In the last 40 years there has been a surge of academic research into grandparenthood as a result of increased longevity and changing family structures. However, limited research has been identified that explores the experiences of young grandparenthood in England, despite academic researchers’ assertions of deviant young grandparenthood made in the 1980s. Maternal grandmothers have been reported to be the most involved grandparent in the lives of their grandchildren. Further, there is likelihood that the transition to young maternal grandmotherhood is a consequence of young motherhood (of mother and/or daughter). Young motherhood literatures report that mothers of young mothers (maternal grandmothers) can be a primary source of support for their daughters, yet this body of research rarely focuses on the maternal grandmother. With the current cultural norm of grandparenting childcare in the UK and the UK Government’s objectives of increasing women in work, improving maternal health, child health and economic self-sufficiency for young mothers, it is important to understand how young maternal grandmothers are, or are not, contributing to Government targets whilst balancing their own working and family lives. This study makes initial steps in addressing these neglected areas of research by exploring the lived experiences of 10 young maternal grandmothers (aged 35 to 42 years at first transition) living in England. Data was collected using face-to-face semi-structured interviews, prompt objects and photo elicitation in order to answer the research question, ‘what are the lived experiences of young maternal grandmotherhood?’ Guided by British sociologists’ conceptualisations of family life and relationships and the use of Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), data were analysed at an idiographic level before moving on to explore convergences and divergences across person cases, resulting in the emergence of shared patterns of meaning and experience. Analysis of the transitional stage to grandmotherhood identified two essential experiences: Experiencing acceptance (or lack of acceptance) of her daughter’s pregnancy and experiencing acceptance (or lack of acceptance) of her grandmotherhood. Analysis of being a young maternal grandmother identified three essential experiences: Experiencing grandmothering through time, distance, places, spaces and inanimate objects; experiencing grandmotherhood in the social world (the influence of others and on others); owning and romancing the grandchild, experiences of connectedness and disconnectedness. The study concludes with a discussion of the current findings in relation to existing literatures and new understandings. Consideration is applied to the research design and the perceived strengths and limitations. The wider implications of this research are presented with specific focus on the potential to develop a conceptual framework for use in intervention measures for mothers (young maternal grandmothers) and/or daughters (young mothers) and recommendations for possible future directions in this research area.

This thesis is about children and transnationalism. It is about the way in which children develop their identities in transnational communities in societies being transformed by globalisation. It is about the reproduction of societies through the socialisation of children and the tension inherent between this reproduction and social change. I set out to study children but became interested in adults' interactions with children and the nature of transnational communities and identities. As my fieldwork progressed I was drawn away from children into a study of families and societies. So, while children are the empirical focus of this thesis, there are many complementary sections which draw on evidence from adults or only discuss adults. As my description of Shirin and her brother above illustrates, processes and tensions are mediated by children often through seemingly contradictory attitudes and practices. I will investigate this phenomenon of contradiction and ambivalence as it characterises the experiences of the British Bangladeshi children I focus on and is key to understanding way in which identities are formed and experienced. [It] was conceived as part of the research project ‘Home and Away: South Asian Children's Representations of Diaspora', which was managed by my supervisor, Dr. Katy Gardner and Dr. Kanwal Mand. One aim of the project was to address a gap in research on the views of transnational children on issues of culture, belonging and identities. The project aims to investigate and bring to the fore the influence of the life course in migration research. This thesis contributes to these aims, but on its own can make only a partial contribution to this field. It is a snapshot of just over a year in the lives of a group of about twenty British Bangladeshi children between the ages of 8 and 12. Added to this material is additional data collected from a wider group of children in less depth, from younger and older siblings and from parents and other adults.

This thesis explores Corporate Social Responsibility disclosures related to gender equality and female empowerment in a developing country context. The study identifies Saudi Arabia as a country undergoing a State-driven gendered transformation in its society, in which laws and regulations positively targeting females are embedded within its National plans and country visions. The investigation used Nvivo Pro 11 to follow voluntary corporate disclosures of eleven (11) national organisations for a period of ten years (2005-2015) to determine the extent of textual and visual disclosures related to gender equality and female empowerment communicated to the public within that time frame. An index card was developed based on the literature and best practice in reporting on gender from international and local frameworks to analyse 140 corporate reports. Findings from the content analysis fed the exploration of the drivers behind this reporting practice. Twenty-nine (29) semi-structured interviews were conducted with 4 participant groups (Companies, Governing bodies, Financial analysts and CSR consultants) in addition to one focus group with female job seekers to determine the factors that influence reporting on gender in the Saudi context. Three theoretical frameworks led the analysis; Stakeholder theory (Freeman, 2010), Institutional Theory(Meyer and Rowan, 1977) and Resource Dependency Theory (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). By adopting triangulation in both theory and methodology, findings indicate that workplace gender equality disclosures dominate within the reports, followed by disclosures empowering females within the community. Gender equality organisational practices are led by State legislation and National plans while reporting on gender is driven by institutional factors rooted in the culture and norms of the region.

This thesis defends the diagnostic accuracy and political usefulness of the claim that women are complicit in their sexual objectification. Feminists have long struggled to demarcate the appropriate limits of feminist critiques of sexual objectification, particularly when it comes to objectifying practices which women both consent to and experience as empowering. These struggles, I argue, are the result of a fundamental misdiagnosis of what happens when women are sexually objectified, whereby the abstract notion of 'treating as an object' is called upon to explicate the kind of phenomena which can only be properly understood in light of a more general set of social norms of masculinity and femininity. A more accurate diagnosis of sexual objectification, I argue, is provided by Catharine MacKinnon's radical feminist theory, according to which sexually objectifying acts are manifestations of the social process through which women are made into objects of male sexual gratification. One important implication of this account is that women themselves play a role in perpetuating the norms through which sexually objectifying treatment of women is enabled: insofar as they participate in the re-constitution of the social context which facilitates their sexual objectification, they are complicit in it. Although this idea lacks intuitive appeal from a feminist perspective, I argue that understanding the nature of the contribution women make to perpetuating their objectification enables a better understanding of what practices of resistance are necessary for effectively combatting the sexual objectification of women. I defend the explanatory power of the complicity account of objectification in light of two pressing debates in contemporary feminist philosophy: the question of how women can disidentify from femininity given the strong attachments they develop to it, and the question of how feminism can continue to appeal to the motif of solidarity considering the anti-essentialist commitments of recent feminist theory.

This thesis explores how poor, single mothers on benefits experienced discourses of welfare and social exclusion within the context of New Labour's policy measures. This research is based on thirty-six months ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2011 on a housing estate in the South of England among single mothers on benefits. The researcher studied how New Labour social policy initiatives had an impact on their lives. This study argues that while social exclusion and its flexibility constituted a tool to explore multi-dimensional aspects of poverty, the same term had come to entail a much more narrow focus under New Labour. The effects of such a shift in terms of providing services to mothers on benefits provided the framework through which the participants viewed dominant discourses on welfare and social exclusion. In doing so this thesis exposes the contestations and tensions that permeate much of these discourses. In interviews and discussions carried out during the fieldwork, many women located described the official political discourse as an external phenomenon with which they strategically engage, while also internalising it and accepting it as an accurate representation of social reality. On the other hand, most participants critically engaged with the dominant discourse and almost all traversed a tightrope of moral evaluation. This study argues that the importance of placing the experiences of single mothers on benefits in the context of welfare reform measures cannot be overestimated because it offers an understanding of how different social groups experience new social policies. It also suggests the possibility to evaluate the the deeper societal struggles and it constitutes an opportunity to reform existing economic, political and social structures. This thesis shows that the tendency to morally condemn poor and unemployed citizens has been part of social policy landscape in the United Kingdom for a very long time. These include ongoing changes to the welfare system, focusing on key elements such as penalising the unemployed and privatising public services.

My research investigates the impact on the survivor of loss of a twin in childhood. Using the qualitative method of thematic analysis applied to a single case, I analyse a published biographical account of surviving this traumatic loss. My findings point to the extreme emotional suffering involved. Among the defences employed to protect the survivor from the anguish of separation and from survival anxiety and guilt, the dead twin is internalised. The trauma and the dead twin are encapsulated in the psyche, unaffected by Time. They are experienced as holes in the psyche and contact with them is avoided. The result can be a half-life for the adult survivor, with a sense of his secret self as wounded, weak, frightened, inhibited, and haunted. This impact of the traumatic loss endures until it is actively mourned and integrated, so far as possible, into the survivor’s life. My findings indicate that external and internal containing objects are needed for this task. It is through mourning that the surviving twin dis-identifies from his dead twin and re-finds the living twin as a life-giving and loving internal object. Through mourning, other containing and protective internal objects are rediscovered and reconfigured. The result is an enlivening of the survivor and a new sense of himself as emotionally capable and contained. In my conclusions regarding the clinical implications of my findings, I suggest that there needs to be recognition of and respect for the survivor’s great sorrow. Above all, treatment needs to be about connectedness and finding a way to the lost good objects. Lastly, I suggest how future research might test the implications of my findings for other kinds of loss of a twin and sibling loss in general.

This thesis examines the construction of frames of Second World War memory in the post-occupation Channel Islands, and considers the impact of gender on both this memory-making process and the resulting popular representations of their shared past. It first explores the gendered tensions and fractures of the occupation years, and their role in the construction of this usable past. The occupation will be shown to have directly challenged the traditional gendered expectations of British wartime conduct (a key tenet of Islander identity), particularly regarding martial masculinity and feminine virtue. These tensions and fractures were particularly acute in the Channel Islands, as they were the only British territory to be occupied by German forces during the Second World War, having been demilitarised prior to the invasion of 1940. The war memories that were popularly adopted by the Islander communities after the war were, therefore, rooted in these early tensions and fractures, as they sought out retribution, closure, and unity, along with a connection to the desirable British war memory and the image of the victorious soldier hero. This thesis examines how this traumatic period has been built into a necessary and powerful founding myth in the Channel Islands, through the gendered sharing of war stories and rituals, as well as the reclaiming of contested spaces and objects to the present day. This analysis of the war memory of these small Islander communities will inform wider understanding of how gendered wartime anxieties might have similarly impacted the construction of war memory within other previously occupied nations across Europe. It also offers an important insight into the role of gender in the subsequent dissemination, disruption and stabilisation of war stories through generations, particularly within small communities recovering from the trauma of war.

No description available.

This study is about the consequences of feminised migration on migrant women workers, on their families and on the Philippine society as a whole. The continued dependence on migration and increasingly, women‘s migration, by the Philippine government to address unemployment on one hand, and by the Filipino families on the other hand, to secure employment and a better life, has led to social change: change in migrant women‘s sense of identity and personhood; restructuring of households and redefinition of families and gender relations and the rise of a culture of migration. To understand these social changes, the study focuses on the return phase of migration situated within the overall migration process and adopts a gendered and feminist approach. Existing theories of return migration cannot adequately capture the meanings of the return of migrant women workers. Studying return through a gendered approach allows us to reflect on the extent migration goals have been achieved or not, the conditions under which return takes place for a migrant woman worker and various factors affecting life after migration for the migrant women and their families. Return of the women migrant workers cannot be neatly categorised as voluntary or involuntary. It is gendered. It is involuntary, voluntary, and mainly ambivalent. Involuntary return was influenced by structural limitations arising from the temporary and contractual type of migration in jobs categorised as unskilled. Voluntary return was mainly determined by the achievement of migration goals, the psychological need to return after prolonged absence and by the need to respond to concerns of families left behind. Ambivalent return was caused by the desire to maintain the status, economic power, freedom and autonomy stemming from the migrants' breadwinning role; the need to sustain the families‘ standard of living; as well as the apprehensions of a materially insecure life back home. The socio-psychological consequences on families and children of migrant women are deep and wide-ranging. Similarly, women migrants, though empowered at a certain level, had to face psychological and emotional consequences upon return influenced by persistent gender roles and gender regimes. By analysing the impact of gendered migration and return on the societal level, the study has broadened and deepened the conceptualisation of the phenomenon of culture of migration by bringing other elements and factors such as the role of the state, human resources, sustainable livelihood, national identity and governance.

This thesis argues that only-childhood was never the sole, and only ever a minor, determinant of only children’s experiences. It analyses autobiographies and oral history interviews of only children who grew up between 1850 and 1950 to show how personal inclinations, parental attitudes, domestic circumstances, geographical location, class, gender, and historical time, alone or in combination, were far more important influences on childhood experiences than only-childhood per se. These factors not only created differences between only children themselves, but also demonstrably influenced sibling children’s experiences. Its findings challenge negative ideas about only children that spread to the public from childrearing manuals through other media from the late-nineteenth century, when numbers of one-child families began to increase. Previous historians have inadvertently maintained these stereotypes by tending to present examples of only children who conformed to them, not seeking alternative explanations for their experiences, and presenting sibling relationships as vitally important. This thesis also questions these largely-positive portrayals of siblings. It additionally shows how some only children use only-childhood as a ‘lens’ through which they present and explain their childhood traits and experiences, attesting to the pervasiveness of only-child stereotypes. By doing so, this research builds upon the work of Raphael Samuel, Paul Thompson, Natasha Burchardt, and others regarding the role of ‘myth’ in adults’ representations of their childhoods. This thesis’ main argument supports sociologists’ suggestions about the influence of factors other than only-childhood, but it takes a more historical and personal approach. It also builds upon, and is informed by, childhood and family historians’ research into the advantages and disadvantages of decreases in family size from the 1870s onwards. Furthermore, it enhances demographic historians’ work on fertility decline by examining why some only children had no siblings, and contributes to the history of emotions by examining loneliness and unhappiness.