The main objective of this study was to examine the intergenerational learning behaviour within the family between Generation X parents and their Generation Y teenage children. This study was designed to investigate the nature of intergenerational knowledge exchange, to identify the characteristics of learning behaviour and culture in such 'learning families', and to find out the subject areas that parents could learn from their teenage children. The sample of this study was made up of ten pairs of middle-age parents with their teenage children coming from middle class families. A narrative inquiry approach was adopted and individual interviews were conducted when participants were asked to recall and tell stories describing their personal intergenerational learning experiences. A questionnaire was also employed to collect their opinions and experience on intergenerational family learning. Results showed that 80% of all the participants thought their family was a 'learning family'. All the parents and 90% of the teenagers found that learning experience in their family was happy. Overall, 80% of all the participants gave a score of 7 or higher when they were asked to rate their family, with a score of 10 representing an ideal 'learning family'. All the parents realised that they had something to learn from their children. The Generation X parents could learn from their Generation Y children on trendy issues such as fashion, sports, recreation, music and western cultures. More importantly, almost everyone recognised that information technology (IT), computer knowledge and skills were the stronger areas among the teenagers. Among all the narratives told, 37% were episodes describing parents learning IT skills from their teenage children. The data obtained from this study suggests that intergenerational family learning can be bi-directional. The families studied did engage in bi-directional intergenerational learning. Parents did learn from their teenage children. A positive family learning culture was found to facilitate intergenerational learning especially in the Generation Y to X direction. Intergenerational family learning was reported to be happy experience and it helped improve communication and understanding between the two generations. The participants pointed out that the learning methodology differed between the two generations due to societal changes and differences in their upbringing. Mothers and fathers play slightly different roles for intergenerational family learning according to their individual personality, interest and expertise, though mothers were believed to be more receptive and open to intergenerational learning, especially in the Generation Y to X direction. There is a close relationship between 'family learning' and 'lifelong learning'. Ideas from the participants were collated to define the concept of 'learning family', 'family learning' and 'intergenerational family learning'. From the data obtained, a conceptual framework of intergenerational family learning in relation to lifelong learning and a developmental learning profile were drawn. The results indicate that parents should foster positive learning attitudes and intergenerational learning culture in the family early at home. It is important that teenagers are empowered to share their knowledge and views. The government also has a role to play in re-defining teaching and learning practise in schools and promoting intergenerational learning in families for a knowledge society.

This thesis explores men's experience of raising children alone, and addresses a central question for men's engagement in care: Can men mother? If men can mother, what makes this possible? To what extent are breadwinning identities and mothers' care for children barriers to men's engagement in caring? If mothering is a constitutive activity based on a response to the perceived needs of children, what does caring mean to fathers, and what is the impact of caring for children in the absence of maternal mediation? Based on evidence from an in depth qualitative study of fathers raising children alone, the study explores men's experience as primary carers for their children. Men's experience of paid employment, childcare and social and structural supports are examined, as is their experience of parenting and relationships with their children. Research into men's participation in childcare and domestic labour in two parent families demonstrates that women continue to do most childcare and unpaid domestic work, and there is significant difficulty in engaging men in care. The psychological literature has underpinned a 'deficiency' perspective of fatherhood, and casts doubt on men's capacity to care, while evidence from social policy research casts doubt on men's willingness to care. The policy response to women's labour market participation has been slow, leaving a gap in care. The findings of this study show how contemporary constructions of fatherhood impact on men's experiences. It will argue that, for men parenting alone, these constructions create a challenge to men's identities, which in turn creates tensions in men's perceptions of caring labour. However, these tensions do not need to be resolved in order for men to experience their parenting as positive, rather, the experience of doing care has the most significant impact on how men experience fatherhood, and having taken responsibility for care, fathers would be reluctant to relinquish it.

This thesis investigates debates and tensions in Second Wave Anglo-American Feminisms since the sixties. It interrogates claims that feminism is in crisis, and that the term 'feminism' itself is now semantically overburdened. Its chief purpose is to show that despite feminism's heterogeneity, there are central features of feminist politics which offer an oppositional identity to theorists concerned with exposing the way meanings of gender still shape society and academic discourse. The scope of this work extends from early Second Wave writings to current scholarly reflections on the interface between feminist and other critical theories. This study emphasizes that even the apparent 'anti-theory' thrust of early writers stand testimony to an abiding concern with theories of knowledge, power and representation. Even feminism's early antagonism to 'high theory' could be interpreted as a challenge to the means by which 'theory' is constructed. The first three chapters examine the emergence of a 'Second Wave' in feminist thought, and the various investments of its differing 'strands' in existing political and theoretical positions. Chapters Four and Five scrutinize what are deemed gaps or sites of conflict in Second Wave theory: theories of ideology, culture, sexuality and subjectivity. Feminism is arguably at its most radical and contentious where its methodology drifts furthest from the epistemological 'mainstream'. Chapter Six considers recent developments in feminist thought - many of which emerged during the writing of this work - illustrating a growing chasm between academic feminism and political feminism. The conclusion engages with critical discussions of feminism's alleged 'identity crisis', and the means by which feminist agendas are put to anti-feminist uses in face of a political swing to the Right in Britain and the USA. It suggests that the worst effects of a 'backlash' might be countered by greater attention to feminism's recent past. This is not to advocate nostalgia, but to indicate that feminism can learn from its past and present 'mistakes'. Recent questions are not new, but ones which merit ever more complex solutions, for the sake of feminism's survival as an autonomous and challenging philosophy.

This commentary outlines how my published works have contributed to knowledge on violence against black and minority ethnic (BME) or minority women in the UK, particularly in relation to domestic violence, forced marriage and so called 'honour' based violence (HBV). They help to define and enhance our understanding of these issues. In addition, they have critiqued multiculturalism and influenced, advocated and developed the former Home Office Minister, Mike O'Brien's concept of 'mature multiculturalism' (Parliamentary Debates, 1999; also cited in Home Office, 2000:10), and utilised the theoretical framework of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989 and 1991) to address these problems. I have also located my works within the framework of violence against women and girls (VAWG), secularism, equalities and human rights. My publications have reflected upon and influenced policy, practice and research, and as such, contributed to documenting the history and achievements of black feminism.

Cuba, once understood to be a highly homophobic country, has been lauded internationally for its attention to sexual diversity rights since 2008. This Thesis examines and analyzes the development of the normalization of attitudes towards sexual diversity in revolutionary Cuba. This includes the evolution of homophobia in Cuba, the Federation of Cuban Women’s development of sexual education, the establishment of the Nation Centre for Sexual Education (CENESEX), and how these elements engage with the island’s view of health. In particular, the thesis focuses on two main questions: how did attitudes towards sexual diversity evolve in Cuba? And what does this evolutionary process tell us about the Revolution?

The academic field of young parenthood has seen a significant increase in interest, both academic and political, in recent years. This increased interest is related to the view that young parents are “outside” normative discourses. Nevertheless, the experiences of young fatherhood have been minimally addressed in the academic field in comparison to the vast research carried out on young motherhood. This thesis investigates from a socio-historical perspective, the lives and experiences of young fathers, aged 16-25, living on the Isle of Sheppey over the past sixty years. The focus of this thesis was to examine how social change may have impacted upon the lives of young fathers throughout the past sixty years within one rural geographic location. This area of interest was chosen based on the current limitations of the field, which predominantly discusses young fatherhood from a contemporary point of view and from the perspective of young fathers living in urban areas. The first phase of this study collected documents on local social affairs on the island over the past sixty years, predominantly in local newspapers and local academic studies. This allowed for the lives of the participants to be understood in the context of a general picture of the life on the island. In the second phase, life story interviews provided detailed accounts from the viewpoint of the young fathers. For these interviews, 21 participants (aged 20-74 at the time of interview) were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. Three cohorts were formed from the 21 participants based on similar ages and experiences. Inclusion criteria were that the young fathers were aged 25 or under when they had or were having their first child and had lived on the island for at least ten years. The study was underpinned by structuration theory (Giddens, 1984); this theoretical approach was selected in order to aid understanding of the relationship between social change and young fatherhood in one geographic location. Sociological concepts were also employed as to act as mid-range theories in order to interpret the data. The findings from this study suggest that social structures have increasingly affected the lives and life choices of the young fathers involved over the past sixty years. Changing political discourses, particularly since the 1980’s, have had a fundamental impact upon the economy, which has impacted upon the transitions that young men make, particularly from education to employment. The timing of this transition has also changed the age at which it is considered appropriate to begin family life, and this has affected the definition of young fatherhood in recent years. Recent political discourses have suggested that it is the individual behaviours of these young people who become parents, which is in need of changing, rather than institutional models (SEU, 1999). However, evidence from this study has shown that there have been fewer changes in the behaviour, attitudes and perceptions of fatherhood from the perspectives of the young fathers themselves over the past sixty years. Young fathers in this study still acknowledged traditional paternal responsibilities, particularly being the main breadwinner, but may have been unable to enact them. This study also provides an original contribution to the field of young fatherhood, addressing the situation of under-researched rural working class young fathers. It also provides an evidenced account, which goes some way to balancing the moral panic created around the discourse of young fathers as choosing to be a burden on society and not caring about their responsibilities.

This research is an ethnography of a British Army regiment from the perspective of women married to servicemen. Its aim is to question wives's power and positionality vis-à-vis the military institution and consider the implications for how to understand the everyday operation of military power. The project is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on and around a regimental camp in Germany during a period when the regiment’s soldiers were also deployed in Afghanistan. As social relations are spun across multiple times and spaces, it analyses women's negotiation of presence and absence, home and away, and distance and proximity. Women married to servicemen emerge as mobile subjects, whose gendered labour and identities serve to trouble the boundary between the military and civilian 'spheres'. The research explores multiple conditions for women's encounters with military presence on a day-to-day basis, from the mandate for international migration and the regiment’s production of social cohesion, to the formal hierarchy of rank and the temporal and spatial registers of an operational tour. The analysis highlights the dependence of these structures on a military-sexual division of labour, at the same time as women can be argued to mobilise social, cultural and discursive resources to appropriate or transcend the place they are allocated in a military social order. It is in this sense that they might be argued to bargain with the terms of their militarisation.

This thesis explores families with live in au pairs. In particular, it investigates the changes that families go through as a result of the addition of an au pair, as well as the means by which the host parents and au pairs negotiate their new circumstances of living and working together. From a theoretical perspective, the thesis is positioned between two bodies of literature, namely, those of migrant domestic work and family studies. Up until now, research conducted in relation to au pairs has mostly been done as a part of feminisation of migration and domestic work divisions. However, such studies do not focus on the family as a unit of analysis and on the diverse experiences of different family members. In terms of family theories, there is a general consensus among scholars that contemporary families are diversifying. Even though the heterosexual couple family is still the most common form, new types of families are emerging, such as lone parents, divorced parents, same sex couples, extended families, reconstituted families, foster families and transnational families. Although the field of family studies has directed attention to diverse family forms, families with live in au pairs have, so far, escaped attention. The host families who employ and live with au pairs have to reset and renegotiate boundaries between fictive kin, family member and domestic worker. This thesis addresses the gaps that are present in much of the literature on migrant domestic work; namely the multifaceted relationships between host parents and au pairs, and the diversity of au pair’s experiences. The role of an ‘employer’ is approached not only from the viewpoint of migrant domestic work, but also from a family studies perspective. This focus allows for a greater understanding of family roles, family time and family boundaries and how they are re-negotiated by au pair employment. The exploration of au pair families was conducted through qualitative analysis consisting of semi structured interviews with 18 host parents and 19 au pairs. The data illustrate that host parents developed various and lengthy strategies to ensure that their au pairs were ‘the perfect fit for their family’. This commodified version of an ideal au pair was largely affected by the host parents’ social class position as well as by their ideals of ‘the family’. Moreover, the degree of association, communication, relationship and involvement with au pairs, appeared to be very different between host mothers and host fathers. In accordance with the gendered roles and division of work within families, the interviews with host mothers and host fathers revealed that the au pairs were perceived as mainly the host mother’s responsibility. Host parents’ endeavours in creating the ‘au pair family’ were explored through their negotiations of ‘family time’. ‘General family time’ consisted of sharing family related activities with the au pair while ‘genuine family time’ meant that the au pair was not involved. Although au pair families navigated their proximity by negotiating their family time and relationships which revealed that families are adaptable, at the same time these host families were crowded with images of the romanticized traditional family. The thesis claims that the combination of family and migrant domestic work scholarship enables a greater understanding of how living with and employing an au pair is experienced and managed in everyday life. Following these empirical findings, it is argued that whilst host families ‘displayed’ flexibility and fluidity (Beck 1992), at the same time, the hegemonic notions of what families should be like indicate that traditional values still prevailed.

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This thesis investigates how digital media participate in and contribute to the emergence and discussion of women’s issues in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in complex intersections of online and offline activity. Specific focus is placed on digital media’s intrinsic complexity and agency, and their interplay with socio-political, economic, legal, and cultural practices. I will specifically ask questions such as, how does an issue work through technological forms of development, and how is it techno-socio-political? How do digital media enrich, reshape, and co-constitute women’s issues in Egypt and Saudi Arabia? In answering these questions, I explore how certain women’s issues are formed, emerge, and become central in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. These explorations involve a reflection on the computational turn of current cultural and social practices2 and the significance of algorithms and software in the making of our socio-cultural realities. They also necessitate an understanding of the countries’ locales, accounts of women’s movements, struggles, and discourses that, inevitably, involve Islamic Tradition. Asking such questions also means exploring how online activities enrich current discourses of women and gender studies in a Middle Eastern context. The resulting work sits In between a number of disciplines and approaches and calls for a bespoke conceptual and methodological approach, built on a combination of methodologies, including close reading of history and literature on the topic, and qualitative and quantitative analysis of digital content through digital media tools. For this purpose I have employed software such as Gephi, Netvizz, and MOZ SERP. Moving beyond an understanding of media as a tool and construing them as constitutive parts of an entangled network made of heterogeneous actants, I introduce the concept of a multi-layered and networked map. This concept is a mode of investigation and a tool of analysis that seeks to understand and discuss the diverse and continuous transformations of certain women’s issues in these two countries as they emerge and evolve online. The visualisations of the quantitative part of my analysis are published on the website that I have created, available at http://www.oxycoms.com/clb. This thesis tries to find a location at the intersection of digital media, gender studies, and studies of the Middle East. At times, specific problematic aspects of each field are at odds with each other, and I attend to the ways in which they touch and contradict each other. Through the concept of the multi-layered and networked map I will trace and follow the intersection of theoretical thoughts, accounts of women’s activities and movements, online activities, and findings of the new methodologies and tools of online social networking analysis. I will discuss how they combine and coalesce, bringing to life what I address as technowomen. I hope to contribute to the current theoretical and methodological discussions in digital media, media, and cultural studies, to discussions in women and gender studies on the digitised reality of movements and activities.