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HIV prevention policies and research on sex tourism in South-East Asia has focused predominantly upon female sex workers catering for heterosexual male tourists. However, sex tourists can no longer be presumed to be solely male and heterosexual, nor sex workers. This thesis argues that theoretical and policy frameworks for sex tourism need to be ‘queered’ and examines the burgeoning gay, transgender and female markets in the region. Moreover, it is not only sex workers and tourists that are becoming increasingly heterogeneous, but also sexual-economic exchanges, with the growth of ‘indirect’ sex work resulting in more diverse forms of monetary exchange, interaction and places of encounter. This project is founded upon twelve months of fieldwork, over the course of three years, in Phuket, Thailand and Bali, Indonesia. My research comprised a multi-method ethnographic approach, combining participant observation, interviews, focus groups and sexual diaries. I explore the imaginative, embodied and micro-geographies involved in gay, transgender and female sex tourism in these two resorts. The thesis aims to deconstruct, demystify and ‘queer’ sex tourism, and argues for a more holistic definition of the phenomenon, which incorporates sex workers and tourists of all genders and sexualities. Such a framework disrupts understandings of sex tourism primarily as an expression of patriarchy. Throughout, I stress the significance of place as a setting for the negotiation of sexual identity and behaviour, which leads me to reflect upon its significance for understanding the practices by which HIV is transmitted. Hence I conclude by discussing the utility of place-based approaches in HIV prevention and assert that interventions must address the complex interaction between individual risk, the environment and structures of vulnerability at a range of spatial scales.

This study explores the reasons that more and more Filipino women are seeking overseas contract work (OCW) and why so many choose to repeat the migration cycle. The experiences of overseas female Filipino workers (OFFWs) are analysed within the framework of social exclusion theory (SET). Analytical concepts, such as capital and arena, are adapted from Bourdieu in order to enrich SET with cultural and personal dimensions. OFFWs are understood as socials agents acting within overlapping social, economic, and political arenas before, during, and after OCW. Social exclusion is defined as lack of full participation in an arena in which a social agent acts. Exclusion in home arenas, for example unemployment and frustrated social aspirations, are examined, as are exclusions within the arenas of labour migration itself, for example in recruitment fees and restrictions on freedom of movement in the host country. The ways in which state policy and political and market dynamics support these exclusions is addressed. Questionnaires and interviews of current and former OFFWs reveal the considerable extent to which choices related to migration are influenced by local ideologies of age and gender, and by local social patterns. It was found that OFFWs voluntarily risk exclusion in the arenas of overseas contract work in hopes of overcoming exclusion for themselves and their families in the arenas at home in the Philippines. Short-term success and long-term failure of OCW to overcome exclusion in home arenas motivate many women to repeat their migration. The dissertation argues that persistent exclusion in the home arenas may be partly due to incommensurabilities among the various (social, economic, local, international) arenas in which OFFWs act, such that overcoming exclusion in one arena engenders exclusion in another.

This thesis takes a multi-method approach to analyse critically the role of scientific advice in policy making on the island of Montserrat in the West Indies. It employs participant observation, interviews and documentary analysis, along with a global survey of volcanologists, to assess the process from scientific observation to evacuation. Chapter 1 provides the rationale for the thesis, and discusses the methods, and the history of Montserrat. Chapter 2 discusses the recent history of volcanology, and its research directions, arguing that this is closely related to recent eruptions and that there are multiple knowledges involved in the progression of the science. Chapters 3 to 5 examine both quantitative and qualitative data. A survey carried out in 2008-2009 is combined with examples from Montserrat to draw some conclusions about the social context of volcanology. Chapter 3 examines epistemological issues, arguing that volcanology combines research-based methods with socially driven questions in the pursuit of volcanic hazard assessment – there are mixed epistemologies involved. Chapter 4 looks at recent developments in volcano monitoring and also at the types of knowledge and interaction that are involved in managing eruptions. Chapter 5 then examines the culture of volcanology as it is played out in observations and universities. Chapters 6 to 9 focus more closely on the eruption on Montserrat. Chapter 6 describes the syn-eruption evolution of the volcanological institutions on Montserrat, arguing that this process was significantly impeded by lack of prior structures. Chapter 7 examines the geographical nature of risk on Montserrat – human and physical. Chapter 8 argues that a degree of reflexivity was present in the development of scientific advice on Montserrat, and has an important role beyond this eruption. Chapter 9 examines the social context of expert elicitation in detail.

This dissertation explores the struggles over identity and place in a small Afro-Caribbean village on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. Cahuita, founded by Afro-Caribbean migrants in the early twentieth century, and until decades ago a village of farmers and fishermen virtually ignored by the national government, is now one of the Caribbean coast's main tourist attractions. Already engaged in battles against the perceived discrimination of the government, the turn to tourism provided Cahuitans with reason <i>and</i> ammunition for their continuing <i>lucha</i> ("fight"). The <i>lucha </i>is engaged in as an argument over Cahuita's meaning as a place, and by implication, Cahuitans' position as Costa Ricans. Cahuita comprises a contested micro-politics that begins between and among various categories of resident and visitors and often extends to the ongoing negotiations with the nation-state. Cahuita is constructed through (re)imaginings of place and time, as actors locate themselves in relation to the past, present and future, to the local, the national and the international, and to others' "makings" of the village. This dissertation shows that contested use of the past, and of the tropes of the "Caribbean" and the "Rastafarian", stand at the centre of life in this village. Through discursive and performative acts and particular readings of the landscape, actors stake their claim to the village and beyond. A sense of liminality pervades throughout, which proves to be both a source of anxiety and of creativity. This dissertation contributes to existing literature in various ways. While discussions of national-level involvement in tourism often focus on pragmatic state-level economic or development considerations, I show that this engagement is part of a process guided by and reflecting complex conceptions of national identity, which leads to a fragmented "tourism industry", and at the same time heralds a potential reconfiguration of the national imaginary.