Jineterismo, frequently used as a synonym of prostitution, became a widely used term in Cuba in the 1990s. Perceived by some as a social problem that needed to be eliminated, and as a liberating economic strategy by others, the term is discussed in major studies on contemporary Cuba and often mentioned by travel writers outside of Cuba. Some scholars define jineterismo as the new female strategy adopted by young women to obtain hard currency, on the other hand, an influential Cuban politician, criticised jineteras, stating that they were immoral and embarrassing to Cuba. This study seeks to understand the meanings and practices of jineterismo from a bottom up perspective. Using ethnography to locate answers about jineterismo, I explore the meanings of the concept based on the views of those that Cuban society labels as jineteras. The central argument put forward in this study is that jineterismo has to be analysed as a diverse set of practices caused by a diverse set of factors, and that it involves a heterogeneous group of individuals. Jineterismo, I argue, ranges from the struggle to obtain hard currency to the practices involved in developing and maintaining romantic relationships with tourists, and is strongly informed by the desire to emigrate abroad. While jineterismo currently appears to be embedded in discourses of prostitution, this thesis highlights the romantic side of jineterismo and brings to the fore young Cuban women’s perceptions of Cuban men and life in Cuba, views that contrast significantly with their positive images of Europeans and the Western world. More importantly, the thesis improves our knowledge of jineterismo by offering a new perspective into the reasons that lead young Cuban women to seek relationships outside Cuba.

The focus of this thesis is the experience of intentional weight loss. There is a growing recognition that the rising levels of obesity are contributing to a global health problem. Although the costs and consequences of obesity for both individuals and societies are many; research in the field of obesity has so far failed to offer successful solutions to these problems. This thesis argues that the reason for this failure is that research has focused primarily on finding the causes of obesity and has ignored to a large extent the experiences of obesity and intentional weight loss. Furthermore, what little qualitative research that has been conducted into obesity and intentional weight loss tends to be short term and fails to follow participants for extended periods of time. In order to address the perceived gaps in knowledge, this thesis adopts a qualitative approach, informed by phenomenology, to explore the experience of intentional weight loss. This thesis intends to explore the following research questions: • What feelings or beliefs motivate individuals to start trying to lose weight and to continue trying to lose weight? • What strategies do individuals employ to try to lose weight and what decisions, feelings or beliefs underpin or influence these strategies? • What factors help or hinder individuals in their attempts to lose weight? Ten overweight or obese women in the South of England were interviewed four times over the period of a year about their experiences of trying to lose weight. Semi structured interviews were used to explore weight loss goals and strategies; feelings and beliefs about losing weight and factors that help and hinder weight loss. The interview transcripts were analysed using Hycner’s (1985) framework and an overarching theme of connectedness was identified linked to four key themes of self sabotage, internal conflict, control and choice. The results reveal wide variations across the ten participants in their motivations for losing weight, many of which are different to the reasons that health educators give for losing weight. The strategies that participants used to lose weight seemed to have less influence on weight loss than participants’ beliefs regarding their chosen strategy and in their own ability. The majority of participants experienced a weight loss relapse. Explanations for these results are sought using two theories of mindfulness and intuitive eating. Implications for weight loss focused health education are considered and recommendations are made both for future health education practice and future research.

This thesis, structured into four separate but related papers, uses survey birth history data to examine marital and fertility change in post-Soviet Central Asia, with a particular focus on Tajikistan. The first paper, ‘Through civil war, food scarcity and drought: fertility and nuptiality during periods of crisis in post-Soviet Tajikistan’, presents recent trends in marriage and fertility rates in Tajikistan since 1989. The fluctuating pattern of change illustrates the importance of three specific crises: the period of peak fighting in the civil war in 1992, which led to a decrease in birth registration but may also have contributed to a real decline in fertility in the worst affected areas in 1993; a food crisis in 1995, leading to immediate and significant declines in marriage and fertility; and a drought in 2000-01, which also led to marriage and fertility declines. Given the significant changes in nuptiality in Tajikistan, the next stage of the thesis places these changes within a wider Central Asian context. The second paper, ‘Marrying more and earlier: age-period interaction in trends of first union formation in transitional Central Asia’, documents the significant increase in rates of first union formation in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, showing that this increase was most marked at younger ages. The third paper, ‘Tajikistan shows the biggest collapse of all: comparing declines in union formation in post-Soviet Central Asia’, examines rates of first union formation in these countries in the post-Soviet period. It finds a significant decline in union formation across the region, but also clear differences between the republics in terms of the extent of the decline. Tajikistan, which experienced the most severe post- Soviet declines in food security, had the highest rate of union formation in the late- Soviet period but the lowest rate by the turn of the millennium. The fourth paper, ‘Spousal separation, selectivity and contextual effects: exploring the relationship between international labour migration and fertility in post-Soviet Tajikistan’ contributes to the sparse literature on the impact of temporary migration on fertility in origin areas. Fertility and migration models are solved simultaneously to account for cross-process correlation. There is clear evidence for a short-term disruptive effect of spousal separation, but it is too early to assess the implications for completed fertility.

This practice based research focuses on events of the body, using the participating observer-researcher's experiences of medical events undertaken by her within a western medical environment to investigate her living existence as a 'unit', an 'experiencing corporeal body'. The project addresses a sharp awareness of body experienced by the researcher. It investigates this body in terms of the literal posthuman associated with Moravec, alongside the theoretical posthuman associated with Hayles where the 'defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity'. Using action research as the methodology and video installation as practice the project considers the position of the researcher in relationship to the medics, a situation of subject / object. With the female participating researcher as a given it becomes relevant to reference ideas from the ideals of feminism and to consider the question 'are women human?' The project produces evidence of change in the relationship of subject / object specific to this research when the researcher actively engages with attributes of the posthuman and it demonstrates how an altered emerging subject resulted from this engagement. There is a movement for the researcher from a liberal humanist subject to an emerging posthuman subject, an empowering and emancipating change.

This research provides some of the first quantitative analyses of the family patterns of Polish and Other A8 groups in the UK and compares their migration experience with that of other recent migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, for whom migration is more commonly thought to be related to family formation. The analyses fill a gap in the literature by offering insight into the trends underlying current foreign-born fertility patterns, in the wider context of increasing UK immigration, increasing shares of UK births to foreignborn mothers and compositional changes in these patterns since 2001. The research uses a pooled sample of UK Labour Force Survey data, combining quarters from 2001-2009, to ensure sufficient sample sizes. A series of binomial logistic regressions are fitted to predict the probability of being partnered and of being a parent, first for recent migrants in comparison to other groups and then for more detailed analyses amongst the recent migrant groups. Own Children Methodology is then used to estimate the fertility patterns of the recent migrant groups so that the timing of births can be analysed in relation to the timing of migration. The findings show that the probabilities of being partnered for the 20-34 years age groups studied here are much higher for females, with it seemingly more common for males to migrate without partners than for females. In this respect, the experience of A8 females is similar to that of South Asian females, but they differ with regards to the relationship between the migration event and partnership status. For South Asian females, the pattern is consistent with marriage migration, whilst this is not the case for the A8 groups. The probabilities of being parents are found to be relatively low for male recent migrants, even amongst those who are partnered, except amongst the Pakistani and Bangladeshi males. For females, the differences in parent status are also pronounced between country of birth groups, with Polish and Other A8 females having lower parent probabilities than the South Asian groups. Own Child fertility estimates confirm that the fertility of the Polish group is relatively low, characteristic of that at origin. For young South Asian migrant females, evidence is found for family formation related migration, with high proportions arriving to the UK childless and having births soon after arrival. For the Polish females, this phenomenon exists at younger ages but is less common, and those in their early thirties more commonly join partners who arrived to the UK previously, and bring their children with them. The findings illustrate that whilst the nature of migration is very different for A8 and South Asian females, for both groups migration is often indirectly or directly related with being partnered and having children, but that this manifests in different ways, relating to the nature of migration undertaken and the different socio-legal contexts for migrants from these flows. The findings contradict the popular belief that recent Polish migrants to the UK are primarily single, with the migration and family reunification process occurring quickly for this group who have relative ease of movement within the European Union.

The Society of Housing Managers. formed from the women trained by Octavia Hill, is not well known, though it played a prominent part in housing management from the 1930s onwards. The aim of this thesis is to examine the hypothesis that the Society of Housing Managers played a substantial role in encouraging the employment of trained women in housing from 1912 to the post- war period. It is further suggested that the ending of an all female Society and its subsequent amalgamation with the Institute of Housing in 1965 was one factor in weakening the position of women in housing employment, although other factors contributed. A major source of evidence used is depth interviews carried out with members of the committee who dealt with unification between the Society and the Institute, as well as interviews with other women managers. Some of these informants supplied early, often unique, documents. The Minute Books of the Society and other records not hitherto documented were also important as were Public Record Office papers, contemporary journals and secondary historical sources. Statistical data centres around a detailed analysis by gender of the Institute of Housing membership records and two major surveys carried out by the City University and the NFHA using unpublished as well as the published data. An additional small survey was done of women's employment in allied professional organisations. It is concluded that the Society of Housing Managers played a crucial role in drawing women into housing employment in the 1930s and thus opened up opportunities for women in the; expansion of public housing during the second world war and after. However some disadvantages may have been incurred by separate organisation. In comparison. women in the 1980s have had some success in combining separate women's networks with membership of a mixed Institute.

The body is the fleshy substance of citizenship. However, analyses of the body and of citizenship have remained largely disconnected, with limited intersection between the two. Traditionally, citizenship has been associated with the ‘public’ sphere and the body with the ‘private’ sphere resulting in the distancing of the body from citizenship in popular and scholarly discourses. This demarcation has resulted in the exclusion of particular groups of people from being able to achieve full citizenship based on corporeal difference. This thesis argues that the separation of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres perpetuates the marginalisation of disabled people. Through developing the concept of embodied citizenship, this thesis offers a useful lens through which to view the experiences of disabled young people’s everyday lives and to bring into focus the comingling of the ‘private’ and public’ spheres. Using data gathered from interviews with 18 disabled young people, with physical impairments, in Scotland, it explores the ways in which disabled young people negotiate their everyday lives. Thematic analysis of the data identified that participants’ inclusion and participation in the ‘public’ sphere were explicitly bound to their experiences of the ‘private’ sphere. Participants’ greatest feelings of exclusion were felt around everyday experiences often associated with the ‘private’ sphere such as intimate relationships, sexuality and toileting. Exclusion from these purportedly ‘private’ areas of social life resulted in negative impacts for participants’ sense of self and psycho-emotional wellbeing, impacting on their engagement with the ‘public’ sphere, and thus their sense of full citizenship.

This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) to The Stendhal Syndrome' (1996). In opposition to the dominant psychoanalytical approaches to the horror film generally and Argento's giallo specifically, this thesis argues that the giallo, both textually and meta-textually, actively resists oedipalisation. Taking up from Deleuze's contention in Cinema 1: The Movement Image that the cinematic-image can be consider the equivalent to a philosophical concept, I suggest that Argento's giallo are examples of what Deleuze calls cinema of the "time-image": provoked and extended "philosophical" acts of imagining the world which opens up a theoretical space of thinking differently about questions of gender and genre in horror film, which takes us beyond the fixed images of thought offered by traditional psychoanalytical and feminist paradigms of horror. In the opening chapters of this thesis, I argue that the cinematic-image has to be thought "historically", and that it is only be understanding the emergence of the "giallo" in the 1960s within the wider picture of Italian national cinema, that we can understand Argento's films as specific cultural expressions of thought, which are not reducible to paradigms based upon analyses of the more puritan and fixed American horror film (via Mulvey et all). In my subsequent discussion of Argento's "Diva" trilogy, I consider an assemblage of Deleuzian becoming and poststructuralist feminist thought (Kristeva I Cixous I Irigaray) as a mechanism through which to explore the increasingly feminised and feminist spaces of his later work. This thesis concludes by assessing Argento's critical and creative legacy in films such as Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap (1988) and Cindy Sherman's Office Killer (1997). In these terms, a Deleuzian "approach", enables a set of readings, which open up the texts to a more productive consideration of their appeal, in a way which other more traditional approaches do not, and cannot, account for. The close textual and historical analysis demanded by Deleuze is both a reconsideration of the [feminist] politics of Argento's work, and a response to criticisms of misogynism.

During the nuclear crisis years of 1958 to 1961, millions of U.S. citizens were instructed by their federal government that the best chance of surviving a direct nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union resided in converting their backyards or basements into family fallout shelters. Directing their policies towards middle-class suburban America, civil defence policymakers asked citizens to realign their lives and family relationships in accordance with a new doctrine of ‘do-it-yourself’ survival, stating that middle-class suburban fathers had the capacity and resources to protect both themselves and their families from the worst possible manmade disaster. “Every Home a Fortress: The Fallout Shelter Father in Cold War America” is the first historical study of fatherhood and the family fallout shelter during the early Cold War. Focusing specifically on the cultural and political representations of fatherhood and masculinity in the formation of and public reaction to the doctrine of civil defence, this project examines the tension between the politics of ‘do-it-yourself’ survival and the lived reality. The process and practice of fallout shelter construction represented an almost unprecedented level of state penetration into the private sphere. Yet, as the ideal of shelter fatherhood permeated society, a widening gap emerged between the political rhetoric of civil defence and the everyday experience of the ordinary Americans facing the prospect of building a family fallout shelter and surviving the next war. Each chapter of this thesis explores the lived reality of civil defence, highlighting the ways in which U.S. fathers interpreted and reinterpreted the act of private shelter construction. Rather than fostering one singular politicised vision of Cold War fatherhood, this thesis argues that fallout shelters brought to the surface a variety of interlinked visions of Cold War fatherhood, rooted in narratives of domesticity, militarism, and survivalism. Central to these narratives of masculinity was the private fallout shelter itself, a malleable Cold War space that inspired a new national discourse around notions of nationhood, domestic duty, and collective assumptions of what it meant to be a father in the nuclear age.

This thesis explores how Field-Configuring Events (FCEs) discursively maintain field legitimacy. It particularly addresses how organisations within the field of fertility treatment employ discourses of the female non-reproductive body at one of the field’s FCEs, the Fertility Show. FCEs are temporally and spatially bounded events where organisations belonging to the same field meet and share collective understandings of issues relevant for field-level activities. Despite being acknowledged as important loci for field configuration and legitimacy (Lampel and Meyer, 2008; Wooten and Hoffman, 2016), FCEs are still relatively understudied phenomena. This research particularly addresses the gap of how discourse is generated and employed at FCEs (Hardy and Maguire, 2010), specifically towards legitimacy. It sits within an academic discussion that sees a number of empirical studies concerned with the discursive analysis of legitimacy (Vaara et al., 2006; Alvesson, 1993; Brown, 1998), but a critical perspective to the analysis of discourse is rarely taken (Vaara et al., 2006; Barros, 2014). The thesis contributes to this discussion by adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to unveil discursive strategies of legitimacy employed at the FCE to maintain field legitimacy. As a dynamic and on-going process (Deegan, 2002; Suchman, 1995), legitimacy needs to be maintained (Shocker and Sethi, 1974). Scholars acknowledge that FCEs can work towards field maintenance (Schüssler et al., 2014), however studies that discursively investigate this process and its implications for legitimacy are missing. The importance and peculiarity of FCEs represent a compelling case for analysis, and for empirical and theoretical expansion in this regard. This thesis importantly also focuses on the concept of the body within organisation studies, and zooms in on the female body in particular. With respect to this literature, works so far have mostly analysed the body at work. The study shifts the attention from the body of the worker to the body per se, as a product, tool, and entity in its own right. Finally, this thesis brings to the fore how the female body is constructed within the organisational domain when it is not reproducing. By doing so, it expands our knowledge and balances our discussions as to how the female body is understood when non-reproductive or infertile. The thesis is based on a qualitative study of organisations within the field of fertility treatment in the UK, and entails the critical discourse analysis of organisational texts collected at the Fertility Show, here understood as a FCE. The study critically investigates how organisations discursively construct the female non-reproductive body; which relations they put in place between themselves and the bodies they construct; and how such bodies and relations discursively maintain the field’s legitimacy at the FCE. The analysis shows that organisations at the Fertility Show construct three discourses of the female non-reproductive body, and that each discourse engenders an imbalanced relation between the organisations and the female body. It further shows that each discourse and relation is rooted in past discourses on womanhood and motherhood, which are not explicitly employed by organisations at the FCE. Further, the research illustrates that, in this setting, organisations maintain field legitimacy through the discursive strategies of adaptation to social norms, reiteration of past discourses, and temporary interruption of social norms. At the FCE, legitimacy is thus sustained by adapting to current social norms on motherhood; by reiterating broader historical discourses on the female body; and by temporarily interrupting the current social norm that views infertility as taboo. Building on the term ‘discursive space’ from Hardy and Maguire (2010), the study further contributes to our knowledge of discourse and FCEs by showing that FCEs can be approached as open discursive spaces where imbalanced relations are generated through discourse. It illustrates that FCEs are open spaces because, while they are temporally and spatially bounded, the discourses employed therein are not. The analysis shows that past discourses are employed at the FCE to maintain legitimacy, but not explicitly so. This in turn makes resistance hard to carry out. The study further contributes to how we methodologically approach FCEs by applying a CDA approach to the study of discourse within FCEs. Particularly, a CDA approach explicitly shows that discourse can foster legitimacy through the creation of imbalanced relations between text producers and text consumers. This in turn brings to the fore issues of power, struggle, and resistance within and outside of the FCE. With respect to organisation studies centred on the female body and reproduction, the thesis highlights how fertile bodies and infertile bodies exist in a dualistic system of societal and organisational expectations that cannot be simultaneously satisfied. Consequently, the female body finds itself locked in a lose-lose situation with regards to its reproductive choices, within and outside of organisational life.