Using three different methods, this thesis critically explores New Labour policy discourses of community cohesion, alongside and in relation to, the construction and performance of gendered and racialised identities in a northern England town. The research is located at the intersection of feminist theory, critical race studies and critical social policy, and draws upon post structuralist approaches. Through an examination of community cohesion policy texts and in depth interviews with policy actors (used to refer to a diverse group of participants in the policy process), I consider how discourses of community cohesion are negotiated and constructed within the policy making process. I also explore how these policy stories contribute to gendered and racialised constructions of local 'communities'. Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted within a 'multicultural' women's group, I consider how communities and identities are negotiated and lived out in the 'everyday', and -in turn how these community stories both challenge and connect with community cohesion policy stories and policy actors' constructions of communities. My findings suggest that community cohesion can be understood as part of the wider New Labour project, drawing upon the ambiguous concept of 'community' central to the agenda of the 'Third Way'. My analysis of community cohesion policy texts indicate that whilst discourses of community cohesion are presented as a coherent agenda, they are multiple and muddled. The search for a set of common 'British' values alongside the management of diversity relies upon notions of integration, which resonate with attempts at assimilation. Moreover, my findings suggest that whilst gender blind, community cohesion policy discourses are deeply gendered and racialised, contributing to particular constructions of race and gender 'difference'. Nevertheless, it is evident that discourses of community cohesion have become rapidly entrenched within the language and practice of local government and local practitioners, bringing with it a 'new' framework governing race relations in the UK. My analysis of policy actors' interpretations of community cohesion policy points to the complexities facing policy actors engaged in 'making sense' of government policies; alongside and in relation to their personal and professional identifications. My findings suggest that New Labour discourses of 'community cohesion' enable practitioners to adopt a safer form of de-racialised language to talk about issues of race and ethnicity. Yet policy actors are also active in the construction of 'expert' knowledge about 'communities', which at times draw upon 'common sense' ideas. These narratives of 'community' and 'identity' often deny the ambiguous nature of identities and the 'messiness' of 'doing community' within the 'everyday'. Indeed, the findings from my ethnographic research conducted with women from different racial and ethnic positionings emphasise the multiple, complex and contradictory ways in which gendered and racialised identities are performed within and across 'communities'. These 'everyday' stories of 'community' both complicate and disrupt policy actors' narratives of community and the community cohesion policy agenda, whilst at the same time suggesting alternative ways of 'getting along' (see also Amin, 2005).

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This thesis documents a qualitative study investigating common patterns that cut across the behaviours of white, heterosexual, working and middle-class men. Previous literature has reported that men’s behaviour during their micro social relations is often risky and potentially harmful. This study provides an important contribution to knowledge regarding the motivation behind these patterns of behaviour. The research is rooted within a critical realist philosophical perspective. Of key importance are the concepts of a dominant masculine norm, as a pre-established representation of social reality, common patterns of men’s behaviour, as occurring during relations between men, and social class dynamics, specifically amongst the working and middle-class. Data were gathered from four focus groups, two with working-class men and two with middle-class men, and from one to one interviews with the same respondents. Template analysis was used to thematically organize and analyse the recorded accounts. Masculinity emerged in the data as a dominant, socially pre-established representation which establishes the transcendence of vulnerability as an esteemed form of men’s behaviour. Following the data, masculinity constitutes but one of a multitude of men’s social identities; with men gravitating to the dominant masculine norm within those contexts when they perceive their status as ‘masculine’ to be under threat. In this sense, men and masculinity emerged as separate constructs, with some men and women having the freedom to gravitate to both masculine and feminine gender norms. Men, during relations between men, police one another’s gravitations to the dominant masculine norm, ostracising those who expose vulnerability. As such, all-male domains emerged as the main context in which men demonstrate their masculinity. The data suggested that patterns of subordination and domination are common among groups of white, heterosexual men with similar social and material resources. The subordination of women and less valued varieties of masculinity emerged as being a by-product, rather than a direct objective.

My three cited studies, The Kop, Red Voices and The Boot Room Boys, focus on two English football clubs, Liverpool and Manchester United and some of the footballing communities within these clubs. All three books use oral history as means of detailing various aspects for historical study. The clubs have been deliberately chosen because they rank as the most successful and best supported clubs in English football. Red Voices is an oral history of fans at Manchester United and as such is a wider examination of the social history of the club’s fans and the culture of fandom at Old Trafford since the 1930s. The two other books are about Liverpool Football Club and focus on different communities. The Kop focuses on a particular area of the ground known as the Spion Kop, where the most fervent of Liverpool fans used to stand but now sit. The other book, The Boot Room Boys, focuses on a community that is centred on the club’s coaching staff who took up residence in the club’s boot room beneath the Main stand. This room took on mythical proportions during the 1960s, 70s and 80s when the club’s successes seemed to have emanated from the discussions, tactics and approach of its occupants. Across these three publications interviews have been conducted with more than 250 people ranging from ordinary fans to owners, directors, players, administrators and managers. By drawing on this wide range of personal experiences, many going back to before the Second World War, it is possible to gauge the importance of the various communities to the footballing map and to ascertain the various changes that have taken place in the culture of football. Backed by extensive research, the reader is able to reconsider the history of football spectatorship in the twentieth century through the experiences of pre-generational fans. My findings suggest that spectatorship divides into three distinct: the pre-1960s; the period 1962 to 1989; and the post Hillsborough period, 1989 to the present. The interviews detail the social, ethnic and gender makeup of spectators throughout the years and also reveal important findings on rites of passage and the role played by fathers and elder siblings in the initiation of younger people into spectatorship. Ritual also emerges as a crucial element in spectatorship. In the case of Liverpool Football Club the interviews suggest that being a ‘Kopite’ is a crucial statement in terms of social identity. Anfield, the home of Liverpool is also identified as the focal point for the emergence of chanting and singing by fans on the terraces in the 1960s. Fashion at Liverpool and hooliganism at Manchester United are shown to have been important in the later period identified as ‘fanatical fandom’. And finally there is evidence from the interviews to suggest that significant cultural changes in fandom have taken place with the introduction of all-seater stadia. Not only does this testimony highlight the social history of spectatorship but it also encourages a new perspective, based on the individual experience which can also include emotional responses to spectatorship. In doing so this has had the effect of fleshing out the history of football, enabling it to break free from the traditional perspective of events on the pitch towards the inter-relationship between sport and everyday life.

This thesis considers how refugee-led community organisations generate social capital for their service users. The concept of social capital has become popular in policy debates in recent years, and previous research has attributed social capital creation for their service users to refugee community organisations (RCOs). This research aimed to analyse the process by which social capital is created by refugee community organisations, and what this means for the members of these organisations in terms of resources. The potential of the current political and economic climate to affect individual asylum-seekers and refugees, and refugee community organisations is considered, with particular emphasis on the funding situation for RCOs. Data was collected via an eight-month case study with an RCO for ethnic-Albanians in London. Interviews and focus groups with staff, volunteers and service users were held. To further understand the broader context in which RCOs are operating, interviews were also held with professionals that work with refugee community organisations, either as representatives of funding bodies, or as capacity-builders. A questionnaire survey of refugee community organisations with income over a certain threshold in London was also carried out in order to further contextualise the findings from the case study. Data from the researcher’s observation journal, the interviews and focus groups was analysed using software Nvivo 8 software. Woolcock’s work on social capital was used in combination with Rex’s typology of immigrant association functions. It was found that in the case study there was strong evidence of bonding and linking social capital. These social capital connections enabled service users to access a wide range of resources. There was less clear evidence of bridging social capital creation. Data from interviews with professionals and the survey revealed that other RCOs work, or at least, aspire to work, in the same way as the case study RCO to create social capital for their service users. The case study also revealed that working in partnership with specialist agencies was key to the success of the RCO, a finding that was also supported by the other data. Finally, the research found that funding uncertainty is an ongoing difficulty for many RCOs.

This research was carried out in three villages in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, and looked at the ways in which Ngaju Dayak Christian women passed on their skills, beliefs and values to their children. It was an educational, ethnographic, collective case-study which was both descriptive and interpretive. The main data collecting methods were participant observation and ethnographic interviews, undertaken over a two year period from 2007 to 2008. The motivation for carrying out the study was to try to find more effective ways of delivering Christian Education to rural Christian women, based on their traditional ways of teaching and learning. The research reveals that traditional Ngaju Dayak teaching and learning fits into a situated learning model. I claim that educational practices based upon that model are not necessarily in conflict with a Christian worldview. While this study confirms many of the findings of studies which have been carried out amongst indigenous people in other parts of the world it broke new ground in that it looked for the first time at traditional education methods among the Ngaju Dayak women. It found that the mothers especially, played the dominant role in passing on skills, beliefs and values to their children. Their methods were almost totally informal, frequently modelling or demonstrating in situations where children were present and included. The younger generation learned through observation, participation and imitation and by listening and experimenting. The context for the teaching and learning was the real and meaningful environment of the village, fields and/or family and was almost always connected to ‘real-life’ situations. Skills, beliefs and values were passed on orally. Also much was visually transmitted especially through the use of artefacts used in ceremonies. With the advent of local or personal electricity supplies, skills, beliefs and particularly values were also being transmitted via the mass media. Although there were some gender specific roles and mothers were dominant in passing on the skills, beliefs and values, overall there was minimal gender differentiation among the recipients. The study showed that these Ngaju Dayak women are ‘functionally illiterate’. They are able to read and write but their main ways of learning are oral. Story telling, has always played an important role in the lives of the Ngaju Dayak people. Further, it is evident that they prefer visual, kinesthetic, modes of learning to passive, formal ones. Cultural transmission from parents to children clearly takes place, but with certain modifications. Even though culture was transmitted by the parents and the wider family, motivation and relevance were important reasons for passing on the skills, beliefs and values. In summary, learning and teaching remains strongly influenced by the traditional Dayak worldview.

The Community IT centre (CITC) is a place where people engage in informal and formal activities leading to positive change in their lives. I undertook a multimodal, qualitative, participant-voice study based on the biographical narrative interpretive method (BNIM) at a CITC on a large housing estate in southern England, with 24 participants; 11 people provided extended life stories. The study addresses the conspicuous silence of learners’ voices in the literature about community education and gives space to the voices of users of the CITC. In the UK and elsewhere, the dominant route to social inclusion is presumed to be employment, for which IT skills are needed. The analysis, using a Third Space conceptual framework informed by Activity Theory, challenges this assumption. The study makes specific and important contributions to knowledge about what people do with a CITC and makes policy recommendations in line with the findings (Ch 9, section 9.5). The thesis shows that the CITC is a social learning space, which supplies critically more IT access to those who don’t have “enough” and basic facilities to those who don’t have IT at all. Positive change is manifested in an emergent, instrumental and interpersonal value system, discovered by this research, consisting of compassion, determination, professionalism, resourcefulness, respect and solidarity. CITCs are shown to provide invaluable spaces within which identity projects may be pursued and the formation of selfeffective identities and communities supported. Through association with the CITC people can be enabled to be more effective managers (and self-managers) of the institutions of society. Engagement with the CITC also appears to be associated with critical reflexivity concerning social presence and participation. People are discovered to have a broad range of motivations for using the centre and to do many things with computers. Affective factors are shown to be significant in determining people’s use of IT. Although they do engender strong feelings, people’s relationship with computers is not fetishised nor do they form a particularly important aspect of identity. Despite assertions in policy about the importance of computers this thesis shows that IT is not the magnet that draws people into uncomfortable spaces; comfortable spaces draw people into IT use, and comfort is a factor of community. A common-sense of the self as the subject of a personal activity system – the institution of the individual – is a useful unit of analysis however this is a complex notion. So too is the notion of community. People express forms of shared experience and interest, and negotiate concerns about identity on multiple scales (Panelli & Welch 2005). I take community as a consistent “intersubjective network” (Žižek 2008, p.12), which, as for Bhabha, “... enables a division between the private and the public, the civil and the familial.” But, which also, “... enacts the impossibility of drawing an objective line between the two” (2004, p. 330). The stories of the participants reveal extensive hybridisation in respect of many factors including: nationality, occupation, domesticity, social class, locale/neighbourhood, and expectations of outcomes in life. Occupational identity: I am what I do – broadly conceived – is an important feature of participants' stories and there is wide community support for creative aspects of employment and for the transformative potential for individuals and communities of working together, whether or not money is involved. Wider social institutions (family, education, work) are discovered to be highly productive in shaping people’s engagement with the CITC. Domestic circumstances and parenthood contribute significantly to people’s use of the centre. In particular, lone parenthood has a profound impact on people but can be a positive choice leading to a fulfilled sense of self and strong bond with the child, which can be facilitated by the CITC. Importantly, some people do not want the Internet in their homes. They resent its intrusion for strongly held reasons which need not be subject of argument or coercion. The thesis shows that participants in this study have a rich conceptualisation of learning, education, IT, qualifications and work, and clear understandings of the differences between formal and informal learning as well as an understanding of the multiply inscribed role of qualifications in social inclusion. The thesis provides specific local evidence for the OfCom (2010) findings about people’s preference for informal learning about ICT. The thesis recommends that communities take it upon themselves, with encouragement and support, to provide community IT centres.

This thesis investigates a contemporary issue in developing countries within the context of the Cameroon North-West Region. It seeks to understand how government policy and development organisations in Cameroon are empowering women and promoting their role in the community development (CD) process. It investigates and analyses the causes of gaps between policy implementation at the grassroots level which prevents women benefiting fully from the programmes initiated by government at the central level. The research is an empirical study which employs a qualitative approach with a case study design, informed by feminist paradigms and guided by the Interpretivists epistemological stand point. The case is the North-West Region of Cameroon, with particular focus on women’s development Non-Governmental Organisations and Women’s Groups. Semistructured interviews, questionnaires, focus groups and documentary analysis were the main methods of data generation. In seeking to understand why women’s role in the process of CD is still limited to basic activities at the household and local community levels it has become necessary to examine gender roles within the Cameroon socio-cultural milieu to observe how these are affecting the overall development process. The Government’s initiative to empower women all over Cameroon and promote their influence in the community is in recognition of the pivotal role they play in uplifting living standards and alleviating poverty particularly in the rural communities, which also falls within the government’s overall development plan for the nation. The research has found that recent efforts to promote this through policy and targeted programmes for women at the grassroots have been thwarted by a severe deficiency in financial and human resources, poor communication networks, high rates of illiteracy among women, corruption, politics of ethno-regional segregation and the lack of a mechanism for enforcing legislation. The thesis has thus, unpacked the rhetoric of government initiated programmes and the gaps between policy and implementation at the grassroots level. A new understanding or perception to the concept of empowerment which focuses on economic and welfare needs, different from the conventional meaning has been brought out through this research. This suggests that definitions of concepts such as empowerment must be brought within a specific sociocultural and political context. The thesis has made recommendations for what is required to be done if women are to be in the driving seat for rural development in Cameroon and the North-West Region in particular. The thesis concludes that Community Development and Women’s Empowerment are two complementary processes in Cameroon. While Community Development has a long history in the country and has been hailed as the total approach to development especially in the North-West Region, women’s empowerment on the other hand is generally considered a secular concept from the West which still has no place yet in any of Cameroon’s sub-cultural groups not least in the North-West Region. Local perceptions are that women should be empowered if only this means increasing their economic opportunities to earn and bring more money into the family and community and not more

Cognitive dysfunction is a core characteristic of schizophrenia, which can often persist when other symptoms, particularly positive symptoms, may be improved with drug treatment. The non-competitive NMDA receptor antagonist, phencyclidine (PCP), is a psychomotor stimulant drug that has been shown to induce symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia in humans and animals. The aim of these studies was to use the sub-chronic PCP model in rats to investigate cognitive dysfunction in behavioural tests which have been highlighted as relevance by the MATRICS initiative (MATRICS.ucla.edu). The main tests used were attentional set-shifting, operant reversal learning, and novel object recognition tasks. The pharmacology of antipsychotics was studied in the reversal learning task using receptor selective compounds. Following this, experiments were carried out using in vitro electrophysiology and in vivo microdialysis in an attempt to investigate the mechanisms underpinning the PCP-induced cognitive deficits. The attentional set-shifting task is a test of executive function, the extra-dimensional shift (EDS) phase relates to the ability to shift attention to a different stimulus dimension; this is impaired in patients with schizophrenia. The studies presented in chapter 2 showed that sub-chronic PCP administration impaired attentional set-shifting performance selectively in the EDS phase, a deficit which was significantly attenuated by sub-chronic administration of clozapine and risperidone, but not haloperidol. The effect of PCP was also shown to be more robust in female rats compared to males. A deficit in set-shifting ability was also observed in isolation reared rats. However, the deficits produced by PCP were more robust than the deficit produced by isolation rearing. The reversal learning task is another test of executive function. Chapter 3 reported that sub-chronic PCP administration impairs reversal learning ability in an operant task, as demonstrated by reduced percent correct responding in the reversal phase of the reversal learning task. It was found that a D1 agonist (SKF-38398), a 5-HT1A partial agonist (buspirone), a 5-HT2C antagonist (SB-243213A) and an agonist and positive allosteric modulator of the alpha 7 nACh receptor (PNU-282987 and PheTQS respectively) are able to reverse the sub-chronic PCP-induced deficit in reversal learning. Although many antipsychotics have affinity for muscarinic M1 and histamine H1 receptors, selective agents at these receptors were not able to improve the PCP-induced deficit. In chapter 4, the atypical antipsychotics, clozapine and risperidone, when given alone to naïve rats had no effect on reversal learning. Haloperidol when given to naïve rats impaired performance at the highest dose. Sub-chronic PCP was again found to impair reversal learning performance. Investigative experiments revealed that the 2 min time-out could be important as a cue. Following a double reversal, olanzapine-treated rats lost the ability to switch between the rules, whereas clozapine and risperidone-treated rats could perform the double reversal. Experiments with the extended (15 min) reversal phase could allow the investigation of the time-course effects of antipsychotics or selective compounds. The studies presented in chapter 5 found a reduction in gamma oscillations in the CA3 region of the hippocampus, following sub-chronic PCP treatment (2-5 weeks post treatment) that was paralleled by a deficit in parvalbumin immunoreactive (IR) cell density, at a similar time point (2 weeks post treatment). In contrast, a time-dependent increase in gamma oscillations was observed (6-8 weeks post treatment), at which point parvalbumin IR cell density was unchanged (8 weeks post treatment). Gamma oscillations were unchanged in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) following the PCP treatment regime. Locomotor activity tests were also carried out to ensure that the sub-chronic PCP treatment was successful. In-vivo microdialysis revealed that vehicle-treated rats show an increase in dopamine in the PFC which is selective for the retention trial of the novel object recognition task. PCP-treated rats were unable to distinguish between the novel and familiar objects and the increase in dopamine observed in vehicle rats was absent. As a control experiment it was also shown that sub-chronic PCP did not induce anxiety-like symptoms in the elevated plus maze and open field tests. These studies suggest that sub-chronic PCP induces cognitive deficits in behavioural tasks, and these deficits may be due to GABAergic mediated processes in the hippocampus and dopaminergic dysfunction in the PFC. These behavioural and neurochemical results are concurrent to findings observed in schizophrenia.

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