This thesis seeks to examine the appropriate role of individual behaviour and responsibility in relation to cancer and weight-control policy in German and US health care systems. It contains six main parts. The first describes and compares the ways in which personal responsibility features in law and policy in both countries. It analyses salient differences in underlying motivation and characterization and highlights ethical tensions that arise from these provisions and their implementation. The second part reviews what established normative theories can do to address the issues that have been identified. It argues that these frameworks lack specificity and are ill-suited as a basis for policy in pluralist societies. It provides an analysis of different notions of the concept of personal responsibility, and makes a proposal for an overarching framework, adopting a procedural justice account that draws on work by Norman Daniels, Jim Sabin and Thomas Scanlon. The third part systematically reviews survey literature on the proper role of personal responsibility and develops an instrument for semi-structured interviews with physicians and population-level surveys in the US and Germany. The instrument complements this earlier survey work and explores key themes that arose in the analysis of policy documents and the philosophical literature. Based on this instrument, the fourth part analyses the findings from twenty semi-structured interviews with primary care physicians and oncologists in Berlin, Germany and Philadelphia, USA. The fifth part presents findings from three population level surveys of 1,000 respondents each. Two surveys with identical instruments were conducted with nonprobability samples (census-adjusted proportional quota sampling with regard to income) in Germany and the US, and one, using a subset of questions, was administered to a probability-based sample in the US. Findings are discussed comparatively between countries and in view of the interviews with physicians. The last part concerns the policy implications of the analysis, and applies the framework proposed in the thesis to the case of colon cancer screening. It seeks to defend an incentive policy that attaches financial advantage to attending counselling on the advantages and disadvantages of colon cancer screening, building also on findings from the surveys, and interviews with physicians. The final chapter highlights a range of general policy implications for the evaluation and implementation of programmes seeking to incentivise personal responsibility.

Why do people support the harsh punishment of criminal offenders? This dissertation starts from the premise that views about punishment go far beyond concerns about crime and security. Punishment is a central component of the social order and a means by which social order is produced. It follows that ideological preferences will be crucial in understanding people’s punitive reactions. People who have a preference for collective security might support punishment to restore order and cohesion. Yet, by committing crime, offenders also seem to gain power in society and punishment can restore the status quo. Punishment might therefore have positive value for people motivated to achieve social order (people high in right-wing authoritarianism, RWA) as well as for people motivated to achieve power and dominance (people high in social dominance orientation, SDO). In this dissertation I build on criminological and socialpsychological research to propose a dual-motivational model of punitive attitudes. I examine whether the effects of RWA and SDO are mediated by different beliefs about crime and symbolic motives of punishment (Paper 1) and whether they predict different retributive goals of punishment (Paper 2). Finally, I explore the circumstances under which RWA and SDO predict punitive attitudes (Papers 3 and 4). The four papers presented in this dissertation suggest that there are, indeed, two ideological antecedents to punitive attitudes. High RWA individuals favoured harsh punishment to restore collective security, maintain hierarchies and avoid powerful criminals disrupting social order. High SDO’s did so to establish and maintain power and status hierarchies in society. However, the effect of SDO was limited to situations where crime was associated with a competitive situation. Punitiveness seems to be related to a groupbased competition for status and power with criminal offenders. Yet, high SDO individuals are not predisposed to think of criminal offenders as threats to hierarchies.

The underlying argument within this thesis is that cities are a reflection of transformations in society which manifest themselves in spatial structures and these spatial configurations vice versa influence society. The enclosure of residential neighbourhoods is accordingly understood as a spatial expression of social processes, which itself influences society and urban civic processes. This empirical research investigates social contacts, political engagement and civic concerns and links these processes to the following urban forms of residence: high income closed neighbourhoods; high income open neighbourhoods; middle income open neighbourhoods and low income open neighbourhoods, all situated within the suburban municipality of San Isidro/Buenos Aires. The criteria of analysis were residents’ social contacts, their social and political engagement, their opinions about local government and local politics, and their values given to the public realm, collective goods and other issues of common interest. This thesis mainly draws on two areas of literature: Firstly, interdisciplinary literature about gated communities and focusing on their implications for society, including social, legal, political and institutional perspectives. Secondly, literature from within sociology, social psychology and political theory, which comprise debates about the consequences of the privatisation of public space; contact and conflict and its impact on civic concerns; and the implications of the spread of private urban governance. The core argument is that as civic concerns are influenced by lived experiences with others, the urban forms people inhabit have social and political implications for society. The main finding of this research is that private urban governance in the form of closed neighbourhoods, significantly impacts residents' relationships with their municipal administration and residents' opinions about local government and local politics. An increase in gated communities will thus, in the long run, have substantial consequences for urban civic processes and urban democracy more broadly.

This thesis looks at how Mexico’s new democratic regime led by President Vicente Fox (2000–2006) faced past state crimes perpetrated during the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI’s) seventy-year authoritarian rule (1929–2000). To test the new regime’s democratic viability, Fox’s administration had to settle accounts with the PRI for the abuses the party had perpetrated in the past, but without upsetting it in order to preserve the stability of the new regime. The PRI was still a powerful political force and could challenge Fox’s efforts to democratise the country. Hence, this thesis offers an explanation of the factors that facilitated the emergence of Mexico’s ‘transitional justice’ process without putting at risk Fox’s relationship with the PRI elite. This thesis is framed by a cluster of literature on transitional justice which follows a social-constructivist approach and it is supported by exhaustive documentary research, which I carried out for six years in public and private archives. This thesis argues that Fox established a Special Prosecutor’s Office (SPO) as he sought to conduct ‘transitional justice’ through the existing structures of power: laws and institutions (e.g., the General Attorney’s Office) administered by members of the previous regime. So, Fox opted to face past abuses but left the task in the hands of the institutions whose members had carried out the crimes or did nothing to prevent them. The PRI rapidly accepted the establishment of the SPO because the most relevant prosecutorial strategy to come to terms with the PRI was arranged by the PRI’s own elite during the authoritarian era – prosecutorial strategy that led to impunity. In this process, the language of human rights played a decisive role as it framed the SPO’s investigations into the past: it determined the kind of violations that qualified for enquiry and, hence, the type of victims who were counted in the process, which perpetrators would be subject to prosecution, and the authorities that would intervene. Categories of human rights violations (e.g. genocide or forced disappearance) were constructed and manipulated in such a way as to grant a de facto amnesty to perpetrators. Fox was able to preserve the stability of the new regime as his prosecutorial strategies never really threatened the PRI elite.

This thesis contributes to understanding two demographically important phenomena: African ageing, and the ageing of the African HIV epidemic. Building on the body of interpretivist demography that privileges context and meanings, it explores older adults’ experiences of becoming old, sexuality and living with HIV in rural Malawi. The research uses a constructivist grounded theory framework. It is based primarily on data produced using repeat dependent interviews (N=135) with older men and women(N=43). These are supplemented by fieldwork observations, as well as data from a three-month multi-site pilot study, interviews with HIV support groups (N=3), and key informant interviews (N=19) and policy documents. The thesis identified sets of meanings surrounding old age and ways of discussing ageing that, taken together, formed an analytical framework. The framework is focused on the importance of maintaining an ‘adult’ identity and draws insights from sociological and psychological identity theories. The adult identity was aligned with personhood. It was situated within the body-centred livelihood system of rural Malawi, and associated with physical production. Old age was understood to limit productivity and thereby an individual’s adult identity. This thesis argues that ostensibly contradictory narratives about ageing experiences can be understood as rhetorical strategies respondents employed to maintain their adult identities. A central tenet of the thesis is that the adult identity (and its childlike counter identity) influenced older adults’ broader experiences and behaviours. This framework is used to explore ageing, as well as sex and HIV infection. The grounded understandings of older adults’ experiences developed in the thesis are presented against dominant understandings of the situation of older adults documented by the academe and in policy and programmatic arena emerging in Malawi. The findings highlight the centrality of wider experiences of ageing for older adults’ experiences of sex and HIV, as well as the broader importance of identity for understanding demographic behaviours and processes. In addition, they demonstrate how grounded theory and repeat dependent interviewing can be used within demographic studies to produce nuanced analytical accounts of the experiences that are most salient for the population of interest.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the politics of the civil society organizations in policy advocacy for gender equality in China. It adopts an agency-oriented approach to illustrate how women civil society organizations of various kinds actively negotiated gender interests in policy change within limited space and access. Through two advocacy activities, I seek to understand why the desired outcomes were different in these two cases by identifying the variables that either hindered or enhanced the realization of their goals. I focus on two policy issues, namely the equal retirement age in the development of the Civil Servant Law (2005) and domestic violence in the revision of the Marriage Law (2001) and the Women’s Law (2005). These two cases are of interest because the actors of the CSOs involved in advocating policy change met with different success in their efforts. In the case of domestic violence issues, the women’s organizations were able to bring about a change. In the case of the retirement age issue, however, the women’s federation was unable to bring about any desired change. The assumed variables include legitimacy, leadership, organizational forms, organizational learning and sources of funds. These conditioning factors are drawn from previous scholarship in civil society, public policy and social movements. I integrate these factors into a pentagon shaped framework that serves as a road map to guide my discussion throughout the thesis. The theoretical purpose of this study is to enrich understanding of the conditioning factors that are responsible for the results of CSO advocacy in China. On the other hand, it also contains a practical purpose, namely to provide implications for civil society actors seeking to influence policy process in China.

This thesis is a long-term ethnography produced in and around three Outer East London youth clubs. Addressing the contemporary intersection between urban multiculture, marginalisation and youth politics, it tells the stories of about a hundred young people living in Newham between 2008 and 2012. Drawing on a variety of ethnographic and textual materials, these themes develop through four substantive areas of concern. The first challenges 'Golden Era' accounts of East London by engaging with the memory practices of young people and youth workers in Newham. It argues for a deeper understanding of the 'traced' processes of 'becoming white' and an appreciation of the potential of diaspora mnemonics. In the context of 'the cuts' in public spending, the second explores the politics of territory in and around Leyham Youth Club. Using a multi-scalar analysis, it argues that the criminalisation of young people's public spaces through neo-liberal and neo-communitarian forms of governance needs to be understood alongside the micro-politics of territory. The third investigates the claim that young people's public productions are sold-out and nihilistic. Engaging with a range of music, video and dance projects, it argues that while young people made use of commercialised and nihilistic aesthetics, their work was meaningful and political. Though a discussion of performance, citation and new technologies of dialogue, the chapter further argues for a re-assessment of academic understandings of cultural syncretism. The fourth area addresses young people's futural projections. It explores how 'aspirational' futures depended on the marginalisation of other futures. Through a discussion of hip hop video, it also shows how, beyond this binary, young people projected alternative futures. The thesis concludes by restating its commitment to ethnography as a method that can address and engage politically with social injustice.

Senegal is one of the very few former French colonies that explicitly pursued the sanitary regulation of prostitution after independence; in Senegal, the legal status of sex work turns on a distinction between registered “avowed” prostitutes, and non-registered, unofficial prostitutes – the clandestines. Based on fifteen months ethnographic study in two clinics this thesis traces the changes that have taken place in the regulation of commercial intimacy in Dakar following the integration of an experimental regime at the state clinic and the creation of the identity “clandestine” by non-governmental organizations. Despite the enormous changes that have taken place over the course of the twentieth century, colonial sanitary regulation remains a governing “biopolitical paradigm” (Epstein, 2007), leaving its traces in the therapeutic, experimental, and affective lives of the clinics. In this thesis I examine how racial, gender, and class difference is produced in regulation through (1) the racial politics of colonial policy; (2) enactments of social and individual bodies at the Enda mobile clinic; (3) how difference is written into the onto-epistemologies of molecular biology; (4) how attempts to understand and accommodate difference are attempted through bioethics and the material effects of ethical practice. I do this by paying close attention to the ethnomethods of the professionals I study and to the local historical geographies of clinical practice. Throughout this thesis I think about the feminist biopolitics that might be capable of responding to and theorizing the surprising social life of the clinics.

An increasing number of young girls produce contents in social media on a everyday basis for the opportunities to express, explore and connect. Public misunderstanding and concern are about whether girls are being narcissistic and vain. Academic works address how girls exercise agency while negotiating structure in the construction of their gendered adolescent identities. This thesis is situated in relation to our hopes and fears about girls’ self-representation through digital media production, and examines the role that photographic self-portraiture plays in girls’ social relations, personal and gender identity work. The theoretical framework combines the perspectives of gender performativity and symbolic interactionism, supplemented by analyses of personal photography. This thesis chose as its case study the popular Taiwanese social networking site Wretch, and employed a mixed method of quantitative content analysis of 2000 self-portraits of teenagers to understand how they represent themselves, and qualitative online interviews with 42 girls aged 13-20 to learn about their relationships with self-portraiture. The content analysis shows that most teenagers represent themselves in a gender stereotypical manner, while some adopt non gender-specific styles to represent themselves as friendly, suggesting that teenagers may use ideals about femininity, masculinity and sociality as shortcuts to present themselves in a positive light. Interview findings reveal how girls use camera technologies and the affordance of SNS for visual self-disclosure, which isimportant for the development of theirinterpersonal relationships. The findings also suggest that self-portraiture is not simply an act of photographing a ‘reality’ of the self, but of formulating self-image(s) and identity in the process of making self-portraits. In self-portraiture, girls are constantly confronted with the ‘who am I’ question, and construct and revise their biographies as they manage an array of audiences from different contexts all collapsing in one space. Furthermore, selfportraiture creates a distance between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, allowing one to ‘play’ with self-image(s) and identity. It creates a space for the negotiation of ideals and anxieties, for experiments with different subject positions that may be socially or individually rewarding, and it is through these seemingly casual endeavoursthat one gradually works out their position in the social world. The thesis contributes to the scholarship on girls’ media culture, and suggests current theoretical perspective be expanded in order to better understand different ways of ‘doing girlhood’.

It is today commonly acknowledged that rape is a weapon of war. This consensus has been achieved in significant part through the efforts of feminist scholars and activists. Yet the consensus hides a multiplicity of ways in which weapons of war might function. This thesis uncovers and critically explores that variety. First, it turns to questions of what makes a form of inquiry specifically feminist, the better to understand the foundations for claims about rape as a weapon of war. Having offered a critique of existing divisions of empiricist, standpoint and postmodern feminisms (and of the distinction between feminism and gender theory), the thesis proposes a view of feminism as critical explanation: as at once explanatory, political and ethical inquiry. These view is expanded on through a framework of modes of critical explanation: styles of reasoning that provide analytical wagers, narrative scripts and normative orientations for feminist inquiry. Second, the thesis explores three such modes of critical explanation in relation to wartime sexual violence. It argues that the modes of instrumentality, unreason and mythology implicitly structure feminist claims about war rape. Each is examined in turn, with particular attention to how the forms of explanation mirror debates found in war studies and in social theory more generally. Each mode is clarified and expanded on, resulting in sets of propositions for each mode and in a clearer sense of where modes contradict each other and where they may combine. Third, this meta-theoretical and theoretical framework is applied to the specific case of atrocity in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Working through several kinds of empirical material (studies of sexual violence, histories of conflict in the Great Lakes, data on economic dimensions of violence and testimony from combatants and ex-combatants on the topic of sexual violence), the thesis shows how 'the rape capital of the world' is best understood in terms of themes derived from the modes of unreason and mythology. It explores retaliatory atrocity, extractive sexual violence and fragmented sexual aggression as three situated dynamics of violence. This part thus critiques a narrowly instrumentalist idea of wartime sexual violence as a strategy of profiteering, whilst also attending to how economic dimensions matter in the war complex as a whole. The conclusion draws out consequences for further work, especially in relation to a comparative project for the critical explanation of wartime sexual violence.