There is an alarming increasing number of children living either partially or permanently on the streets of African countries. This research has been undertaken with children who live their lives more permanently on the streets of Accra the capital city of Ghana. The study is focused on their survival strategies and investigates the detail of their day to day lives on the street. In addition, this thesis illustrates the home experiences of these Street children prior to their coming onto the street. These experiences include poverty, neglect and abuse. On the street, the life of the children is full of the struggle for survival and is. characterised by the complexities of the Street Children's vulnerability as well as their resilience. The study reveals interactions and negotiations that go on between Street Children and their community, their peers and other people they come across in their settings, for their mental, emotional and physical wellbeing.

Youth work, as a form of engaging young people "in which the participation of young people is voluntary and the aims are broadly educational" (Harrison and Wise (eds.), 2009: 1) has been positioned as an inherently ethical practice (see: Sercombe, 1998; National Youth Agency, 1999). However, what makes youth work ethical and what constitutes ethical youth work is currently the subject of some debate. At present, two broad, overlapping schools of thought exist: that youth work is made ethical by the fact that the procedures within it are more equitable and fairer (Young, 1999; NYA, 1999); or that youth work is made ethical by the fact that it holds the young person as its primary constituent, receiving its 'mandate' directly from them (Sercombe, 1998; 2010). To this debate I would like to provide an alternative model of ethics which focuses on the potential to disrupt unequal relations of power and unsettle discourse. In doing so I will be able to highlight the existent possibilities for and limitations on the production of an ethical youth work practice. This model is drawn from a Foucauldian reading of ethics. Foucauldian ethics focuses on the capacity of the subject to disrupt discourse and challenge power relations. Applying this Foucauldian ethics, the thesis explores what about youth work creates openings for the subject to disrupt discourse. These openings, I argue, are rooted in the ambiguity of the discourse of youth work. This ambiguity is the result of the production of youth work discourse by multiple, contradictory understandings of youth, adulthood and 'good' youth-adult relations. These manifest in the varying sub-discourses of positive youth work co-existent within the overarching youth work discourse. Using evidence from policy textwork and ethnographic fieldwork at a youth club in Nottingham (Urban Youth) I illustrate how the co-existence of these understandings renders the subject-positions and subject-functions of youth workers and young people in youth work discourse ambiguous. As such what constitutes positive youth work, a 'good' youth worker and the dimensions of positive youth worker-young person relationships is unclear. Because of this ambiguity, openings for critical reflection and disassembling of the subject (what Foucault considers as the epitome of being ethical) emerge.

In most police services the only spatial and temporal analysis of crime was conducted until recently by statisticians at the force headquarters, with little or no regard for any short term or localised patterns of crime. In recent years there has been a move towards a more decentralised, proactive style of British policing focused at the police divisional and community level. This has left an intelligence void where force level analysis techniques are neither appropriate nor subtle enough to elicit any meaningful information at a local level from the mass of crime data generated within the police service. This thesis reveals patterns in community level crime which have not been recognised previously using traditional techniques in spatial and temporal investigation which tend to lack the necessary analytical ability. Current policing considerations are recognised and the thesis concentrates on three aspects of police crime concern: accurate temporal analysis, repeat victimisation, and the identification of hotspots. A number of new techniques are presented which are designed with the needs of a crime analyst at a divisional police station in mind, an individual who has until now lacked the necessary analytical tools to perform the role effectively.

This thesis is concerned with the lived experience of nineteen Zimbabwean migrants I interviewed in the UK who were forced apart from their children for a lengthy period of time by the UK immigration system. It explores the processes through which these migrants were rendered rightless in their country of birth where their government directly threatened their physical lives and how they were forced to migrate to the UK without their children in search of human rights and protection. However, upon arrival in the UK, these migrants' rightlessness was reinforced as the UK immigration and asylum law affords only the most minimal of rights to asylum seekers and other categories of forced migrants. The thesis attempts to uncover the extent to which the Zimbabwean migrants were denied full access to human rights, especially the rights to legally remain, work and to be reunited with their children in the UK. It also seeks to show how, over a period of time, these migrant parents' selves fell apart; they lost total control of their own lives in the UK and witnessed the disintegration of the connections they had to their children, partners, parents, friends and other kin left behind. The thesis argues that to be afforded partial rights, that is, the right to continue to live and breathe (bare life) but not the right to legally belong and/or to exercise personal autonomy is to be condemned to a living death. By exploring the sufferings and dehumanization processes of the Zimbabwean migrants, the thesis seeks to reveal the gap between the UK's rhetorical commitments with regards to promoting and protecting human rights, and the actual practice of its immigration regime.

Willingness to pay is increasingly being used in health technology assessment, although a number of methodological issues remain unresolved. Using data collected from four studies, this thesis presents the findings from a direct comparison between alternative format designs to elicit willingness to pay for two alternative colorectal cancer screening tests; faecal occult blood (FOB) testing and flexible sigmoidoscopy (FS) testing. Along with the willingness to pay values estimated using the open-ended, payment scale, closed-ended and iterative bidding formats, information is collected on household income, attitudes toward health promotion and personal risk perceptions to determine the nature and value of responses. In comparison with the alternative formats, the closed-ended question design produced significantly higher WTP valuations and different justifications for those valuations. It is hypothesised that the yea-saying effect may explain this difference. The payment scale format achieved a higher completion rate compared to the open-ended design and both formats produced broadly similar valuations. Although a subsequent study suggested evidence of range bias within the payment scale design. The iterative bidding format produced higher valuations than the open-ended and payment scale but lower than the closed-ended, it is hypothesised that valuations obtained using different initial bids demonstrate the existence of starting point bias. Across all studies, respondents who have a high health motivation, are well educated, have a high household income and who are particularly worried about the disease have a positive effect on the willingness to pay for colorectal cancer screening.

The aim of this research was to explore staff and student experiences of the barriers print disabled students face and the adjustments made to overcome these. Universities are obliged by the Special Education Needs and Disability Act 2001 and the Disability Discrimination Acts 1995 and 2005 to make 'reasonable' adjustments, but receive only limited guidance as to how far they have to go to do this. No literature, research-based or otherwise, has so far dealt with the full range of issues relating to the implementation of adjustments for print disabled higher education students and until now few questions have been asked about why difficulties arise. Some studies have dealt with general issues relating to disabled higher education students (e. g. Riddell, Tinklin and Wilson, 2004; Fuller et al., 2006; Healey, Fuller, Bradley and Hall, 2006) but their conclusions are not fully applicable to print disabled students. Other literature has looked at issues relating to the accessibility of documents (e. g. RNIB, 2003, 2004, 2006; JISC TechDis, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b) but does not consider how these issues affect higher education students. A small amount of literature focuses on general issues affecting print disabled students, but so far this has only focused on the underlying impairments that lead to it in isolation (e. g. visual impairment - Roy, 2003; or dyslexia - Riddick, 2001). Several sources have produced guidelines for making reasonable adjustments for students with dyslexia (e. g. The University of Nottingham 2006a) and visual impairments (e. g. West Virginia University, 2005b), but no comparisons appear to have been made been the similarity of the two. This study expands on previous research to explore the experiences of print disabled students, both from the perspective of print disabled students themselves but also from the perspective of the staff who support them. It explores the impact of the medical and social models of disability, as well as the mediatory model of disability displayed by the disability legislation. Its findings suggest that whilst universities have made considerable progress in reducing discrimination and promoting equality, print disabled students still experience significant problems. It concludes that whilst SENDA 2001 has contributed to the progress that has been made, legislation alone may not be capable of producing the cultural change that is needed.

This thesis provides a timely retrospective of New Labour's public politics of global and domestic poverty through examination of their speeches and policy documents and secondary literature on the post-war politics of poverty and development, New Labour and public attitudes to poverty. It adopts a 'public politics' approach, in understanding these speeches and policy documents as public political discourse and understanding politics in broad cultural terms as the discursive struggle to embed a particular vision of the social world in the public imagination, and provides a rare example of a crossdomain study of New Labour, seeking to connect analysis of global and domestic policy. As such it contributes to what Colin Hay has called the 'new political science of British politics'. Both global and domestic poverty received a greater public political profile under New Labour than could have been envisaged in 1997. By the end of their first term they had made high-profile, time-specific commitments in both domains. Global poverty in particular gained unprecedented public attention in the build-up to the G8 Summit in 2005 and New Labour was centre stage in the political spectacle of Make Poverty History. This followed a period of neo-liberal dominance in which poverty was absent from the domestic political lexicon and subsumed by structural adjustment imperatives in the global domain. This comparative study of the public politics of poverty asks: whether New Labour made explicit connections between their global and domestic poverty discourses and commitments, and if so, what the nature of these connections were; what the 'narratives' employed to justify government action to tackle poverty were, and the similarities and differences between the two poverty domains; whether the general public shared these 'narratives' and, if not, how they differed; how New Labour's 'public politics of poverty' evolved over time in both global and domestic domains; and what the key characteristics of New Labour's public politics of poverty were, how could have differed, and what impact they appeared to have had on public opinion.

Calving is an essential event in dairy production, as lactation only begins after calving and cows must give birth at regular intervals in order to maintain milk production. Careful management is important during the weeks around calving as this is when dairy cows most frequently experience health problems. Experienced stockmen use judgements based on physical and behavioural changes in order to recognise when cows may be about to calve, and subsequently be available to offer assistance when required. With increasing herd sizes and large numbers of cows per stockman, individual attention is often difficult. An automated system that monitors behavioural or physiological changes before calving could potentially be used to predict the time of calving, and help improve supervision by farm staff. Data comprising two years of records from Langhill Farm were used to identify any variables which could be used for calving prediction or as risk factors for various calving problems. Records kept by stockmen detailing the signs of calving and time of observation were compared with quantitative behavioural data. Observations from video recordings were used to identify any consistent behavioural changes occurring the day before calving that could be used to predict the onset of calving. The frequencies of lying and tail raises proved to be the most useful indicators, as they showed consistent changes in the final six hours before calving. Differences between heifers and cows, and between those experiencing calving difficulties and those which did not, were also investigated. Differences between heifers and cows were shown which should be taken into account when predicting calving times. However, no early-warning signs of difficulties were identified for cows and heifers assisted with a calving jack. Cows were also fitted with collars containing accelerometers to investigate if features in tri-axial accelerometer data could be shown to correspond to specific behaviours. Some success was achieved in identifying eating behaviour and postural changes, demonstrating that there is potential for monitoring behaviour using this method. Weekly heart rate recordings were also taken to establish if there was a change in the heart rate or heart rate variability during the final six weeks of gestation. Changes were found but, although they were statistically significant, they were considered too subtle for any practical application. Consistent changes in behaviour were observed in the six hours before calving, some of which could be measured using accelerometers. These changes have the potential to be used as the basis of an automated monitoring system to predict calving.

This thesis examines two research questions: firstly, how does community punishment impact upon the lives of those subjected to it; and secondly, to what extent is that impact affected by the relationship between the offender and her Probation Service supervisor? It considers these questions in both conceptual and empirical terms by outlining, and then deploying, the analytical framework of penal impact, an approach to penal severity that uses pain as a metric by which to judge the suitability of punitive interventions. By evaluating sentence severity in terms of penal impact, one can examine both the types of pain that follow from a particular sentence, as well as their relative magnitude, building up a qualitative comparison of different impositions of community punishment. However, because pain is an inherently subjective concept, the evaluation of penal impact requires empirical data. This study therefore explores the findings of interviews with nine offenders and 11 supervision officers within a single Probation Trust. The data drawn from these interviews indicate a broad range of pains that vary considerably in their intensity and incidence from offender to offender. The study explores the question of the extent to which these pains can be associated with the formal process of punishment, the extent to which they can be considered punitive in a retributive sense, and the means by which such pains can be compared between subjective experiences. It concludes that the penal impact of community punishment in England and Wales is considerable, and goes substantially beyond the relatively ‘soft’ image suggested by a narrow, liberty-based conception of sentence severity. The process of supervision has a substantial effect upon the pains felt – and therefore, upon the sentence’s overall impact. The implications of these conclusions for sentencing policy in England and Wales are discussed, and avenues of further research are identified.

The sale of ancient objects on eBay is presented to buyers as legitimate and ethical. However the antiquities trade is a grey market, where both licit and illicit objects are sold (Bowman, 2008). An unknown percentage of illicit antiquities have entered the market as a consequence of archaeological looting. However, antiquities are fungible by nature, meaning that it is very difficult for buyers to differentiate the licit from the illicit. This thesis is based on the premise that the antiquities trade causes harm through the destruction of archaeological knowledge, and therefore there is a necessity to reduce the size of the market. Using Sutton’s market reduction approach, the study sets out to collect empirical data on the market from eBay. The thesis considers three main research questions: First, is the current regulatory framework for the sale of antiquities adequate? Second, what is the scale and scope of the market on eBay for antiquities? Third, what are the routine features of the operation of this market?