This thesis answers to a question “Why adolescent girls drop out of school in Northern Uganda?” In Uganda, approximately 70% of the children drop out of public school before 7th grade, the final year of primary school. In northern Uganda, girls drop out of school in more significant numbers than boys, and it happens around the age when girls reach puberty. Northern Uganda is also a particular location because it is recovering from long conflict, affecting strongly the whole population living in the area. The thesis is based on two-month ethnographic fieldwork in northern Uganda during the spring of 2015. To answer the main research question this study seeks to analyse it through taking a look how the school, the community and the girls themselves experience and talk about dropping out, education and growing up in the current post-conflict state of the social life. The thesis argues that the dropout rate is linked to the adolescence as life-stage of becoming an adult that is making the girls to make decisions about the future. The analysis is done through three different perspectives – the educational, societal and personal narratives of the youth. The first perspective is the education and schooling in northern Uganda. It explores the concept of ’educated person’ by Levinson and Holland through sexual education and gender in education. The study shows that Ugandan public primary and secondary education is deriving its ideas and understanding of educated person from the national curriculum, which often conflict with the local concepts of the educated person in the Acholi community, influencing the blamed and real reasons for dropping out. The second perspective looks into the community and the societal pressures the girls are facing when growing up. It will describe family, kinship, marriage and gender in post-conflict context and show how in these areas of life, the past conflict, “loss of culture”, generational conflicts and subsequent disobedience are presented as reasons behind the challenges to stay in school. The third perspective tells the stories of the girls met and talked to during the ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Uganda. It answers the question “What is happening in the life of a girl when she drops out of school?”. It is argued that the girls take actions of a gendered agency to further their lives and become adults. Thus, dropping out of school cannot just be explained as a simple event just suddenly happening without their own will. It will further answer the question “What makes some girls stay in school?” to show how those girls still in school manage the crosscurrents of growing up in Acholiland. The thesis argues that the girls in northern Uganda are active appropriators and social agents who through their own actions contest, struggle and penetrate the structures in their society while also at the same time reproduce them. In Northern Uganda, both the community and the state together with different international agencies will have plans and expectations for the girls’ future. The study shows how the girls navigate the school, community and peer expectations and sociocultural and economic structures to stay or finally drop out of school. These structures are state organised and aid-infused formal schooling and society in amidst of post-conflict recovery which creates a framework where the girls are acting. The school presents the modern and globally orientated educated person, and in contrast to it, the community is looking for to restore ‘traditional’ way of life. It is argued that these two sides are often in conflict and in the middle of this conflict the girls act and solve their way out of it, looking for adulthood and gaining respectable status in the society. The schools, the community and even sometimes the development actors see the girls as passively following the things they will encounter. The thesis will show that they are not. The girls either stay in school or drop out of it, but more often as a consequence of their own decisions and actions than passively because the school or the community could not support them. It is demonstrated that dropping out of school looks more of line a tactic for the future as a respectable grown-up than mere problem to be solved.

In my master’s thesis I study the Nepalese literature through the works of Prajwal Parajuly, Manjushree Thapa and Samrat Upadhyay. I want to study how caste, gender and marriage are presented in their literatures and what functions they have in the material. The material is based on total amount of twelve literary works of all the three authors. My research questions are in the thesis are in which circumstances the caste plays importance, how gender is displayed and how the marriage institution functions in the social fabric represented in the literature. The theoretical basis of my research is the subaltern theory by Gayatri Spivak. First, I introduce some of the key concepts in regarding my thesis to help the reader to understand the basic terminology of Hinduism concerning my thesis as well as the Nepalese setting of the issues represented in the literature. Then I analyse the women’s position and how they are being marginalized in the literature. Finally, I get into the conclusion that is based on the theories, that caste, gender, and marriage are deeply intertwined with each other in the literature and I have reached to the conclusion that caste in the most important marker of person’s identity and women’s marginalization is based on the combined effect of caste and gender. The marriage institution is also deeply involved to caste and gender issues, as it is one of the core units of the society as well as the benchmark for women’s life.

Cohabitation is more common than marriage when couples are expecting their first child in Finland. However, little is known about possible differences in wellbeing between the two groups. In this study, we examined differences in parental wellbeing, relationship satisfaction, infant health outcomes, and use of social support among cohabiting and married first-time parents. Survey data was collected from 903 parents during pregnancy and at one month postpartum. Cohabiting parents had more depressive symptoms than married parents. They were also less satisfied with their relationships and expressed less satisfaction with the quality of support they got from their partner. Cohabiting fathers did not use the cost-free support from maternity clinics as often as married fathers. Our results show differences in well-being between married and cohabiting first-time parents and that the support from maternity clinics should better acknowledge diversity and address the different needs of different types of families.