This thesis takes ‘mixed-race’ individuals and parents of ‘mixed-race’ children in Scotland as its subject, exploring the meanings and significance of ‘mixed-race’ and the process by which ‘mixed-race’ identities are constructed. Contributing to the burgeoning ‘mixed-race’ scholarship in Britain, and more broadly to the intersection of the sociology of ‘race’ and the sociology of family relationships literature, this thesis presents a qualitative analysis of ‘mixed-race’ identities by exploring how mixed individuals view themselves through interactions with others. Informed by a theoretical approach combining interactionist and intersectional perspectives, this thesis stresses the role of everyday interactions with family members in shaping one’s views of the self, but it also pays attention to the ways in which meanings associated with ‘mixed-race’ are conditioned by and produced in the wider social context. Based upon thirty-one in-depth interviews with ‘mixed-race’ individuals and parents of mixed children conducted over a 24-month period, this thesis qualitatively examines interviewees’ experiences and interpretations of ‘mixed-race’ by locating them within the wider socio-cultural context. Focusing on personal and family experiences of being ´mixed race’ or being associated with mixedness, this thesis pays particular attention to family dynamics, seeking to explore the ways in which family practices influence children’s attitudes towards mixed heritages. In so doing, empirical data is analysed and presented in a ‘thick description’ fashion. Illustrative cases are employed to draw out and exemplify the complex processes of negotiating and constructing meanings of ‘mixed-race’. Contending that the relative centrality of mixedness varies between individuals, the analysis shows that ‘mixed-race’ identities are embedded in various forms of social relations and conditioned by structural constraints. Due to the uneven access to symbolic and material resources, mixed individuals have different capacities to mobilise collective meanings ascribed to ethnicities in order to negotiate racialised differences. Within this process, ‘mixed-race’ families play a pertinent role in providing their children with access to knowledge about their mixed heritage. Furthermore, parents have an impact on children’s early attitudes towards their ethnic heritages by either reinterpreting or reproducing racial ideologies. Once again, parents’ priorities, strategies and specific plans to communicate the idea of ‘mixed-race’ are structured by their racialised, classed and gendered positions.

This study provides a critical analysis of the influence of social class on life chances in post-reform Vietnam. As the country underwent a profound structural transition from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy in the mid-1980s, social class gradually replaced political class as a major source of inequality. Knowledge about this phenomenon is rudimentary – not least because of the continuing power of state ideology in contemporary Vietnam. Throughout the investigation, Bourdieu’s framework of class reproduction guides both a quantitative analysis of the Survey Assessment of Vietnamese Youth 2010 and a qualitative research of 39 respondents in the Red River Delta region, including young people of the first post-reform generation – now in their 20s and 30s – and their parents. The study discusses the ways in which class determines the ability of parents to transmit different resources to their children, focusing on those that are usable and valued in the fields of education and labour. It finds that, across several areas of social life in contemporary Vietnam, implicit class-based discrimination is disguised and legitimised by explicit and seemingly universal ‘meritocratic’ principles. The study makes a number of original contributions to sociology, three of which are particularly important. (1) Empirically, it breaks new ground for a sociological understanding of both the constitution and the development of class inequalities in contemporary Vietnam. (2) Methodologically, it offers numerous useful examples of mixed-methods integration. (3) Theoretically, it proposes to think with, against and beyond some of the most relevant Bourdieusian research on this topic. The empirical application of Bourdieu’s framework in toto, as opposed to a more customary partial appropriation, facilitates comprehensive insights into: class-specified practices as governed and conditioned by internalised powers and structural resources; the multidimensionality of class-based advantages and disadvantages; and the causative transmission and activation of capital across and within generations.

Veterinary Medicine does not have a history in the social sciences and is therefore a fascinating field of study. Despite the growth of education research in the veterinary schools, the social and relational aspects of veterinary training and practice are under-examined, and could have profound effects on the ability of students to make a successful transition into qualified work. This thesis explored the development of occupational identity in veterinary students and newly-qualified veterinary surgeons, using narrative interview techniques and organisational policy analysis. From interviewees’ stories, a clear distinction could be drawn between the majority, who were vocationally-motivated, and a smaller group who were drawn to a veterinary career by the high academic standards required. All identified several influences on their own professional identity development: role models, the need to perform as competent and confident, and presenting an approved personality type in order to gain access to the practical experience required during training. The predominant story arc is that of becoming increasingly ‘vetlike’ as they progress through the course. Animal welfare is a substantial silence in the organisational discourse of veterinary medicine. The discourse analysis revealed the overwhelming presentation of the elite academic nature of the profession, at the expense of any mention of animal care or welfare, or acknowledgement of vocational motivation. A compelling collective responsibility was also identifiable in terms of upholding a professional reputation and its high standards. A strong occupational history contributes to this, leading to a very bonded occupational group. The idea of veterinary medicine not being a nine-to-five job is expressed in policy and resonated very strongly with interview participants. However, there exists a very clear, organisationally-sanctioned, officially-approved attitude towards veterinary life and work, allowing very little deviation. This has the subsequent effect that tolerance of weakness, unhappiness, or complaint is low; so that members are forced to either internalise their unhappiness or leave the profession entirely. Veterinary medicine is perceived as a career with high job satisfaction and a positive public image. However, awareness is increasing of worryingly high levels of mental illness, stress, unhappiness and dissatisfaction with their work among the veterinary workforce. This thesis suggests that one factor that could underlie this is a mismatch between a new entrant’s ideas of what a vet is and does, and the reality of a working life in veterinary practice. From the conclusions presented in this thesis - in particular the finding that, as a profession, veterinary medicine strives to distance itself from an animal care or animal welfare focus - I suggest that it is the confused messages received as part of the process of socialisation during training that could connect to many of the problems facing the modern entrant to the veterinary profession. This research specifically focused on the development of occupational identity in veterinary students and newly-qualified veterinary surgeons in the UK and is the only current work to examine the processes, presentation and experiences of veterinary training in this comparative manner. As a relatively new, and very interdisciplinary, field of study, the capacity for future work in veterinary social sciences is considerable, with much to be learnt from allied fields as well as further explorations of just what makes veterinary medicine unique, and such a valuable source of social inquiry given the significance of pets and livestock to the lives of a nation of animal lovers. This is potentially a very rich field.

This thesis aims to elucidate perceptions and practices in relation to learning disabilities in different contexts over a period of a hundred years, between 1780 and 1880. Previous studies have concentrated on institutional and professional contexts, on informed medical opinion for example, or on focused studies of local practices. Here a wider range of opinion and practice is sought. The Introduction includes a discussion of nomenclature, and explains why 'intellectual impairment' is used rather than the familiar term 'learning disability'. Part I of the thesis explores perceptions of, and responses to, intellectual impairment held by different people in various contexts, while Part II employs biographical methods to examine the life histories of a number of intellectually impaired people in their familial setting. Part I starts with the views of professionals - educationists,doctors (who were at the forefront of the well documented emergence of idiot education in the 1840s) and also charity workers. Concentrating on previously neglected issues, the thesis shows that educational theory and practice offered nothing to families with an intellectually impaired child, and medical dominance had negligible competition. In a chapter on the efforts of charity workers as well as doctors to promote and raise money for the new idiot asylums, the focus is on the notion of idiocy that they put forward. Here ideas from the past mingled with new ideas. The question of the nature and origin of the image, or images, of the idiot is continued in two chapters that explore the varied and changing portrayals of intellectual impairment in imaginative literature. Part II uses family papers in a novel way to investigate the lives of individuals who had an intellectual impairment, and the responses of their families. These families, well known because of at least one eminent member, and well documented, are at the least, comfortably off. But within these parameters there is variation. Augustus, son of William and Caroline Lamb, is from the aristocracy, while Laura, daughter of Leslie Stephen of DNB fame, is from the middle class intelligentsia. This makes the similarity of responses to an intellectually impaired child the more interesting. For the most part, a child's difficulty was conceptualised as an educational, health or social problem, and not in terms of idiocy or a related all inclusive notion. The final chapter of Part II, that explores experiences of the modestly off or the poor, uses, in the absence of family papers, other sources of information. The inclusion of both the familial and private, and the public, contexts enables this thesis to reveal a wider range of perceptions and practices in relation to intellectual impairment during the period than have previous studies.

The aim of this investigation is to analyse the decision-making processes in housing in order to see the extent tenants are able to participate in these processes. Of particular interest to this examination are the ethnic and gender divisions in these processes. Thus, this thesis deals with the question of public housing and those theoretical and practical issues that provide an understanding of the relationship between social space and physical space; the complex relationship between individuals, collectivities and the welfare state and how ethnicity and gender issues figure in these practical relationships in general and housing processes in particular. The main theoretical issues to be looked at are the social divisions of ethnicity and gender and related notions of 'power'/ 'empowerment', 'identity'/'difference', 'participation' and 'the community' socially and spatially both at macro and local levels. The methodological approach arising out of the aims of the research was an in-depth study of three different types of housing projects where the degree of tenant involvement in their housing processes varied considerably. Each of these three types of housing projects characterised a different way and degree of participation by tenants in decision-making. These were firstly, council managed estates in which all major and minor decisions are taken by the local authority; secondly, tenant management cooperatives in which tenants take over the responsibility of the day-to-day management of their estate while the ownership of the estate remains with the council and some major decisions are taken by the council; and thirdly, self-build projects which involve tenants in the actual building and management processes of their housing and in which tenant involvement is supposed to be at its highest level.

This thesis examines gender differentiation in prosecutions for minor offences in local secular and ecclesiastical courts in Kent from 1460 to 1560. Chapter one explains the need for research on gender and crime in local courts, and for studies bridging the historiographical gap between medieval and early modem England. Chapter two examines crimes against property, arguing that reasons other than gender may explain the apparent lenience towards female thieves. Women were disproportionately prosecuted for small thefts and peripheral offences like hedgebreaking and receiving: this could indicate, not that they lacked initiative, but that they were more likely to be prosecuted for offences which were overlooked when committed by men. The reverse appears to be true for physical violence, the subject of chapter three. Here the evidence suggests that men were charged for very minor assaults, whereas minor violence by women was only prosecuted in special circumstances. Almost equal numbers of men and women were prosecuted for verbal offences, the subject of chapter four, but the women were accused mainly of scolding or quarrelling with their social equals, and the men of insulting or slandering their social superiors. Chapter five deals with prosecutions for sexual misconduct. Thechurch courts were relatively lenient towards females accused of fornication or adultery-, both ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions, however, prosecuted `bawds', who were mainly female, and prostitutes, but rarely the men who used their services. Chapter six is concerned with alleged sorcerers (mainly women), and with sabbath breakers, illegal games-players and vagabonds (largely men). The concluding chapter discusses the similarity of the policies of the ecclesiastical and secular courts, and the tendency for charges against women to be vague and generalised while those against men were specific. It then focuses on the different crimes for which men and women were typically presented, particularly sexual and verbal offences for women and physical assault for men. These and other gendered offences reflect contemporary assumptions and fears about femininity and masculinity: women were expected to be quarrelsome, malicious gossips and sexual delinquents, while physical violence was expected and feared in men. It is suggested that the way local courts exercised their considerable discretion over what, and whom, to prosecute reflected and reinforced these preconceptions, and operated both to control women and to minimise men's fears about them.

The main objectives of this research are to investigate the interaction between the city of Edinburgh, Lothian Buses (Edinburgh's principal public transport provider) and people using specific bus routes within the city boundaries. A single overarching question dominated the nature of this research: ‘What can we know about the local character of the city from the vantage point of the bus?' The primary means of data collection were systematic participant observations along specific bus routes from 2004 to 2005. Consideration moves beyond solely examining the interaction between passengers, and treats the bus and the city as complex phenomena with which people have an interactive relationship. Through these observations, it explores the ways in which the bus is more than a mode of transport that links places, and instead maintains that the bus network forms its own multi-stranded signature within the city. Unravelling these strands reveals a mobile place where heterogeneous types of bus users engage in sense making procedures. In addition, the quotidian conversations that take place within the bus add their own unique rhythms and provide an added dimension to city life. Analysis draws on these systematic observations, delving beneath the surface of the familiar practice of bus travel, seeing the new in the familiar and subjecting these observations to philosophical enquiry. This research also considers the multifarious dimensions of the embedded experience of travel within its in-situ spatial and temporal imagination. The changing temporal and spatial nature of the bus creates a highly complex place within which contested identities produce knowable and recognisable corporal inscriptions upon the bus. Through the everyday practices and accomplishments within the lifeworld, we treat the city as a work in progress, in which there is an enduring tension between a community's need for inclusiveness and the concomitant practices that contribute to the process of exclusion. The embodied time spent travelling is the substantive life-blood of this thesis and the rich veins of the bus network present themselves as an essential part of the city's anatomy. In chorus, the theoretical foundation reflects upon itself as principled speech.

In recent years, Malawi has received global attention as a global hotspot for human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity since the arrest of Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza for holding a wedding ceremony in 2009. The violations are a result of negative attitudes against ‘homosexuality’, and the application of anti-gay provisions of the Penal Code and the Marriages Divorce and Family Relations Act, which outlaw consensual adult same-sex relationships and non-conforming gender identities. Malawi’s failure to protect queer persons amounts to the violation of its domestic and international human rights obligations. Paradoxically, the Malawian Constitution and international human rights obligations (to which Malawi subscribes), guarantee equal and effective protection against discrimination, which I have argued that it includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. This interdisciplinary study explores the life stories of 44 queer Malawians examining how the lack of human rights protection affects their daily lives. I have found that the majority of queer Malawians are unlikely to come out due to fear of stigma and discrimination. As a result, they are unable to claim the full status necessary to enable them to formally assert their identity, citizenship and relationship rights. Drawing from social construction theories, this study will show that local meanings regarding human rights and sexuality include a misinterpretation of SOGI-based human rights as ‘the right to conduct mathanyula’, which is locally (mis)understood to imply permission to engage in sexual activities between men and young boys. I have recommended a radical shift in the articulation of SOGI-based human rights so that it is understood as the equal entitlement to protections in accordance with Malawi’s domestic and international human rights obligations. If understood as the latter, Malawians are likely to endorse human rights protection based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

This thesis looks into the complex relationships which women have had with their bodies throughout the twentieth century. It uses oral history evidence, medical sources, and official government material to examine women’s experiences of and access to physical recreation and sport throughout the life-cycle. It argues that despite the official view that throughout the twentieth century women’s sporting bodies were essentially fragile bodies, unsuited to competitive and manly sports, there were a number of alternative discourses available to women during these years. Women who had strong sporting identities, and confidence in their own physical abilities, were able to test the capabilities of their bodies and maintain their exercise participation throughout adolescence, menstruation, pregnancy and during motherhood, despite the advice of state officials, and many doctors, which advised them against participation. This thesis makes a powerful contribution to what at present is a largely uncharted historical landscape of female participation in and experience of physical recreation in Scotland and the UK in the mid-twentieth century. In a global context, it contributes to our understanding of the relationship between the female body and physical activity throughout the physically and culturally guided female life-cycle, and the particular ways in which women interacted with sport and exercise throughout the twentieth century.

Principles of Realist Evaluation (Pawson & Tilley, 1997) were used alongside a framework based on Realist Social Theory (Archer, 1995; De Souza, 2013) in order to explore and explain the nature of the local parenting context in which the Holding Hands Parenting Programme (HHPP) was both embedded and functioned. The research identified particular mechanisms that were pre-existing in the local context in its structural, cultural, agential and relational aspects which were activated by the introduction of a parenting programme. It was carried out in a large shire county where the researcher worked as a Trainee Educational Psychologist. Stakeholders in the HHPP from various system levels, ranging from those with service and commissioning responsibilities to recipients of parenting support, participated in the study, providing a rich insight into the multi-layered local context. Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) was used as a grounding framework for the analysis of data which followed a realist analytical process culminating in retroduction (Crinson, 2001) and six overarching themes were developed: (i) forward thinking; (ii) one size fits; (iii) collaboration; (iv) involvement; (v) barriers and (vi) perceptions and expectations. Network patterns (or configurations) were created which mapped out the relationship between aspects of the context, pre-existing mechanisms and the outcomes potentially generated as a result of a parenting programme. Existing literature was explored and findings formed a key part of the theorisation and retroductive phases of data analysis. Two overarching theories were constructed in order to summarise the concluding thoughts in this study on the relationship between the HHPP and its context. These were presented and can form the basis of future realist evaluation research. This research contributes to the further development of the HHPP as it seeks to use innovative and creative ways to support a wider range of parents within a complex and changing local context. Implications for future research and links to the practice of educational psychologists are discussed and the potential value principles of realist evaluation may have for an educational psychology service is outlined.