This thesis is a social psychological approach to youth empowerment and social change in urban African contexts. Over a period of 22 months, 39 young people from Dar es Salaam and Soweto participated in a community‐based initiative called Shooting Horizons. The aim of the project was to engage young people in a process of critical consciousness and social action to represent themselves and their communities through their own words and images using Photovoice methodology. Six Photovoice workshops, involving a total of 23 young women and 16 young men, took place in multiple sites, two youth centres in Dar es Salaam and one in Soweto. The data was collected through multiple methods, including a series of 37 photo‐stories, 6 focus groups on development and social change, a record of daily discussion groups, and 1 focus group and 10 individual interviews post‐project. Emerging from the narrative positions of the participants, the project affirms the different directions for living envisaged by young people and promotes alternatives to the stigmatization of young people and their communities by the grand discourses and practices of development. Through a social psychological lens, I explore the impact that stigmatizing representations of development have on individual and social identities in order to make sense of the contradictions and ambiguities that it presents for enacting social change. I argue that a community empowerment framework, supported by an agenda of resistance to the exclusionary discourses and practices of development, can overcome some of the complex mechanisms of power that lead to oppressive social stratifications. The analysis observes the politics of knowledge and recognition in constructing social identities and building social capital to open up spaces for alternatives within the limitations of these particular contexts. The findings of this study consistently refer to how ‘difference’ is imbued in the narratives of young people and the need to address the gendered and racialized beliefs that contribute to participants’ internalized and victimising perspectives and that constrain processes of social change. Recommendations include practical, concrete, and innovative methods for urban African youth to engage in initiatives that suit their own development interests within a social psychological approach to empowerment that redefines community as a space of inbetweens, a citizenry of people sharing common interests and different agendas.

The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential benefits of affiliation with nature on British and Greek secondary school students’ positive functioning, and the variations in relation to climate and geography conditions. Particular emphasis is given on the role of schools' environmental education programs and activities. Following the contemporary positive psychology theory, we have focused on two main well-being conceptualizations: (i) the hedonic (or so-called subjective well-being), i.e. life satisfaction/happiness, and (ii) the eudaimonic, i.e. personal growth/flourishing life. A wide range of objective and subjective indicators have been used to represent various environmental parameters. The subjective indicators include students’ perceptions about the surrounding environment, their experiential exposure to nature (participation in outdoor sports, excursions to nature, etc.), environmental attitudes, values and knowledge, while the objective indicators assess the local climate and geographical characteristics, such as average annual temperature, wind and precipitation, altitude, distance from sea, rural vs. urban areas, and local environmental conditions, such as air pollution, proximity to heavy industries and airports, and proximity to areas of outstanding natural beauty. The study employs a quantitative survey approach (paper and internet based) to collect cross-sectional data from various lower and upper secondary schools across the two countries. A sample of 3614 students (aged between 14 and 19 years old) from 94 Greek secondary schools and 527 students (aged between 12 and 19 years old) from 15 English secondary schools have been collected during the academic years 2010-2011 and 2011-2012. The statistical analysis is mainly based on OLS and ordered logistic regressions with clustered standard errors, to control for intraclass correlation among the respodents. The findings highlight the significant effect of connectedness with nature on subjective and eudaimonic well-being, and the beneficial role of environmental education in promoting overall life satisfaction, school satisfaction and eudaimonia, either directly or indirectly through the enhancement of connectedness with nature.

This thesis looks at how ‘the Muslim woman’ is produced in social policy discourses in the UK. It is a qualitative study based on interviews, observation and interpretive analysis of policy material. It focuses specifically on initiatives to empower Muslim women in order to combat terrorism which formed part of the UK’s Preventing Violent Extremism Agenda (Prevent). In January 2008 the National Muslims Women’s Advisory Group (NMWAG) was established and Local Authorities were encouraged to fund projects aimed at ‘empowering Muslim women’. The thesis begins by situating the research within a wider policy framework. At the national level it relates to debates on community cohesion, Britishness and multiculturalism; at the global level it relates to the UK’s involvement in the ‘war on terror’. The research examines local inflections in how the initiatives worked in practice, considering the impact of diversity within diversity. A key objective of these initiatives was to ‘give the silent majority a stronger voice’. The thesis considers the extent to which this objective was achieved, particularly in relation to the establishment of NMWAG. Through an analysis of the initiatives overseen by NMWAG it considers how empowerment is conceptualised and, therefore, also by definition, disempowerment. It suggests that empowerment is positioned as individualised in the form of neoliberal meritocratic aspiration. At the same time, however, it is collectivised in relation to religious affiliation; Islam emerges both as a source of disempowerment and as a potential solution. The thesis argues that these initiatives have worked to privilege religion at the expense of other salient axes of difference, particularly those embedded in socio economic and regional variations. Moreover, this privileging constitutes part of a broader gendered anti-Muslim racist rhetoric. Finally the thesis argues that deconstructing the trope of ‘the Muslim woman’ and attending to the differences between Muslim women opens up the possibility of building solidarities across religious boundaries and harnessing an “alternative politics of recognition”.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the various ways in which globalization is performed in the locus of the South Korean advertising industry. In doing this, I focus upon the practice of creative advertising which is considered as one of the main practices to perform globalization in the locus. Addressing globalization as performativity means that this study rejects the idea of globalization as an objective structure. Instead, it approaches globalization as discursively induced practices and a transitory construction constituted of aggregate action. However, the actions that build globalization are diverse and situated in time and place. It necessitates this study to ‘follow’ the actors who embody narratives of globalization and produce it in their daily performances of those narratives. In this thesis, I follow South Korean advertising creatives who are an embodiment of a particular type of agency which identifies creative advertising with globalization and modernity. In this respect, their practicing creative advertising is simultaneously practicing globalization and modernity. However, their practice of creative advertising is situated in the South Korean advertising industry and takes place in a network of actors who embody different agencies. It makes creatives’ practice of globalization and modernization by way of creative advertising an ongoing struggle and negotiation. I explore the ways in which creatives’ practice of creative advertising transforms when they are connected to other actors in the network, particularly ad firms and clients; and the ways in which this transformation produces different forms of globalization. In this thesis, globalization appears multiple, contingent and mediated. Various narratives of globalization produce diverse subjects but these narratives are locally mediated. . It is the processes of performing the imaginary ‘global’ that is locally defined. Therefore, globalization is essentially a local product in which local agents practice the local on a new platform.

This PhD studies the professional practice of policing from a situated perspective. It explores with social psychological theories and methods how officers attend to incidents, showing that discretion exists within the ambiguity of a concrete situation that an officer interprets then and there. With Body-Worn Video(BWV), a head-mounted camera introduced into UK policing in 2007, officers record as part of their practice. Within the framework of Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE) (Lahlou, 2011) self-confrontation interviews of officers with their recordings allow insights into situated decision-making processes. I also became a Special Constable to train as an officer and organised a working group of police on the use of video, to gain insight into institutional factors. Hence,video use in policing is both an object of study and enabler of methodological innovation for this work. The empirical material is analysed to explore the interplay of institutions with concrete situations as displayed in officer recorded footage, focusing in particular on affordances (Gibson, 1986), connotations of action (Uexküll, 1956), sequential dimension (Knoblauch et al., 2006, Sacks et al., 1974) and social encounters (Goffman, 1961). The PhD develops 3 papers. Paper 1 focuses on discretion: crucial to the policing of an incident is whether it is pursued formally or informally. This categorisation occurs in a process where officers anticipate formal outcomes. They therefore often have discretion to construct an incident as warranting a formal response or not. So officers frame the situation as well as respond to it. Paper 2 expands on the formal/informal distinction to consider the trade-offs they have to make under cross constraints. Being able to simultaneously maintain an appearance of control Manning, 1977), adherence to due process, and attend to situational demands is only possible because officers have discretion in the process of co-constructing an incident in the ‘correct’ formats. Paper 3 discusses the relevance of seeing and visibility for policing. It also explores the impact of camera-mediated visibility on officer practice, therefore, addressing the implications of increasing visibility on policing and the biases resulting from using BWV as data for research. As the emphasis on appearance grows, officers lose the discretion that comes as part of interpreting a situation, forcing them to be more mechanistic in how they police incidents.

This thesis contributes to the literature seeking to reconceptualise human security from a critical feminist perspective. It argues that security is a field of power, implicated in context-specific ways in the (re)production of gendered violences, and that human security must account for how such violences are (re)produced in and through the everyday. It explores how socially and historically embedded security institutions, discourses and practices are implicated in ‘the (violent) reproduction of gender’ (Shepherd 2008), taking as a case study Delhi Police’s initiatives to address violence/crime against women, in response to the city’s notoriety as India’s ‘rape capital’. Drawing on 86 in-depth interviews and 6 months of observational fieldwork with Delhi Police, the thesis shows that Delhi Police have found innovative ways of doing ‘security’ which depart from its association with (masculinist) authority and protection, and which apprehend violences embedded in the everyday. However, the effects are contradictory and ambivalent. Despite challenging some aspects of gender relations, the policing of violence/crime against women also reproduces conditions which enable and sustain the violence. The thesis explores how police discourses construct violence in terms of vulnerability and responsibility, in ways which both normalise and exceptionalise certain violences, and map gendered safety onto normative ideas of sexual integrity such as to reproduce the heteronormativity of marriage as a compulsory institution for women. It investigates the spatial and temporal distancing through which violence/crime against women is constructed, and the consequent reproduction of class differentiation and identification, and normative gender and sexuality. It considers how the unstable gendering of policing, and police work, intersects with and contributes to such constructions of violence/crime against women, and their discursive effects. The thesis concludes with a qualified and partial recuperation of human security as emancipatory – where emancipation is conceived as transforming oppressive power relations, and power is understood in a Foucauldian sense as pervasive, unstable and productive. It highlights the limits of security, and the relativity of its achievability.

This thesis investigates the issue of co-production; that is, the joint provision of services involving residents, the local government and private providers. Co-production is a commonly used approach to facilitate access to basic services in informal settlements in the developing world. But, rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of its causal effects is rare. This study uses a ‘natural experiment’, possible due to strict technical reasons involved in the provision of gas energy to informal neighbourhoods in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, to estimate the effects on the social and physical dimension of residents’ investments. Estimates are created at three co-production stages: an initial social interaction stage to introduce the service; the connection stage, and; an impact stage several years after programme completion. The research measures effect on housing improvements, participatory involvement associated with the internalisation of benefits, and suggests the presence of collective capacity for furthering collaborative efforts. The latter can be associated with the significant improvement in the residents’ reported trust in neighbourhood organisations at the different implementation stages. Importantly, the research measures residual effects by legal tenure conditions. Co-production has contributed to an incremental effect only for informal residents’ reported level of trust in the local public sector. Trust in the family, rather than generalised trust, appears as a significant residual effect of the intervention that is positively correlated with the undertaking of housing improvements.

The continuing difficulty of integrating immigrants, especially Muslims, has led many European political leaders to question the merits of multiculturalism and to promote more commitment towards national values and social cohesion. This thesis aims to examine how these national discourses are interconnected and why they have an exclusionary character. Starting from this point, I draw on a theoretical approach based on a model of mediatised convergence in the European public sphere. Secondly, I reconstruct through a critical discourse analysis, the national debates that have emerged across Europe. I then identify commonalities, by looking into the strategies through which these discourses are articulated. Thirdly, I investigate through content analysis, how press coverage has amplified and reinforced this debate. The cross-national comparison demonstrates a shared concern for how multicultural policies have passively tolerated and encouraged Muslim immigrants to live in self-segregated and isolated communities. This nexus between securitisation and multiculturalism targets first and second generation of Muslims who are assumed, because of their religious and cultural identity, to have authoritarian customs and illiberal values. Conversely, embracing those secular and liberal values that characterise the European ethos is exemplified as the best practice to deal with a correct and safe integration. However, this strategy to reduce integration towards a process of assimilation to majority norms and values risks creating further exclusion, rather than enhancing social cohesion and political belonging. The analysis of national press coverage confirms a shared way of thinking and talking about integration. Despite the political specificity of each national debate, simultaneous coverage across Europe develops reciprocal discursive references on how to achieve community cohesion and manage the migration of Muslims. It can be claimed, therefore, that the more discourses converge across national public spheres, the more they are perceived as stable and consensual. Hence, convergence is a crucial factor to be considered because it allows us to define the boundaries of the European public sphere. However, the study of this transnational debate is crucial not only for scholars of media and communication, but also of European policies and immigration, as this debate involves a larger discussion on how to manage the complexity of relationships between immigrant minorities and the majority in Europe.

In recent years, Chinese engagement with Africa has expanded dramatically but has also become increasingly diverse as a wide range of Chinese institutions and individuals have undertaken activities on the continent. This phenomenon has attracted significant interest from scholars in different disciplines; however, most of the research carried out to date has been relatively macro-level, e.g. looking into international political-economic relations between states. This thesis aims to contribute to the recently emerging research perspective that focuses on Sino-African interactions from the ground up. It is based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out mainly in two sites near Lusaka, Zambia: a Chinese state-sponsored ‘agricultural technology demonstration farm’ and a private farm that is owned and run by a Chinese family. With their respective modes of organization and operation, fieldwork in these two farms provided access to very different types of interlocutors and situations. The primary focus in the thesis, building on data from these two contrasting settings, is on everyday situational interactions within the Chinese community itself and, to a lesser extent, between Chinese migrants and their Zambian hosts. The daily patterns of interaction among the Chinese migrants illustrate the essential role that emotion plays in forming and reproducing social relations and groups. On the one hand, in the Chinese folk understanding emotions are stressed and they are seen to be more important than instrumental exchanges when it comes to achieving sustainable relationships. On the other hand, as they are embedded in everyday moral interaction and conversational situations, the empathetic realization of embedded emotions is held to encourage convivial communication and group formation. At the pragmatic level, I argue that the significant role given to emotion within the folk understanding of social life may actually hinder interaction with ‘outsiders’. This can be manifested in the form of mismatched ethical practices in the course of everyday interaction. In this particular setting, it therefore causes tension between Chinese migrants and their Zambian hosts. Theoretically, against Potter’s claim that emotion is largely irrelevant in Chinese society, I argue that emotion, with an extensive connotation, is in fact the fundamental factor in the formation and reproduction of Chinese social relations.

In most mature welfare states, policy evaluations are sponsored by the very organisations that designed and implemented the intervention in the first place. Research in the area of clinical trials has consistently shown that this type of arrangement creates a moral hazard and may lead to overestimates of the effect of the treatment. Yet, no one so far has investigated whether social interventions were subject to such ‘confirmation bias’. The objective of this study was twofold. Firstly, it assessed the scientific credibility of a sample of government-sponsored pilot evaluations. Three common research prescriptions were considered: (a) the proportionality of timescales, (b) the representativeness of pilot sites; and (c) the completeness of outcome reporting. Secondly, it examined whether the known commitment of the government to a reform was associated with less credible evaluations. These questions were answered using a ‘meta-research’ methodology, which departs from the traditional interviews and surveys of agents that have dominated the literature so far. I developed the new PILOT dataset for that specific purpose. PILOT includes data systematically collected from over 230 pilot and experimental evaluations spanning 13 years of government-commissioned research in the UK (1997-2010) and four government departments (Department for Work and Pensions, Department for Education, Home Office and Ministry of Justice). PILOT was instrumental in (a) modeling pilot duration using event history analysis; (b) modeling pilot site selection using logistic regression; and (c) the systematic selection of six evaluation reports for qualitative content analysis. A total of 17 interviews with policy researchers were also conducted to inform the case study and the overall research design. The results show little overt evidence of crude bias or ‘bad’ design. On average, government-sponsored pilots (a) were based on timescales that were proportional to the scope of the research; (b) were not primarily designed with the aim of warranting representativeness; and (c) were rather comprehensively analysed in evaluation reports. In addition, the results indicate that the known commitment of the government to a reform had no significant effect on the selection of pilot sites and on the reporting of outcomes. However, it was associated with significantly shorter pilots. In conclusion, there is some evidence that the known commitment of a government to a reform is associated with less credible evaluations; however this effect is only tangible in the earlier stages of the research cycle. In this respect, sponsorship bias would appear to be more limited than in the context of industry-sponsored clinical trials. Policy recommendations are provided, as this project was severely hindered by important ‘black box’ issues and by the poor quality of evaluation reports.