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.

This thesis is about the migration decision-making experiences of Kenyan and Nigerian women migrants in London. Its aim was to investigate the influence of culture, family and networks on the women’s decision to migrate. The study used in-depth interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs) to gather data. The four theories of migration decision-making used to illuminate the data and understand the women’s experiences were: value expectancy theory; place utility model; network and system theories. The results revealed that the sociocultural expectations of women in Nigerian societies influenced the migration decisions of some Nigerian women. It was a migration motive for some women who were stereotyped by gender in their society of origin and it was also a part of the migration decision-making negotiations, within households, especially between spouses. This was not true of Kenyan women who were least affected by gendered sociocultural expectations in their society of origin. Children also indirectly influenced the decision-making of married and single mothers. Single mothers focused almost exclusively on the needs of their children, whereas married women accommodated both their children and spouses’ interests. Young single women were more likely to discuss their migration plans with their parents, but for a few, migration had to be negotiated before taking a decision. The results also indicated that the women studied used various types of networks, linked differently, within a migration system. Women were interested in the type and quality of the information provided by their network(s) rather than in its gendered nature. Finally the findings also showed that the idea of ‘gendered information’ exists whereby certain information is given specifically to men or exclusively to women depending on the recipient’s life stage and reasons for migrating. This study contributes to the small body of literature on women’s migration decision-making while adding new knowledge about what influences decision making among women from two African countries. It lays foundations for further research case studies on factors affecting African women’s migration decision-making.

This thesis is about the place of gender roles and relations in global food production, based on an extensive ethnography of tomato production and processing in Turkey. Broadly, it looks at how attempts to integrate Turkish agriculture and food industries into the global economy have affected rural populations including women and men, but particularly the transformative consequences for women’s labour. The main question guiding the research is to ask how constructions of, and the availability of, women’s labour shapes and is shaped by the interaction between the global economy and local dynamics. In order to answer this question, I chose to engage with tomato production and processing because tomatoes have the highest export rate of all fresh and processed fruit and vegetables in Turkey. My participant-observation followed the path taken by tomatoes produced in Western Turkey for one of the biggest Japanese tomato processing brands. This included my work on the tomato fields for all of the spring planting and the summer harvest in 2013 and in a tomato-processing factory in late summer and autumn 2014. The research also drew on in-depth interviews with different social actors in the global tomato production chain in Turkey, including members of landowning families and the factory manager. I completed my fieldwork by travelling to South-eastern Anatolia (March, 2014) and staying in the homes of the Kurdish seasonal migrant workers, with whom I worked on the land in Western Turkey (in 2013). In looking at the transformation of rural women’s labour in Turkey, my sociological focus comprised the gendered division of labour in factory, field and domestic work; different forms of patriarchy; the intersection of inequalities, including those of gender, ethnicity, class and age; forms of workers’ consent and resistance, as well as the interwoven nature of the relations of production and reproduction. Focusing on these aspects of women’s lives has reshaped this research; it began as a study of women’s labour and turned into research about gender in global food production, although women’s experiences are still at its heart. My thesis is that these processes can be best understood by applying the term ‘intersectional patriarchy’ and its material manifestation 'el âlem'. The ultimate goal and contribution of my research is to integrate women’s reproductive work into global commodity chain analysis and contribute to labour process theory with the help of these ‘locally’ developed terms.

Policy frames in England and Melbourne rely upon unrealistic understandings of young peoples’ transition experiences. Nebulous conflation of ‘youth’ with ‘transition’ insensitively infers a desired state of adult independence is an outcome of the capacity to follow correct transition paths. These understandings are consistent with a political interest in the individualised decision making competencies of young people. This is particularly relevant to ‘care leavers’, whose transitions are problematised, rendering their futures ‘risky’, and disregarding their perspectives. The life stories of a sample of 20 foster care-experienced young people were supported through sensory ethnographic principles. The associated methods evoked narratives of past experience within care trajectories, tracing self-representations into the present, and sense making of independent futures. Participants’ transition biographies derived from a methodological and analytical orientation exploring the biographical-relational facets to transition. Metaphors of transition and independence were revealed, shaping development of a contemporary anthropological frame. This thesis argues for a refocus upon the relational context to transition, and contests the contemporary significance of persistent debates regarding ‘structure’ or ‘agency’ as arbitrators of youths’ future. Supporting a sense of relatedness is crucial when ‘family’ is absent, particularly when moving forward to a desired future requires high degrees of affective recalibration.

During the period 1850-1913 the landscape of Irish childcare witnessed significant changes. The Famine left thousands of children orphaned or deserted in Irish workhouses and Ireland was forced to confront the question of how best to raise these children of the poor to be respectable and self-sufficient adults. The period was defined by attempts to answer this question and by 1913 a new system for such care was in place. This was a system dominated by a belief in institutionalisation, mainly in industrial schools, of children as beneficial both to the children and to Irish society, and driven by a fear and mistrust of the poor as parents. The developments during 1850-1913 have not previously been examined in a coherent and cohesive manner. This thesis aims to do so, thus adding to the understanding of the attitudes and approaches to childcare for the poor in Ireland. The thesis will also make use of quantitative analysis in a manner not previously done in order to understand the evolution and development of childcare institutions. The first chapter focuses on the Irish Poor Law, its relation to children, and the development of voluntary, charitable childcare institutions. The second chapter examines the increasing criticism against workhouse care through two case studies. The third chapter explores the rejection of foster-care in Ireland in the form of boarding out from workhouses. The fourth chapter analyses the rise of the reformatories and industrial schools managed largely by the Catholic Church. The final chapter explores how the increasing interest and concern for the children of the poor resulted in the development of an increasingly extensive framework of legislation that, by 1913, touched on almost all aspects of the lives of the children of the poor and their families.