Over 275,000 women died of pregnancy related causes in 2015. Most occur in resource-poor settings and are preventable. This study aimed to improve the working lives of maternity healthcare workers in Malawi to enable delivery of higher quality care, using Appreciative Inquiry (AI); a positive-focused, participatory action cycle. Following a systematic review and narrative synthesis of AI, an ethnographic study and Interpretative Phenomenological perspective were utilised to understand working lives. Before the intervention was implemented, working lives were assessed through validated questionnaires for staff and patient satisfaction surveys. AI has been used in healthcare, but little empirical evidence for its effectiveness exists. Staff wanted to do a good job, but were confined by a lack of resources, knowledge and support. The longitudinal survey of staff showed significant improvements in general wellbeing and home-work interface, and patient satisfaction improved. AI also improved staff relationships and made work easier and happier. Qualitative work suggested this was because staff were working better together, underpinned by everyone meeting together. From these findings a theory of change was developed. AI showed great promise. However, further research, in the form of a large-scale trial, is needed to empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of AI in healthcare.

There are two areas of research into challenging behaviour that are, as yet, underexplored and yet important and likely to promote beneficial outcomes. First, there are very few studies of the persistence of challenging behaviour and predictors of persistence. In this thesis this question is addressed by studying challenging behaviour in people with the same cause for their intellectual disability, Fragile X syndrome (FXS). Second, the interrelationship between the quality of life of children with intellectual disabilities who show challenging behaviour, parental wellbeing and service use has not yet been explored. The relationships between these factors are explored in a large scale survey. Challenging behaviour was found to be highly persistent in FXS and predicted by the presence of autism spectrum disorder. For the second question posed, impulsivity, a behavioural correlate of challenging behaviour, but not challenging behaviour alone, was predictive of parental emotional wellbeing. Behavioural correlates of challenging behaviour and parental emotional wellbeing were related to the quality of life of children with intellectual disabilities. Finally, parental anxiety and the child’s age were strongly associated with access to mental health and social services. The results have important implications for the targeting of individualised early intervention strategies at children at high risk and which can effectively support children with intellectual disabilities and challenging behaviour in order to enable families to experience better quality of life.

Drawing on empirical data, this thesis investigates the interplay of cultural differences in the ways Persians practice, negotiate, and sustain their partnering relationships across cultural differences; reasons for and implications of failure; and the extents to which Persian intercultural partnering practices could be understood in relation to wider social processes. I grounded this analysis on the Pre-Partnering, Prevailing-Partnering, and Post-Partnering Practices, and argue that Persians in intercultural partnering relationships ‘do partnering’ in relation to Internal, External and Intergenerational social positionings. I suggest that participants’ in-between cultural identities help them to sustain their partnering relationships, with negotiations centring on the interplay of five cultural sources: gender, religiosity, relationality, life course, and language. Failure in partnering relationships are usually attributed to shifting positions on the continuum of cultural identities, due to participants seeking their best ‘me’, which is social, and is defined through personal relationships with wider social connections. Partnering practices in the particular context of this study may not align with the claims of detraditionalization theory. I argue that religion should be considered independent from other forms of traditions to understand the wider social processes relevant to construction of contemporary family lives.

This thesis addresses the concept of the contemporary muse in the work of six late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century women poets. In my introduction, I detail the history of the muse in literary tradition. I examine the problems that the gendered dynamic of poet/muse presented, by restricting women to a passive, inspiring role. I argue that, due to these problematic aspects, contemporary feminist criticism of the woman poet’s muse has often elided the homoerotic desire and power-play that structures these relationships. To rectify this, I focus on contemporary, living muse figures. I emphasise why these kinds of figures (as opposed to dead, historical or mythological muses) were particularly inspiring to women poets in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth centuries. I also address the specific ethical dilemmas of claiming a living muse. My four main chapters detail and theorise the dynamics between poets and their contemporary muses: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson; Olive Custance and Lord Alfred Douglas; Amy Lowell and Eleonora Duse/Ada Russell; and H.D. and Bryher. My conclusion draws these individual studies together to emphasise their illuminating similarities, including the increased fluidity between the roles of poet/muse, destabilisation of gender categories, and the presence of a third term that mediates the muse/poet relationship.

This thesis investigates the relation between legal institutions, strengthening of legal rights and criminal behaviour in India with a focus on the gender gap in access and welfare. In Chapter 1 I provide an overview of the determinants of violence against women in India using micro-level data. In Chapter 2 I investigate how strengthening women’s legal rights affects women’s position within the household. I find that following the amendments to the major inheritance law in India reported and self-reported violence against women fell. This result is explained by an improvement in husbands’ behaviour and in marriage market negotiations. Finally, in Chapter 3 of this thesis, I analyse the implications of missing women on overall crime and on violence against women by investigating the relationship between uneven sex ratio and illegal behaviour. Using district-level information of age-specific sex ratios, I estimate the effect of a surplus of males at crime and marriage prone-ages on violence against women, general violence, acquisitive crime and aggregate gender-specific juvenile delinquency. I find a negative relation between sex ratio of the crime-prone age cohorts and violence against women.

This study offers a critical insight into the practice of theology and pedagogy with marginalised members of society with regards to what liberative praxis may mean as part of everyday living. Its characteristic feature is that it adopts a womanist approach to the process of constructing a new theological pedagogy in collaboration with British African-Caribbean women. In a manner suitable for the British context it centres the educational experiences and connected knowing of marginalised British Christian African-Caribbean women, as a resource for addressing complex issues in society. Accordingly, the experiences and wisdom of these Black women passionate about justice, freedom, spiritual development and relationships provide the raw material for this articulation of a liberative Spirit-led pedagogy. A process described as ‘womanistization’. The result is a broad and inclusive approach to research and biblical hermeneutics. The researcher and researched engage in dialogue as open and honest ‘candid participants’ employing their experiential imagination and wisdom to re-read scripture and translate their renewed faith into liberative action.

While many countries in the West have been broadly pursing policies of deinstitutionalisation since the latter half of the 20th Century, orphanages remain the norm for many countries. Orphanage research has often tended to be conducted through a bio-psychological lens, and there remains little qualitative research to reveal the nuances of micro-scale practices taking place within these institutions. This thesis employs a multi-sited ethnography and explores the orphanage as a complex institution influenced by Soviet and Post-Soviet practices of childcare. In particular, this research draws upon an ethnography conducted in an orphanage for children with severe intellectual disabilities. The thesis considers the multiscalar nature of this institution and explores childhood mobilities, agency and elements of discipline and control within the institution, destabilising the notion of the orphanage as an environment of care. This research addresses significant empirical lacunae in human geography and studies of post-socialism through an ethnographic study of Russia's disability orphanages. This research also challenges understandings of mobility in children's geographies by drawing upon theories of coerced and disciplined mobility. Finally, in highlighting the vulnerability of these children, this thesis develops the concept of 'contingent agency' to provide a more nuanced understanding of agency in children's geographies.

1970s and 1980s feminist writing about rape in relation to early modern legal practice and to its representation in literary works established a paradigm of misogyny and female victimhood that has remained largely unchallenged. Two works in particular have become almost ubiquitous in modern criticism: a 1983 paper by Nazife Bashar, and the 1632 treatise, \(The\) \(Lawes\) \(Resolutions\) \(of\) \(Womens\) \(Rights\). But a scrutiny of source material revealed factual error and misreading of early modern law and commentary in Bashar’s piece. Additionally, \(The\) \(Lawes\) \(Resolutions\) is unreliable in its account of statute law, while its legal credentials are unclear. Mistaken assumptions arising from both sources have been perpetuated and compounded in modern criticism, and established as commonplace. The resulting critical paradigm constrains the scope for further investigation. The thesis attempts to set the undeniably subordinate status of women in a fuller context than that of oppositional gender politics. It reviews early modern statute law, the background to \(The\) \(Lawes\) \(Resolutions\), Bashar’s essay and its influence on subsequent criticism, the cultural context that established women’s secondary status and reinforced their vulnerability to rape, and the part of neoclassicism in the dynamic. Later chapters turn to early modern – particularly Jacobean – drama. The thesis suggests that in a fuller context of complexity and contradiction there is potential for wider and more interesting approaches to rape in literature than ideological assumptions prevalent in criticism over the past thirty years have allowed.

Qualitative research has tended to not recruit participants with learning disabilities due to concerns that they would not be able to engage with the research process. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is a new qualitative methodology which aims to make sense of participant's experiences through the researcher's interpretative enquiry of a homogenous sample. A literature is presented which synthesised, developed a quality guide and evaluated whether IPA is an appropriate methodology to use with people with learning disabilities. The main focus was around the quality of research is this area and additional issues to consider when recruiting people with learning disabilities. An empirical paper that investigated the experiences of women of South Asian origin in receipt of social services using IPA is also presented. It revealed that the participants are satisfied with services through 3 super- ordinate and 8 subthemes. Further research is needed in this area.

The first paper is a systematic review of the impact of informal social support on symptoms of PTSD in female survivors of sexual assault. Thirteen studies were identified and reviewed against quality criteria. The findings suggest that negative and positive social support from informal sources of support differs as to its effects on PTSD symptom severity. Specifically, negative social support was found to increase symptoms of PTSD, whilst positive social support may play a buffering role for some survivors. However, positive social support did not appear to buffer against the more detrimental impact of negative social support on symptoms of PTSD. The second paper explored how police and women with learning disabilities co-construct sexual assault during police investigative interviews. Six closed and archived investigative interviews were identified and analysed using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. Analysis observed a central pattern of discourse around fault and blame which was drawn on my both survivors and officers in constructing sexual assault. The analysis highlights opportunities for further police training in identifying and questioning adults who report a sexual assault who also have a learning disability.