Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Voluntary and forced migrations over the past century have given rise to the number of displaced peoples and nations who consider themselves diasporas. The resiliency of these extra-territorial nations after displacement is something of a paradox in nationalism studies. For diaspora, the nation is simultaneously local and transnational, divided and caged by the confines of state borders, often intermixed with other ethnic groups, nations, and cultures, and yet, undeniably, a singular community. Through a comparative examination of the Assyrian and Chaldean diaspora in the United States, this dissertation uses boundary theory to explore the role of diasporic elites in making and sustaining a diasporic nation, and the events, identities, and ideologies that shape diasporic action. It draws from twenty-nine interviews held with Assyrian and Chaldean leaders in Michigan, Illinois, and California, and with policy-makers, as well as research into congressional documents, policy papers, and press reports. The multi-ethnic fabric of American society is formative to boundary-creation, and yet challenges its retention, providing an open society for ethnic expression and civic and political engagement, whilst at the same time facilitating assimilation and loss of diasporic culture and identity. Diasporic elites pursue institutional completeness to sustain diasporic presence in local societies, and cultivate national ideologies that in turn engender activism on behalf of the greater diasporic nation. The Iraq War served as a catalyst to nation-building, providing the first political opening in decades for diasporic actors to mobilize on behalf of Assyrians and Chaldeans in the homeland, seeking constitutional recognition as equal members of the Iraq state. However, the impermeable, exclusionary Iraqi national boundary wrought in conflict instead posed an existential crisis, forcing Assyrians and Chaldeans from Iraq and forcing diasporic leaders to confront questions of what will become of their nation if the homeland is lost. Revealed in the resulting political demands are two distinct strains of nationalism: that for resettlement into diaspora and continued integration into Iraq; and that for territorial autonomy within Iraq’s Nineveh Plain. This dissertation argues diaspora is a continuous, evolving product of boundary-making, often the result of diasporic elite mobilization. Diaspora is a nation not simply born of displacement, but formed through social boundaries encountered and made upon resettlement outside the homeland. Nationalism is a significant component of diasporic nation-building, offering insight into political goals, ideologies, and the dedication of diasporic elites to sustaining an Assyrian and Chaldean homeland, an atra, in diaspora.

This thesis interrogates the website BlueServo.net through a neoliberal framework with a focus on surveillance theory. BlueServo is a site that registers users as "Virtual Deputies" and allows them to file reports with U.S. Border Patrol on activity observed through camera feeds trained on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Employing textual analysis of the site and its attendant Facebook page, four thematic categories emerge for analysis: Labor, Entertainment, State, and Social Sorting. This thesis concludes with a discussion of the site in relation to reality TV and video game culture and the future of increasingly sophisticated and widely accessible digital surveillance as applied to social minorities.

Many scholars who have studied nations and nationalism have observed that nationalist movements draw upon mythologised narratives of figures from their nations' pasts to build a sense of national identity and to articulate their vision. Drawing upon the ethno-symbolic approach to nations and nationalism, this thesis seeks to identify the major hero myths, as one form of mythologised narrative, drawn upon by the Provisional IRA during the period of conflict in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998. In so doing it examines the origins and development of those myths across the history of Ireland, and of the republican strand of Irish nationalism since the turn of the twentieth century. It identifies the pivotal role of the early twentieth century republican, Patrick Pearse, as republicanism's political archaeologist par excellence, and examines the enduring influence of three factors on the form that such myths took: Celtic culture, Roman Catholicism, and socialism. The thesis further situates the narrative chain of the hero myths within the broader context of the Provisional IRA's wider mythological system, and interrogates the purposes that these myths fulfilled for the movement. In so doing, it reveals that not only did the hero myths, as symbolic resources of the Irish nation, fulfil purposes related to the nation itself, but that the strategy employed in pursuit of the national objectives, insurgency, also imposed its own requirements on those purposes. This has profound implications for orthodox understandings of the role of “blood sacrifice” within the ideology and world-view of the Provisional Republican Movement, as this thesis argues that the role of that concept has been misinterpreted to this point. On the theoretical level, this thesis amends and refines the conception of myth within the ethno-symbolic approach to nations and nationalism, bringing it into line with the work of scholars who have studied the theory of myth. Furthermore, it has considered how the means of pursuing the national objective helped to shape the concept of the nation and ideas of national identity.

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This thesis examines the influences on Irish identity articulation within Melbourne and Chicago during the nineteenth century. Bringing together ethnicity and religious devotion, this thesis argues that the foundational identities encouraged by religious orders within parish schools and societies were fundamental to the shape of nationalist politics that emerged in each city. While the imperial and republican contexts of Melbourne and Chicago presented specific opportunities and restrictions on Irish cultural and political identity articulation, the ethnic pluralism of the Catholic Church in each city influenced the networks established between Irish migrants across class, occupation, and gender. In turn, the Catholic parish structures of each city altered how Irish identity was articulated at a local and global level. While focusing on Irish Catholic identity, this thesis also examines the establishment of secular and ethnic Irish institutions utilised by middle-class culture brokers within Melbourne and Chicago to promote a civic Irish identity. It explores the ways that Irish migrants interpreted British imperial and American values to encourage diasporic Irish identities shaped by Irish and local contexts. Using comparison, this work identifies similarities between two cities previously dismissed as divergent and transnational links between Ireland, Australia and Chicago. Examining these societies over a fifty-year period allows for the interrogation of identity influencers over numerous generations, addressing the evolving shape of two cities and the Irish communities therein.

No description available.

Vi har analyserat Forum för levande historias material brott mot mänskligheten under kommunistiska regimer genom en hermeneutisk textanalys. Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka om materialet förmedlar historiemedvetande. Resultatet visar att materialet inte förmedlar det som krävs för att historiemedvetandet ska stimuleras. De historiska händelserna sätts inte tillräckligt väl in i sitt sammanhang och det råder otydlighet beträffande vad som orsakade utvecklingen. Materialet redovisar inte tillräckligt många förklaringsperspektiv. Avslutningsvis diskuteras resultatet mot tidigare forskning och vad denna typ av historieskrivning kan få för pedagogiska konsekvenser.

This thesis demonstrates the powerful relationship between ethnicity, culture, nation and state in the Basque Country and the Former Yugoslavia. In placing Basque and Yugoslav sub-state nationalism in comparative relief this study argues that political state or autonomy seeking behavior on the basis of an ethnically defined or imagined community continues to have powerful contemporary salience. Furthermore when situated within the literature on nationalism, these two cases suggest that the theoretical literature needs to be reworked beyond the positions of Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner. The endurance of cultural claims to a political state suggests that the connection between ethnicity and the nation is stronger then many contemporary observers have suggested. It is argued that the cultural, political and territorial rights of sub-state nations are likely to remain highly divisive sites of historical, cultural and political contestation. As a force, nationalism is by no means relegated to the past by cosmopolitanism or a ‘post-national’ shift as a number of high profile commentators in the contemporary social sciences have argued. Rather, it remains an active and powerful idea that will continue to shape the sociopolitical landscape of human societies into the twenty-first century as it has the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation considers the place of religious argument in the public sphere. While deliberation about religion’s place in the formal public sphere within the United States has often been seen as taking place in a two-dimensional space, with Christian nationalism and pure secularism representing the opposite deliberative positions, I argue that in reality, rhetorical engagements over the place of religion often are contested by arguments hewing to Christian Nationalism on one side, but a kind of civic religious pluralism on the other. This dissertation explores the tensions that exist within public discourse in the United States between Christian nationalism and larger secular society. Rather than seeing secularism as a counterweight to Christian nationalism, I argue that instead a civic religious pluralism that allows for religious thought to enter the domain of public deliberation is present in arguments about religion’s role in the democratic process. I also argue that this problem is extended into the three-dimensional space through an added tension between religious citizens who wish to remain isolated from secular culture and the state which must maintain some sense of cultural participation among all of its citizens. Through rhetorical analyses of three cases, I develop a more nuanced perspective on this deliberative space and contend at the end that the civic religious pluralism I find in two of my cases represents a more effective response to nationalist rhetoric than a pure secularist opposition.