relative size of the agricultural sector contracted substantially, there is a significant increase in the non-agricultural ‘room’ for occupational attainment, especially in the routine non-manual class and manual working classes. However, the analysis of relative mobility shows that the significant increase in total mobility and upward mobility has resulted mainly from structural changes. Between 1996 and 2006, the origin-destination association net of structural effects has been largely stable. Hence, the study provides little evidence in support of a more equal Chinese society. As regards gender differences, Chinese women are less socially mobile than men, and their mobility outcomes tend to be more affected than men by their social origin.In fitting the density levels model and the core model of social fluidity to the pooled data, I show that the highest likelihood of occurrence lies with the self-inheritance of peasants as well as small business owners. In contrast, mobility between the agricultural sector and non-manual classes displays the lowest likelihood of occurrence. While relative chances of mobility for both men and women are heavily affected the boundary between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, women are further subject to the hierarchical effect that hinders long-range mobility. In the final part of the empirical analyses, I reveal the decisive role that the first job class plays in mobility processes in China. The results of the multivariate analysis also indicate that the institutional barriers imposed by the hukou system have a striking negative effect on mobility chances.

As a founding member of the Via Campesina (1993) and active participant in the Global Justice Movement (the altermondialiste movement in France), the Confederation paysanne (CP) - which literally stands for 'peasant confederation' - has been presented in academic and activist circles as a key player in the struggle against neoliberal globalisation, and as a contributor to the emergence of new transnational activist networks and a 'global civil society'. As a trade union representing the interests of 'peasants', the CP has been praised as an innovative form of professional organisation whose originality lies in its ability to defend farmers' interests while at the same time responding to a broader set of challenges for the planet and those who populate it (environmental degradation, cultural homogeneity, social injustice). As a result, the CP - and in particular its emblematic leader Jose Bove - was rapidly propelled to the forefront of a new progressive avant-garde whose discourse on the cultural and economic threats of neoliberalism found a positive echo in farming and non-farming circles alike. -- Yet, as I shall argue throughout the following pages, the CP's success was not only related to its successful response to the new challenges for the 'peasantry' and society but also to its re-appropriation of popular and essentialist representations of 'peasantness' as a timeless and intrinsically egalitarian condition. From the moment that we recognise this, our understanding of the union's evolving popularity changes. Many observers and activists, for example, explained the CP's disappointing result in the 2007 professional elections by arguing that the CP was ahead of its time.