In recent years urban violence has become understood as a 'reproduced', multi-causal and socially generated phenomenon. Less is understood about why young men reproduce the majority of this violence. This thesis uses original empirical data based on thirty-two life-histories of youths living in two poor and violent neighbourhoods in Medellín, Colombia. It argues that urban violence is reproduced by male youths because it is linked to 'masculinity'; that is, the process of 'becoming men' where youths strive to fulfil productive or 'successful' models of masculinity. These processes are related to contexts of poverty, inequality and exclusion, so this thesis does not reduce the generation of urban violence to masculinity alone. Rather, understanding masculinity provides us with further insight into the reproduction of violence. This thesis further argues that male youths are disposed by their habitus - after Pierre Bourdieu - to negotiate a pathway to manhood that largely reflects traditional masculine values in their context. Striving to achieve prevailing versions of manhood contributed to some of these youths joining armed groups, such as gangs. The gang acted as a mechanism to fulfil their dispositions to become men, by providing them with a way to perform a version of 'successful' masculinity. This is prevalent in urban contexts of exclusion and high levels of social violence, because there are limited opportunities to achieve legal and dignified versions of manhood, whilst there are significant opportunities to join the local gang. The youths interviewed that did not join gangs tended to come from families that taught them to reject violence at a young age, whilst supporting them in pursuing alternative pathways to manhood. Youths that joined gangs tended to have more problems at home and often had family members already in gangs.

Internationally the contribution that teachers’ learning can make in bringing about change in education, by improving outcomes for young people, is a topic of ongoing interest. Influenced by discourses of professionalism, in Scotland education policy has developed over time to support and structure teacher learning throughout the teaching career. However, the lived experience of being a teacher is a socially constructed act located in multiple realities. Policy in action may, or may not, reflect the intentions of policy makers. Within the context of Primary Education, in which 92% of teachers are women, this qualitative study explores women Primary Teachers’ experiences and understandings of professional learning. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 women Primary Teachers and 12 opinion shapers. Critical analysis of relevant educational policy also took place in order to explore dominant policy discourses. A Grounded Theory approach was adapted for data analysis and theory construction. Sensitised by thinking tools provided by feminist theory and Bourdieu, the findings suggest early schooling plays an important part in shaping experiences and understandings of learning. Moreover, gender matters in understanding women Primary Teachers’ experiences and understandings of learning. Early gendered learning identities seemed to notably influence how learning was negotiated and enacted later as a woman, as a teacher and thus as a professional. The woman teacher participants in this study were theorised as Caring Teachers. However, Caring Teachers is not a homogenous construct as the women performed as Nice women, as Confident women, as Kind women and as Authoritative women. Influenced by early schooling and a desire to be ‘good teachers’, the Nice and the Kind women produced themselves within traditional discourses of femininity, of compliance and subordination. This performance of a teacher was vulnerable to policy demands as, despite the rhetoric of professionalism, education policy constructs Class Teachers as technicians. In contrast, the Confident and Authoritative women, more likely to be Chartered Teachers, produced themselves somewhat differently. Their habitus predisposed them to perform as a learner with some confidence. However, although the Confident women and Authoritative women understood and enacted teacher learning differently, their learning too was constrained by the limitations of policy-sanctioned discourses. Informed by the findings of this small-scale study, I argue that teacher learning is subject to complex, interwoven understandings of woman, of learner and of teacher as professional. Attention, therefore, should be given to the interrelated nature of the aforementioned constructs as Women Primary teachers’ learning and professionalism has played, and will continue to play, an important role in shaping the outcomes available to children.

This thesis examines the emergence of the organization, the Glasgow UNESCO City of Music, following the award of the title UNESCO City of music to Glasgow in 2008 from a Bourdieusian perspective. Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus, and particularly capital are used to interrogate the negotiation of symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986) in the field of music in Glasgow. The thesis examines how the members of the organization–viewed their organization's position in the field of music in Glasgow and their attempts to secure its legitimacy in a field with established players. It shows how agents ‘work' to negotiate for the positions they want, or need, in order to establish the legitimacy, and thus the position, of an organization through the acquisition and use of capital. Although cultural capital is a core constituent of an organization's original position in the field of music the dominant and influential position of economic capital means that it is the symbolic capital associated with being granted funding rather than cultural capital, which influences and thus legitimate organizations in the cultural field. In its discussion of capital the thesis contributes to the literature on institutional work and organizational legitimacy.

This dissertation explores how social class matters in young men’s everyday relationship to digital media. The aim is to contribute to the existing knowledge about how young people incorporate digital media in their everyday lives by focusing on the structural premises of this process. It also presents an empirically grounded critique of popular ideas about young people as a “digital generation”, about the internet as a socially transformative force, and about class as an increasingly redundant category. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with 34 young men (16-19 years) from different class backgrounds, upper secondary schools and study programmes. Drawing on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu, three classes are constructed: the “cultural capital rich”, the “upwardly mobile”, and the “cultural capital poor”. The analysis shows that class, through the workings of habitus, structures the young men’s relationship to school and future aspirations. This also engenders class-distinctive ways of conceiving leisure and digital media use. Through their class habitus and taste, the young men tend to orient themselves and navigate in different ways in what they perceive as a space of digital goods and practices, endowed with different symbolic value in school and society. The “cultural capital rich” are drawn to-wards practices capable of yielding symbolic profit in the field of education and beyond, whereas the other classes gravitate towards the “illegitimate” digital culture but deal with this different ways. These findings indicate that there are social and cultural continuities at play within recent technological changes. They also expose the structural differences hidden by sweeping statements about young people as a “digital generation”. Finally, they show that class, contrary to popular beliefs about “the death of class”, still represents a pertinent analytical category.