This study is an exploration of familial bilingualism in which I examined the reported experiences of a small group of bilingual family members who live in the South of England and whose heritage languages are French or Spanish. The study, located in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, draws upon the main fields of bilingualism, second language acquisition, language ideologies, family language policies, as well as bilingualism and emotions. It offers evidence of the difficulties to transmit heritage languages and implement familial bilingualism because of a mixture of intertwined ideological and practical factors. Having experienced familial bilingualism, I was interested in understanding the meaning that familial bilingualism had for other families and how familial bilingualism subjectively affected family members in their everyday lives and in their interactions at home and in society. To conduct the study, I adopted an interpretative approach in which I tried to derive context-situated interpretations from the narratives of my participants. Thus, my data enabled me to examine the complexity of maintaining and transmitting heritage languages within families. The data highlighted the strong link between familial bilingualism and society as the heritage languages of the participants could be construed as social capital that the parents had to transmit in order to be 'good parents'. The data also highlighted the complex relationships between bilingualism and emotions not only at societal level but also at individual and familial levels. The salient emotions revealed in the data comprise feelings of responsibility about maintaining and transmitting heritage languages as well as feelings of insecurity and isolation generated by migrating and belonging to bilingual families. A greater understanding of familial bilingualism and how families view their languages as lenses through which they negotiate family and societal relations, as well as emotions and education, is not simply an academic exercise but is arguably of importance to all of us, given the world in which we live, with diversity and migration featuring as major political and ideological issues.

Western-origin women’s lifestyle magazines have enjoyed great success in post-Soviet Russia, and represent part of the globalisation of the post-Soviet media landscape. Existing studies of post-Soviet Russian women’s magazines have tended to focus on either magazine content or reader interpretations, their role in the media marketplace, or representations of themes such as glamour culture or conspicuous consumption. Based on a discourse analysis of the three Russian women’s lifestyle magazines Elle, Liza and Cosmopolitan, and interviews with 39 Russian women, the thesis interrogates femininity norms in contemporary Russia. This thesis addresses a gap in the literature in foregrounding a feminist approach to a combined analysis of both the content of the magazines, and how readers decode the magazines. Portrayals of embodied femininity in women’s magazines are a chief focus, in addition to reader decodings of these portrayals. The thesis shows how certain forms of aesthetic and cultural capital are linked to femininity, and how women’s magazines discursively construct normative femininity via portraying these forms of cultural capital as necessary for women. It also relates particular ways of performing femininity, such as conspicuous consumption and beauty labour, to wider patriarchal discourses in Russian society. Furthermore, the thesis engages with pertinent debates around cultural globalisation in relation to post-Soviet media and culture, and addresses both change and continuity in post-Soviet gender norms; not only from the Soviet era into the present, but across an oft-perceived East/West axis via the horizontalization and glocalisation of culture. The thesis discusses two main aspects of change: 1) the role now played by conspicuous consumption in social constructions of normative femininity; and 2) the expectation of ever increasing resources women are now expected to devote to beauty labour as part of performing normative femininity. However, I also argue that it is appropriate from a gender studies perspective to highlight Russian society as patriarchal as well as post-socialist. As such, I highlight the cross-cultural experiences women in contemporary Russia women share with women in other parts of the world. Accordingly, the research suggests that women’s lifestyle magazines in the post-Soviet era have drawn on more established gender discourses in Soviet-Russian society as a means of facilitating the introduction of relatively new norms and practices, particularly linked to a culture of conspicuous consumption.

Native American women played a key role in negotiating relations between settler and Native society, especially through their relationships with white men. Yet they have traditionally languished on the sidelines of Native American and colonial American history, often viewed as subordinate and thus tangential to the key themes of these histories. This dissertation redresses the imbalance by locating women at the centre of a narrative that has been dominated by discourses in masculine aspirations. It explores the variety of relations that developed between men and women of two frontier societies in eighteenth century North America: the Creeks of the Southeast, and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia. This dissertation complicates existing histories of Native and colonial America by providing a study of Indian culture that, in a reversal of traditional inquiry, asks how Native women categorised and incorporated white people into their physical and spiritual worlds. One method was through ritualised violence and torture of captives. As primary agents of this process women often selected, rejected or adopted men into the tribes, depending on factors that ranged from nationality to religion. Such acts challenged contemporary Euro-American wisdom that ordained a nurturing, auxiliary role for women. However, this thesis shows that ‘anomalous’ violent behaviours of Indian women were rooted in a femininity inculcated from an early age. In this volatile world, women were not shielded from the horrors of war. Instead, they became one of those horrors. Therefore, viewing anomalous actions as central to the analysis provides an understanding of female identities outwith the straitjacket of the Euro-American gender binary. With violence as a legitimate and natural expression of feminine power, the Indian woman’s character was far removed from depictions of the sexualised exotic, self-sacrificing Pocahontas or stoic Sacagawea. The focus on women’s violent customs, which embodied several important and unusual manifestations of Native American femininity, reveals a number of jarring behaviours that have found no home within colonial literatures. These behaviours included sanctioned infanticide and abortions, brutal tests for adolescents, scalp dancing and death rites, cannibalism, mercenary wives and sadistic grandmothers. With limited means of incorporating such female characteristics into pre-existing gender categories, the women’s acts were historically treated as non-representative of regular Indian lifeways and thus dismissed. Colonial relations are therefore analysed through an alternative lens to accommodate these acts. This allows women to construct their own narrative in a volatile landscape that largely sought to exclude those voices, voices that challenged dominant ideologies on appropriate male-female relations. By constructing a new gender framework I show that violence was a vehicle by which women realised, promoted and reinforced their tribal standing.

This thesis explores divorce and judicial separation as it occurred in nineteenth-century Scotland, between the years 1830 and 1890, predating the phenomenon it came to be in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Scotland’s history has frequently been incorporated within a general history of Great Britain, this thesis separates it from the widely researched accounts of marriage and marital breakdown in England to highlight the different approach to regulating marriage, divorce and separation under Scots law. Applying Scotland’s distinctive legal, demographic and economic context has provided a social and gender history of marriage breakdown unique to the country, and filled a historiographical gap for the nineteenth century. This research will be presented through separate analyses of divorce for adultery, desertion—both official and unofficial, and marital cruelty in the civil and criminal courts. To present individual experiences inside the courtroom, Court of Session divorce and separation cases are used and supplemented with newspaper accounts of Court of Session trials. To provide context to the related discourses, Parliamentary papers and newspaper articles are used. Lastly, to address the unofficial instances of marital breakdown, criminal court trials of wifebeating and poor relief applications from deserted wives are also analysed. This thesis argues that despite comparably liberal divorce and separation laws established in the sixteenth century, legal, economic, social and cultural factors and discourses imposed on the accessibility of these legal forms of marital breakdown.

(česky) Diplomová práce rekonstruuje životní příběh Václava Smutného (1859 - 1922) dnes zapomenutého (a možná nikdy neobjeveného) ředitele měšťanské školy, nadšeného amatérského národopisce, přispěvatele do Českého lidu a dalších periodik, sběratele, kreslíře a badatele ze Sadské. Diplomová práce se pokouší představit různorodou činnost, úsilí a invenci tohoto "večerního vědce z maloměsta" a v širším kontextu interpretovat a zhodnotit výsledky jeho celoživotní práce. Klíčová slova (česky) Václav Smutný (1859 - 1922), národopisná kresba, lidová architektura, archeologie, zeměměřictví, národopisné hnutí, svéráz, amatérský badatel, učitel, Sadská

The object of this thesis is to explore the representation of ‘ Thainess ’ in Thai wedding magazines. The thesis adopts semiotic and multimodal analysis as methods to examine how cover pages, photographs, editorial contents and advertisement s in the magazines communicate their denotative and connotative meanings through primary markers and modality markers such as pose, objects, setting, framing, lights, shadow and colour tone. Subsequently , each image is examined through its depiction of people in the image to determine any st ereotypical cultural attributes that highlight a distinction between the traditionalised Thai and modernised Thai bride. This thesis argues that the legacy of Thailand ’ s semi colonial history constructs an ambivalent relationship with the West and Thailand ’ s self - orientalising tendency, as well as the diffusion of hybrid cultures and modern Thai beauty ideals. Self - orientalising tendencies and the desire to encapsulate ‘ Thainess ’ are thusly observed in the magazines ’ representation of traditional ‘ Thainess ’ with a nostalgic overtone, by linking the ideals of traditional beauty to the imagined qualities of heroines in Thai classic literature and aristocratic ladies from pre-modern Siam through fashion and traditional beautifying remedies.

This study aims to understand and critically analyse the knowledge and practices of child welfare professionals who play an important role in recognising, responding to and intervening in cases of child neglect. The study contributes towards a greater understanding of the complexities of the child welfare professionals’ (CWP) institutional practices when categorising cases as neglect. Three data collection methods were used; semi-structured interviews, an analysis of child protection case conference minutes and observation of social work practice. The complementary data sets produced revealed an understanding of CWP’s knowledge and practices which would not have been possible using a single method. The CWPs interviewed, from four professional groups, shared a typical image of a neglected child but this image did not coincide with all cases categorised as cases of neglect identified during the analysis of the Minutes and the observation of social workers’ practice. The exceptions to the typical image included young people, unborn children and children experiencing emotional neglect. The CWPs working in universal services talked about ‘building a picture’ of neglect since neglect was not always obvious. There were inter-professional differences around thresholds and the ‘level of neglect’ that warranted child protection intervention. The CWPs talked about their understanding of neglect being broader than the parents’, since their understanding included emotional neglect. This perceived difference in the CWPs’ understanding of neglect had implications for their interactions with parents and was seen as a challenging area of practice. The participant observation data showed that social workers used numerous features when carrying out assessments, including features relating to the parents, the children and the home environment. These features functioned in different ways depending on the context and which features co-existed. CWP practice was influenced by professional roles and personal values. Professional practice involved multiple interactions, and the crucial nature and impact of these interactions was key to understanding the process of categorising cases of neglect.

As the HIV/AIDS pandemic matures increasingly more women are infected than men. The heightened prevalence amongst women suggests that they are at particular risk of infection. Although the gendered dimensions of HIV/AIDS have been recognised, this is not fully understood and the tendency is to respond at a surface level only. This research provides a critique of the current response to HIV/AIDS in Malawi and a theoretically informed analysis of why women are vulnerable. It is argued that the response is limited because it fails to engage with the gendered dimensions; and that gendered structures of power underscore the vulnerability of women to infection. This research makes an important contribution to the feminist task of radically challenging the conventional boundaries of international relations, which typically draws upon a masculine form of knowledge. It also challenges the dominance of the scientific discourse that governs the way HIV/AIDS is conceived and makes an important contribution to the literature on understanding the gender context. A ‘feminist interprevist’ approach is employed and the methodology is a combination of a case study analysis, semi-structured key informant interviews, documentary analysis and data analysis. Feminist critical theory and post-structuralist understandings of how power operates through gendered structures provide the theoretical basis for the empirical analysis. The critique of the response to HIV/AIDS in Malawi reveals how it fails to engage with the gender power relations because of pervasive gendered structures. Three aspects of women’s vulnerability to HIV infection are explored: the majority of women are not in the position to negotiate for safer sex; many women do not have the power to leave a marriage if it puts them at risk of infection; and the biological susceptibility of women to infection. It is argued that gendered structures underscore this vulnerability. The gendered structures are deeply embedded and hard to discern. However, where HIV/AIDS travels along the fault lines of society it reveals these deeper structures of power and provides the opportunity to challenge them. It reveals the importance of empowering women across their lives in order for a sustainable and effective response to HIV/AIDS.

This study analyses the ways in which gender relations are expressed and articulated through the use of folk proverbs amongst Pashto-speaking people of Pakistan. Previous work on Pashto proverbs have romanticised proverbs as a cultural asset and a source of Pashtun pride and ethnic identity, and most studies have aimed to promote or preserve folk proverbs. However, there is little recognition in previous literature of the sexist and gendered role of proverbs in Pashtun society. This study argues that Pashto proverbs encode and promote a patriarchal view and sexist ideology, demonstrating this with the help of proverbs as text as well as proverbs performance in context by Pashto speakers. The analysis is based on more than 500 proverbs relating to gender, collected from both published sources and through ethnographic fieldwork in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Qualitative data was collected through 40 interviews conducted with Pashto-speaking men and women of various ages and class/educational backgrounds, along with informal discussions with local people and the personal observations of the researcher. The study is informed by a combination of theoretical approaches including folkloristics, feminist sociology and sociolinguistics. While establishing that patriarchal structures and values are transmitted through proverbs, the study also reveals that proverbs’ meanings and messages are context-bound and women may, therefore, use proverbs in order to discuss, contest and (sometimes) undermine gender ideologies. More specifically, it is argued that: (1) Proverbs as ‘wisdom texts’ represent the viewpoint of those having the authority to define proper and improper behaviour, and as such, rather than objective reality represent a partial and partisan reality which, in the context of the present research, is sexist and misogynist. (2) While proverbs as ‘texts’ seem to present a more fixed view of reality, proverbs as ‘performance in context’ suggest that different speakers may use proverbs for different strategic purposes, such as to establish and negotiate ethnic and gendered identities and power which varies on the basis of gender, age, ethnicity, and class of the interlocutors. The thesis concludes that, rather than considering folk proverbs as ‘factual’ and ‘valuable’ sources of cultural expression, scholars should pay more attention to their ‘performatory’, ‘derogatory’ and ‘declaratory’ aspects as these often relegate women (and ‘other’, weaker groups) to a lesser position in society.

The majority of children in the developing world are suffering from hardship and poverty, and are not able to reach their full potential. This thesis focuses on the relationship between parental resources and children’s outcomes in the areas of nutrition, cognition and physical health in Indonesia. The life-stages early childhood to young adulthood are crucial for human capital formation. Nutrition, cognition and physical health are key human capitals that are important both as a means to achieve wellbeing and as an end in their own right. They have been identified as some of the main routes for changes in well-being over the life-course and as significant pathways for breaking intergenerational poverty cycles. Disadvantages in these domains are especially salient in developing countries. Yet, evidence is still limited due to lack of appropriate data. Here, data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) is used, a rich panel data set consisting of four waves of data spanning a period of 14 years. I study a cohort of children who are less than three years old in the first wave of the IFLS and for whom relevant outcomes can be observed. While the availability of longitudinal data from IFLS is very important, the setup and design of the data presented an enormous challenge: unlike with longitudinal datasets from developed countries, such as the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) or the cohort studies, the IFLS data is presented more or less in raw form. In order to facilitate a critical and careful approach to working with this kind of complicated raw data, I completed two self-organized research stays with the IFLS team in which I witnessed the data collection and interviewed IFLS team members. This helped me to understand the questionnaire and measures better and to identify the strongest parts of the IFLS: the self-collected measures for children – namely the physical health measures height and lung capacity (collected by specially trained nurses) as well as a cognitive measure – the Raven’s coloured progressive matrices. These are unique features for a general household survey in a developing country context and constitute important child outcomes. As a starting point from which to ask more specific research questions concerning the three types of children's outcomes, I synthesized research from relevant domains such as neuroscience, social science, childhood studies and economics. Chapter 1, 2 and 3 constitute the setup of the research by detailing the motivation and background for the research, the conceptual frameworks, literature reviews, data and methodology as well as the research questions. Chapter 4, 5 and 6 are the empirical chapters investigating the aforementioned child outcomes in detail. Chapter 4 entitled: “Children’s nutritional status in early life and dynamics into adolescence” investigates firstly, to what extent parental resources are associated with children experiencing stunting in early childhood and in adolescence. Results for parental resources for stunting in early childhood reveal protective factors which include mother’s height and direct measures of living standards. For stunting in adolescence the importance of parental resources as protective factors increases (mother’s height is stronger related and father’s height is now significant as is household consumption as a measure of financial resources). The association with direct living standards decreases. Secondly, I investigate if there are stunting dynamics – that is, movement in and out of stunting between early childhood and adolescence. For dynamics of stunting I use transition matrices to show that entries and exits from stunting occur over children’s entire life-course (not just in early childhood). Movements into stunted growth decrease the older children get but are still around 6% between middle childhood (7-10 years old) and adolescence (14-17 years old). Movements out of stunted growth occur over the whole life-course of children with the highest exit rates of around 19% between ages 7-10 years and 14-17 years. My results support Adair’s study for the Philippines (1999) and Schott and Crookston’s recent research for Peru (2013). In Chapter 5, I investigate children’s cognitive outcomes – i.e. Raven’s coloured progressive matrices and math scores. Firstly, I examine to what extent children’s growth status in early childhood and change in growth is associated with cognitive test results in adolescence. Secondly, to what extent parental resources are associated with children’s cognitive test results. One key result indicates a significant positive association between initial/early height-for-age (HAZ) and cognitive test scores. This could support the hypothesis on early sensitive periods for cognitive development and the important role of pre– and post natal influences up to the early childhood measure. However, I also find evidence that changes in growth into middle childhood (i.e. the residual HAZ between early and later childhood) is significant positive associated with children’s cognitive test scores. This supports the hypothesis of the plasticity of the brain beyond early years. Chapter 6 is about children’s physical health measure of lung capacity. I investigate to what extent children’s growth status in early life and growth dynamics into adolescence are associated with children’s lung capacity. Further, I examine to what extent parental resources are associated with children’s lung capacity. A key result is that in terms of parental resources there is a strong positive association between father’s and mother’s lung capacity and their children in adolescence. Also maternal years of schooling is significantly associated. I do not find a significant positive association between initial/early height-for-age (HAZ) and lung capacity. This would work against the hypothesis on early sensitive periods and rather point to the importance of changes in growth after early childhood for children’s lung capacity development. The change in growth into middle childhood (residual HAZ) is significant positively associated with children’s lung capacity. These result differ from what I find for cognitive outcomes where early growth status and changes in growth are both relevant. Chapter 7 discusses recommendations for future research; for example, how new data collection efforts in Indonesia could contribute to closing evidence gaps on children’s life chances identified in this thesis by collecting birth cohort data or extending the IFLS. I also address implications for policy covering recommendations for more holistic childhood interventions, the kind of support provided and targeting of vulnerable children. Evidence on children’s life chances from Indonesia is very limited. I set out to make a contribution in providing evidence on child outcomes that are uniquely featured in the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS). My key concern is to study the intergenerational determinants of child outcomes – that is, asking to what extent parental resources are linked to the level of children’s nutrition, cognition, and health but also the intra-generational link – that is to what extent nutritional status is linked to later growth dynamics and other child outcomes such as cognitive and health outcomes. To the best of my knowledge, there are very few previous studies for Indonesia that investigate these important child outcomes, especially with the focus on the intergenerational and life-course determinants.