The purpose of this research was to investigate the perceptions of refugee children, refugee parents and school staff regarding what they believe contributed to the positive adaptation of refugee children after facing adversity. This research examined how the participants understood the factors inherent in the new social milieu and its effect on refugee children’s mental health and psychological well-being. This included an exploration of resilience and the role of risk and protective factors. Few studies have focused on exploring views from a resilience perspective and studies that have, have also tended to focus on exploring factors through quantitative rather than qualitative measures. This mixed methods piece of ‘real world’ research, adopted a ‘what’s working well’ perspective, aimed to explore the important voices of children, parents and staff. The views of three refugee parents and twenty one refugee children aged between 9 and 19 years old, of various ethnic origins and length of stay in the UK (six months to eight years) were explored through semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using a thematic analysis approach. The children’s level of well-being in different domains such as school was assessed using the Multidimensional Student Life Satisfaction Survey (Huebner, 2001). The views of sixty-three staff members were also gathered via questionnaire. Findings from this research reveal the valuable perspectives parents and young people can offer. The psychological construct of resilience was of relevance to the children in the present research, with several themes reflecting factors that have been shown to impact on resilience in positive or adverse way. Young people’s comments suggested that they were not protected from all negative experiences, but were able to succeed in the face of such adversity due to a number of factors that provided a defence against it. The key differences that children identified, that could be protective as well as a risk for them featured in the following main themes: factors within the family, experiences at school and individual/personal characteristics. Staff, parent and child responses were triangulated to provide a rich picture of the potential protective factors operating within the school and family environment. Implications for future practice for schools and Educational Psychologists in areas such as the voice of the child, bullying, home-school and community partnerships and mental health interventions are discussed. Methodological issues are also considered, together with suggestions for future research to create a deeper understanding of the role of culture, schools, coping styles and the community. Further opportunities for research exploring risk and resilience in unaccompanied refugee children are suggested.

This thesis considers how sexual and romantic relationships between academic faculty and students in higher education are governed. Using analytic techniques drawn from Foucault and discursive psychology to interpret a corpus of texts, which includes policy documents, interview transcripts, fictional accounts, newspaper articles, and computer mediated discourse, I explore how five discourses are mobilized to frame faculty student relationships. I find that harassment discourse, which emerges as the dominant frame of reference in scholarly accounts, is taken up less readily in the accounts studied here. Rather, discourses foregrounding four alternative, but often imbricated, themes are more extensively mobilized: infantilization; religiosity; health, safety, and hygiene; and professionalism. These discourses reinforce elements of the truth claims propounded by harassment discourses; notably, their gendered and heterosexist assumptions, and their insertion of a gap between academic and student, albeit one configured along subtly different lines. However, they also challenge them, positing alternative claims to truth, recasting the subject positions of academic and student, and re-orienting relations between the two. For example, infantilization discourses construct faculty-student relationships as a horrific relation between adult or parent and child which must be monitored, whereas religious discourses construct a pastor-flock relation, articulating relationships as a temptation to be resisted or atoned for. The thesis offers contributions to research on faculty-student relationships per se, and is also understood as opening up analysis of organizational sexuality and the university more generally by arguing for the usefulness of a government approach to these phenomena.

This thesis explores how digital technologies such as social media, smart devices and gaming platforms are shaping young people’s sexual cultures. While the majority of research on young people’s digital sexual cultures has maintained a narrow focus on risk and harm, and limited what digital practices are considered relevant and for whom, this thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to support children and young people to navigate the complexities of an ever-changing digital sexual age. I worked with a socio-economically and culturally diverse sample of twenty-five young people aged 11 – 18 years from England and Wales. Rather than focusing on a pre-defined set of digital practices, I set out to foster a creative, curious and open-ended approach that allowed participants to identify which digital practices mattered to them. Over a period of fifteen-months, I employed a range of creative, visual and arts-based methods in group and individual interviews to explore a flexible set of core issues including digital worlds, relationships, networked body cultures and media discourses. Taking inspiration from feminist posthuman and new materialist concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘affect’, ‘phallogocentricism’ and ‘feminist figurations’, I trace normative articulations of gender and sexuality as well as activate different ways of seeing and relating to young people’s digital sexual cultures. My data highlights the enduring force of heteronormative and phallogocentric power relations in young people’s digital sexual cultures through the publicisation of intimate relations online, social media’s visual culture of bodily display and gendered harassment online. However, it also maps ruptures and feminist figurations that displace vision away from the heteronormative and phallogocentric mode. I illustrate how young people’s digital sexual cultures can be the site of unexpected and unpredictable relations that move beyond normative notions of (hetero)sexuality and towards possibilities for re-imagined sexualities that exceed heteronormative and phallogocentric norms.