The present research sought to expand upon previous research demonstrating that individuals shift their attitudes to match the attitudes of their romantic partner. This research examined whether attitude alignment is influenced, in part, by belonging threats. Participants reported their attitudes about social issues and were randomly assigned to receive a belonging threat (or acceptance) in the form of feedback about their future relationships prior to discussing issues about which they disagreed with their partner. Partners discussed issues that were central to self - peripheral to partner and peripheral to self - central to partner. Attitude alignment was measured following discussion and at a one-week follow-up. Attitude alignment was expected to vary as a function of belonging threat, centrality of issue, and strength of unit relationship. Results did not support hypotheses, but did reveal noteworthy points to be considered for future work in this area.

This dissertation pays critical attention to the "community" concept in archaeological research, casting it as the flexible and impermanent loci of identity formation and social reproduction. In three articles, it investigates various iterations and transformations of the Arikara community in North Dakota after European contact. First, I examine the ethnohistoric record of the Upper Missouri River to investigate how increased flexibility in Arikara settlement strategies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries yielded new community configurations, with particular emphasis on Arikara coresidence with their occasional enemies, the Mandans. The second article analyzes archaeological spatial data to elucidate how the organization of open space at the nineteenth- century coalescent settlement of Like-A-Fishhook Village structured interactions between the Arikara and the Mandan-Hidatsa. The third article explores how the Arikara navigated the reconfiguration of their community space as a result of allotment policies during the early twentieth century, and how the now-inundated settlement of Nishu is situated in the social memory and contemporary identity of the Arikara people. The Arikara case demonstrates that social and spatial configurations of community are not always commensurate, and that understanding the multidimensionality of belonging requires both archaeological and ethnographic approaches.

Building offerings, artefacts or bones that had been placed under or within house features, are considered evidence of rites associated with house construction, remodelling or abandonment, and are an archaeological phenomenon that was common throughout European prehistory. This dissertation focuses on interpreting building offerings dating to the Viking Age in Iceland and Scotland. Each find of this type is unique, which poses a challenge for archaeological investigations that often lack the interpretive framework needed to make comparisons between sites. This dissertation critically refines the frameworks of previous studies of similar types of deposits in AngloSaxon Britain and Scandinavia in order to fill this gap in research and discuss the purpose of houserites. The frameworks of behavioural and cognitive archaeology indicate that the performance of house-rites played a role in the construction of the house as the centre of the world-view of Vikingage people. House-rites are situated as prescriptive behaviours that negotiated perspectives of space throughout the residential life-cycle by adding to house materiality. This refined interpretive paradigm is then applied to a comparative survey of Viking-age houses and farmsteads from Iceland and Scotland. In the North Atlantic region, house-rites appear to have been performed in order for Norse people to reimagine their place in the world. The practical elements of the tradition were altered based on the relevant cultural frameworks and specific geo-political contexts to which Norse people were migrating in the Viking Age. In Iceland, people utilised displays of generosity and skills as providers during house-rites to construct an association between social relationships and residential space. The house itself had agency in situating people both within the landscape and the community. In Norse settlements in Scotland, Scandinavian people were relating themselves directly to the symbols used by native peoples through the use of personal objects in the performance of houserites, integrating their new environment into their mentalities. In Scandinavia, house-rites were a long-standing tradition, leading to a well-established, carefully negotiated sense of identity within the landscape. The Norse people who migrated into the North Atlantic region during the Viking Age were leaving this well-established sense of place. This intensified the climate of uncertainty regarding their place in the world, leading to the negotiation of mentalities through the discursive dynamics of house-rites in altered contexts.

In the second quarter of 2013, 7,944 people were detained in the UK ‘for the purposes of immigration control’ (Home Office, 2013). While 1,138 of those detained were women, major shortcomings are identified in their treatment and calls made for a more gender sensitive asylum system. Although 35% of these women went on to be released there is a lack of research that investigates the on-going legacy of detention and the consequences for the sense of belonging, social integration and wellbeing of ex-detainees. This thesis draws on in-depth narrative interviews with 16 migrant women in the UK who were detained and then released from UK Immigration Removal Centres and five charity workers. Within migration scholarship the paradigm of exclusion has been traditionally adopted to understand how states seek to protect borders, keeping unwanted individuals out or contained. A spatial examination of respondents’ critical geographies of home reveals however that despite their release from detention these women continued to negotiate multiple and fluctuating boundaries. It is argued therefore that this paradigm obscures a nuanced perspective and proposes instead a discourse of precarity. Not only can the ‘state of precarity’ implicit within narratives of detention seep into and define the everyday geographies of home beyond release, respondents’ everyday negotiations with home remained central to the construction and proliferation of everyday precarity. This is achieved through a home-infused geopolitical rhetoric and interventions in the name of immigration enforcement which were revealed through (in)secure spaces of home. An exploration of emotional and embodied geographies also exposes erosive implications for feelings of belonging and health and wellbeing. A discourse of precarity therefore allows for a differentiation and critical inquiry of subjective gendered positions, citizenship and importantly, emergent accounts of resilience, reworking and resistance on predominantly social trajectories.

Retention of first-year students was a problem at a private 4-year university in the Southeastern United States. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the reasons entering first-year students who were part of the Promise Program withdrew from the university during their first year. Tinto's model of student attrition provided the conceptual framework for the study. Research questions addressed students' rationale for selecting the school, their perspectives on the main causes of first-year attrition, their expectations of campus support services, and their recommendations for how to decrease student attrition. Data were collected from semistructured interviews with 7 students from the spring 2016 and fall 2016 semesters. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using manual coding and coding software. Findings indicated that students' sense of belonging was the most influential factor in their decision to withdraw from college. Recommendations included a training program for administrators and staff on customer service techniques. This study can bring positive social change to the profession by seeking out systemic changes to promote entering freshmen's college completion. Conclusively, the implications of positive social change is most benefical to students when more students are able to earn a degree, and better their livelihood. The university would benefit by graduating more students and the success of their college graduates could be seen as their own success of addressing student's social and academic needs. Finally, the positive social change for externalities would benefit from the investment in human beings and human capital as a critical input for change and innovations to society.

This research explores East Timoreseness as a complex and evolving identity in which Timorese 'frontiers', both physical and psychic, have been drawn and redrawn over time and through space. It deals specifically with the sense of displacement and ambiguity that underpins the social identities of young East Timorese living in Australia during a period of intense political transformation in East Timor’s recent history (1997-1999). ¶ Acknowledging the diversity of experience among diasporic youth, the study focuses primarily on young ‘nineties’ Timorese, that is, those who were in their teens or early twenties when they fled East Timor in the wake of the Dili Massacre in 1991. It considers the ways in which they negotiated their experiences of displacement and the immensity of a highly politicised Timorese identity, often framed by young people themselves in terms of an embodied ‘weight’ and a viscerally deep, and occasionally overwhelming, sense of moral responsibility. In the diaspora, the evocation of traumatic memory has been central to the preservation of a uniquely East Timorese identity and its reconstitution in a breached world. Memory has thus been called upon to legitimate a very specific and homogenous East Timorese identity and to reconstruct it through public ritual. Yet an over-determination of such a monological discourse threatens to subsume the heterogeneous experiences and possible alterities of young Timorese and the diversity of Timorese cultural expression. This study explores the interplay between a monological discourse that articulates a cohesive public identity that implies an ‘authentic’ East Timoreseness and a dialogical discourse through which more ambiguous and hybrid identities emerge. ¶ I begin by tracing the strands of history, culture, myth and power that combine to produce totalising representations of East Timoreseness and youth as patriotic and self-sacrificing collectivities. I argue that the exigencies of the struggle for independence from Indonesian occupation depended upon a very specific enactment of youth within East Timor through which East Timorese youth acquired a potent and heroic role. Yet the potency of this politicised identity has always been unstable and provisional, both within and outside of East Timor. As well, such an identity is both enabling and confining for young Timorese since its performance is always infused with power structures and relations that are both socially and spatially contingent. ¶ I then explore processes of identity formation and re-evaluation among young diasporic East Timorese in depth. Removed from the immediacy of struggle, the 'doing' of youth among young diasporic East Timorese inevitably shifts according to the different knowledge formations that frame and produce 'youth' and particularly 'migrant youth' in host countries. While young Timorese often feel caught between apparently contradictory practices and constructions of youth, and discourses that oppose 'Timoreseness' and 'Australianness' (as well as ‘Timoreseness’ and ‘Indonesianness’), there is always room for slippage. Thus, I draw upon examples of their cultural negotiations in the world of the arts to show how young East Timorese sought to engage in meaningful forms of social action and deployed various forms of testimonial as a self-affirming and identity-validating practice. Through practices of music, poetry and theatre young East Timorese, in different ways and with varying force, deploy cultural strategies that are not necessarily inimical or unsympathetic to the concerns and political imperatives of older generation Timorese. The everyday narratives of young Timorese, however, reveal that their identities are entangled in the complex interplay of a number of divergent and interdependent structuring dispositions: the personal and the collective; the global and local; difference and continuity; freedom and constraint. The management of these tensions, as well as the uncertainties of their legal status in Australia and political upheavals within East Timor itself, required the creation of strategies of identity that drew upon both existing and new cultural referents and resources. The experiences of young diasporic East Timorese thus highlight the dialectical and contingent character of intercultural experience and social identities.

The study is a narrative account of Chilean men who came to Canada after the September 11th, 1973 overthrow of government. In-depth interviews are used to reflect the life stories of 12 political exiles living in Saskatoon and Regina, Saskatchewan. This study expands the theme of belonging by analyzing how exiles negotiate identity to their country 25 years after their imposed departure. The accounts reveal how different groups of exiles draw on a view of their past as to reinforce links to the homeland. The question of identity is examined through the changing nature of exile political discourse and how that discourse provides meaning and shape to the host and home country. The study therefore asks how Chilean men in Canada remember their country, make sense of their political experiences, and give meaning to the question of belonging in the light of changing circumstances in their lives.

The study is a narrative account of Chilean men who came to Canada after the September 11th, 1973 overthrow of government. In-depth interviews are used to reflect the life stories of 12 political exiles living in Saskatoon and Regina, Saskatchewan. This study expands the theme of belonging by analyzing how exiles negotiate identity to their country 25 years after their imposed departure. The accounts reveal how different groups of exiles draw on a view of their past as to reinforce links to the homeland. The question of identity is examined through the changing nature of exile political discourse and how that discourse provides meaning and shape to the host and home country. The study therefore asks how Chilean men in Canada remember their country, make sense of their political experiences, and give meaning to the question of belonging in the light of changing circumstances in their lives.

This dissertation is a study about belonging among the Fatanis who are caught between two places, namely Makkah and Jawi. Using historical and ethnographic data collected during two years of transnational fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Malaysia, this dissertation shows that belonging is constituted as much by ideas of community, namely home and the homeland, as it is by lived experience as well as practical and cultural factors. Its central argument is that belonging is unstable, often incomplete, and always contingent owing to the dynamic quality of social life. Belonging is a condition that is volatile. It is not something that can be retained perpetually. A person might experience comfort from belonging someplace at a particular moment, while yearning to be somewhere else simultaneously. Thus, longing often accompanies belonging. In the late-eighteenth century, some Fatani men and women left Patani, on the northern Malay Peninsula, and sailed northwest until they arrived at Makkah. These migrants left in search of safety and inspiration as Siamese armies pillaged their homeland in attempts to depopulate Siam’s recalcitrant tributary kingdom from 1785-1839. Almost two and half centuries later, in contemporary times, the Fatanis are once again on the move. This time, unfavorable conditions in Makkah are the causes of reverse migration to the homeland, which the Fatanis refer to as Jawi. For the Fatanis, who are caught between Makkah and Jawi, belonging is elusive. Makkah, the place and society that many of them consider home, is familiar, but also where their right of residency as foreigners is fragile. On the other hand, Jawi, the homeland, is foreign to the Fatanis despite their status as nationals. From one page to another, this text tells the Fatanis’ stories of pain and yearning, but also of their ingenuity and perseverance. / Anthropology

Weathering introduces a language of durability and change throughout time. Architecture and its materials are constituents of place, as is the way they weather and age. The intent of this research is to analyze regional weathering characteristics specific to the American Southwest as a reflection of a sense of belonging that evolves over time.