The impact of severe mental illness on the individual and their family can be substantial. In addition to living with the vagaries of a condition that can be of unpredictable duration and severity, individuals and their families may also have to live with public perceptions that can be devaluing, discriminatory or indeed hostile. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the impact of severe mental illness on the individual and their key relatives using a social cognitive perspective. Chapter 1 provides a review of the mechanisms and consequences of stigma and discrimination in severe mental illness, and explores ideas for intervention that are predicated upon empirical research findings. Chapter 2 examines the pattern of desynchrony between lay representations of severe mental illness held by individuals, their carers, and a sample of the general public. It also highlights the association between aspects of perceived stigma and divergent patient-parent representations of schizophrenia. Chapter 3 adopts a self-regulation theory approach to distress in the relatives of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and concludes that aspects of the self-regulation approach, (perceptions of psychosis, coping, and primary appraisals) have some utility as a framework to understand distress in the carers of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Finally, chapter 4 reflects on the research process and discusses the development and course of the research. It also provides some further reflections by participants on the experience of severe mental illness.

In the last few decades female permanent sterilization became the most used contraception method in Mexico. During this time the demand for short-term contraceptives fell consistently. The shift in the demand for contraceptives raises concerns among demographers that the timing of children may remain unchanged regardless of the observed reductions in period fertility rates. After presenting a brief discussion of the economic theory on fertility behaviour (Chapter 2) and introducing the reader to the main demographic issues of modem Mexico (Chapter 3), Chapter 4 assesses these ideas in the context of modelling the timing of a first child, using duration models as main analysis tool. Findings suggest that young cohorts of women are effectively delaying first birth relative to the experience of older generations. Chapter 5 reports a study of the determinants of completed fertility. Special attention is given to studying how characteristics such as religion and ethnic group affect the likelihood of transition from low to high order parities. An innovative Double-Hurdle count model is developed for the analysis. Findings indicate that education and Catholicism are associated with reductions in the likelihood of transition from parities lower than four to high order parities. Being an indigenous language speaker increases the odds of a large family. Chapter 6 enquires how fertility plans of young individuals who live in intact families (i.e., those where both biological parents are present) differ from fertility plans of young individuals who live in non-intact families. The role of family background in the formation of fertility plans is studied. Count data models are used in the analysis, including an innovative technique for estimating quantile regression for count data. Findings suggest that an absent father reduces planned fertility, especially when women have weak preferences towards children. Education decreases planned fertility if strong preferences towards children are felt.

The thesis examines Sex Education lessons integrated to the fourth and fifth year core curriculum of a mixed comprehensive school. It studies their stated objectives, contents and implementation in the classroom and analyses how pupils interpret curricular meanings with regard to their gender expectations from sexuality, employment and domesticity. A variety of qualitative methods - in particular, participant observation and informal interviews - has been used. The first chapter argues that sexual and gender socialisations must be understood from a materialist position and that the Sex Education curriculum may be structured by the fundamental functions of schooling in a gender - and class - divided society. The second chapter locates the marginal position of Sex Education within the Health Education course of the deeply divided school. Strategies for control over curriculum and classroom social relations developed by both Sex Education teachers and pupils constitute the theme of the third chapter with illustrations from the lesson on childbirth and pregnancy. Contraception, sexual intercourse and marriage are discussed in the next three chapters which follow the same pattern. Each considers the selection of curricular meanings, their transmission in the class and boys' and girls' perceptions of these topics. The last chapter underlines the dominance of traditional views on sexuality, gender and marriage in teachers' and pupils' perceptions alongside a liberal reformist theme. Both dominant and negotiated meanings form the ideology of personal relationships which blends objective information with commonsense knowledge of sexual and gender conflicts. Consistent with the social democratic views of education, this ideology serves to negotiate the fundamental contradiction between the socialisation of pupils to ascribed positions (sexual, familial and occupational) and individuals' self-determination with regard to these. By and large, pupils' accommodative strategies based on conflicting sexual - and gender - interests validate this ideology but also give them some limited control over definitions of appropriate behaviour.

The focus of this dissertation entitled 'Difference, Identification & Desire: Contemporary Lesbian Genre Fiction' is the representation of lesbian identity in four contemporary popular lesbian genres: autobiographical fiction, speculative fiction, romance fiction and crime fiction. The aim of the dissertation is three-fold. Firstly, it seeks to acknowledge and celebrate the large variety of representations of lesbianism produced by lesbian writers working with popular forms of the novel during the past twenty five years. Secondly, it explores the ways in which lesbian writers have reworked popular genres in order to highlight lesbian and feminist concerns and to depict aspects of lesbian existence. It analyzes the effects of introducing discourses of lesbianism into the plots of popular genres, showing how the latter have been subverted or adapted by lesbian use. Thirdly, the thesis seeks to specify the ways in which the generic forms themselves, according to their own codes and conventions, shape and mediate the representation of lesbian identity in the text. In addition to this focus, the dissertation traces a number of themes and concerns across and within the four genres under discussion. These include the relationship in the texts between the sign 'lesbian' and the discourse of feminism, and the oscillation between the representation of lesbian sexual identity in terms of woman-identification and difference-between women. The aim throughout the analysis of contemporary lesbian genre fiction is to identify both that which is specific to lesbian representation and that which is characteristic of the particular genre under discussion. The dissertation represents a contribution to three areas of literary study: Genre Studies and Feminist Studies in general, and to Lesbian Studies in particular.

This research project is based on ethnographic observations of andinterviews with a sample of nineteen young women about their experiences of sexual harassment in everyday life. The fieldwork was carried out in a school. The aims of the project were to explore young women's perceptions and negotiations of sexual harassment as much as to document the variety of forms it took and to explore the role of schools in the institutionalization of sexual harassment. The methods employed and the methodological perspective adopted were both ethnographic and feminist, underpinned by a realist philosophy and a standpoint epistemology. I highlight the need to address questions about how methodology, epistemology and substantive data are indissolubly interconnected. Thus, the traditional 'scientific' principles of objective impartiality and unemotionality are explicitly challenged by the demand that we reflect critically on -our own inevitably emotional knowledge of the world which we investigate. The appeal to reflexivity rather than to reason or rationality (supposedly unfettered by emotionality) profoundly challenges our understanding of what 'science' means and, therefore, what knowledge is. A definition of sexual harassment is offered. I argue that the phenomenon is a situated, mundane and masculine power practice which reconstructs or reproduces patriarchal social relations. It is patriarchy operationalized. Since the young women with whom I worked collaborated in defining what the research was about by relating their experiences of heterosex, the thesis also explores some of the oppressive continuities between these more intimate encounters and sexual harassment in everyday life. Given that sites of oppression are also potentially at least sites of resistance, the thesis critically examines the ideological context which structures human agency and explores the extent to which young women are empowered to resist rather than accommodate themselves to the oppressive exercise of masculine power. I argue that the school effectively reproduces the oppressive reality in which the young women live their everyday lives.

This thesis is based on research which aimed to describe and account for patients' experiences in eight unexceptional examples of predominantly long-stay geriatric wards, each in a different hospital. Observational methods were used to document the experiences of 86 patients. Other data on ward work processes were drawn from interviews with Ward Sisters and Consultants, written records and informal conversations with ward participants. Data analysis was based on the type and amount of inhumane treatment which patients suffered. In focussing on inhumane treatment and developing a systematic and non-emotive analysis of its origins, the research breaks new ground. Patients in all the wards experienced inhumane treatment, but this varied in kind and quantity. It is shown that poor staffing levels and heavy workload cannot by themselves account for the inhumane treatment of patients which was observed. Instead, the beliefs, work practices and interrelationships between Consultants and Ward Sisters emerged as important. Where the work of long-term care was viewed as a valuable and important task, there was evidence of attempts to offer personalised care to patients. Where long-term care was viewed as low-status work, an outcome of 'failure' of the medical cure system, there was scant evidence of personal attention to patients' needs. The nature of inhumane treatment which was observed enables a new perspective to be offered on what constitutes humane treatment and how this might be reliably secured in practice. Eight practical recommendations are made on the basis of research findings. Consideration is also given to ways in which the innovatory social research approach of documenting inhumane treatment might be further developed and applied in practice by professionals seeking to monitor and improve patients' experiences in geriatric wards.

Most women workers' education focuses on women's objective-material situation namely employment conditions and rights as workers. Hence, consciousness-raising on exploitation and the importance of workers unity are the usual agendas. Women's subjectivities, their individual personally lived experiences are rarely taken on board. Even in situations where gender agendas are covered, their unspoken thoughts, repressed feelings and pains, especially the personally felt emotional subordination tend to be overlooked. This thesis explores how silenced experiences of emotional subordination, powerlessness and inferiority can be taken on board in and as educational work with factory women. Guided by principles of participatory research and feminist research I used multiple methods to review current and past educational work with factory women in Malaysia, to explore a way of approaching and doing educational work that is empowering for factory women and that is based on their lived experiences. Specifically the research (i) undertook a historical and critical review of women workers education in Malaysia and identified the neglected dimensions 1 (ii) probed the lived gendered experiences of factory women, and (iii) evolved a pedagogy that can evoke and reconstitute silenced experiences of emotional subordination. Storying, as a narrative methodology for negotiating and constructing meaning from experience (and practice) frames the epistemological and methodological approach to this study. The study established that although emotional suffering is only one dimension of factory women's lived experiences and one dimension of women's subordination, it is however, a critical area to address in educational work concerned with factory women's empowerment, given the pervasiveness of debilitating emotional subjectivities amongst them. Story-telling-sharing in small groups was found to be effective in facilitating the constructive unfolding of differences and commonalities while also fostering an emotionally safe space in which women can rebuild self-esteem and confidence and discover solidarity. Indeed, story-telling-sharing that incorporates processes of reflective talking and making sense is the educational method par excellence. It commences with lived experiences and experienced feelings to reconstitute women's subjectivities. These findings bring significant insights to the pedagogy and content of educational work with women on the global assembly line, and for women and workers' education in general.

In this thesis, I use poetic texts by two German women Expressionist authors, Claire Gull and Paula Ludwig, to examine questions of selfhood, aesthetics and sexual difference within a Kantian philosophical frame. The thesis is structured in two parts. In Part One, I situate the project via a critical examination of Lyotard's reworking of the Kanlian sublime. I argue that Lyotard closes down the gaps within Kant's system that feminist philosophy could usefully exploit and explore. I then position German Expressionism as an alternative mode of post-Kantianism. I argue that although the male Expressionist poets break down the Kantian subject-object distinction, they continue to position woman as the "other". There follows a brief bridging section, in which I outline work by some of the key women Expressionists, and argue that the theoretical frameworks used in Expressionist scholarship are inherently gendered. In Part Two of the thesis, I explore texts by both Go!! and Ludwig in detail. I argue that whilst the male Expressionists are concerned with dissolving male subjecthood, these writers can be read as subverting Kantian space-time to produce alternative modes of female selfhood and of the sublime. In chapter 4,! examine Goll's disruptive exploration of a mode of embodied selfhood generated through productive play and movements of relationality. Chapters 5 and 6 extend the theme of relationally generated selfhood by tracing the subversive use of neoplatonic and Orphic elements in a short story by Goll. In chapter 7, I show how Ludwig radically reconfigures the limits of both body and self to produce identities no longer constructed via oppositional boundaries in the manner of the Kantian subject. I conclude by arguing that the work of these authors provides feminist philosophy with productive models for rethinking immanent transcendence and relationally generated selfhood which can incorporate both difference and change.

This thesis is a comparative study of popularisation of feminism in Britain and Turkey in the 1990s. It focuses on selected British and Turkish women's magazines and examines the ways in which they engage with feminist concerns. The methodology is derived from feminist critical theory and cultural studies in order to address the dynamic interchange between feminist politics and mainstream or consumer women's interests and to examine the relationship between the concepts of feminism and femininity in contemporary women's magazines. The significance of the research lies in the identification of ways in which these texts incorporate and appropriate feminist discourses to the extent that the notion of femininity has increasingly come to be associated with feminist thought. The argument presented in this study is that the relationship between the producers of cultural texts and feminism, and producers and readers need to be taken into consideration to investigate how gendered subjectivities are reproduced in any given culture or crossculturally, by whom they are reproduced, in whose interests they work, and how they are constructed. This approach to popular culture will provide tools to articulate the political and cultural identities of women. The thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first, I discuss the evolution of feminist movements in the different historical and cultural contexts of Britain and Turkey by focusing on current feminist debates. The second chapter examines the women's magazine as a diverse form of popular culture with regard to its market and content. Contemporary women's magazine markets in these two countries and the ways in which these markets have been changed and expanded in conjunction with the development of feminist movements over the last two decades are discussed. This chapter also discusses the role of editors in defining a contemporary understanding of femininity for mass consumption and the editorial control of the magazine form as a commodity. The final chapter examines the dominant themes through which these texts have engaged with feminist issues. By comparing and contrasting the Turkish and British women's magazines I have found that specific conditions and politics engender a variety of diverse forms for the popularisation of feminism. Feminist themes and issues embedded in popular and commercial discourses are complex and various. However, I have found that the Turkish women's magazines primarily provide an outlet for women's voices and share a common goal with feminist politics of promoting female empowerment in the context of 1990s' Turkey. On the other hand, feminism is predominantly recognized as a cultural value by the British women's magazines in which feminism is often redefined through commodities and fetishized into a symbol of things. Their approach is defined as postfeminist which means the incorporation, revision and depoliticisation of feminist politics.

This thesis explores the relationship between local government and social change strategies. More specifically, it examines the series of highly contested attempts during the 1980s to deploy local government in order to challenge the discrimination and prejudice facing lesbians and gay men. Whilst, much of the effort was directed at making council services more responsive to lesbian and gay needs, a key aspect of the project concerned the transformation of dominant sexual meanings. Four questions provide a theoretical and empirical framework for this research. First, why did some local authorities address lesbian and gay issues? Second, how successful were they in doing so? Third, what factors constrained or limited their attempts? And fourth, why were lesbian and gay municipal initiatives so controversial? The first section of this thesis examines the reconstitution of lesbian and gay issues on the local government agenda, and the subsequent trajectory of their development within particular authorities. The thesis then goes on to examine the impact of bureaucratic processes and right-wing opposition on lesbian and gay municipal discourses. I argue that despite significant opposition to lesbian and gay policies, in general the right did not mobilise. The ideological steer within local government bureaucracy was usually sufficient to 'weed out' or dilute more progressive proposals. However, on occasions where this broke down, opposing forces intervened, both to obstruct lesbian and gay initiatives and to use the policies' existence to advance their own political agenda. The final part of this thesis draws together several key issues: the general absence of a more radical sexual politics; the crisis of implementation; the nature of opponents' attitudes towards homosexuality and local government; and the decline of lesbian and gay municipal politics post-1987. In the conclusion, I return to the question of local government's radical potential by proposing an alternative, decentred approach to municipal sexual politics. Methodologically, this thesis is eclectic drawing on several disciplinary areas in conjunction with a range of theoretical perspectives, particularly neo-marxism, feminism and poststructuralism. Field research comprises of interviews, mass media and local government documentation combined with my own experiences as an actor within the municipal lesbian and gay project. This thesis is intended to make a contribution to a theoretical understanding of municipal politics, especially to the relationship between local government, sexuality, ideology and social change. it also offers a detailed account and analysis of lesbian and gay municipal developments, one of the most controversial initiatives of the 1980s.