The two main sites of research are in south London: one, the street market stall of a Yoruba woman and her extended social networks; the other, an independent Yoruba Pentecostal church, its leaders and members. The individual chapters draw comparisons between the market and the church, focussing on the practices undertaken and materials used to achieve physical, spiritual and social well-being, where well-being is conceptualized through the idiom of circulation. Physical health is considered by examining external material agents and their various properties for improving physical circulation and their social benefits. After, money, gifts and services, and their uses in creating useful (i.e.: reciprocal) social networks are explored as are the effects these exchange relations have on the capacity of individuals to realize themselves within a community. Exchange relations with God are addressed next, wherein exchanges are undertaken to gain a better quality of life, and to become members of a conceptual Kingdom whose power and dominion is beyond that of any nation. Lastly, children are considered, both in their mediating roles between their forebears and the resources they wish to access, and in their own right as agents who create relations for themselves, which impinge upon their identification and wellbeing as persons. This thesis shows that Yoruba Nigerians in London attain well-being by both reaffirming and expanding their identities, through the circulation of transnational goods, practices and ideas.

Background Cape Verde has produced migrants over the centuries. Its history and geography have compelled males and females to leave their homeland in search of resources to invest in their family s survival and development. Literature on parental investment has evidenced the association between investment in embodied capital during infancy and early childhood and its outcomes at later stages. However, these studies seldom address migrant population. Aim This study aims to gain a better understanding of the relationship in a migratory context between parental investment in infancy and its outcomes in prepuberty embodied capital, among Cape Verdean children living in Cova da Moura, a deprived neighbourhood in Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Portugal. Methods A mixed method s approach combining quantitative with qualitative studies - is used. The prepubertal capital of the 221 schoolchildren attending the basic school located in Cova da Moura is assessed through Anthropometry and educational records analysis. The parental investment in infancy of 75 is analysed through interviews with parents and combined documentation (e.g. health booklets, reports, legislation). Results The key findings are: 1)Children are born and raised between 1997 and 2002, a time characterized by a favourable socioeconomic development in Portugal in general and Cova da Moura in particular. 2)In spite of living in a so called deprived neighbourhood , the school children linear growth falls into the healthy range of the III NHANES growth reference, and it is slightly better than the linear growth of other groups of children measured in Portugal in late 1980s and early 2000. School-oriented cognitive development is not adequate, however. A third of the students have not a regular school performance. 3)Parental investment in infancy is significantly associated to prepubertal physical growth and school-oriented cognitive development. The size effect is, however, small.

Studies of migration are usually about movement, but what about people who aspire to migrate but whose attempts to do so remain largely unsuccessful? The focus of this thesis is not migration per se, but people’s aspirations of transnational mobility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2007 in Ziguinchor, a crossroads town in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, this thesis examines how men and women imagine and attempt to cross international borders. It is important to consider the push and pull factors behind their aspirations: why does their current situation make them want to leave Senegal, and equally, why are they attracted to the West? I use four examples to address the importance of migration in the life-trajectories of Senegalese people. I discuss how some women have turned to online-dating websites in the hope of forming relationships with European men who could lead to a future outside of Senegal. I then consider a group of women for whom sex-work is not just a way of making money but a migration strategy in its own right. Men also aspire to migrate, and using the examples of côtéman (local beach-boys) and clandestine migrants boarding pirogues to the Canary Islands I discuss male strategies for departure. Côtéman claim that ‘making contacts’ with tourists is a means to migrating, whereas unlike the other strategies discussed in this thesis, clandestine migrants do more than just imagine and embark on illegal sea voyages in the hope of arriving in Europe. Whilst there are many similarities between male and female migratory aspirations, we can see very distinct gender differences: women are seeking relationships of dependence on which to base their futures, whereas men only want temporary assistance. These new migration strategies exist within a West African country that has a long and complex history of migrations. Rather than concentrating on the importance of existing migratory networks, however, this thesis discusses very individualised ways of thinking about migration. Some of the choices made by hopeful migrants may appear to be both psychologically and financially irrational, but I show the reasons behind their decisions to invest time and effort into migration strategies that remain largely unsuccessful.

A paucity of knowledge of social care services to transgender people in Scotland led to this research. Medical and social care services take very different approaches to the needs of migratory transgender people. The research design involved online questionnaires and interviews with statutory service commissioners and providers, and with voluntary organisations and transgender people themselves. A framework of three research questions underpinned the research, firstly looking at the nature of dedicated and generic support services in Scotland, secondly exploring assistance relating to transgender identity and status, and thirdly considering additional support to transgender people within their relationships and their communities. Data analysis was influenced by grounded theory in the development of themes and sub-themes which structured the research findings. The research findings indicate limited planning, guidance, training and policy development to facilitate access to generic services by transgender people. Dedicated service provision was found to be often limited to adults during transition whilst transgender children and young people, and family members including partners and parents, received limited support. A range of alternative sources of support, including transgender support groups, gender specialists, GPs, counsellors/psychiatrists and social care staff, were found to provide varying levels of support to transgender people with gender identity, transition, family support, documentation, transgender linked mental health problems and with long-term physical or other mental ill health issues. Approximately half of transgender respondents indicated that social work advice and support would be valued for each of the above categories, and that additional support would also be valued regarding making plans for the future, conflicts with family, friends, colleagues or neighbours, social isolation, social rejection, and with developing a more confident community presence. The thesis concludes with a proposal for a re-balancing of the historical systematic ‘medicalization’ of transgender, by a process of socializing transgender, through advocacy work seeking greater understanding and acceptance of transgender people and the adoption of a transgender legal status, and through the provision of the wide range of additional social care support to transgender people noted above, particularly during the socialization phase of transition and beyond.

The collapse of Nazi Germany was accompanied by a humanitarian disaster of staggering proportions. The newly-founded United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its successor the International Refugee Organization (IRO) identified repairing the damage that the war had inflicted on Allied displaced populations as one of its foremost humanitarian obligations. These UN agencies cast themselves as pre-eminent agents of ‘rehabilitation’, facilitating a fast transition from war to peace through scientific methods of refugee management conducted along Rooseveltian lines. Departing from earlier relief efforts, their ambition was to provide more than a mere ‘soup kitchen’ charity, their aim being to ‘rehabilitate’ Displaced Persons (DPs). Their methods were, however, vigorously contested in the field by military and occupation authorities, by members of established voluntary societies, and by UNRRA/IRO’s own continental recruits. This thesis explores these confrontations through the lens of French DP administration. Although these UN agencies proclaimed a new era of internationalism, solutions to DP problems were often defined in nationalist terms. DPs were organised by ethnicity and strong ties attached relief workers to their own national groups. For French planners and humanitarian workers, the DP question was much more than a humanitarian problem, and was bound up with issues of domestic reconstruction, culture and identity as much as the provision of medical aid and relief. This thesis demonstrates that distinctive diplomatic constraints, economic requirements and cultural differences influenced the thought and practices of refugee humanitarianism, shaping alternate ways of arranging interim provision and ‘rehabilitating’ DPs in the French zone of occupation. Despite the fact that Allied responses to the DP problem mirrored divergent wartime experiences and differing national visions for the post-war future, this thesis argues that the history of UNRRA and the IRO in the French zone cannot be solely understood as a story of inter-Allied confrontation and clashes of political culture. Numerous transfers of expertise and the circulation of ideas and people between the zones belie such a view. New-Deal influenced methods penetrated the French zone and local UNRRA/IRO staff progressively embraced the organizations’ declared mission of ‘self-help’, albeit on terms that reflected their particular interpretation of DPs’ best interests. The real impact of UNRRA and the IRO lies in this grey area of subtle processes of imitation and re-interpretation.