Despite the plethora of literature regarding the cause and characteristics of homelessness, there has been relatively little discussion regarding causal explanations emanating from policy makers and practitioners. This research sought to address this gap by examining the dual practice of support and sanctions introduced under the Labour Administration 1997 - 2007.Conducted within and between five local authorities in the North West of England and inspired by the philosophical arguments of critical realism (Bhaskar, 1989) alongside Elder-Vass’s (2010) concept of relational emergence, a qualitative approach was adopted in which eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior managers in Supporting People and Community Safety teams. The overall aim was to examine professional beliefs and understandings of homelessness and explore its impact on practice. A primary contribution of this study to the literature on homelessness is the framework used in which emergent properties, or causal powers, which construct a particular ‘reality’ of homelessness, were identified. Utilising this framework, the analysis explored how taken for granted assumptions about the pathological and deviant behaviour of homeless people not only informed policy, but also had a significant impact on practice which, in turn, served to maintain and reinforce the exclusion of people in acute housing need. This research also extends the current literature by recommending a move away from what could be described as ‘traditional’ methods in homelessness research and towards an approach which, by utilising the dialectic arguments of critical realism, seeks to develop transformative practice. This approach would not only challenge prevailing orthodoxies of homelessness, but, following the seminal work of Gramsci (1971 cited Joseph, 2002) could also support the development of a counter hegemonic discourse.

The main objective of this study is to provide an understanding of the way Civic and Citizenship Education, as intended at the macro level is translated, implemented and enacted at the micro level. Moreover, it also seeks to understand the contestation and challenges of secondary school teachers as policy implementers at the micro level in transferring the new curriculum policy into teaching and learning practice. Adopting a qualitative research approach, empirical evidence and in-depth information were gathered through document analysis, interviews, questionnaire, lesson observation and field notes. The document analysis showed that there were similarities between Western and Malaysian concepts of citizenship education in that Malaysia’s Civic and Citizenship Education was concerned with developing good personal and patriotic citizens. This differed from England’s citizenship education that promoted political literacy and active participation in democratic society. Despite in the official document, Civic and Citizenship Education seems to be strongly classified and strongly framed (Bernstein, 1975; 1971), at the school level, this subject is weakly classified and weakly framed. Indeed, a closer examination in each school visited showed that the ‘battle’ (Goodson, 1998 : 45) between this subject and other academic subjects continue. The analysis also illustrated that the enactment of Civic and Citizenship Education was mediated, not only by school students’ ethnic population, but also by school contexts that existed in each school. This also led to the gap between teachers’ perception of citizenship and citizenship education with their teaching practices. Thus, this study demonstrated that the process of translating, implementing and enacting policy at the school level is not a direct process (Ball, 2006) as there are various factors that could mediate the way a policy is implemented and enacted at the micro level (Ball et al., 2012; Braun et al. 2011a).

Homelessness is experienced by considerable numbers of people throughout the UK. Research convincingly demonstrates the multiple and frequent difficulties that people who are homeless face, including: limited support networks, mental and physical health difficulties, problems associated with substance use, and social exclusion. There is a lack of research however, that explores their strengths, resilience, and ability to cope with adversity. Many services arguably parallel this trend and focus on risk management and treatment strategies that target perceived pathology and vulnerability characteristics. The study contributed to strengths-based research and explored the psychological processes associated with a sense of manageability of people who were homeless. This unique line of research enquiry was guided by the study’s systematic review. In-depth interviews were conducted with eight adult males who temporarily resided at a homeless hostel in Wales. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to identify themes. Processes that both enhanced and detracted from manageability were inferred. In particular, self-efficacy and self-esteem seemed important to sustain and promote the well-being of participants, and influenced actions towards future transition out of homelessness. There was evidence to suggest that these constructs were closely associated with participants’ relationship experiences. The study supports the core components of Rutter’s (1985; 2013) conceptualization of resilience. Intervention strategies were discussed in relation to the findings, but primarily, services were encouraged to promote supportive relationships for homeless people, as these can foster self-efficacy and self-esteem processes that are hypothesised to mediate resilience, and encourage people’s social inclusion. Further culturally sensitive research of resilience processes is recommended.

This thesis is an anthropological investigation of the interconnections between personhood and place in rural northern Kyrgyzstan. It studies the way people negotiate and experience relations with others and with the places in which they live and work. It is based on 18 months of fieldwork carried out in Kochkor raion between June 2006 and August 2008. I look at how the interplay between conceptual forms and everyday practices constitute personhood. I show how both formal ways of reckoning kinship, such as recounting genealogies and tracing back seven generations of male ancestors, and everyday forms of socialising are both integral in what it means to be a person, and are flexible in their designation of persons of the same kind and persons that are different. I go on to show how place holds particular significance for the attribution and negotiation of personhood, but that this meaning is emergent and processual. Providing an historical overview of the linking of persons to places by successive bureaucratic structures, I highlight how understanding places as “cultured” or “pure” have important consequences for how people understand themselves and others as more or less “Kyrgyz”, more or less “modern”. I show how recent reworkings of the meaning of “lineage places” following privatisation and village resettlement have led to changing forms of personhood, shifting from state farm worker to independent farmer. Other kinds of places are also meaningful for personhood. I highlight how the home and the objects it contains are active in the negotiation of a daughter-in-law’s personhood. I examine everyday practices of caring for the home, as well as more unusual practices of building new kinds of homes. These practices are integral to varied personhoods such as being a village daughter-in-law, or seeing oneself as “modern”. These personhoods and relationships with place are subject to ongoing negotiation, and death and grief disrupt these connections. A focus on emotion both within ritual practice and during grief lived everyday enables a better understanding of how personhood emerges from intersubjective processes which involve negotiation, rejection and incorporation of social and political processes. A focus on the co-production of place and personhood allows us to see both as becoming meaningful through these interactions.

Background: The Marschak Interaction Method (MIM; Marschak, 1960) is a video-based observational assessment of parent-child interactions and relationships (Lindaman, Booth, & Chambers, 2000). Parents are videotaped while they engage with their child in a series of play-based tasks, followed by a therapist-guided reflective review of the interaction. This process is intended to highlight areas of strength and difficulty within parent-child interactions to be addressed in subsequent therapeutic intervention; however, initial reports suggest that the MIM may have additional therapeutic utility beyond this rather narrow application (Lindaman et al. 2000). There is a growing evidence base for the use of video-feedback in family interventions to improve the quality of parent-child interactions (Fukkink, 2008). Such approaches are believed to enhance parental reflective capacity and sensitivity to their child’s needs, thus supporting more positive parenting behaviour (Svanberg, 2009). The MIM is similar in its approach to other video-feedback interventions, and so conceivably may effect comparable therapeutic action; however little is known about parents’ experiences of the MIM. Aims: This study aimed to explore the therapeutic nature of the MIM through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of parents’ and caregivers’ experiences. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted with six parents and primary caregivers who had participated in the MIM as part of on-going therapeutic assessment and intervention with their child. Results: Analysis of participant accounts identified five key themes concerning; their experiences of the MIM interactional procedure, reflective and emotional processes and the therapeutic factors that supported these, and subsequent attitude and behaviour change. Conclusions: Findings suggest that the MIM has potential therapeutic utility as a brief video-feedback intervention to support positive parent-child interactions. This therapeutic hypothesis is discussed in relation to current theoretical explanations for the efficacy of video-feedback interventions in child and family mental healthcare practice. Further research is needed to test the clinical effectiveness of the MIM in improving parent-child outcomes.

This study explores the marketing dynamics of the Fairtrade Towns movement in the United Kingdom and presents unique, empirical insights and understandings of its place-based marketing dynamics. It recognises that Fairtrade Towns, despite their rapid growth and recognition as a major contributor to Fairtrade marketing, still remain significantly under-researched. It also argues that the activities of Fairtrade Towns need to be considered through a marketing lens and presents a comprehensive application of grounded theory, to empirically capture the marketing dynamics of Fairtrade Towns directly from the people and places that socially construct them. This study theorises that Fairtrade Towns have capitalised upon the significance of symbolic interactionism to develop their marketing dynamic. It argues that Fairtrade Towns have embraced consumer culture and have used media not necessarily associated with marketing practices to validate their actions. It theorises that the Fairtrade Towns movement has generated a marketing dynamic built upon both intrinsic and extrinsic validity. Intrinsic validation transpires from better quality products, increased availability and the development of the Fairtrade mark. Extrinsic validity emerges from the strengths, backgrounds, skills, situations and symbolic value of other people, places and social movements. Fairtrade Towns demonstrate an ability to identify spaces and places not normally recognised for their marketing potential. This study explores how Fairtrade Towns transform and develop these spaces and places into media capable of effectively marketing Fair trade products. Fairtrade Towns display increasing consumer citizenship sophistication, achieved through a marketing dynamic, emerging from a collision between sustainable/ethical consumption, place and responsibility. Fairtrade Towns are therefore presented as a place where marketing functions are socially constructed around a ‘unique to place’ ethos, in which people and places are developed to their full potential in their capacity and desire to increase Fair Trade consumption wherever and whenever possible.

Some football fans go to matches, but what do others do? This thesis examines online football fan forums in order to explore the construction of fan identities and positions. By implementing a cyberethnographical approach supplemented by online interviews with fans, it explores how football fan communities operate, discussing aspects of forum management, control and hierarchies, all the while illustrating how these factors contribute to the development of individual and collective identities. In considering this, it presents football fans as inhabiting a multitude of complex positions, taking into account arguments of 'active' and 'passive' fandom and the importance of fan status (Hills, 2002.) I argue that that there has been a significant lack of research into 'everyday' football fandom, with both the mainstream media and academic perspectives preferring to focus on the extraordinary instances of performance and behaviour, which, I further argue, are simplistic in their treatment of fans. Mainstream media representations are addressed; with the latter sections of the thesis illustrating that discourses produced by fans themselves often contrast significantly with dominant narratives at play in the news media. The football fan is found to demonstrate articulate consideration for his/her own position, with this being frequently determined by the overriding importance of the team's success and the part that the fan plays in this. This is particularly apparent when considering national and regional allegiances, and how these can be seen to present regular areas of conflict in regards to dominant affiliation, yet all the while contributing to the fan's position as an extension of the football club.

This thesis studies the application of geometric concepts and methods in the analysis of strategic-form games, in particular bimatrix games. Our focus is on three geometric concepts: the index, geometric algorithms for the computation of Nash equilibria, and polytopes. The contribution of this thesis consists of three parts. First, we present an algorithm for the computation of the index in degenerate bimatrix games. For this, we define a new concept, the “lex-index” of an extreme equilibrium, which is an extension of the standard index. The index of an equilibrium component is easily computable as the sum of the lex-indices of all extreme equilibria of that component. Second, we give several new results on the linear tracing procedure, and its bimatrix game implementation, the van den Elzen-Talman (ET) algorithm. We compare the ET algorithm to two other algorithms: On the one hand, we show that the Lemke-Howson algorithm, the classic method for equilibrium computation in bimatrix games, and the ET algorithm differ substantially. On the other hand, we prove that the ET algorithm, or more generally, the linear tracing procedure, is a special case of the global Newton method, a geometric algorithm for the computation of equilibria in strategic-form games. As the main result of this part of the thesis, we show that there is a generic class of bimatrix games in which an equilibrium of positive index is not traceable by the ET algorithm. This result answers an open question regarding sustainability. The last part of this thesis studies the index in symmetric games. We use a construction of polytopes to prove a new result on the symmetric index: A symmetric equilibrium has symmetric index +1 if and only if it is “potentially unique”, in the sense that there is an extended symmetric game, with additional strategies for the players, where the given symmetric equilibrium is unique.

Radical, ‘eventful’ bodily vulnerability has yet to receive sustained attention in contemporary human geography. As one way of addressing the implications of existential vulnerability, this thesis explores the social geographies of people living with epilepsy. It draws upon multiple-methods research comprising an extensive mixed-methods questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, all conducted with people with epilepsy who are members of the charity, Epilepsy Scotland, the project partner. By paying attention to the (post-)phenomenological experience of ‘seizures’, the thesis argues that a failure to appreciate the complex and often extremely troubling spatialities of epileptic episodes invariably results in sustaining the stigmatisation of epilepsy and the partial views of ‘outsiders’. By exploring changed, changing and changeable relations between self, body, space, time and others, the thesis suggests that spatial behaviours in and across different places shift according to various biographical, social and illness experiences and contexts. More specifically, it contends that certain spaces become risky some or all of the time because of the body that not only threatens personal disorientation but also the very foundations of the social order. While there is a corresponding risk that individuals with epilepsy will confine themselves within the socially (although not materially) contained homeplace, many adopt active and resourceful practices, taking into account immediate time-space and embodied knowledges so as to resist being told what they can do, where and when. Disciplining the ‘epileptic body’ and environment to accommodate the unpredictability of seizures are put forward as a challenging case study for thinking through how the vital vulnerabilities of everyday life are made sense of through the very governmental regimes that they will always escape.

This thesis is an inquiry into the economics and ethics of residential integration. Efforts to integrate otherwise segregated black and white households in the United States over the last 40 years has been met with legitimate skepticism. Primarily, there is an absence of evidence as it relates to whether neighborhoods cause disadvantage (neighborhood effects) in addition to a lack of evidence related to whether “mixing” actually produces adequate social benefits for those being moved or for society as a whole. I intend to move the conversation forward by presenting two additional considerations. First, in the economic paradigm, it is useful to explore the issue of segregation through what has been described as adverse impacts occurring in the wake of a market failure (“subprime financial crisis”). Second, there are ethical considerations relevant to the integration discussion that offer new norms by which to engage and advance our approach to residential integration and endeavors to mix. This thesis makes a contribution to knowledge by explicating these two points and ultimately providing a more morally capacious evaluative framework by which to appraise this complex social issue.