This thesis reports on research regarding the influence of family structure on young people’s engagement in physical activity. It focussed on understanding how young people’s physical activity dispositions were constructed within wider structural forces that impacted on their everyday lives. A socio-cultural theoretical perspective was adopted and the data were collected using a mixed methods approach. Participants were young people from three inner city comprehensive schools in the Midlands, UK, who completed questionnaires (n = 381) and paired, semi-structured interviews (n = 62). All schools were from low socioeconomic areas since this provided a greater diversity of family structures. As such, three family types were most prominent in this study: intact-couple, lone parent and stepfamily. The data took the form of surveys and interview transcripts and were analysed using PASW Statistics and inductive and deductive procedures respectively. The analytical framework was influenced by the social theory of Bourdieu, recognising the importance of structure and agency. Family was recognised as a social ‘field’ that shaped young people’s dispositions towards specific activities. Moreover, the transmission of an intergenerational habitus within families was bound by their cultural, social and economic resources, which differed according to family structure and contributed to existing societal inequalities.

This thesis is a theoretical exercise which relies on the Strategic Relational Approach to analyze the broad social processes of change and to deliver a critical account of the contingent contemporary transformations in Mexico. By engaging in an exercise of process-tracing, this thesis aims to examine critically key features of social change, challenging economic deterministic accounts, and ignoring social and political circumstances. Its focus is on the application of theories of change to illuminate broad trajectories of reform. By presenting a theoretically informed empirical narrative of contemporary transformations in Mexico, it is possible to enhance the insight into the particular processes of commodification, democratization and integration. Moreover, the varied and combined paces, depths and strengths of these transformations provide an excellent opportunity to understand and assess the importance of tendencies and countertendencies in play. By referring to the analytical tools of structure and agency, material and ideational elements, all within specific locations of time and space the contingency of processes of change is recognized. The restoration of agency is a crucial element for an analysis of the socially embedded processes of commodification, democratization and integration. By relying on the accounts of political economists and economic sociologists, it can be shown that the processes are deeply political and non-determinate. Therefore, alongside constraints, they also offer windows of opportunity which encompass a broader social and political spectrum and possibilities of transformation. Since different modes of governance are not necessarily incompatible with each other, the account offered here focuses on the state, the market and networking, as well as their complementary roles, which are not reducible to determinisms or inevitability of any sort.

Black radical politics are comprehensively defined and the aim is to understand how such a political ideology can be used to overcome racial inequalities in contemporary Britain. A Black radical challenge to mainstream racial theory within the academy is outlined, along with an interrogation of the principle limitation of Black radical thought, that of essentialism and cultural authenticity. To illustrate how a Black radical approach can be understood, the position was applied to inequalities in schooling. Black radicalism argues for a Black independent education. Black supplementary schools are spaces organised by concerned members of the Black community and offer extra teaching of mainstream curricula and also Black studies. These are presented as potential spaces for Black radical independent education. A Black supplementary school was selected as a case study, where a critical participatory ethnography was undertaken. The researcher spent 7 months working as a teacher in the supplementary school, collecting extensive fieldnotes. Experiences in the programme revealed strengths in the relationships, diverse curriculum and empowering nature of the environment for students. A number of challenges also arose including structure, coordination and decline in attendance. Overall, the potential for a Black radical independent education exists within Black supplementary school movement.

In the recent years, social issues around renewable energy implementation have been gaining prominence both in developed and developing countries. Though researchers across different disciplines in developed countries have started dealing with this issue, there is a lack of theoretical or empirical research in developing countries. This research from a pluralistic perspective and using the case study of ‘Charanaka Solar Park’ qualitatively analyses the relationship between ‘justice’ and solar energy implementation in India. The justice framework used in this thesis corresponds to the theoretical knowledge on a) procedural justice and b) distributional justice principles based in social, environmental, and energy justice literatures. The application of multiple theories of justice proved to be significant and useful instrument for analysing controversies over implementation of solar (renewable) energy policies. The results of this research have provided new insights into how social justice issues, such as recognition of marginalised communities, equal and democratic participation, and just distribution of project outcomes, are strongly interconnected to implementation of ‘environmentally good’ projects. Following the findings of this research, recommendations for policymakers and practitioners are proposed and pathways for future research are outlined.

The notion of reappearing responds to a prominent article by Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003a) who argued for the disappearance of leadership, predominantly due to their failure to look for the practices. This research focuses on this ontological orientation and undertakes a theoretical and empirical exploration of leadership practice in a Russian organisation, and provides three main contributions for the emerging field of leadership-as-practice. Firstly, I develop a framework primarily based on cultural-historical activity theory and critical realism that conceptualises leadership practice by placing agents’ actions and interactions within the context of their relationships, objectives, experiences, material and non-material artefacts and wider organisational processes and structures; work that has not yet been undertaken in the field. Secondly, I provide a methodological guidance for future qualitative research design that connects ethnographically informed approaches to fieldwork with critical realist Grounded Theory techniques for data analysis process. Thirdly, drawing on the findings from my empirical research, I suggest how leadership practice is enacted within the day-to-day interactions and activities and how it affects the very context of its appearance. I conclude with suggestions for future research that draws on these contributions, as well as making recommendations for leadership development practice.

The portrayal of migrants in Spanish and British media and political discourse has been the focus of much recent academic study and is largely concerned with negative images. Where positive or sympathetic portrayals have been examined, they alert us to pitfalls: compassion aroused by the portrayal of migrants as victims is a double-edged sword because victims need an external agent to empower them and, therefore, are deprived of their own agency. The image of the 'passive' and 'rightless' migrant has been counteracted by literature that portrays migrants as 'political activists' mobilising to demand legalisation of their immigration status. This portrayal of the 'activist migrant' can be viewed as 'utopian' whereby migrants are transformed into a new historical subject for social change and, as such, become the site for the projection of political hopes and desires. This study focuses on an area of research that has received little attention - how migrants' rights organisations portray migrants. Two organisations provided the research sites for the case studies: Sevilla Acoge, based in Seville, Spain, and Praxis, based in London, Britain. As demonstrated in this thesis, both of them were strongly influenced by the radical leftist ideas of liberation theology. The thesis argues that over a period of approximately thirty years (from the 1980s to the early 2010s) the portrayal of migrants shifted from a political to a humanitarian framing. More specifically, it shows that these changing portrayals reflected shifts in the organisations' values and expressed a sense of disappointment in the politics of the past that had aimed to change society through collective political action. This cross-country, comparative and longitudinal study uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the changing portrayals of migrants. The case studies illustrate the consequences of the humanitarian trumping the political approach to migrants' rights and the implications of this for the possibilities of political action and empowerment.

Contemporary debates about military technologies have tended to overlook important interjections from feminist security scholars. These interjections have drawn attention to the myriad ways in which gender functions in the development and deployment of technologies in warfare, so that the technology is perceived as either having 'feminizing' or 'masculinizing' effects. However, the accounts offered in support of these arguments include data which does not ‘fit’ with the narrative of either/or masculinization/feminization. This thesis is that 'Haunting' provides an important lens through which the interaction between, and co-constitution of, gender and military technologies can be more adequately explored. Supplementing the 'ghost hunt' with 'queer logic' to draw the concerns of Haunting (the complexity of personhood, in/(hyper)visibility, disturbed temporality and power) in conversation with feminist scholarship, the thesis reveal military technologies as simultaneously destabilizing and (re)inscribing dominant discourses of military masculinity. At its core this thesis argues that Haunting as a theoretical framework and methodology gives us access to, and a means of understanding, data that centres nuance, details and specificity which is fundamental to social research.

How should the criminal justice system respond to women who conceal their pregnancies, resulting in the death of the foetus or baby? It is widely expected that a pregnant woman will act in the best interests of her unborn child, including submitting herself to medical examination. However, these expectations are not always met and this causes particular problems for vulnerable women who experience crisis pregnancies. In such situations women have hidden their pregnancies, given birth in secret, and are suspected of causing the death of the baby. Alternatively, their actions while pregnant, and during labour and delivery are deemed to have culminated in the stillbirth of the child. While there are no accurate statistics, every year approximately 7 babies/foetuses are known to die in such circumstances during the perinatal period. Through a detailed examination of transcripts from sentencing hearings of criminal cases heard 2010-2014, I explore how and why women involved in such cases have come to be dealt with through English criminal law. There appears to be a strong desire to criminalise women who are perceived to fail to put the foetus first. Criminal justice professionals use out-dated offences to capture these perceived criminal wrongs. I conclude that if the state wishes to punish women for harm caused to the foetus, then the enactment of foetal protection laws would be appropriate. However, as critical assessment of such law in the United States of America illustrates, such laws could have dramatic consequences on the rights of women. The cases analysed in this thesis provide a fascinating lens through which to examine a range of broader issues including, the expectation that women should put the needs of the foetus before their own, and the assumption that motherhood starts at conception and is natural and inherent.

No description available.

This thesis is an exploratory study of the way perceptions and emotions shape the agency of asylum seekers. Using Eritrean asylum seekers that travel to Italy and their perceptions of the Italian asylum system as a case study, it explores how perceptions of Italy and its asylum system shape the strategies of Eritrean asylum seekers at different stages of their migration journey. This research went some way towards developing a notion of agency that also takes into account dimensions (such as the importance of perceptions and emotions) that are sometimes overlooked in forced migration studies, thereby contributing (or so I hope) to a more informed and subtle view of asylum seekers’ movements and of their interaction with their surrounding environment. My fieldwork demonstrates that perceptions and emotions play an important role in shaping asylum seeker agency, and that perceptions are heavily influenced by the circulation of rumours among migrants. The first part of the thesis explores the way perceptions about Italy are produced and re-produced in Eritrea (thereby leading to a set of recurrent expectations), as well as the way the identity formation process happening in Eritrea has led to the emergence of peculiar characteristics that are relevant in explaining Eritrean asylum seekers’ strategies for coping with the challenges of the asylum system. The second part of this project focuses on asylum journeys, and specifically on the various trajectories developed by asylum seekers, on the circulation of rumours and on the way perceptions about destination countries evolve. The last part examines the Italian asylum and reception systems and provides some examples of the strategies adopted by asylum seekers to overcome problems and obstacles; it also explores the factors that shape the agency of Eritrean asylum seekers, especially in relation to the Italian asylum system and to the rules of the Dublin Procedure.