Magister Artium - MA / This study focuses on young people and how they etch a sense of belonging in the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town, in multicultural, post-apartheid South Africa. The study mainly focuses on a group of performers known as Black Ink Arts Movement (Black Ink), who are based in Du Noon township, near Cape Town, South Africa. The study looks at how young people who are involved in community performance projects; it also engages with their varied audiences. Lastly, the thesis shows the performers’ day to day lives when they are not on stage to see what it means to be young and black in Du Noon as a member of Black Ink

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis explores the precarious nature of authenticity as it manifested itself in the activities of H.I.M. Society, the Rastafarian student organization at the University of the Western Cape. Ethnographic research was conducted, to explore the above mentioned issue, which involved observation of various activities and in depth interviews. I also inquired about outsiders' perspectives on Rastafarianism and H.I.M. Society in particular. Authenticity, as it is conceived in this thesis, is about what a group of people deem culturally important. Three important ideas follow from this. The first is that not everyone in a group agrees on what is important. Put differently authenticating processes tend to be characterized by legitimizing crises. Therefore, secondly, social actors need to invest cultural ideas, objects and practices with authenticity. Lastly the authenticating processes are predicated on boundaries not necessarily as a means of exclusion but as fundamental to determining the core of cultural being and belonging

There is no such state as Palestine. But nearly 70 years after the termination of the British mandate for Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel, Palestine remains a home for the Palestinian. It is an identity not dependent on the existence of a Palestinian state, nor arrested by the presence of an Israeli one. Palestinians have a home relationship with Palestine, where home is a sense of belonging that comes from within, that isn’t earned and given, but personal and chosen, even while it is communal. Home is a self-determined relationship of person to place. The relationships of Palestinians with Palestine are complicated and inconsistent, but I contend that the complications and inconsistencies of understanding Palestine as home functions as a spatial strategy of holding out for justice. Where home is an intensely personal attachment with effects that vary between individuals, the nation-state seeks to create a matrix relationship between nations and territories that defines those who belong to the exclusion of all others. The persistence of Palestinian home relationships with Palestine stand argument against a nation-state world order founded on the idea that certain people belong natively to certain place.

Sweden has a long history of receiving immigrants and has also a generous integration policy where the immigrants can enjoy their rights as well as themselves being responsible for their relation towards the society culturally. This is true for all immigrants but this study concentrate on immigrants from Bolivia who mostly arrived in the 1980s. As time passed by, families were formed and in many cases the cultural identity of the parents were transmitted to their children. Today these children are young adults; they have their own perception of their self-identity and are in a way the result of the Swedish integration policy. This study has through semi-structured interviews tried to explain and show the complexity of their perception of identity. Due to the author’s own background, focus has been on Bolivian migrant’s descendant’s perception of identity, which factors have been important for them and whether or not they feel they want to transfer their identity to their children. The study is based on 16 interviews with young adults with one or two parents with origin in Bolivia. Interviews have been made all around Sweden and the findings were analyzed by using the theory of Biculturalism, Acculturation and Intergenerational Transmission of Identity. The findings show that the aspect of identity is complex and also that the descendants feel they are always questioned about their origin, which in a way prevent them to define themselves as a Swedes or Bolivians. This they have solved in many cases by accepting their parent’s origin and acknowledge it at the same time as they claim to be Swedes. Even though it is complex, they feel very positive about their belonging in two worlds and feel they thereby have a broader perspective than others. Considering transmitting their identity to the third generation, they all feel it is important and will try to achieve it. By this study it is hoped to feed into the discussion on identity and belonging, and also for how long have one’s immigrant background validity before assimilating, if ever.

A SECOND UNIVERSE is a memoir-in-essays that traces the author’s coming of age and her pursuit of self-discovery, belonging, and healing in all its forms. The book opens in the past, diving into the lives of the author’s parents before she was born and shedding light on the many obstacles they overcame to bring her earth-side. Set against the backdrop of the Southern Utah deserts and the clarity the author finds in the natural world, these essays wind through the author’s different childhood homes, down the lonely and desolate road of a sister’s addiction, and into the darkness that comes as she braces for her father’s impending blindness. Similar to Brenda Miller’s LISTENING AGAINST THE STONE, this collection explores the inherent desire for human connection and spiritual insight that we search for in the places we live, the people we love, and the nature that surrounds us.

The discourse on education for Aboriginal people has long been limited to a curriculum of cultural assimilation often resulting in an erosion of self-esteem and disengagement. Consequently, this research puts forth narratives of how fiddle programs in northern Manitoba work as a culturally responsive curriculum that in turn address such curricular erosions. As a research methodology, Metissage afforded me pedagogical opportunities to weave the various perspectives of community members, parents, instructors, and former students into an intricate story that attempts to represent some of their social, cultural and historical experiences within the north. Braiding stories of the historical and present impacts of fiddle playing reveals the generative possibilities of school fiddle programs in Canadian Indigenous communities. In addition to building intergenerational bridges, the stories put forth in this thesis demonstrate how the fiddle has become a contemporary instrument of social change for many communities across northern Manitoba.

This thesis examines the everyday experiences of Anglophone communities in three different regions of Quebec – the Gaspésie, Gatineau and Eastern Townships – with the aim to understand their sense of place. Specifically, the focus is on the role of different geographic contexts on everyday access to social services, particularly healthcare, and how these experiences contribute to Anglophones’ place attachment. Data collection involved semi-structured personal interviews with ten participants in each region. Comparative analysis yielded three main findings: (1) issues with accessing healthcare in English reinforces Anglophones’ minority status; (2) in spite of the challenges faced as a linguistic minority, Anglophones demonstrate a strong sense of place to their region; and (3) feelings of home, heritage, and rootedness constitute elements in Anglophones’ place attachment and contribute to their sense of place in Quebec. The study also concludes that age, mobility, and location are important variables in influencing everyday experiences in each of the three regions.

La présente étude, faisant l’objet d’une thèse de doctorat, a trait à l’analyse diachronique et psychosystématique des possessifs et de la représentation spatiale en italien, français et roumain. Ce travail s’assigne l’objectif d’étudier et d’aider à mieux comprendre l’expression de l’appartenance dans les langues italienne et, par contraste, française et roumaine, en nous intéressant aux implications que cela peut avoir sur la représentation de la personne dans chacune de ces trois langues romanes. L’étude que nous nous proposons de mener a pour objet l’analyse des systèmes de langue considérés, systèmes cohérents et clos, préalables à tout emploi que les individus qui, naturellement en disposent, pourraient en faire. L’analyse des effets de sens dans le discours, rendue possible par l’élaboration d’un corpus dont certains items déroutent parfois l’initié, sont autant d’occasions de mieux comprendre la cohésion du système de langue considéré. / This study as a doctoral thesis, deals with the analysis of diachronic and psychosystematic possessives and with spatial representation in the Italian, French and Romanian languages. The goal of this work is to study and to better understand the expression of membership in the Italian language opposing to French and Romanian ones, while focusing on the implication that they may have on the representation of the person in each of the three languages. This work focuses on a system analysis of language considered as a coherent and closed one, prior to any uses which is inner to each person that could deal with it. The analysis of meaning effects in speeches, which was made possible by the development of a corpus that some items can sometimes confuse the initiate, provides opportunities to better understand the cohesion of the language system considered.

This thesis aims to investigate and illuminate lived experiences, cultural representations, and organizational conditions that influence the way therapists in Swedish psychiatry receive and treat migrant women. This overall aim is pursued through two distinct but interlinked part-studies. The aim of the first of these is to examine migrant women’s perceptions of mental (ill-) health along with their actual experiences of therapy in Swedish psychiatry. The aim of the second part is to describe and explain how therapists, in their organizational work conditions, interpret and experience their professional encounters with migrant women.   The thesis is based on qualitative interviews with twelve migrant women and eleven therapists in psychiatry. The result show that the migrant women experience health and mental health through a sense of belonging. Non-belonging, isolation and estrangement will point to the other direction i.e. not having health. The migrant women may gain a sense of belonging to society through therapy. However there are also obstructions on this path to belonging. The therapists, in psychiatry, seeing migrant women are doing emotion work comparable to physical labor. As the production is expected to increase due to marketing principles it puts a demand of acceleration on the therapists emotion work. They, thus have to find strategies to manage their emotion work. Everyday resistance thus becomes a way to gain emotional energy and to avoid emotional numbing and burnout. It is also gives openings to be content with their work with their patients and thereby to be able to offer an adequate reception of migrants into treatment in psychiatry. The thesis contributes to the gap in research by focusing on the borderlands between migrant women’s lived experiences of social suffering and the receiving therapists’ possibility to meet their migrant patients’ request. / This thesis aims to investigate and illuminate lived experience and organizational conditions that influence the way therapists in Swedish psychiatry receive and treat migrant women. This overall aim is divided into two separate but interlinked part-studies. The main body of the thesis is based on interviews with migrant women as well as therapists in psychiatry. The result show that the migrant women are searching for belonging in the host society. One way of searching for belonging is through therapy in psychiatry. However the work pace in health care and psychiatry is increasing and the therapists are struggling with giving a decent reception of migrants. In order to manage the heavy emotion work the therapists oppose the accelerating work pace by doing resistance in their everyday work. This thesis contributes to gap in research on the borderlands between lived experiences of social suffering odf migrant women as well as the lived experiences of the work conditions that make it possible to care for another person

The Holocaust and post-war anti-Semitism-propelled migration changed the face of Poland, a country that for centuries has been the heartland of the Jewish diaspora. Remnants of the Polish Jewry that did not emigrate, regardless of whether they considered themselves Poles, Poles of Jewish descent or Polish Jews, often felt fearful about speaking of their ancestry, let alone acting upon it. Jewish organizations and social life did not disappear, but religious congregations in particular gradually diminished in number and activity. Post-socialist Poland has become an arena of profound transformation of Jewish communal life, fostered by stakeholders with distinct agendas and resources: empowered and politically emancipated Jewish Religious Communities, now-marginalized secular organizations of the communist era, a nascent generation of Polish Jewish activists and volunteers, and transnational Jewish non-governmental organizations. My thesis explores Polish Jewish communal life and experiences of being and becoming Jewish. It is a study after the ‘revival’, but revealing its looming presence in unsolved predicaments over a Jewish future, global structural dependencies, and temporal dynamics of programs of socialization. I argue that the post-socialist reality not only witnessed the coming of a new Polish Jewish generation, but also the emergence of a new sociality, shaped in two decades of continuous friction between ontologies, agendas and hopes originating in different locations within, and on different scales of, the Polish Jewish contemporaneity. This new Polish Jewish reality invites us to rethink the impact of globalization on the Jewish diaspora in Eastern Europe, and also offers a new perspective on the role of global NGOs in the contemporary world.