This thesis employs a narrative analysis of more than twenty-five films that are centrally concerned with immigrants and the immigrant experience. In Part One, drawing from the work of Yosefa Loshitzky, I will focus on films that feature an immigrant lead character. In Part Two, I will explore movies that filter immigration through the perspective of a native-born citizen protagonist. Important to my reading throughout this study is how we, as viewers, are situated by these stories to feel or react to the predicament of the immigrant. By examining two narrative approaches, that of the immigrant protagonist and the citizen protagonist, we can better understand how films engage larger issues of identity, belonging, and citizenship. The thesis will conclude with a close reading of Goodbye Solo. This film uniquely transcends convenient categories of immigrant narrative or Eurocentric perspective; instead it approximates Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's call for a polycentric approach to narrative in their foundational work, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. / Graduation date: 2013

Uppsatsen behandlar folkgruppen assyrier/syrianers upplevelser och erfarenheter av livet i diaspora i allmänhet och förhållande till hemlandet Turabdin i synnerhet. Fenomenet hemlandet utgör uppsatsens centrala tema. Vad betyder hemlandet och vad ges det för innebörd? Svaren på dessa frågor har jag funnit i de artiklar, insändare, reportage och dikter som jag studerat i tidskrifterna Hujådå och Bahro Suryoyo. Uppsatsens syfte är att belysa livet i diaspora och dess komplexitet utifrån assyriers/syrianers egna beskrivningar av sina upplevelser och erfarenheter av livet i Sverige. Upprätthållandet av hemlandet visar sig fylla både en politisk och en existentiell funktion. Hemlandet är diasporans fundament och sammanhållande länk. I min studie framgår det att man inte kan tala om en enda enad assyrisk/syriansk diaspora där samtliga medlemmar av folkgruppen upplever sin livssituation på ett likartat sätt, utan att det snarare handlar om flera olika diasporor.

This Master‟s thesis is the result of research conducted through field-work which has taken place in Sweden, and additionally text analysis. The aim of this study is to explore the specific case of the Colombian diaspora in Sweden, to discover the reactions, possible involvements, and motivations for involvements and/or un-involvements in relation to their homelands currently ongoing peace negotiation process. This study first seeks to understand the overall reaction and attitudes of the Colombian diaspora members in Sweden towards the peace negotiations, and then looks to provide an understanding over possible influences being exerted from the Colombian diaspora members, and why or why not there is an exert of influence/involvement. The overall understanding of how the Colombian diaspora members in Sweden react to the peace process, are involved/un-involved, and their motivations behind what they do has been discovered through the field-work conducted in this study. This field-work was conducted solely in Sweden, as to provide the specific case of the Colombian diaspora member in Sweden, through qualitative methods and has used semi-structured interviews as well as questionnaires in English and Spanish to collect the information needed to answer the aim of the research presented in this study. Through the field-work, this study has discovered strong hesitations on the Colombian diaspora member behalves to not only be involved in any form of economic, social and political means of influence towards the peace process, but to also take part in this study. The concerns presented by the Colombian diaspora members towards involvements and/or un-involvements are those of political interests, hesitations from the strong bi-polarity of the Colombian society, as well as personal security. Overall, this study has discovered that there is more support from the Colombian diaspora members in Sweden for the ongoing peace negotiations than non-support, but that very few involvements are exerted by this small population of Colombian diaspora members in Sweden.

This report is an assessment of archaeological research conducted on sites related to African American history that have been examined within the state of Texas. The research conducted had four broad research goals. The first goal was to understand the nature of African American archaeology in Texas. The second goal was to compare African American archaeology as practiced in the state of Texas to that of the wider discipline of African American archaeology as practiced within academia. The third goal was to integrate data of historic sites that have an African American component to assess sites within the state that hold archaeological promise. Finally, the fourth goal was to compare and contrast between the common types of historic and archaeological sites related to the life and history of Black Texans in order to assess gaps in the archaeological understanding of African American life and history. / text

During eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the suburbs of southwest Houston, Texas I examined the ways in which White upper class students, teachers, administrators, and parents think about race. As a result of exploring racial language, racial discourse, and racial texts in two US history textbooks, classroom lectures and activities, students' conversations and interviews, and local parents' political organizing, I explored the ways in which White people often think about, construct, and employ race. More specifically I learned the ways in which the White elite residents of this particular suburb know race. I am calling their way of knowing race a "White epistemology of race." I demonstrate how this White epistemology of race has informed, shaped, and guided this particular White community's attitudes toward their own education and residential resources as well as the education and residential resources of their Black and Brown intra-district peers. This dissertation aims to theorize the White epistemology of race and show it to be the unyielding source of a White "redemptive" ideology that is supported and created by the deployment of certain racialized discourses that insist and depend upon representations of Black cultural pathology. / text

In 2010, for the first time since 1895, the Argentine census asked those living within its national territory if they were of African descent. While the inclusion of this question followed broader regional shifts to integrate questions on race and ethnicity into national censuses, this historic disjuncture is most astounding in Argentina. No country in Latin America has more successfully constructed itself as a nation donde no hay negros, where there are no blacks, than Argentina. Through a frame analysis of digital texts produced in Argentina between 2010 and 2012 regarding the new census question, this Master's thesis uncovers how government, media and Afro organizational actors understood the meaning of Afrodescendant and the purposes of the census question. As such, this research seeks to expand research on the African diaspora in the Americas by analyzing how racial politics of identification work in a nation-state of hegemonic whiteness. / text

For Scots and non-Scots alike, the sounds of the bagpipes and the pipe band serve as a cultural metaphor for Scottish identity: the skirl of the pipes, the crisp sound of the snare drums, and the unique lilt of the music conjure an imagined Scotland of fierce, kilted clansmen and rugged, picturesque Highland scenery. This nearly global association appears to have been constructed on a series of transformations of cultural practices within Scotland itself, as well as throughout greater Britain and the lands of the Scottish diaspora, that began with the early “kiltophiles” in the late eighteenth century. Then, in the nineteenth century, its appeal was rendered greater by the romanticization of the Highlander in British literature, Queen Victoria's affinity for summer holidays at Balmoral Castle, expanded pipe band use in the British Army, and the formation of Scottish heritage societies embracing Highland dress, music, and sport. The turn of the twentieth century saw the pipe band move beyond military spheres to serve a range of civic and social purposes within Scotland, and throughout the subsequent hundred-plus year period, pipe bands as community musical ensembles have spread throughout the lands of the Scottish diaspora and other areas of the globe. Although there were and are a range of organizations, practices, and trends that offer insight into cultural developments within Scotland and the Scottish diaspora, the primary goal of this dissertation is to study the role of the pipe band in the construction and transformation of Scottish identity through an examination of the meanings, values, and musical practices that are built into ideas of "Scottishness" from the mid-nineteenth through the twenty-first century in the British Isles and North America. In its consideration of late twentieth- to twenty-first-century North American pipe bands, it will cast special light on selected bands of the Southeast and Ohio Valley regions, using two ensembles, the Kentucky United Pipes and Drums and the Knoxville Pipes and Drums, and one Highland festival, the Scotland County Highland Games, as case studies of present-day practices, but also as windows into identity formation within and through bands of the past.

This dissertation is a comparative study of ways in which women writers from Latina, Middle-Eastern and Native American backgrounds narrate their identities as a function of the different locations they inhabit, and the manner in which these places inform their subject positions and their everyday lives. Some of the key questions explored concern how these writers deploy spatial stories as a tactic to construct textual spaces within which their identities may be expressed, especially since they are often faced, as immigrants or members of diasporic or ethnic populations, with negotiating the contradictory expectations of multiple locations and cultures; it asks what is at stake in constructing particular narrative spaces of identity within categories such as immigrant, exile, migrant, or hyphenated American. The dissertation argues that because people revise their stories throughout their lives, narration can be considered a spatial tactic as well. The act of telling and retelling creates a place within which the narrator constructs an identity; therefore, the narration itself becomes a metaphorical, mobile meta-place that allows people to construct and reconstruct multiple selves subject to constant flux. These narrative meta-places can serve as framing devices for the different selves people are creating at any given time.Each chapter analyzes specific terms and their various related discourses in conjunction with concrete and metaphorical places and spaces used in representing identity in particular ways. Chapter One considers spaces of expression, in which an individual's use of more than one kind of language or discourse confers upon her the ability to narrate her subjectivity and claim her right to self-representation instead of accepting subject positions historically created by others. Chapter Two examines gendered spaces such as the harem, a construction both real and imaginary; it extends the harem as a trope that helps us understand gendered spaces as a vehicle through which women can exercise agency and articulate their multiple subjectivities. Chapter Three focuses on the deployment of labels such as immigrant, exile, or diasporic to construct a specific identity and examines recursive patterns of movement that seem an important process in articulating fluid identities across borders.

In this thesis, women who identify as both queer and Muslims living in North America tell their stories of family, religion, and home. These immigrants and first generation Westerners describe their identities in an effort to acknowledge the difficulties that can accompany being both Muslim in the diaspora in a time when religious and political tensions are aimed at the Middle East. While each has a unique life history, the participants represented here challenge assumptions about the "inherent" contradictions that are assume to exist for those who are both Muslim and queer due to constructions of Islam as sexually and socially conservative. They also offer insight into the usefulness of the current international LGBTQ movement for Muslim lesbians. Using the in-depth interviews from eight women, as well as several first-person published narratives, the aim of this research is to explore how each of these individuals to experience their identities in the diaspora.

Louis Sullivan’s “form ever follows function” had a profound influence on architecture. Although often confused as synonymous with modernism, functionalism is more closely related to positivism in its bias toward science and its rejection of introspective knowledge. This dismissal of the superfluous (such as aesthetic form or ornamentation) diminished the intuitive “human” in architecture by assuming universal rationality. This thesis re-examines functionalism in a contemporary setting: a vertical Buddhist temple set in between two tenement buildings within a New York City plot. Influenced by the work of Lars Lerup and the early work of Diller and Scofidio, the design explores the poetic tensions and obsessions between the profane world of the inhabitants and the sacred world of the temple through abstraction without any attempt to resolve them.