Search

The study of the wind instruments of Anglo-Saxon England has been largely neglected, with the result that the wind instruments present in Anglo-Saxon England - what they were like, how they were used, and in what contexts - is not well understood. A wind instrument produces sound through the vibration of air and includes instruments voiced in the manner of modern brass and wind instruments. Research concerning such instruments will enable greater understanding, not only of the instruments and music, but also of life at the time. The current thesis aims to fill this gap and create a foundation on which future research can build. As a result, the main aim of this research is to establish the nature of wind instruments of Anglo-Saxon England including their appearance, formation and function as well as their social contexts, allowing for recreations and experimentation to be completed as part of this thesis. An interdisciplinary approach, especially encompassing knowledge from archaeology, music, history, literature, acoustical engineering and mathematics, enabled the data to be assessed to create a comprehensive study of the wind instruments. Through such methods, it was demonstrated that horns (and potentially trumpets), hornpipes, bagpipes, reed pipes, flutes (both duct and end-blown such as panpipes) and the organ were present in Anglo-Saxon England. The creation of these instruments varied from the simple bone pipes to the complex organ. Analysis of the sources has, for the first time, allowed for a re-creation of a decade of organ pipes and consequent experimentation to form a comprehensive understanding of that instrument. The instruments are divided into two categories: those for entertainment and those with a practical use, whether that was horns for signalling in battle and on the road, or the organ to demonstrate the new religion of Christianity. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the wide-range of wind instruments present in Anglo-Saxon England, including their diverse functions and methods of creation.

Evidence from NGOs and the charitable sector suggests that people who are refused asylum in the UK lead highly marginalised lives, experiencing levels of deprivation that flout UK and international human rights legislation. However, the number of studies engaging with this largely hidden population is small, with little attention paid to understanding how this marginalisation is engendered, perpetuated and experienced. This thesis addresses this gap by engaging with social theory to understand empirical research findings. Research was carried out with fifteen destitute refused asylum seekers in Sheffield using a qualitative methodology comprising in-depth interviews and participant-led auto-photography and photo-elicitation. This thesis makes three main contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it expands empirical understanding of the lived experience of being a refused asylum seeker in the UK. In line with previous studies, participants experienced extreme material and social marginalisation. This impacted on their health, wellbeing and social relationships. Secondly, the thesis develops an analytical framework of theoretical concepts to engage with the empirical data that might prove useful to other scholars seeking to understand marginalised groups. Thirdly, novel theoretical insights are generated in relation to the data. Elias and Scotson's (1994 [1965]) theory of established-outsider relations is utilised to explain how power disparities between the established UK 'group' and refused asylum seekers underpin participants' marginalisation. Other concepts, including Wacquant's urban marginality (2008), situate the findings in the context of the modern city. Additional analytical lenses, such as Goffman's (1963) work on stigma, provide nuanced insights into participants' day-to-day lived realities, and the way that stigma seemingly perpetuates segregation. The research finds that participants frequently experience their marginalisation as a form of imprisonment, and Foucault's concepts of governmentality and the carceral archipelago help to further understand this, providing new perspectives on what it feels like to be a refused asylum seeker in the UK today.

This thesis explores constructed understandings of honourable manhood and the nature of militarism amongst the Acholi of northern Uganda from c.1750 to 1986. As such, its focus ranges from a social history of warriorhood to the intersection of gender with colonial military service. Importantly, this thesis unravels multiple layers of complexity and reframes the relationship between masculinity and militarism as a contested space which encompassed local debates. It argues that over the past two hundred and fifty years Acholi men have been challenged with negotiating respectable manhood within an economy of honour that both requires and condemns the use of violence, and which in addition, has been repeatedly disputed and adapted over time. By using a range of unique source material and a variety of disciplinary approaches, this thesis challenges a series of scholarly and popular stereotypes about African cultures of violence in general, and the Acholi people in particular. It analyses how Acholi speakers themselves have presented the nature of their society to outsiders, and exposes the sociocultural contexts which have both shaped and reshaped local understandings of military service. In addition, this thesis explores how Acholi veterans have contextualised the violence they both witnessed and participated in, and examines how different interest groups have struggled for control over the public representation of divisive, contentious historical events. As such, it further demonstrates how violent pasts can be reframed and manipulated in pursuit of contemporary aims and agendas. Overall, the long historical perspective of this thesis underscores the importance of studying cultures of violence and gendered hierarchies over the longue durée. Only by doing so are we equipped to identify significant fluctuations over time and examine any practices, patterns and processes relating to masculinity and militarism which link the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods.

In this thesis I present the findings of an investigative research project which explored the relationship between children's leisure reading and their volitional writing in the upper years of primary school. The data was collected in two primary schools in the north of England, using mixed methods. Quantitative data was collected in an online reading survey taken by 170 children, and qualitative data was provided by independent writing journals maintained by 38 participants. Through analysis of the data I demonstrate that the writing children choose to do is influenced by the texts they encounter as readers in terms of content, text type and linguistic style. By using Text World Theory as an analytical framework I examine the ways that children use language to create texts, and interrogate the ways that the contexts surrounding text production influence the texts children create. In a detailed examination of a variety of children's written texts, including narrative, comic strip, informative writing and poetry, I show that children's interactions and transactions with texts as readers and writers are complex and multiple. The narrative strategies that children use in different types of text and the ways in which they work multimodally to communicate meaning are illuminated by the analysis and provide insights into children's learning and development in literacy. The importance of children's enjoyment and agency in reading and writing is also a notable theme arising from the analysis. In addition I draw together socio-cultural, linguistic and psychological orientations towards literacy by making innovative use of Text World Theory and demonstrate the need for an holistic understanding of children as readers and writers. The findings of the study have implications for theoretical research into children's literacy and for pedagogies of reading and writing in primary classrooms.

Movement is a fundamental aspect of life, which is intrinsically linked to almost every ecological and evolutionary process. Thus, a large fraction of an individual's energy budget is invested in movement. Managing energy expenditure in relation to energy acquisition is critical for survival and is a primary focus for natural selection. Therefore, investigating how, when and why animals modulate their movement is crucial to understand behavioural ecology and, ultimately, the driving forces shaping evolution. The aim of my DPhil is to investigate how animals modulate their movement in response to their navigational capacity, the external presence of conspecifics and their internal reproductive state using two model species: the homing pigeon (Columba livia) and the African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana). In Chapter 2, I report that homing pigeons modulate their wingbeat characteristics as a function of navigational knowledge, which suggests, for the first time, that navigation may have physical (biomechanical) manifestations. In Chapter 3, I show that pigeons increase their wingbeat frequency by c.18% when flying in pairs relative to flying solo. My results demonstrate that there is a substantial cost to flying together, and that the ultimate drivers of flocking, including predator protection and navigational knowledge, must outweigh these proximate costs. By contrast, in Chapter 4 I reveal that gestation, parturition and the presence of a neonatal calf has little impact on the movements of multiparous elephants, which could suggest that elephants' unusually long gestation period evolved to facilitate an advanced stage of physical development. In my final data chapter, I show that reproductively active male elephants significantly increase their speed with age, suggesting that elephants increase energetic investments into reproduction as their probability of reproductive success increases. Overall, the results of my thesis provide key new insights into proximate and ultimate causes of movement and its modulation in animals.