This study focuses upon the relatively unexplored area of sexual harassment in British universities. In sum, the thesis suggests that although MacKinnon's (2004) aim is to enable women to feel more powerful and less stigmatised, the contribution of feminist harassment discourses may, in part, generate in some women an understanding of powerlessness and vulnerability. In particular, it suggests seemingly prevailing discourses surrounding sexual harassment in higher education and considers if and how the women interviewed define themselves through these discourses. Thus, by exploring the power effects of and resistances to these suggested prevailing discourses, it is possible to infer the degree to which these discourses may have constituted the participants' subjectivities. Further, the thesis argues that feminist harassment discourses may have generated specific effects of power with regard to my participants. That is to say, many of my participants seem to understand sexual harassment as exploitative behaviours rooted in the unequal distribution of ascribed power in higher education. Feminism's understanding of power as a static and gendered appears to have generated for the participants, at least in part, the understanding that sex at work is used to humiliate and degrade women, maintaining and reproducing ascribed notions of power. For this research, twenty-four unstructured interviews were carried out with women who had identified themselves as having experienced sexual harassment within higher education, either as a student or a member of staff, or who had witnessed events they had defined as sexual harassment. This was a passionately interested form of inquiry, recognising the partial nature of knowledge and identifying my political positionings (Gill 1995; Aranda 2006). The analysis is Foucauldian oriented, understanding power as fluid - rather than possessed - and as generating particular ways of being. In addition, although it notes that the participants did resists specific effects of power, this resistance always takes place from a new point of power and does not, therefore, carry us beyond power into a power free space. The prevailing discourses suggested from my data are: the 'grades for sex' discourse; the 'all boys together' discourse; the 'trustworthy lecturer' discourse; the 'knickers in a twist' discourse; and the 'sexual harassment as unwanted sexual behaviour' discourse. Supervisors: Dr. Kristin Aune and Dr. Gordon Riches

The study of sport initiations is in its infancy. So far, the North American-centric research has focussed on ‘exposing and condemning’ morally unacceptable initiation activities, which are referred to as hazing. Hazing moral panics in North America has resulted in universities utilising sport initiation empirical research to construct anti-hazing policies; policies proven to be ineffective in banning sport initiations. The purpose of this research is to address some of the gaps in the knowledge of sport initiations. A two stage ethnographic research approach was utilised to collect information on British university sport initiations. An international student embedded himself as a student-athlete within a British university to learn the cultural meanings of a foreign sport culture and to possess an emic perspective. Semi-structured interviews were then conducted with key policy actors possessing differing organisational cultural perspectives (differentiational and fragmentational), specifically university staff and sport - rugby union, football, and track and field - club members from multiple higher education institutions. The researcher’s ethnographic confessional tale of his experience as a self-funded international student is combined with the data from interviewee participants to construct British university sport initiations as a resistance research topic.