Abstracts 2025

References to “China’s climate leadership” have become increasingly normalized among officials, academics, and journalists. This research investigates how and why China has become associated with a “climate leadership image” in global climate governance despite continuing to be the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter since 2006. The research adopts a realist-constructivist approach and offers a theory of indirect national image-building. It argues that China circuitously builds an image of climate leadership by quoting foreign voices that praise China's existing climate commitments; this strategy allows China to obtain a desired climate image while avoiding the costs of undertaking climate responsibilities at the expense of China’s core national interests. The analysis employs discourse tracing to examine how discourses by the Chinese official government, international actors, and the Chinese international media outlet interact to co-construct China’s climate image from 2006 to 2024. Empirical observations demonstrate that, contrary to conventional expectations, the Chinese official government does not explicitly present China as a climate leader through strategic narratives; instead, influential UN officials, NGOs, and academics first begin portraying China as a climate leader based on green growth narratives and liberal institutionalist ideologies. In response, Chinese international media outlets selectively quote these foreign endorsements to legitimize China’s negotiating positions and advance its geopolitical objectives. This pattern reveals a process of strategic social construction where China deliberately relies on foreign voices to build its climate leadership image, thereby allowing China to avoid the reputational costs of making direct leadership claims. By denaturalizing China’s climate leadership image, this research unveils more nuanced intentions behind China’s engagement in global climate governance that are not driven by environmental interests per se. These findings have policy implications for countries seeking climate cooperation with China amid intensified geopolitical competition.   

The concept of ecocide, defined as ‘the extensive damage to, destruction of, or loss of ecosystems to the extent that peaceful enjoyment by inhabitants is severely diminished’ (Higgins, 2012), has become a critical issue in environmental law. While efforts to recognise ecocide as an international crime under the Rome Statute have gained momentum, the complexities of integrating ecocide into domestic legal frameworks remain underexplored. This presentation provides an insiders’ perspective on drafting the UK’s first ecocide bill, highlighting the procedural, doctrinal, and political challenges faced in criminalising ecological destruction. 

Drawing from the experience of drafting a private members bill for the UK Parliament in November 2023, the forthcoming paper from which this presentation is drawn examines how elite actors, institutional constraints, and doctrinal legacies shape the law, often excluding marginalised perspectives including the victims themselves. It situates the drafting process in these ‘rarified spaces’ where legal, political, and economic interests intersect. Despite existing literature on environmental legal frameworks, few studies address the experiential aspects of attempting to draft ecological law.  

This first-hand account elucidates the practical evolution of a drafting process that was influenced by theoretical and comparative legal considerations. In the forefront of the minds of the drafters was the legacy of Polly Higgins’ work, which envisioned law as a protector of ecosystems’ intrinsic value. Translating this vision into a viable legal framework for England posed significant challenges, including navigating tensions between international ecocide norms and domestic legal traditions, political pressures, and institutional constraints. Definitional complexities, such as establishing thresholds for criminal liability and a coherent mens rea standard, require careful negotiation. 

A central challenge was the reconciling of theoretical ideals with legislative realities, for example the contentious inclusion of the term ‘wanton’ and the necessity of strict liability provisions. Comparative insights from France and Belgium’s ecocide initiatives provide valuable lessons, highlighting potential enforcement mechanisms and liability thresholds. The research underscores the broader tensions in environmental law between deterrence, accountability, and political feasibility.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a tool for workers, firms, and educational institutions to plan ahead for the impact of new technologies on the future of work. To do this, I aim to develop a model that represents workers and firms in terms they speak, can forecast a wide range of scenarios under uncertainty, and is grounded in sound economic theory.  
Workers, firms, and educational institutions speak in terms of specific tasks, skills, or technologies. Economic models typically favor parsimony over specificity and are unable to speak to these needs. For instance, the task-based literature reduces work to one key dimension and the multi-dimensional skill literature usually stops short at three dimensions. However, when a worker wants to invest in new skills, they are choosing between different programs or courses with specific outcomes, like Python programming. To speak to these needs, a model must represent heterogeneous workers and firms. While this added complexity is important for a model's usefulness, it makes the model more susceptible to erroneous findings and forecasts. Therefore, it will be critical to have a principled way of estimating uncertainty. 

One way to estimate uncertainty is to test under many different assumptions. This is important for the future of work research because of the variety of estimates on exposure and productivity. Robustness checks across a range of these modeling features will be key for uncertainty estimates. Specific outcomes that are robust across a wide range of scenarios and modeling choices will have higher confidence. While ones that are not can be communicated as conditional on a set of assumptions. 

A model that can produce useful, calibrated forecasts must be based on sound economic theory that has been empirically verified. In this thesis, I will draw on the results from a few research areas that have well-developed theories and robust empirical results. Each paper in this integrated thesis draws on slightly different sets of literature to generate a research question, hypothesis and methodology. 

How does the privatisation and outsourcing of security gain legitimacy and support?

Using a newly created dataset on Hansard-style parliamentary proceedings from the South African Parliament from 1999-2023, I analyse government discussions around private military and security companies and compare these results to discussions of the South African police (SAPS). I use a mix of quantitative text analysis and qualitative discourse analysis to trace changes in the so-called anti-mercenary norm, comparing my results to existing findings in the English and Italian parliaments. I find that by discussing PMSCs in a more positive light compared with domestic police, the South African government have legitimised their usage and proliferation over time. South Africa is an important case for several reasons, not least because they have the largest private security industry in the world, with over two private security guards for every state police officer. In addition to relying on private security, South Africa also exports (though not always sanctioned by the state) private security and military companies across the continent and has a long history of mercenarism. Couching this project in a broader agenda of why states outsource security and to whom, I treat government attitudes and the erosion of norms as potential mechanisms.

Humanitarian aid delivery is often delayed due to logistical, bureaucratic, or security challenges. While the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) predicts limited impacts, its assumptions may not hold in humanitarian contexts. We test this hypothesis using high-frequency panel data and random variation in interview dates in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, in Kenya. We find that households are able to smooth consumption within the regular aid cycle, but delays lead to sharp declines in caloric intake, food security, and food stocks, with evidence of downstream effects on subjective well-being, time preferences, and cognitive function. Access to credit mitigates these effects, but at a 17% cost premium. Local market prices also respond to the timing of aid, with spillovers across camps. These findings challenge the PIH and models with present-biased preferences, and underscore the hidden costs of frictions in aid delivery.

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Sexual violence is a prominent global concern. Since the 1970s, feminist scholarly and activist efforts have advanced conceptions of its perpetrators from perverted individuals whose crimes were exceptional, to ubiquitous societal threats who are often known to their victims and whose behaviour is facilitated by social structures. While true, I argue that this travelled conceptualisation has come to reflect the paranoid critical stance (Sedgwick, 2003). This offers minimal capacity for affected persons to reclaim agency within the same world that harmed them. Instead, I propose that reading the perpetrator concept reparatively could expand the critical tools with which survivors can conceptualise their experiences. As contemporary political challenges exacerbate the risk of sexual violence, including climate change and a global backlash against women’s rights, developing an epistemological approach to the concept which recognises the systemic perpetration of sexual violence and empowers survivors to recover is an important survival project.

My research focuses on the creation of racial quotas in Brazil, I seek to explore how legal concepts of race compare with social understandings of race. I aim to do this by looking at the experiences of applicants applying for university places through racial quotas, adjudicators in their role and policymakers’ perceptions. By investigating racial quotas, my research seeks to interrogate the site of historical memory about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in Brazil. What is the overarching legacy of slavery as a historical crime for the nation? How and why did the university become a tool for social change among activists advocating for racial quotas? In addition, my research seeks to understand how racial quotas were created as a step to overcome the legacy of slavery, racial discrimination and stigma in Brazil for the Black and Brown communities.

In this, it aims to explore how racial quotas have been implemented in the university setting to overcome the lack of Black and Brown presence on campus. Moreover, my research explores how lei de cotas a bottom-up law was created and how the grassroots origins of this law have influenced its outcomes as it was adopted and implemented by federal and state legislators. Through research on racial quotas, it seeks to explore how the memory of slavery has been confronted through the legislative process of racial quotas. By looking into what types of Black and Brown Brazilians acquire quotas, this research seeks to explore the current manifestations of racial stigma and how colour and phenotype have played a role in the types of life opportunities Black and Brown citizens acquire. Through this vein, my work explores substantive equality and reparatory justice in equality legislations such as affirmative action.

Japan has nine million empty houses (akiya), a number that is only predicted to increase in the future. As the population declines, more people move to cities, and young families buy new-build properties, an increasing number of houses are being left unoccupied. These empty homes are often portrayed in the media as a national crisis: as symbols of rural decline, aging communities, and a struggling economy. Overwhelmed by this narrative, most people in Japan see empty houses as inherently negative, as a serious problem to be solved. Across Japan, however, empty houses are also being transformed into homes, cafes, restaurants, charities, galleries, hostels, and community centres: spaces for community, conversation, and collaboration.

At this conference, I will present findings from my literature review that contribute to my research on using archival materials containing insight into LGBTQ+ student experiences from the 1970s onward as prompts for narrative discussions with current LGBTQ+ students about their senses of belonging at/to Sussex, Bristol and Oxford.

This will include histories of Sussex, Bristol and Oxford, ideas about how and why they are used, and who they are used by. This is situated in a wider discussion of the capitalisation and claiming of history, as well as the impact that this might have on the organisation and progress of higher education institutions. Historiography plays a large role in this.

I will then relate my literature review findings to my research aims, one of which involves queering history. In doing this, I will share some examples of the archives and insights I have found from Oxford’s history. While trans existences are questioned and trans people further marginalised, it is particularly important that we consider our history as a potential resource, if not to give us an idea of what to do, to remind us that we have continued to exist. We are here. We have always been here.

The Immigration and Asylum Tribunals hear appeals against Home Office decisions. Its findings have profound impacts on the lives of appellants. Yet, and despite forming a vital part of the border control system, they have received limited attention in either criminological or legal scholarship. This presentation explores the utility of court-watching and legal analysis as methodological tools to address this deficit and deepen our understanding of these tribunals. Drawing on findings from my Grand Union-funded MSc fieldwork and my experiences during my DPhil project so far, I explore the ways that these methods can allow us to better understand how judges conduct credibility assessments during the tribunal process. In particular, they reveal the contradictory standards of consistency and disclosure for different parties, and the subjective nature of decision-making processes. Moreover, such methods highlight the gendered aspects of tribunal processes, such as the challenges judges face in dealing with complex/intersectional cases, or assessing the impact on family life under Article 8 ECHR. These elements of decision-making have significant impacts both for appellants themselves and for public trust in the tribunal system.

Camden has the second largest wealth divide in the UK, with 1 in 3 children living in poverty, while the cost of living in the borough continues to grow. Relationships between disadvantaged communities and Camden Council have become increasingly strained. In response Camden Council have developed a new missions driven strategy which, through a relational approach to engagement, aims to solve these issues. Central to this approach are attempts to rebuild places and networks of social infrastructure across key neighbourhoods. Through using a participatory action research methodology, I am working with Camden Council staff and local residents to track and analyse these processes, while also supporting individuals and communities most impacted by these issues to co-design the solutions.

Responsive adult-child interactions are associated with positive learning outcomes in the early years. For example, adults’ use of contingent talk and expansions can support children’s language development. Toddler Time is an early years programme that was developed by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK, in partnership with researchers (including a speech and language therapist and a developmental psychologist). The programme aims to promote responsive interaction strategies during its monthly themed sessions which include activities such as object handling, craft and gallery hunts. The museum educator’s adherence to the programme aims was evaluated over a 12 month period through analysis of reflective logs and adherence rating scales (completed by both the museum educator and observing researchers). Different perspectives on the implementation process were also sought through semi-structured interviews with the museum educator, research assistant, a charity partner and two parents, which were analysed thematically. Adherence ratings improved over time and the museum educator’s delivery shifted from predominantly didactic practice in the early sessions to more consistently responsive interactions towards the end of the evaluation period. The museum educator reported that self-reflection and regular adherence feedback and review was beneficial, resulting in iterative refinements, but also noted this was sometimes difficult to make time for. Other implementation challenges that were identified included differentiating for different child ages and stages of development, and the need to balance child-centred learning principles with providing enriched learning content for the parents and carers themselves.

Postpartum anxiety (PPA)is the most common mental health difficulty in the year following childbirth. It can significantly disrupt mother-infant interactions and have long-term developmental implications for the child(ren), leading to substantial individual and societal costs. Reducing the prevalence and impact is therefore a public health priority.

This doctoral research adopts a three-phased mixed methods design – comprising a systematic review (published in the Journal of Affective Disorders), a retrospective preliminary online survey, and a prospective online longitudinal study – to identify modifiable risk factors associated with PPA among women and birthing people in the UK. The process of developing the final protocol is presented.

Insights from the systematic review and preliminary survey informed the design of the longitudinal study, which will explore some of the social and cognitive risk factors most amenable to change during the perinatal period (pregnancy/postpartum). These include repetitive negative thinking, perceived parenting self-efficacy, and perceived social support, identified as priorities in the systematic review and patient and public involvement (PPI) activities due to the potential impact of addressing them in practice.

The longitudinal study will collect data at five time points from mid-pregnancy to 12 months postpartum, using online surveys co-developed with local stakeholders and experts by experience to ensure accessibility, safety, and relevance to the population in focus. Signposting to mental health resources is embedded within the survey platform to support participants.

By examining how key risk factors interact over time and within varied contextual experiences, this research aims to build a clearer understanding of PPA risk trajectories in the UK. Findings from all three phases will be integrated to highlight the most promising targets for early intervention and guide future research. Recognising the scope and limitations of this doctoral project, directions for further investigation into PPA risk factors are also proposed.

Bioweapons have been outlawed since the Geneva Convention in 1925, though a formal governance regime only emerged with the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). However, there remains almost no mandatory international oversight for synthetic biology, and the governance of biotechnology exhibits considerable variance across technologies, concerns, and actors. Yet, since 2000, there have been several biotechnological developments seemingly relevant to the production of bioweapons. Therefore, to understand how these developments have contributed to the broadly absent and high-variance patterns in the global governance of synthetic biology, I centre on securitisation as a mechanism and address the following research question: how have biotechnological developments shaped the securitisation of bioweapons? To address this question, I adopt a content analysis research design to explore how narratives about the level of threat from bioweapons evolved across four cases of biotechnological development and two deviant cases.

Ultimately, I find that biotechnological developments have continued to drive security concerns underpinned by consensus about the harmful potential of bioweapons. However, they did not resolve central uncertainties about the strategic viability of bioweapons for states and the ease of weaponisation of bioweapons for non-state actors. I conclude that the central dynamic at play is the problem of indeterminate affordances driven by the processuality of biotechnological development. Uncertainties around the strategic viability and the ease of weaponisation of bioweapons make technological specificities important for the securitisation of bioweapons in principle. However, the processual nature of biotechnological development means each innovation confers indeterminate capabilities onto actors. This has limited the extent to which biotechnological innovations have driven the securitisation of bioweapons. I conclude by noting the implications of this finding for securitisation theory and the governance of bioweapons.

I am proposing to present an overview of my research on bereaved men and telephone support, as I am about to engage in data collection. I will specifically focus on how critical realism has shaped this research as a philosophical paradigm.
 

Very little is known about the impact of bereavement on men. Few men engage with grief support services, and there is evidence of increased suicidality and anti-social behaviour in men, if grief is not spoken about and remains unprocessed. There have been initiatives to increase service accessibility for men, including the offer to diversify the means of engaging in counselling, such as moving from predominantly in-person support to telephone therapy. However, there is scant evidence present that specifically considers how telephone support influences the grief experience of bereaved people, let alone bereaved men. Significantly, providing a support service without an evidence base indicating its impact, is endemically risky to those men receiving support and the organisations providing it.

My research is a qualitative study focused on exploring how the grief experience of bereaved men is influencing by their receipt of weekly short-term telephone bereavement counselling. I will be interviewing two participant groups from a bereavement support organisation – bereaved men who have accessed telephone counselling, and the trained volunteers who have supported other bereaved men in this way. This will be complemented by a contextual document review of the organisation’s strategies, policies, procedures and training relating to this support.

I am basing my research on critical realism as a philosophical paradigm. Literature searches I have undertaken indicate that such research using this paradigm, in the context of bereavement, has not been undertaken. The strength of critical realism is in the focus on investigating and deepening understanding of the causative factors underlying an event. Critical realism can also highlight the dynamic changes taking place over time, that account for observable behavioural changes.

My aim is for this research to influence telephone support practice, and how funders and services choose to deliver support.

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable general capabilities, their ability to provide trustworthy explanations of their decisions remains uncertain and has recently been an intense research focus for the AI community. Reliable natural language explanations are seen as crucial for the development of useful AI assistants that can interact productively with human users. More recently, they have been proposed as a mechanism by which we might ensure the safety of artificial general intelligence.

In this project, we investigate counterfactual explanations, a structured form of explanation where an LLM explains its decision by providing an alternative scenario which would have caused it to produce a different decision. For example, a medical LLM may predict a patient is at high risk of developing heart disease. The patient, concerned by this, might seek an explanation from the model and advice on what they should do to reduce their risk. The model might then deliver a counterfactual explanation, describing a scenario under which it would have predicted low risk. This provides an understanding of the model’s internal reasoning and actionable insights for the patient.

We show that current state-of-the-art LLMs are unable to offer trustworthy natural language counterfactual explanations. Instead, they provide misleading insight into how they would have acted in alternative scenarios. We then develop a new training technique to teach models to reason counterfactually and explain themselves more reliably.

This research is based on a chapter of my DPhil research looking at the lifecycle of a mortar bomb, and the experience of those who work with them, from production, sales, and use through to humanitarian clear up. In this paper I focus on the ‘use’ and draw on interviews with individuals with a wide spectrum of (British) military experience and ethnographic research on UK military firing ranges. Through these interviews I explore how the same object – an 81mm mortar – can variously be perceived as thrilling, terrifying and banal. This range of emotional responses provides insight to how these objects, designed to kill and maim, are perceived by those who hold, handle, and fire them, and who are fired at by them. In piecing together different life stories united through the touch point of a mortar bomb further themes emerge: the search for legitimacy, identity, masculinity, and the reverberations of explosions long after any return from combat. Through this object-oriented approach to conflict, I explore the affective, emotional, relational nature of working with explosive ordinance.

Anti-genderism has been extensively studied since its rise in the early 2010s, with scholars developing an advanced understanding of it as a highly coordinated transnational political movement aiming to oppose gender equality (Butler, 2025; Grzebalska et al., 2017; Holvikivi et al., 2024; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2018). This paper reviews the up-to-date literature on anti-genderism and discusses its limitations, suggesting that focusing solely on elites fails to capture the complexity of the mobilisation. Anti-gender elites are influential only as long as their rhetoric resonates with the broader public, constituting merely a tiny fraction of the movement – a powerful one, but tiny nevertheless. Yet, as the review highlights, the more attention is given to the influence of anti-gender elites, the more the phenomenon is framed within the context of broader illiberal trends in global politics; this, in turn, reinforces portrayals of anti-gender supporters as culturally ‘backward’ traditionalists who simply fall prey to populist manipulation. This framing is problematic for two key reasons: first, it reproduces ethnocentric narratives of cultural incompatibility; second, it overlooks socio-economic realities of anti-gender supporters. In light of these limitations, this paper argues for a materialist lens that takes seriously the socio-economic conditions shaping the popular appeal of anti-gender discourse. Discussion begins with an overview of the development of gender equality as a human right; it then explains the rise of anti-gender movements in response to this development and outlines the risks of studying anti-genderism as a matter of cultural incompatibility. Drawing on the work of Sally Engle Merry (2005) and Mark Goodale (2009), the paper concludes by suggesting a more nuanced approach that accounts for both material conditions and cultural expression of anti-genderism. It asks whether anti-gender mobilisation might be understood not simply as cultural incompatibility and populist manipulation, but as a complex response to material exclusion in the process of globalisation – one shaped in part by the selective application of intersectionality within human rights frameworks.

Decolonisation is often understood as a transfer of sovereignty - the multiple alternative political projects it entailed often dismissed as ephemeral experiments - yet it also renegotiated sovereignty itself, as visible in interactions between liberation movements, international institutions, and colonial powers. Dismantling the international colonial order required the unmaking of its ordering principles of hierarchy, dominance and sovereign inequality. This paper argues that Lusophone Africa’s liberation movements occupied multiple liminal spaces that enabled them to discursively challenge Portuguese sovereignty while constructing their own legitimacy. Their claims were initially grounded in UN Resolution 1514, which declared colonialism an international crime, but evolved to reflect developments on the ground: mass atrocities committed by Portuguese forces and the establishment of liberated zones. These movements navigated liminality across multiple levels. Internationally, they moved between spaces of recognition and marginalisation in the UN, petitioning and participating in hearings as neither purely state or non-state actors. Nationally, they established liberated zones where they exerted effective control and governance, creating transitional spaces of sovereignty. Individually, their members moved between roles as resistance fighters, activists, intellectuals, and diplomats. By framing Portuguese rule as equivalent to foreign occupation, these movements contested and transcended Portugal’s pluri-continental sovereignty doctrine, which sought to present its empire as a unified political entity rather than a colonial system. This paper ultimately argues that the UN was a crucial site where liberation movements leveraged liminality as a tactic, using legal and discursive strategies to contest Portugal’s claims and assert their own emerging sovereignty.

Over 20% of school pupils in England speak a language other than English at home (DfE, 2024). In some areas of the country, the support provided for these pupils includes working 1:1 with a Bilingual Learning Assistant for at least one lesson per week. How does this lesson differ from the others? What difference does this support make to the pupil, their work and their participation in the lesson

These are the preliminary findings of an analysis of classroom observations, comparing primary school English lessons with and without support from a Bilingual Learning Assistant (BLA).

The focus pupils have been in their school for several years and are not ‘new to English’. Though children may learn basic language skills within a couple of years of English (Cummins, 1979), it takes 5-7 years for pupils to develop academic English (CALP, or Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, Cummins, 1979). Extended support beyond the first two years of schooling in English may, therefore, be beneficial in a variety of ways.

In this part of my research, I observed two pupils of the same age in different class groups, experiencing both a lesson with BLA support, and one the following day without a BLA. I then conducted follow-up interviews with the focus pupils, BLAs and class teachers. The lessons and interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and translated as necessary before analysis.

Private voluntary climate initiatives have long sought to turn corporations into responsible actors. Adopting their framing, the EU increasingly relies on investors to encourage companies to step up their climate efforts. This approach rests on two key assumptions:

First, it assumes that climate risks are financially material enough to concern investors. However, if they were, why are many investors and corporations backtracking on their climate commitments?

Second, and more importantly, it assumes that mitigating climate risks implies reducing a company’s environmental impact. In practice, however, addressing climate risks and mitigating climate change are often decoupled, prompting the question why the EU continues to build on this approach.

While existing research focuses on the policy content by interpreting existing legal norms, evaluating their effectiveness, and proposing reforms, my research focuses on the policymaking environment, mapping the influences that frame and constrain EU climate lawmaking.

This presentation will go through the stories of 3 empty houses that I visited during my 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork in Gifu Prefecture, Japan. Each of these houses are at a different stage in the life cycle: from decay to clearance, and finally renovation. I will use these ethnographic vignettes to reflect on key questions: What happens to a house after its inhabitants leave? How are empty houses given a second life? And is an empty house truly "empty"? Highlighting the objects, memories, animals, people, and possibilities that continue to occupy these spaces, this challenges conventional notions of emptiness and dominant narratives of empty houses in Japan.

Abstract TBC

Elucidating the brain areas and neural processes which facilitate social trading of rewards (i.e., mutually beneficial exchange of goods with our peers) is an area of increasing research attention. To investigate this complex human behaviour, we present a novel experiment connecting objective, nutrient properties of foods (amounts of fat or sugar) to subjective valuations of rewards (choosing which foods are more desirable) and finally to social trading behaviour (maximising one’s desired foods while trading with multiple social partners). Previous unpublished work by our group (N=30) validated the use of real-time food delivery to evaluate reward choice in humans during fMRI. The current tested paradigm was developed through extensive pilot testing (N=58), combining concepts from neuroscience, psychology, and economics. Over the course of a multiple-day study design (three separate testing sessions), participants made choices between multi-component food rewards and engaged in reward-trading with multiple partners (in behavioural testing as well as during MRI). During a behavioural follow-up test, participants traded rewards in-person, as a group. Preliminary results are promising; behavioural data (N=115) confirm accurate capture of participant reward preferences and strong predictability of trading decisions. Neuroimaging data (N=31) provide early insights into a possible mechanism: activity recorded from a pilot participant’s (i) anterior insula correlated with the value of trading partners’ rewards (for themselves) and (ii) dmPFC tracked the trial-by-trial proposed trade ‘optimality’ (from Economics: relative distance from a computed contract curve). Group behavioural data reflected expected increase in overall welfare (i.e., group utility). Additional investigation will provide further insights into the neural basis of economic decision-making and social interaction in humans.

This paper seeks to examine the material culture of boxing and how it impacts on the experiences of female boxers. By focussing on the clothing and equipment worn and used by women in boxing gyms, we can explore the importance of such material items to the female identity formation of women who actively participate in what has previously been seen as the masculine space of the boxing gym. It draws on data collected during an ethnographic study in the UK which developed a novel method using the material objects in a boxer’s kit bag alongside traditional ethnographically-informed methods. The analysis shows that females use clothing as a means of undoing femininity in the boxing gym. The findings also illustrate that female boxers in this study consider that boxing equipment, not designed for female bodies serves to symbolically and physically exclude them from ‘fitting in’ to the culture and space of the boxing gym.

Family socio-economic status (SES) influences children’s development through Home Learning Activities (HLA), a key proximal process in Bronfenbrenner’s model, framed as parental investment in the Family Investment Model. However, research shows significant variation in HLA engagement within low-SES families, challenging simple SES-based assumptions, and indicating HLA as protective factor against the developmental risk imposed by a family’s ‘low-SES’. Despite this evidence, little is known about specific resources, as well as their dynamics and mechanisms, relating to high HLA engagement of ‘low-SES’ parents.

Adopting a resource-focused approach, I aim to address this gap through secondary-data analysis. Using a subsample of the representative Growing Up in Germany survey, I focus on families with financial resource limitations. Applying person and variable centred analyses, I will (i) explore resilience factors through subgroup comparisons, (ii) test risk-accumulation dynamics though hierarchical regression modelling, and (iii) investigate aspects of intersectionality through the inclusion of interaction effects into my regression models. Together, I aim to contribute to a better understanding of the (most) relevant resources and some of their dynamics in relation to HLA engagement of ‘low-SES’ parents. In my presentation, I will present my overarching framework of HLA and first results for discussion.