This dissertation contributes an interpretation of the ancestral altar tradition among Vietnamese American first and second generation practitioners. It traces the contours of the shifting transformations in domestic religious practice, specifically the transnational and diasporic dimensions in people's lives. I address how and toward what ends the "spiritual" is accessed, experienced and/or transformed in the materiality of everyday life, in the context of a complex relationship to a diasporic homeland and an emerging second generation. The research was conducted in Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio (Texas), Carthage (Missouri), Sài Gòn (Viet Nam) and Pulau Galang (Indonesia). I make two main assertions. The first is that domestic religious practices matter in exploring issues of cultural citizenship and belonging. As a collection of things, I explain how altar assemblages are constituted through the purposeful and chance encounters of the practitioner(s), which is a way to talk about the global (such as transnational mobilities or the discourses about diasporic citizenship) through the intimately local. My second claim is that ideas of cultural citizenship can intersect with religious motivations and practices, and that they happen (are performed, imagined and circulated) transnationally, or more precisely, translocatively. I document how practitioners' and groups of practitioners' struggle to combat the (current Vietnamese) state's interventions in re-narrating the circumstances of their exile and also the relative invisibility they face as historical subjects in the United States. By carefully examining ancestral altars as a constitution of "things" and as situated "spaces," I address various facets of what they are and how they work -- as ways to express a familial or diasporic imaginary; or as assemblages of things that are both intimately meaningful and private, yet situated at the intersections of geopolitical engagements and cultural politics. / text

This dissertation examines the Americanization of immigrants as a defining theme in American musical theater. It does so through studies of productions from across the past century about Irish Americans, Chinese Americans, and Latino/a Americans, and in each case, at least one of the creators is a member of the ethnic American group depicted. I contend that these artists found the musical to be a constructive tool for voicing their experiences of the struggle of Americanization and broadening notions of American identity. The resulting narrative expands upon the substantial "golden age"-centered literature on Jewish assimilation and the American musical. Decentralizing the "golden age," I show how the genre has helped write into cultural citizenship a broad range of immigrant groups during fraught periods in which their national belonging was contested. I draw upon a wide range of disciplines - especially immigration history, ethnic studies, and American studies as well as musicology - and diverse methods, including archival research, oral history, textual and musical analysis, reception history, and historically based hermeneutics. / Music

This dissertation presents a study of Chinese diasporic narratives from Canada and Australia and examines the formation and negotiation of diasporic cultural identity and consciousness. Drawing upon theoretical discussions on diasporas in general, it investigates how the Chinese diaspora is imagined and represented, as a visible minority group, within the context of the multicultural nation state. This dissertation begins with a taxonomy of the modes of explaining diaspora and offers three ways of theorising diasporic consciousness. In analysing the filmic and fictional narrative forms of the Chinese in Canada and Australia, the practices of cultural self-representation and of minority group participation and enjoyment of the nation are foregrounded in order to advance critical analysis of the Chinese diaspora. While taking into account the heterogeneity of the imagined diasporic Chinese community, this study also contends that the formation and negotiation of diasporic consciousness and diasporic cultural identity politics is strongly and invariably affected by the multicultural conditions and policies of their host countries. The adaptation and manifestation of minority groups’ cultural practices are thus a matter of social, cultural and political contingencies more often aligned with dominant cultural expectations and manipulations than with the assertiveness of more empowered minority group participation. This dissertation therefore argues for a broader and more complex understanding of diasporic cultural and identity politics in the widespread attempts to merge and incorporate minority group narratives into the key foundational (‘grand’) narratives of the white nation state. The importance of reinscribing Chinese diasporic histories into the cultural landscapes of their receiving countries is moreover increasingly propelled by the speed and momentum of globalisation that has resulted in the growing number of multicultural societies on the one hand but also led to the homogenisation of cultural differences and diversities. In focussing on the fictional and filmic narratives from Canada and Australia, the diversity of the Chinese diasporic community and their conditions are emphasised in order to reflect upon the differences in the administration and practice of multiculturalism in these two countries. The comparative reading of Chinese-Canadian and Chinese-Australian novels and films locates its analysis of notions of ‘homeland’ and belonging, community and national and cultural citizenship within the context of the development and negotiation of diasporic identity politics.

This thesis will explore the concept of cultural citizenship by researching visitor’s responses to five exhibitions across two museums in the Lower Hutt region of New Zealand. The thesis will also examine museum management and staff’s perspectives on these exhibits, and compare these to visitor’s. The aim of the thesis is to understand how museum visitors reflect upon and use museum exhibits as tools in relation to their cultural heritage and cultural citizenship. This approach provides a focus for reflection regarding the cultural importance of museum exhibitions. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model will serve as an overall framework for the study, and the theoretical concepts of memory, rhetoric, meaning making and cultural citizenship will further inform the analysis. The results indicate that museum visitors reflect upon exhibits as tools for reminding, and also indicate that exhibits are seen important for learning and representation. Furthermore, the study finds that visitors do not find exhibits particularly challenging or personal. Museum staff provide other perspectives on the importance of museum exhibits, such as their art historical, representational and community-museum relationship building potential, but the study finds that these themes are seldom explicitly recognised by visitors. The concluding discussion reflects on these results, and suggests avenues for future research.

Transgender lives and identities have gained considerable popular notoriety in the past decades. As part of this wider visibility, dominant narratives regarding the “transgender experience” have surfaced in both the community itself and the wider public. Perhaps the most prominent of these narratives define transgender people as those living in the “wrong body” for their true gender identity. While a popular and powerful story, the wrong body narrative has been criticized as limited, not representing the experience of all transgender people, and valorized as the only legitimate identifier of transgender status. The dominance of this narrative has been challenged through the proliferation of alternate narratives of transgender identity, largely through transgender people telling their own stories, which has the potential to complicate and expand the social understanding of what it means to be transgender for both trans- and cisgender communities. I focus on transgender literature as a point of entrance into the changing narratives of transgender identity and experience. This work addresses two main questions: What are the stories being told by trans lit? and What are the stories being told about trans literature? What follows is a series of separate, yet linked chapters exploring the contours of transgender literature, largely through the context of the Lambda Literary Awards over the past twenty years. Chapter 2 explores the changing definitions of transgender literature in popular discourse over the last two decades. Drawing on a data set of 51 articles, interviews, book reviews, and blog posts published from 1997-2017, I present a framework for defining and categorizing transgender literature. This framework lays out the different possibilities of what transgender literature might be using the three variables of content, authorship, audience, as well as the likelihood of each iteration being included in the definition of transgender literature as understood in the popular conversation. My findings in this chapter suggest a changing definition of transgender literature from “telling transgender/transition stories” to a focus on “transgender people telling stories.” Chapter 3 moves from conversations defining trans literature to an exploration of how texts within transgender literature have changed over time. Using the finalist and winners in the Lambda Literary Award transgender categories, I constructed a sample of transgender literature covering the past two decades, from 1997-2016. Using digital textual analysis methods, I identify various “demographic” trends in transgender literature since 1997, which mirror the trend identified in chapter 3, a shift from “telling transgender stories” focused largely on identity and transition processes to “transgender people telling stories” which rely much less on transition and identity as central themes. Chapter 4 attempts to contextualize these shifts identified in chapters 2 and 3 by situating trans literature in a broader socio-historical context. I frame transgender literature as an intellectual movement situated in an intellectual opportunity structure that includes the publishing industry, LGBT social activism and organizations, and the Lambda Literary Awards themselves. Lambda Literary functions here as a primary gatekeeper for understanding transgender literature in a broader intellectual community around LGBT cultural production, which transitions us to thinking more critically about the Lambda Literary Awards in chapter 5. Chapter 5 introduces us more fully to the Lambda Literary Awards, the largest LGBT book awards in North America, and positions them as a claim for LGBT cultural citizenship in the United States. Using archival documents from the Lambda Literary Foundation, as well as published statements and articles about the Lambda Literary Awards, I explore three conflicts and controversies within the LGBT community through the localized claims for cultural citizenship made on the Lammys. Finally, I provide a brief conclusion, which recaps the main findings of each chapter, sketches my tentative hopes for the future of transgender literature, and outlines my recommendations for future research in this area. / Sociology

What forms of resistance are gay men in France and North America enacting against heteronormativity and homophobia? And why are they enacting these particular forms of resistance? To answer these questions, this thesis aims to draw connections between gay men's resistance strategies and larger socio-political phenomena in both France and North American cultures. First I focus on the discursive construction of citizens, both heterosexual and homosexual, in order to illustrate how gay men are relegated to second-class citizenship based on their sexual identities and practices. My focus, here, is cultural citizenship and sexual citizenship, two themes that run throughout this thesis. Next, I use Foucault's theories of knowledge-power to reveal how power relations in society discursively create subject positions, such as 'homosexuals' and 'heterosexuals', utilizing structures of control, norms, rewards, and punishments in order to champion heterosexuality to the detriment of homosexuality. In order to contest exercises of power, gay men engage in acts of resistance. i examine scholarly debates centered on resistance, and create a list of criterion for overt resistance, which I dub A AVOIR Resistance on account that it includes the characteristics of Action, Alternatives, Visibility, Opposition, Intent, and Recognition. Utilizing my rubric for overt resistance, as well as Foucault's notions of power, I analyze interview transcripts from a sample of gay men in North America and France to reveal that some gay men, living outside of large metropolitan areas, are rejecting hegemonic ideals of 'gayness' and integrating into mainstream heteronormative society. These men are creating what I call 'authentic communities' where many individuals from various backgrounds and lifestyles live together harmoniously based primarily on access to resources rather than identity markers such as sexual identity. this research shows a split between the ways that urban and suburban gay men embody their homosexuality. Since research on gay men focuses on those living in urban areas, my research calls, instead, for focus on suburban gay men and their resistance to homo-normative ideologies of what it means to me gay. / text

This dissertation explores the relationship between state, citizen and public culture through an ethnographic and historical examination of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in northern Greece. In the two-year period leading up to and following its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, the festival was caught up in the larger economic, political and social crises that have overtaken Greece in the last five years - a painful period of rapid transformation and neoliberalization for one of Europe's staunchest social-welfare states. As the Greek state faces bankruptcy - both economic and political - it is being forced to revisit the terms of its social contract with its citizens. In a country where "culture" was once touted as a national "heavy industry," the relationship between the state and cultural production is also being restructured. Public culture is one of the areas of social life in which people are now struggling with these changes and attempting to redefine what it means to be a citizen of the Greek state - utilizing and revising local, national and transnational identities in the process. / Anthropology

This study takes a cultural studies approach to investigating the ways in which the articulation of vernacular creativity with digital technologies and the networked cultural public sphere might constitute sites of cultural citizenship. In the thesis, the concept of 'vernacular creativity' describes the everyday practices of material and symbolic creativity, such as storytelling and photography, that both predate digital culture and are remediated by it in particular ways. The first part of thesis, covering Chapters 2 and 3, develops a theoretical framework and cultural history of vernacular creativity in new media contexts. Chapter 2 introduces the idea of vernacular creativity and connects it to cultural studies approaches to participatory media and cultural citizenship. Chapter 3 theorises and historicises the relationships among vernacular creativity, technological innovation and new media literacy, drawing on social constructionist approaches to technology, and discussing concrete examples. The first of these examples is the mass amateurisation of photography in the first half of the twentieth century, as represented by the monopoly of popular photography by Kodak in the United States and beyond. The second is the domestication of personal computing in the second half of the twentieth century, culminating in a discussion of the Apple brand and the construction of an ideal 'creative consumer'. The second part of the thesis, covering Chapters 4 and 5, is devoted to the investigation of two major case studies drawn from contemporary new media contexts. The first of these case studies is the photosharing network flickr.com, and the second is the Digital Storytelling movement, structured around collaborative offline workshops in which participants create short multimedia works based on their biographies and personal images. These case studies are used to explore the ways vernacular creativity is being remediated in contemporary new media contexts, the socio-technical shaping of participation in digital culture, and the implications for cultural citizenship. In Chapter 6, the thesis concludes by suggesting some further implications of the research findings for cultural and media studies approaches to the relations of cultural production and the politics of popular culture.

In many cases, the need to survive has been the reason for many individuals to leave their country and to start anew in a foreign land. Indeed, migration has played its role as one of the solutions to struggle against poverty among many migrants. Nevertheless, migration can also be an excellent way to improve or develop one’s linguistic, professional and cultural competencies. And one way of doing this is to be part of the au pair cultural exchange program. The interest to be an au pair as well as the interest to have an au pair has been the subject of colorful debates in Denmark, and pushing politicians to make an action due to reports of abuse by many host families. Where the au pair program will end up is still a question hanging up in the air. This study is about the journey of many young and educated Filipino migrants who have decided to embark on the au pair expedition. The theme is anchored on deprofessionalization and deskilling. Transnationalism, civic culture and cultural citizenship, and media are the central theories of the study. Feedback from the participants indicates that there is a need to shift the discussion and focus. It is also important that the au pairs’ knowledge and skills are recognized. The study recommends further research on how participatory communication can be utilized or applied to engage all the stakeholders: au pairs, host family, social organizations, sending and receiving countries, and mass media, in finding long term solutions. The ‘cultural exchange or cheap labor’ argument must not be ignored; however, debates should not be limited to this alone. Most of the au pairs are educated. Recognition of such qualifications must be done to create a new arena for discussions. Oftentimes, many au pairs themselves do not see this side of their background as something valuable. From a communication for development perspective, behaviour change- the au pairs should not see themselves as domestic workers, but as educated migrants, and this must be promoted and advocated, so that au pairs and members of the host society can acknowledge this unknown aspect of these unsung migrants. They are education migrants; it is only right and logical that the au pairs are supported to enhance their qualifications. Deprofessionalization and deskilling must be avoided.

A presente pesquisa trata de examinar uma política pública concebida no âmbito legislativo, na Câmara Municipal dos Vereadores do Município de São Paulo, entre 2001 e 2002, com expressiva participação juvenil e da sociedade civil. Originou a Lei 13.540/2003 e o Decreto 43.823/2003, que instituíram uma política pública por meio de um programa cultural batizado de Programa VAI, implantado a partir dos anos de 2004 na Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, na Gestão de Marta Suplicy. Em seus mais de dez anos de implantação, Programa VAI passou por tranformações importantes em seus métodos e execuções, em decorrência de seus gestores, metodologias compartilhadas entre eles e a comissão de seleção no decorrer da execução dos projetos. Dados estes que demonstram positivamente, um processo de implantação da política pública com efetiva participação dos contemplados e não contemplados no edital. O programa trouxe também outros aspectos externos ao curso de sua implantação, que são cruciais para compreender um arranjo possível da democracia cultural pelo viés do território, onde muitas populações das periferias paulistanas e cidades de fronteira das mesmas estão vivenciando processos da tão almejada cidadania cultural. A participação política dos jovens e também as ações intergeracionais são responsáveis pelas mobilizações e reivindicações relacionadas aos direitos culturais via pressões e diálogos com o Estado. Por fim, territórios complexos e reveladores se observados por meio do seu cotidiano, suas práticas culturais coletivas, em suas potências de deslocar a cartografia cultural da cidade, invertendo fluxos de poderes pelas ações afirmativas, artísticas, culturais e identitárias para garantirem o direito à cidade / This research examines a public policy conceived within the legislative body, at the Sao Paulo City Council, between 2001 and 2002, with significant participation of civil society, especially youth. This public policy originated the Law 13.540/2003 and the decree 43.823/2003, which instituted a cultural program named VAI, implemented in 2004 by the City Cultural Department during the mandate of Marta Suplicy. Over its ten years of implementation, the VAI program has undergone important transformations in its methods and executions, due to its different managers, and the methodologies theyve shared with the selection committee throughout the execution of selected projects. These transformations provide important information on management and monitoring of the program, revealing a qualitative and evolving process of this public policy. During the course of its implementation the program also brought up other external aspects that are crucial for understanding a possible arrangement of cultural democracy by the bias of the territory, where many populations from the peripheries of Sao Paulo\'s and its bordering cities are experiencing processes of this so desired cultural citizenship. The political participation of young people and also intergenerational actions are responsible for the mobilization and claims related to cultural rights via pressure and dialogues with the State. Finally, when observed from within their daily lives and own collective cultural practices, those are complex and revealing territories with power to displace the cultural cartography of the city, reversing power flows through affirmative artistic, cultural and identity actions to ensure the right to the city