The Second Space is a novel that presents the place of women in a patriarchal society, exploring themes such as sexuality, reclamation of space, and the power of physical objects. It follows the story of a woman who escapes from the prospect of marriage and works to discover her self-identity, forging meaningful relationships with other women. The accompanying critical study contributes to the knowledge of women’s writing and the creative process by acknowledging the existence of a distinct space for women in a patriarchal society. This concept is called ‘The Second Space’. This study refutes the assumption that women’s fiction is autobiographical due to the use of themes such as domesticity and motherhood, demonstrating the value of building a narrative for women. The sources that support this research include creative, critical and feminist texts, as follows: Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, and Miranda July’s The First Bad Man, Carla Kaplan’s The Erotic’s of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms, Sean Burke’s Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, Micaela Maftei’s The Fiction of Autobiography, Margaret Atwood’s On Writers and Writing, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

The relationship between the state and citizens can give rise to legal and moral tension when the state interferes into private life in order to fulfil its statutory duties. An important statutory area where the state has such powers occurs in the Children Acts 1989 and 2004. These Acts inter alia confer powers on local authorities to undertake surveillance and assessment of private family life in order to identify and assess children who may be ‘in need’ of services, ‘at risk’, or suffering significant harm. The thesis argues that these powers enable the state to police private family life in order to ensure parents' compliance with prevailing child welfare ideology. Child welfare discourse dominates and mediated debate over the measures used by local authorities to police parents, claiming these state powers are necessary to protect children from harm. The thesis challenges these claims. The justification for 'child protection' and 'safeguarding' is critically examined from post-modem theoretical, statistical and doctrinal law perspectives. Areas of imbalance in current law and practice are identified and these are linked in the conclusion to focus upon the fundamental flaws in the current position. This offers the possibility of more integrated debate that challenges the orthodoxy and suggests fundamental revision of the current policy.

This study examines the female-initiated divorce right of khulʿ in Ḥanafī jurisprudence and its practical implementation in Pakistan. Previous research presents Ḥanafī jurisprudence as only allowing a khulʿ with the consent of the husband coupled with a financial liability placed upon the wife. This thesis argues that there has been a fundamental misunderstanding of the khulʿ under Ḥanafī fiqh, which is capable of providing divorce rights to women without the husband’s consent and financial recompense. This research also illustrates the judicial activism exhibited by the Pakistani courts, which has created a no-fault khulʿ surpassing existing statutory provisions. To date, there have been no studies on the efficacy of these developments, so this research assesses the extent to which these new liberal divorce laws have filtered down into Pakistani society. Through qualitative interviews and observations, this study examines married Muslim women’s perceptions of the khulʿ and the obstacles that female litigants face whilst trying to utilise the khulʿ in the Lahore courts. The findings reveal that whilst the khulʿ has empowered some women within the marital domain, religious and cultural norms coupled with practical problems within the courts have curtailed the potential of the khulʿ as a liberating tool in marriage.

Communication between politicians and the public is rarely direct and first-hand, but almost always mediated by journalist opinions and values. Consequently, the way in which the media reports on State matters has a profound impact on people’s understanding of political processes and their attitudes towards the governing figures. The aim of this research project is to investigate the role that the Polish Press assumes in mediating women’s involvement in contemporary politics. Stemming from the perspective of feminist critical linguistics, the thesis empirically examines a wide array of media publications derived from leading Polish socio-political magazines (‘Polityka’, ‘Wprost’, ‘Newsweek Polska’) and electronic press. By engaging with the journalist discourse, it focuses on the importance of language in generating epistemological claims about women and femininity. It demonstrates not only how female subjectivities are produced in the Polish public domain, but also how history and culture impinge on these constructions in a dialectical-relational manner. The intention is to draw up an ‘inventory’ of signifying practices through which female MPs emerge as gendered subjects in the hope that this will inspire closer scrutiny of media content, leading to its informed critique and transformation.

Volume 1, the research component, includes a literature review examining the efficacy of interventions for parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in relation to parent outcomes; an empirical paper, which presents findings of a quantitative study exploring parental illness perceptions, coping, wellbeing, parenting stress and parent perceptions of the child-parent relationship in parents of a child with pathological demand avoidance syndrome (PDA) and a public dissemination document. Volume 2, the clinical component, includes: a report detailing two psychological formulations; one from a cognitive behavioural perspective and one from a systemic perspective, for a 20 year old gentleman who was experiencing anxiety and depression, following removal of part of his bowel; a service evaluation report detailing an investigation of the extent to which a local respiratory service was addressing the psychological needs of COPD patients; a single case experimental design presenting an evaluation of a behavioural intervention for a 25 year old woman with a moderate learning disability, who presented with skin picking behaviours; a case study of a fourteen year old girl, who was under investigation for Crohn's disease and experienced anxiety and an abstract, reflecting on providing consultation within a looked after and adopted child's psychology service.

New technology is increasingly part of children’s lives. While a growing body of literature has explored various aspects of nursery-aged children’s exposure to ICT, children are seldom asked about their experiences. With this in mind, this study sought to explore children’s perceptions of their experiences of ICT. This exploration was underpinned by current trends in the new sociology of childhood studies and the principles of United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child, both of which aim at giving a greater status to children’s voice. The thesis reports on a series of ethnographic case studies of three privately run nurseries in the West Midlands, England. It involved fieldwork observations, field notes, and discussions with 65 children aged three and four years old. In carrying out conversations with children, the study made use of some participatory techniques (e.g., photography and drawing). Adopting a friendly adult role, I participated with the children in their daily activities collecting information about their ideas and thoughts with regards to their experiences with new technology. Related ethical issues were discussed, and negotiated in the field. Using their own words, the study captured children’s own perspectives on their encounters with whatever technologies were available in the nurseries. The findings showed that the children tended to perceive their ICT-based activities as play under certain circumstances. Significantly, they were more likely to view these activities as play when they owned their play, felt it was fair, had fun, and felt it accorded with their gendered identities. Conversely, when the children did not have influence on the activity, they often perceived it as boring and unfair. In addition, there was a tension between a preference to conduct their play with a friend(s) and a desire for personal ownership of the experiences. Recommendations for pedagogical practice, policy and future research are suggested.

This thesis considers some of the different forms taken by the intersection of social inequalities and exploitation in Sri Lankan garment factories. It identifies the organisational policies and practices that reproduce different ‘inequality regimes’ (Acker, 2006) in three case study garment companies, including inequalities of gender, class, ethnicity, religion, age and sexuality. These ‘inequality regimes’ also operate as ‘factory regimes’ (Burawoy, 1983), through which companies seek to generate worker productivity. Further, the thesis analyses the relation between women’s domestic situations and their employment, showing how both are shaped by the wider Sri Lankan patriarchal social structure. In order to understand the inequalities experienced by women at work the thesis mainly seeks to answer two research questions. The first research question asks about the nature of intersecting inequalities in the three case study organisations. The second research question relates to how women going to work in garment factories changes women’s lives. This research question pays special attention to Elson and Pearson’s (1981) three possible tendencies in the relationship between the emergence of women’s factory employment and women’s subordination. Methodologically, the research was based on semi-structured interviews with 36 male and female participants, including owners, managers and workers across three case study organisations, and observations in headquarters offices and three factories over nine months in 2014-2015. The research found that although all three case study organisations are located in the Sri Lankan garment industry, each case study organisation is typified by a highly distinctive inequality regime characterised by different mechanisms for maintaining or modifying wider inequalities and generating workers’ consent: one a ‘despotic regime’, one a ‘maternalistic regime’ and one a ‘pragmatic regime’. Each of these is associated with a degree of individual worker agency, but little collective resistance. The research also found that women’s decisions to enter employment is influenced by the income level of their husbands or fathers. When household income is low women are more able to challenge familial patriarchal authority by taking up employment in garment factories. Women’s contributions to household finances are associated with their families gaining status, women being involved in family decision-making and men contributing to domestic work.

This thesis traces how feminist subjectivities are shaped, formed and lived through a focus on English schoolteachers from postwar (1945-1979) and neoliberal (1980-2015) generations. The data is located in British society at a time of resurgence in feminist activism which is also simultaneously a period of ‘postfeminist sensibilities’ combined with the pervasiveness of neoliberal rationalities. In this contradictory scenario, and using a feminist approach and qualitative methods, this research is based on fifteen life story interviews that include five further in depth thematic interviews which have been thematically analysed. The core arguments of this thesis are located in a feminist poststructuralist framework. This approach highlights the fluidity of selfhood shaped by experiences, relationality and language. Subjectivity within poststructuralism is understood as neither completely free nor absolutely determined and power relations are not only limiting but also become productive in forming the subjectivities. Accordingly, this thesis explores how feminist subjectivities are constructed and shaped in multiple ways. In particular, the feminist schoolteachers in this thesis narrated the emergence of early forms of ‘protofeminism’ located in an unarticulated sense of injustice. They spoke of the influence of ‘significant women’ and the bonds of ‘imagined sisterhood’ as enabling a more fully developed awareness of gender injustice. They also talked of their practices to support gender justice, mostly non oppositional in form or as micro resistances to patriarchal practices. All these, I argue, are experiential resources for these women to draw upon in order to enable them to form alternative and counter narratives to patriarchal discourses, and thus construct feminist subjectivities and live feminist lives to resist patriarchal regimes in neoliberal times.

With the increase in the number of women working in the formal economy, there has been a growing literature on women handling multiple roles arising from work and the home. Currently there is a gap in the literature about the activities of working mothers in emerging economies, with theories and most findings concentrated on studies in advanced economies. This study therefore intends to fill part of the gap in the literature by investigating the lives of working mothers in the oil and gas sector in Nigeria, with a view of understanding their challenges, pains and gains as they navigate between the home and work spheres. This research adopted a qualitative approach through the administration of semi-structured interviews to working mothers, supervisors and Human Resources practitioners. Using the Greenhaus and Beutell’s (1985) sources of conflict model, this study explored the work and family lives of working mothers in Nigeria, thereby giving a detailed view of the time, strain and behaviour-based conflict they experience, as well as appropriate coping strategies that have been put in place to mitigate the effects of such conflicts. Findings complement earlier studies on work and family in Africa focusing on the experience of strain by working mothers in Nigeria. However, analysis from this study suggests that some of these stress-related conflicts were caused by the prevalent work culture of presenteeism. In comparing evidence of a more equal sharing of domestic tasks between couples in advanced economies, the embrace of equal sharing of housework by men and a demand for such by women in Nigeria is rather limited and slow. A striking difference on the strategies employed by working mothers in the west and in Nigeria is that what working mothers in Nigeria lose by way of government support, they gain in the form of family support.

A diagnosis of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a World Health Organisation (WHO) grade IV brain tumour, is devastating for patients and their families who bear the impetus of caregiving. GBM caregivers act as de facto health professionals when their loved ones are discharged prematurely from hospitals. Faced with complex healthcare needs, GBM caregivers report the highest psychological burden, and highest unmet needs of all cancer caregivers. Despite this, they rarely accessed rehabilitation services. Researchers hardly engaged with their stories. The current research on GBM caregiving is predominantly from a biomedical perspective, not only offering limited understandings of psychosocial experiences, but also, evidencing the need for caregiver stories in caregiving research. The researcher recruited 7 bereaved caregivers, who had previously narrated stories online about caring for their loved ones diagnosed with GBM and; consented to the use of their stories as research data. These stories covered a period of between 1-3+ years, throughout the illness trajectory and post-bereavement. The researcher further conducted email interviews focussed on the retrospective perspectives of sharing stories online. Participants provided feedback on the preliminary findings of the DNA. The findings consisted of multiple layers of interpretations drawn from social constructionism, narrative and feminist relational theories, beginning with subjective stories, collective story typologies and core narratives, thereby illuminating the relationships between GBM caregivers, the stories they narrated and the event of narrating stories online. An additional layer of interpretation served to shed light on the relational, dialogical, performative and hindsight perspectives of storytelling and the storytelling landscape. This research decentres the dominance of biomedicine in caregiving research to present a perspective from GBM caregivers using their own stories, in their own voices, so as to inform counselling psychology research and practice.