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Background: Studies have reported that preschool children may not be sufficiently active according to guidelines. This is worrying because early childhood is a critical period for the establishment of sedentary behaviour (SB) and physical activity (PA) habits, which have immediate and long term influences on health. The majority of evidence on levels, determinants, and health consequences of SB and PA in young children is, however, based on subjective measures in predominately White children aged three years or older. Aims: To 1) assess the feasibility and acceptability of using three different accelerometers in South Asian and White British 2-3 year olds and their parents; 2) calibrate and validate the accelerometers to measure SB and PA in 2-3 year olds; 3) investigate the influence of 5-, 10-, and 15-second epochs on time spent in SB, light PA, and moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) in 2-3 year olds; and 4) assess the feasibility of measuring the habitual SB and PA with the ActiGraph GT3X+ accelerometer in South Asian and White British 2-3 year olds and their parents. Methods: Focus groups were performed with 17 South Asian and White British mothers and the audio-recordings were transcribed verbatim and analysed with thematic analysis (Aim 1). To calibrate the three accelerometers against direct observation (Aim 2), semi-structured activity sessions were run with 18 South Asian and White British 2-3 year olds. Mixed-effects regression and receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis were used to generate prediction equations and 5- and 10-second cut-points to assess children s SB and PA. Validity of the generated cut-points against direct observation (Aim 2) was assessed in a separate sample of 20 White British and Black African 2-3 year olds during free-play, using Cohen s kappa, ROC curve analysis, Bland-Altman plots, and Lin s concordance coefficient. Differences in estimated time spent in SB, light PA and MVPA from 5-, 10- and 15-second epochs were tested with repeated-measures ANOVA and paired t-tests in the calibration sample (Aim 3). A pilot study was conducted with 120 South Asian and White British families from a birth cohort study to address aim 4. Study intake and compliance with an 8-day measurement protocol were calculated, and differences between ethnicities were assessed with the Chi-square test. Results: The ActiGraph GT3X+ was the most widely accepted accelerometer, with the least amount of issues raised by mothers. Practical and software issues with the Actiheart and activPAL3 during the calibration phase resulted in insufficient good quality data collected, which made it unfeasible to calibrate both monitors. The overall 5-second Axis1 cut-points for the ActiGraph GT3X+ provided a valid tool to measure the SB and total PA of 2-3 year olds in free-living conditions. Using 10- and 15-second epochs overestimated children s light PA and underestimated time spent in SB and MVPA. Less South Asian than White British families were recruited into the study, and less South Asian than White British children complied with the 8-day measurement protocol. There were no ethnic differences in the number of children and parents providing enough accelerometry data (i.e. ≥ 3 valid days), or the number of parents complying with the measurement protocol. Conclusions: The results demonstrated that it is feasible to use the ActiGraph GT3X+ to assess the habitual SB and PA of a bi-ethnic sample of 2-3 year old children and their parents. The accurate assessment of SB and PA in 2-3 year olds using the overall 5-second Axis1 cut-points developed and validated in this thesis will enable researchers to investigate the levels, determinants, and health consequences of SB and PA. Such research will inform public health policies and interventions to improve children s health.

This research explored the understanding of coronary heart disease among the South Asian Migrant men in the UK. The objectives of this study are: • To explore migrant South Asian men's understanding of the risks involved with coronary heart disease in the UK • To relate their understanding in the context of current health care policy • To suggest ways to provide culturally sensitive health promotion programs to these groups. A phenomenological perspective using qualitative research methodology and focus group interviews were used to obtain a more precise and in-depth understanding of the risks involved with coronary heart disease. In total 83 men were recruited. 13 focus groups were conducted in three different areas across the country which had a significant South Asian population. Three themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews: Psychosocial factor, conventional risk factors & health care experiences. These themes reflected the men's understanding of the risks Involved with coronary heart disease In the UK. According to Williams et al, (2007 & 2009), information about psychosocial risk profiles in UK South Asians is limited and that there is an increased possibility that psychosocial related factors contribute to increased vulnerability to coronary heart disease in South Asian in the UK. This study concludes with the importance of recognizing that not all South Asians are the same and that health professionals should look beyond the context of religious, and ethnic background and focus on individual men.

In Shivaji Nagar, if you are 39 years old you are most likely dead. Some in this neighborhood say it is far worse if you are alive. Yet, seemingly paradoxically, the residents of this neighborhood do not want to leave it. Located between one of Asia’s largest garbage dumps and Mumbai’s largest abattoir, this Deonar neighborhood is popularly known as “Bombay’s gas chamber.” This dissertation examines the social worlds of the residents of Shivaji Nagar by asking how an apparently odious, and potentially toxic place that appears to foreclose all possibilities other than failure, waste and death becomes an object of attachment for its residents.

This dissertation asks how Muslims in north India today understand four paradoxical aspects of Sufi saint shrine traditions. The shrines of Sufi saints are sometimes regarded as apolitical, sacred, all-inclusive, and anti-elite religious spaces. At the same time, they are sites that are politicized, illegally bought and sold as commercial real estate, fuel for Islamic sectarian divisions, and often controlled by upper-caste Muslim elites. Based on the analysis of historical archival materials and twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh), this dissertation argues that shrines are sites that straddle the dīn-duniyā distinction in Islam. Dīn (understood as “religion” in the modern period) is the atemporal, immaterial domain of true spirituality, whereas duniyā (“world”) is the realm of this-worldly material concerns and temporal impermanence. As sites imbued with the ethereal barakah (love of God manifest as the power of a blessing) of Sufi saints that aid individuals in drawing near to God by transcending “worldly” desires and also material commodities that are aggressively competed over by adversarial stakeholders (e.g., the state, real estate mafias, sectarian rivals), these shrines are paradoxically both of dīn and of duniyā. When asked how one can differentiate between dīn and duniyā—for example, when a Sufi politician is acting a religious manner or in a worldly manner—many of my interviewees explained that one can distinguish between these two domains based on the material presence of money. In this dissertation, I argue that the concept of money (paisā; also, “money” in English) acts as a symbol to help Muslims in Lucknow navigate this paradoxical quality. By attributing to the materiality of money those aspect of shrine operations associated with duniyā, interviewees effectively identified the boundary line dividing dīn from duniyā, thereby resolving the ostensibly contradictory nature of, for example, the politicization of an apolitical space. As a key signifier in the broader neoliberal context of Lucknow and the global politics of Sufism, money is an important concept by which Muslims make sense of the social, economic, and political complexities of Muslim life in the north India.

With unique historical, political, and social perceptions, the experiences of refugees, and later, their children, contribute to a more complex narrative of remembrance, citizenship, and belonging in the United States. Often framed as creating a disconnect between generations, intergenerational trauma may be addressed by surfacing different forms of affective and embodied remembrance. Recognizing the unique identities and subjectivities that the second-generation, Southeast Asian American (SEAA) population embodies (and the implications that those have for how the U.S. perceives and produces itself), this project engages narrative inquiry and participatory visual methodologies to explore how the children of Southeast Asian (SEA) refugees make meaning of their family histories and themselves through negotiating generational memories. This project shows that SEAA young people are actively engaging with the legacies of their families and communities as they move through the world. Through a series of individual interviews, participant creations, a whole group sharing circle, and a group co-created artifact, my analysis shows the ways that SEAA continually look inward and turn outward, seeking to understand, build, and re-member as they negotiate generational memories. As SEAA move toward continuity through a deep recognition and, ultimately, acceptance of rupture, they engage in healing practices. Drawing from the ways that a feminist refugee epistemology asserts the refugee as knower and centers their rich, complicated daily experiences and the ways that healing justice centers the transformation of institutions and relationships to facilitate individual and collective healing, this project offers continued opportunities to theorize the connections between historical understandings and how young people with legacies of displacement see themselves as actors in relation to those around them.

Drawing on archival materials, family stories, and student artwork, “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon, 1795–1855” examines how nineteenth-century American missionary education in South Asia facilitated dominant-caste supremacy while distributing negotiated sensibilities of colonial modernity. The work’s first section explores the arrangement of an educational nexus of mutual benefit between the Jaffna Peninsula’s dominant Veḷḷāḷar caste, the British Ceylonese government, and American Protestant missionaries. I track this nexus from its origins in the veranda school of Tamil Śaiva poet Kūḻaṅkai Tampirāṉ (1699–1795) to its apogee in the American Ceylon Mission boarding schools of the late 1840s. The dissertation’s second part examines two pedagogies of colonial modernity: the embroidery of needlework samplers that taught an American form of gendered domesticity, and map drawing that imparted a geographically specific and American-style national identity. By describing three moments in its development and two pedagogical facets of its career, the dissertation argues that an educational nexus crafted for some Veḷḷāḷars a distinct Jaffna Tamil identity that is geographically bound, gendered, and pervaded by a sense of superiority. This dissertation makes two significant contributions to South Asian studies, first by demonstrating an unexamined arrangement of power in the context of colonialism—the educational nexus—and second, by exploring the way colonial teaching methods in the first half of the nineteenth century transformed South Asian ways of being.

Social media usage is a paradigm shift in mass communication history, and members of the diasporic communities use social media for building and maintaining relationships. Social media have taken an important step by allowing the users to communicate in their native languages online. Because of this new step, communication through social media has become easier for the diasporic people who lack language and communication skills in their host countries. The diasporic people can communicate with the members of the same diasporic community in the host society and also with friends and family back home by using their native languages. Diasporic people have various motivations for using social media including gratifications. This dissertation examines patterns of use of social media among the South Asian diaspora living in the U.S. In doing so, the study uses a broader framework of bridging and bonding social capital to examine how South Asian people in the U.S. maintain relationships with friends both back home and in their host society via social media. Moreover, the influence of language for socio-cultural adjustment of the South Asian immigrant people was also explored in this study. An online survey following a snowballing technique was conducted among 535 South Asian people in the U.S. The results found that bonding relationships are related to native language use in social media, information sharing about back home and frequencies of social media use. Bridging relationships are related to relationship maintenance with friends in the U.S. and frequencies of social media use. The results of this study show the English language preference is not related to cultural and psychological behaviors in social media. However, English language preference is related to home country media related behaviors.

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Today, there are about 250 million international migrants globally, and the number is increasing each year. Immigrants have contributed to the global economy, bridged cultural and business exchanges between host and home countries, and increased ethnic, racial, social, and cultural diversity in the host societies. Immigrants have also been overgeneralized about, misunderstood, scapegoated, and discriminated against. Understanding what drives international migration, who migrate, and how immigrants fare in destination has valuable theoretical, practical, and policy implications. This dissertation consists of three essays on international immigration. The first paper aims to test a series of immigration theories by studying immigrant skill-selection into South Africa and the United States. Most of the research on the determinants of immigrant skill selection has been focusing on immigrants in the United States and other developed destination countries. However, migration has been growing much faster in recent years between developing countries. This case study offers insights into the similarities and differences of immigration theories within the contexts of international migration into South Africa and the US. This project is funded by the Hamilton Research Fellowship of Columbia School of Social Work. The second paper narrows down the focus onto Asian immigrants in the United States, studying how the skill-selection of Asian immigrants from different regions has evolved over the past four decades. Asian sending countries have experienced tremendous growth in their economy and educational infrastructure. The rapid development provides an excellent opportunity to test the theories on the associations between emigrants’ skill-selection and sending countries’ income, inequality, and education level. On the other hand, during the study period, the United States has had massive expansion employment-based immigration system, followed by cutbacks in immigration policies. I study the association between immigration patterns and these policies to draw inferences on how the changes in immigration policies have affected the skill selection of Asian immigrants. This research is funded by Columbia University Weatherhead East Asia Institute’s Dorothy Borg Research Program Dissertation Research Fellowship. The third paper centers on the less-educated immigrant groups in the US and investigates the gap in welfare use between less-educated immigrant and native households during 1995-2018, spanning periods of economic recessions and recoveries, changes in welfare policy regimes, and policies towards immigrants. I use “decomposition analysis” to study to what extend demographic factors, macroeconomic trends, and welfare and immigration policy could explain the disparities in welfare participation between immigrants and natives. This paper is co-authored with Dr. Neeraj Kaushal from Columbia School of Social Work and Dr. Julia Shu-Huah Wang from the University of Hong Kong. The work has been published in Population Research and Policy Review (doi.org/10.1007/s11113-020-09621-8).