This paper analyzes the effect of culture – measured by aggregate levels of an immigrant parent’s home country educational attainment – on the educational attainment of second-generation immigrants in America. I use 2005-2014 October U.S. Current Population Surveys (CPS) data and the Barro-Lee data set to match the educational attainment of second-generation immigrants to the educational attainment averages of the respective home country from which their parents emigrated. Overall, I find that second-generation immigrants’ educational attainment is significantly and positively affected by their immigrant parent’s home country educational attainment. This suggests that cultural norms, particularly those regarding education, may persist in immigrant families even after resettling in America. I also find that the effects of home country educational attainment on second-generation outcomes do not differ by the gender of the second-generation immigrant.

Background: It is widely acknowledged that Uganda was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to experience a significant decline in HIV seroprevalence in the 1990s. Framed as the initial ‘success story’ in the history of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, the behavioural mechanisms and policies accounting for the Ugandan HIV decline have been extensively debated over the past 25 years. With reference to broader debates about the role of evidence in policy, this thesis aims to examine contested explanations for the decline in HIV prevalence in Uganda and the role of evidence in the development of global HIV prevention policy in the 1990s. The thesis examines diverse explanations for Uganda’s HIV decline and how these came to be framed in the context of the emergence of Second Generation Surveillance (SGS), a global HIV/AIDS surveillance framework introduced by UNAIDS/WHO in 2000. Official accounts describe SGS as having been developed on the basis of Ugandan behavioural evidence presented during a key meeting of HIV/AIDS policymakers which took place in Nairobi in 1997. This meeting provides a focal point for examining the role of evidence in global HIV prevention policy and the relationship between evidence and policy pertaining to low income countries in the 1990s. Methods: A review of UNAIDS/WHO documents and 29 in-depth interviews with HIV/AIDS experts from Uganda and international organisations were analysed. Results: UNAIDS documents present SGS as a technocratic, problem-solving response to limitations in established HIV surveillance approaches, developed at a UNAIDS-sponsored workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1997. These official accounts present the emergence of SGS as evidence-based and reflecting a clear consensus that developed during the Nairobi workshop. While interview data suggest agreement around the need for improved HIV surveillance systems, they indicate a more complex picture in terms of the extent to which SGS was evidence-based and highlight contested interpretations of this evidence among HIV experts. Findings from interviews suggest that the introduction of SGS by UNAIDS/WHO may be understood as serving both technical and broader strategic purposes. As indicated in UNAIDS/WHO policy documentation, SGS was intended to improve older global HIV surveillance methodologies via the triangulation of multiple data sources. The introduction of SGS also appears to have served two broader purposes, functioning as something akin to a marketing tool to help promote the institutional identity of UNAIDS, while also signalling a shift towards a ‘multisectoral’ approach that aimed to unify epidemiological and social scientific disciplinary approaches. While interviewees’ accounts coincide in describing a decline in HIV prevalence during the 1990s, they present divergent interpretations of this evidence which became significant in the development of SGS. One interpretation focused on a reduction in multiple partnerships within the Ugandan population as the key change driving the decline in HIV prevalence, while a contrasting explanation focused on increased use of condoms as the primary cause of this decline. Interviewees’ accounts suggest a process of competition, whereby different actors sought to secure the primacy of their interpretation in institutional understandings of Uganda’s HIV decline and in the development of SGS. Claims of disciplinary bias and institutional marginalisation appear to have contributed to the subordination of explanations focused on a decline in multiple sexual partners, while the policy entrepreneurship of one key actor appears influential in explaining the ascendency of explanations focused on increased condom use. Despite these contestations around the evidence used to inform the development of SGS, UNAIDS documents and peer-reviewed publications from this period emphasise one interpretation (that of increased condom uptake) which thus appears as the official explanation for the success of HIV control in Uganda. The transition from the WHO’s Global Programme on AIDS (GPA) to UNAIDS, and the initiation of a multisectoral HIV prevention approach, appear as important contextual and institutional influences in the interpretation of evidence for Uganda’s HIV decline. The failure of the partnership reduction explanation to align with the evolving institutional and political orthodoxy, and the potential for this explanation to challenge UNAIDS’ new focus on multisectoral HIV prevention, may help to explain why it did not inform subsequent HIV/AIDS policy and does not appear in official accounts of SGS’s development. In contrast, explanations focused on increased condom use were consistent with UNAIDS’ HIV prevention policy agenda (including its emphasis on multisectoral approaches) and appeared to reinforce the organisation’s need for increased financial resources to mitigate HIV/AIDS via the distribution and promotion of condoms. Discussion: This study demonstrates that the development of SGS, and the politics of evidence supporting its introduction, are more complex than existing UNAIDS/WHO accounts describe. Official explanations of the development of SGS provide a simplistic account of how evidence informed policy in a linear and rational way. In contrast, findings from this thesis suggest that SGS served multiple policy functions (i.e. marketing, promotion of institutional credibility, and a demonstration of disciplinary integration) in the context of the recently-formed UNAIDS, and that the role and interpretation of evidence in this context were highly contested. Consistent with the work of Kingdon (1995) and more recently Stevens (2007), this study suggests that personal, political and institutional factors play important roles in shaping how evidence is presented and linked with policy. These findings suggest that more nuanced understandings of the relationship between evidence and policy are needed to explain HIV/AIDS policy development within both sub-Saharan African and at a global level.

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This thesis focuses on college-aged second-generation Americans whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from India. The purpose of the study is to examine the ethnic and cultural identities of second-generation Indian Americans in the Atlanta area. This exploratory study is meant to interrogate cognitive boundaries to suggest that identity is not a fixed state but a fluid process that is continually shaped both by the individual and by society. I have amassed data through both video-recorded ethnographic interviews and self-video ethnography yielding visual ethnographic material that supplements the written thesis. During the research period, I posted regularly at www.kellyshonorsthesis.wordpress.com, providing updates on my progress with the research project. Through creating a visual project that is public from the very beginning, I have aimed to achieve transparency as a researcher and to increase visibility for the field of anthropology. In addition, I demonstrate that research collaboration using self-video ethnography can be an effective ethnographic method to give voice to research participants and to reveal nuances not otherwise accessible.

The research question for this study is: how do religious and ethnic identities intersect for second-generation Americans? Is religious identification consistently coupled with strong ethnic identity among second-generation Americans, as posited by the current literature on is this issue, or are there other extant patterns that need to be further examined? I considered this question by comparing religious and non-religious second-generation Americans from Muslim-origin families from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. I interviewed 44 individuals across a range of religious and ethnic identification, and found six main patterns in how ethno-religious identities do and do not map on to one another. I titled these six patterns thusly: "Religion > Ethnicity; Higher Religion, Higher Ethnicity," "Religion > Ethnicity; Higher Religion, Lower Ethnicity," "Religion = Ethnicity," "Religion < Ethnicity," "Somewhat Ethnic, Somewhat Religious," and "Critics of Religion and Ethnicity."The case of second-generation Muslim Americans is particularly interesting, given that what may actually be occurring is the growing importance of a "pan-religious" identity, rather than the continued dominance of specific ethnic identities at the group level. Indeed, the primary function of the congregation vis-à-vis ethnicity may not be to maintain the ascendancy of a particular ethnic identity, as the sociology of religion literature claims; rather, for second-generation Muslims, religiosity may encourage a "pan-ethnicity" based on shared religious identity. This is borne out in the presence of two forms of the "Religion > Ethnicity" category, and the differentiation in how segmented assimilation occurs between the highly religious and the less religious.

This thesis explores several issues in the adaptation process of immigrants and their children in Canada. Chapter 2 investigates why second-generation immigrants are better educated than the remaining population. Using a standard human capital framework where individuals choose how much to invest in both their children's and their own human capital, I show that a gap in education can arise in the absence of differences in unobservable characteristics between immigrants and the native born. Rather, it can arise due to institutional factors such as imperfect transferability of foreign human capital and credit constraints. The model's key implication is a negative relationship between parental human capital investments and children's educational attainment, particularly in families with uneducated parents. I find strong empirical evidence of such tradeoffs in human capital investments occurring within immigrant families. Chapter 3 re-assesses the effect of living in an ethnic enclave on labour market outcomes of immigrants. I find evidence of cohort effects in the relationship between mean earnings and the proportion of co-ethnics in the CMA which vary by education level. Next, using information on the proportion of one's friends who share one's ethnicity, I test a common assumption that the enclave effect is a network effect. I find that traditional, geography-based measures of the ethnic enclave effect capture the impact of factor(s) other than social networks. In fact, the two effects generally offset each other to some degree in determining immigrant employment outcomes. Neither measure has a statistically significant effect on average immigrant earnings, at least in cross-sectional data. Chapter 4, co-authored with David Green and Craig Riddell, tests two alternative theories about why immigrants earn less than native-born workers with similar educational attainment and experience - discrimination versus lower skills (measured by literacy test scores). We find that immigrant workers educated abroad have lower cognitive skill levels (assessed in English or French) than similar native-born workers. This skills gap can explain much of the earnings gap. At the same time, foreign-educated immigrants receive no lower returns to skills than the native born. These results offer strong evidence against the discrimination hypothesis.

The carboxylate biofuels platform (CBP) involves the conversion of cellulosic biomass into carboxylate salts by a mixed microbial community. Chemical engineering approaches to convert these salts to a variety of fuels (diesel, gasoline, jet fuel) are well established. However, prior to initiation of this project, little was known about the influence of inoculum source on platform performance. The studies in this dissertation test the hypothesis that microbial communities from particular environments in nature (e.g. saline and/or thermal sediments) are pre-adapted to similar industrial process conditions and, therefore, exhibit superior performances. We screened an extensive collection of sediment samples from extreme environments across a wide geographic range to identify and characterize microbial communities with superior performances in the CBP. I sought to identify aspects of soil chemistry associated with superior CBP fermentation performance. We showed that CBP productivity was influenced by both fermentation conditions and inocula, thus is clearly reasonable to expect both can be optimized to target desired outcomes. Also, we learned that fermentation performance is not as simple as finding one soil parameter that leads to increases in all performance parameters. Rather, there are complex multivariate relationships that are likely indicative of trade-offs associated within the microbial communities. An analysis of targeted locus pyrosequence data for communities with superior performances in the fermentations provides clear associations between particular bacterial taxa and particular performance parameters. Further, I compared microbial community compositions across three different process screen technologies employed in research to understand and optimize CBP fermentations. Finally, we assembled and characterized an isolate library generated from a systematic culture approach. Based on partial 16S rRNA gene sequencing, I estimated operational taxonomic units (OTUs), and inferred a phylogeny of the OTUs. This isolate library will serve as a tool for future studies of assembled communities and bacterial adaptations useful within the CBP fermentations. Taken together the tools and results developed in this dissertation provide for refined hypotheses for optimizing inoculum identification, community composition, and process conditions for this important second generation biofuel platform.

This thesis focuses on college-aged second-generation Americans whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from India. The purpose of the study is to examine the ethnic and cultural identities of second-generation Indian Americans in the Atlanta area. This exploratory study is meant to interrogate cognitive boundaries to suggest that identity is not a fixed state but a fluid process that is continually shaped both by the individual and by society. I have amassed data through both video-recorded ethnographic interviews and self-video ethnography yielding visual ethnographic material that supplements the written thesis. During the research period, I posted regularly at www.kellyshonorsthesis.wordpress.com, providing updates on my progress with the research project. Through creating a visual project that is public from the very beginning, I have aimed to achieve transparency as a researcher and to increase visibility for the field of anthropology. In addition, I demonstrate that research collaboration using self-video ethnography can be an effective ethnographic method to give voice to research participants and to reveal nuances not otherwise accessible.

This project is interested in the ways that second-generation Muslim women experience public space, in particular with respect to how their identities and sense of belonging are shaped through everyday encounters in public. This implicates the reactions and behaviours of strangers who they meet in public, their own bodily comportment, and the ideas and values communicated by their parents and other co-ethnics about women’s place in public space, as well as the ways that religiosity may enhance or hinder everyday belonging. Through the use of qualitative, one-on-one interviews, this research seeks to investigate daily experiences within Ottawa, Canada, particularly with respect to how such interactions inform a sense of (dis)comfort and belonging in public space in Canadian society. Moreover, this project is interested in the negotiation that many second-generation Muslim women undertake between family and ethno-religious community values and those of mainstream Canadian society in urban public spaces. In order to address these topics, the study examines Muslim women’s everyday experiences in public – the ways in which visibility and generational status can influence daily encounters and (dis)comfort, as well as women’s ability to actively negotiate their identity and belonging through engagement with strangers and acquaintances.

This thesis explores several issues in the adaptation process of immigrants and their children in Canada. Chapter 2 investigates why second-generation immigrants are better educated than the remaining population. Using a standard human capital framework where individuals choose how much to invest in both their children's and their own human capital, I show that a gap in education can arise in the absence of differences in unobservable characteristics between immigrants and the native born. Rather, it can arise due to institutional factors such as imperfect transferability of foreign human capital and credit constraints. The model's key implication is a negative relationship between parental human capital investments and children's educational attainment, particularly in families with uneducated parents. I find strong empirical evidence of such tradeoffs in human capital investments occurring within immigrant families. Chapter 3 re-assesses the effect of living in an ethnic enclave on labour market outcomes of immigrants. I find evidence of cohort effects in the relationship between mean earnings and the proportion of co-ethnics in the CMA which vary by education level. Next, using information on the proportion of one's friends who share one's ethnicity, I test a common assumption that the enclave effect is a network effect. I find that traditional, geography-based measures of the ethnic enclave effect capture the impact of factor(s) other than social networks. In fact, the two effects generally offset each other to some degree in determining immigrant employment outcomes. Neither measure has a statistically significant effect on average immigrant earnings, at least in cross-sectional data. Chapter 4, co-authored with David Green and Craig Riddell, tests two alternative theories about why immigrants earn less than native-born workers with similar educational attainment and experience - discrimination versus lower skills (measured by literacy test scores). We find that immigrant workers educated abroad have lower cognitive skill levels (assessed in English or French) than similar native-born workers. This skills gap can explain much of the earnings gap. At the same time, foreign-educated immigrants receive no lower returns to skills than the native born. These results offer strong evidence against the discrimination hypothesis.