This thesis examines the performance of Indian classical dance in the contemporary 'diaspora space' (Brah 1996) represented by the city of London. My aim is to analyse whether and how performances of "national" art, assumed to represent an equally "national" culture, change when performed in transnational contexts. Drawing upon theories of postcolonialism, multiculturalism and diaspora, I begin my study with an historical analysis of the reconstructed origins of the dance in the intertwined discourses of British colonialism and Indian nationalism. Using this analysis to ground my ethnography of the present-day practice of the dance, I unearth its relation to discourses of contemporary multiculturalism and South Asian diasporic identity. I then demonstrate specific ways in which the relationship between colonial and postcolonial artistic production on the one hand and contemporary performances of national and multicultural identity on the other are visible in the current practices and approaches of diasporic and multicultural Indian classical dancers. My thesis advances the scholarship that has demonstrated the link between the construction of Indian classical dance and the Indian nationalist movement by highlighting particular ways in which historical narrative, national and religious identities, gendered ideals and racialised categories are constituted through, and help produce in turn, contemporary Indian classical dance practices in the diaspora. Locating my study in the UK while still accounting for the Indian nationalist aspects of the dance, my contribution to the scholarly literature is to analyse its performance in relation to both Indian and British national identity. My research demonstrates that Indian classical dance is co-produced by both British and Indian national discourses and their respective cultural and political imperatives, even as the dance contributes to the formation of British, Indian and South Asian diasporic politico-cultural identities.

This thesis looks at the role of discrimination and ethnic group identity as explanations of political behaviour of ethnic minorities in Britain. Chapter 2 examines vote choice and partisanship, arguing that a group utility heuristic explains the high level of support for the Labour party among ethnic minorities. I provide individual-level evidence of this heuristic by showing that ethnic minority voters support the Labour party to the extent that they are (i) conscious of the experiences of their ethnic group members with regards to discrimination, and (ii) believe that the Labour party is the best political party to represent their interests. These two attitudes mediate the effects of group-level inequalities. Chapter 3 asks whether Muslims are alienated from mainstream politics by Islamophobia and British military intervention in Muslim countries. I find that perceptions of Islamophobia are linked with greater political alienation, to a greater likelihood of non-electoral participation, but also to a lesser likelihood of voting. Likewise, disapproval of the war in Afghanistan is associated with greater political alienation and a greater likelihood of some types of non-electoral participation. I also provide strong evidence that Muslims in Britain experience more religious discrimination than adherents of other minority religions. Chapter 4 considers the interaction between the extreme right and ethnic minority political attitudes and behaviour. I find evidence that the extreme right British National Party (BNP) increases voting for the Labour party, at the expense of minor parties and abstention. Surprisingly, the BNP effect also benefits the other main parties. Although they do not benefit in increased vote share, Liberal Democrat and Conservative party and leader evaluations are more positive where the BNP stood and performed better in 2010, which I suggest is due to the electoral contrast provided by the BNP. Chapter 5 looks at the mobilisation effect of ethnic minority candidates on ethnic minority voters. I find a positive mobilisation effect of Pakistani and Muslim Labour candidates on Pakistani and Muslim voters, conditional on someone trying to convince the respondent how to vote. I also find a demobilisation effect of Labour Muslim candidates on Sikh voters.

This thesis explores the experiences, encounters, responses and reactions to Islamophobia through a narrative study of forty female Pakistani and British students with a Pakistani heritage in universities across England. In exploring Islamophobia as a ‘racialised’ phenomenon, the participant narratives locate the experiences and encounters of Islamophobia within their ‘intersubjective’ realities, across various ‘communities’ of ‘discourse.’ These realities are informed by the wider socio-political milieu of a war against Al Qa’ida and its affiliates that ‘securitizes’ the Muslim and Pakistani identity(s) particularly in Britain. The university is also implicated in the counter terrorism agenda of the state, depicted as a ‘vulnerable’ space for radicalizing students. However, females in this discussion are predominantly absent within the academic and public narratives. Therefore, this research will explore the experience of Islamophobia, the way it is perceived by the British/Pakistani/Muslim/female student, and the way students respond and react to it within the university. The research employs a narrative method of inquiry. The narrative analysis is informed by a Bakhtinian notion of ‘dialogics’ to explore the multiplicity of ‘meanings’ that emerge through individual accounts of Islamophobia located within their public and private realms. In exploring these narratives the thesis illustrates how ‘degrees of religiosity’ influences encounters and experiences of Islamophobia, and highlights responses and reactions of students to such experiences, that include individual and group activism to challenge Islamophobia and the insecure meta-narrative about Muslims and terrorism. The research further focuses on both the religious identity of the Muslim student, and their problematic ethnic identity, Pakistani demonstrating how in a securitized socio-political milieu Muslim students are further vulnerable to experiences of Islamophobia, in the form of Pakophobia, where both their religious and ethnic identities are held suspect. These narratives have implications for the emerging understanding of Islamophobia as a ‘racialised’ phenomenon. They further have implications for universities that are encouraged to participate in the government’s counter-terrorism agenda. The narratives by locating the research within the particularities of a wider socio-political milieu that ‘racialises’ and ‘securitizes’ Muslims raises critical questions about the nature of discrimination in a post 9/11, 7/7 era that may have repercussions for other Muslim minority groups.

This study aims at ascertaining via a cross-country/cross-city comparison why different national contexts characterized by allegedly opposite ideologies concerning the incorporation of immigrants (namely, the British Race Relations/multicultural model and French republicanism) have led to the adoption of similar policy tools in the prevention of forced unions amongst young people of ethnic minority background. In order to do so, the study will examine French republican and British multicultural rhetoric and policies aimed at the prevention of forced marriage at different institutional levels, with a focus on the preventive role played by the educational sector and within a historical institutionalist theoretical framework. The comparison begins with a consideration of French and British national rhetoric and policies against forced marriage from 1997 to 2008 to develop an adequate framework for the analysis of the preventive role attributed to educational policies in four major localities (the capital cities, Paris and London, and the second two largest cities per population size, Lyon and Birmingham). Despite differences in the policies and rhetoric adopted by multicultural Britain and republican France to tackle forced unions, the study hypothesizes a common trend in the ways French and British public authorities conceptualize the practice of forced marriage - intended mainly as the product of cultural difference. Similarities in the conceptualization of the practice, in turn, have contributed to the identification of similar policy tools despite dissimilar institutional contexts. Such a hypothesis contrasts with one of the key claims of historical institutionalism, according to which dissimilar institutions lead to different policy outcomes across different countries. The study will introduce the role of ideas – in the form of frames (Bleich 2003) – as a tool to explain the reasons why French and British policies aimed at the prevention of forced unions have led to similar policy outcomes despite dissimilar institutional contexts.

After the Enlargement of the European Union in 2004, around a million Accession State migrants arrived in the United Kingdom, with Polish migrants constituting the largest group. There is a growing body of literature focusing on their migratory patterns, networks, labour market performance, and identity. However, little has been said so far about the Polish migrants' relationship with law in the United Kingdom. This thesis asks: how do the Polish post-2004 EU Enlargement migrants form their relationship with the law, and what are the factors that affect this? It focuses on the intricacies of migrants' choices of `semi-legal' over legal status, subsequent legalization strategies, and the interpretations of legality they result in. Socio-legal integration has so far been viewed solely via state legal frameworks, following the traditional approach of the `law-first' perspective. This thesis argues that it is not the institutional arrangements and legal architecture alone that decide the nature of migrants' semi-legal relationship with law in the host society. A more comprehensive insight into the socio-legal integration of migrants is possible only when we combine in the analysis the interplay between the structural factors of the host country's legal environment, migrants' agency and the culturally derived values, attitudes, behaviour and social expectations towards the law and its enforcement. The thesis therefore makes a case for a `proper' recognition of migrants' legal culture in the study of their socio-legal integration. The thesis concludes that semi-legality, as an initial response to the legal environment is not static, but changing. As a result, migrants' socio-legal integration is extended in time and gradual. Migrants' legality could be discussed at two levels - at the behavioural level and at the level of a value. Changing status between the two poles of legality and illegality brings with it greater appreciation of legality as a value. This research presents a strong argument that the relationship between behaviour and attitudes to law could be meaningfully investigated in an applied domain of the new socio-legal environment.

This thesis addresses the “foreign talent” situation in Singapore with an ethnographic account of the lived experiences of immigrant PRC students on scholarships, or “PRC scholars.” For some two decades, the Singapore government has annually recruited middle school students from China in their hundreds, selecting them through tests and interviews, granting them full scholarships at either pre-undergraduate or undergraduate level, and, very often, “bonding” them to work subsequently in Singapore for a number of years. Wooed and appropriated in such a way as prized potential human capital, PRC scholars exemplify the Singapore state’s desire for “foreign talent.” In the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the influx of all manners of “foreign talent” into the small city-state gathered pace, local sentiments and discourses of resentment arose. The local-vs-“foreign talent” problem became a serious strain on a city and people proud of their cosmopolitanism. This thesis analyzes the “foreign talent” situation through the ethnographic “macro-trope” of desire. It argues that “foreign talent” is a site of convergence and divergence, collusion and collision, accommodation and contestation, fulfillment and failure of various individual, sociocultural, and political desires and longings. Through the lens of desire, and its psychoanalytic undertones and insights, this thesis looks ethnographically into the PRC scholars’ “foreign talent” journeys in nuanced ways. Based on ethnographic fieldworks carried out in a Chinese middle school and a Singaporean university, the thesis shows how Chinese students are constituted as specific subjects of desire, and how they subsequently develop certain perceptions, attitudes, and stereotypes about the local “other” as well as about themselves after arriving in Singapore as “foreign talent.” Infused with multifarious desires, the PRC scholars’ experiences are often characterized by angst and dissatisfaction; yet it is also argued that generative subjective transformations take place precisely amidst these dynamics and pragmatics of desiring. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to make possible an ethical re-imagination of the “foreign talent” situation in Singapore from the perspective of desire; to provide an account of the so far little-studied Chinese migrant students in the context of Singapore; and to speak more broadly to the cultural and subjective dimensions of human experiences in the context of educational mobility, identity politics, and globalization.

Cette étude porte sur la représentation politique des minorités visibles en France. Près de 10% au sein de la société française, moins de 2% au sein de la sphère politique, les Français de la diversité sont sous-représentés, aussi bien au Gouvernement qu’au Parlement. Adoptant une double perspective structurelle et culturelle, nous essayons de suggérer plusieurs pistes de recherches qui expliqueraient la sous-représentation politique des minorités visibles en nous concentrons sur les trois étapes du processus électoral, soit le recrutement, la sélection et l’élection. Le dessein de cette étude est double. D’une part, il s’agit de mettre en lumière les principaux obstacles qui semblent affecter la sous-représentation politique des minorités visibles, sans pour autant prétendre à l’établissement de liens de causalité directs entre les obstacles évoqués et la sous-représentation des minorités visibles dans la sphère politique françaises. D’autre part, il s’agit de déblayer un terrain d’étude encore trop peu appréhendé en France afin de permettre une opérationnalisation et une évaluation des hypothèses articulées dans d’éventuelles études futures. / This research investigates the political representation of ethnic minorities in France. Nearly 10% of the French population is from an ethnic minority, however, only 2% of the politicians are from an ethnic minority. Thus, ethnic minorities are underrepresented in both Parliament and Government. From a twofold structural and cultural perspective, this study focuses on the three steps of the electoral process — recruitment, selection, and election — to suggest several research paths to explain the political underrepresentation of ethnic minorities. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, we try to identify the main barriers that hinder ethnic minorities’ political advancement, without claiming a causal effect between these barriers and the political underrepresentation of ethnic minorities. Second, we try to propose several hypotheses that can be operationalized and evaluated in potential future researches.

L’intégration des nouveaux immigrants pose un défi, et ce, particulièrement dans les nations infra-étatiques. En effet, les citoyens vivant dans ces contextes ont davantage tendance à percevoir les immigrants comme de potentielles menaces politiques et culturelles. Cependant, les différents groupes ethniques et religieux minoritaires ne représentent pas tous le même degré de menace. Cette étude cherche à déterminer si les citoyens francophones québécois perçoivent différemment les différents groupes ethniques et religieux minoritaires, et s’ils entretiennent des attitudes plus négatives envers ces groupes, comparativement aux autres Canadiens. Dans la mesure où ces attitudes négatives existent, l’étude cherche à comprendre si ces dernières sont basées principalement sur des préjugés raciaux ou sur des inquiétudes culturelles. Se fondant sur des données nationales et provinciales, les résultats démontrent que les francophones Québécois sont plus négatifs envers les minorités religieuses que les autres canadiens mais pas envers les minorités raciales, et que ces attitudes négatives sont fondées principalement sur une inquiétude liée la laïcité et à la sécurité culturelle. L’antipathie envers certaines minorités observée au sein de la majorité francophone au Québec semble donc être dirigée envers des groupes spécifiques, et se fondent sur des principes de nature davantage culturelle que raciale. / Immigrant integration poses a particular challenge to sub-state minority nations where citizens are more prone to perceive immigrants as cultural and political threats. However, different ethnic groups might be seen as differentially threatening. This study investigates whether francophone citizens in Quebec perceive different ethnic minority groups differently and whether they are more negative towards these groups than other Canadians. To the extent that negativity exists, the study seeks to understand whether it is grounded principally in racial prejudice or in concerns about culture. Results from national and provincial data show that Quebec francophones are specifically negative toward religious minorities, not racial minorities, and that their negativity is largely couched in concerns over secularism and cultural security. Ethnic antipathy among Quebec’s majority francophone population thus appears to be more group-specific and culturally principled than generalized and racially based.

<p>Postdoctoral scholars encounter various challenges as they navigate the gap between graduate school and faculty or industry positions, one of which includes the challenge of work-family conflict and balance. The science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields represent one sector of the workforce where a closer examination of work-family conflict and balance is important due to the rise in prominence of these fields and the unique populations of people who are underrepresented within these fields. Scholars have identified various experiences or constructs (e.g., bias) that suggest that STEM environments may not be particularly welcoming or supportive for racially and ethnically underrepresented minorities (URMs). The transitional stage of being a postdoctoral scholar in combination with high work demands and a “chilly” or unsupportive work environment may contribute to work-family conflict among racially and ethnically URM postdoctoral scholars in STEM, which could contribute to the underrepresentation of racially and ethnically URMs in the STEM fields and/or the premature exit of these postdoctoral scholars from STEM fields. </p><p>Using role congruity perspective (Diekman & Eagly, 2008), I examined the function of goal endorsement (communal or agentic) as a possible cultural moderator in the indirect relationship between work demand and work-family conflict. This study formulated and empirically tested the relationships between work demand, perceived work environment, goal endorsement (communal or agentic), work-family conflict, and satisfaction with work-family balance. Two models were examined to differentiate two different aspects perceived work environment: (a) one using a supportive work environment variable as a mediator of the relationship between perceived work demand and work-family conflict, and (b) one using a hostile work environment variable as a mediator of the relationship between perceived work demand and work-family conflict. Hypotheses regarding the moderating role of a communal goal orientation and an agentic goal orientation in the indirect relationship between work demand and work-family conflict across the two models (supportive work environment and hostile work environment) were assessed. </p><p>Data was collected from 282 racially and ethnically underrepresented minority postdoctoral scholars in the STEM fields enrolled in postdoctoral positions at universities through an online survey. Using structural equation modeling, results revealed that the indirect effect between work demand and work-family conflict was significant and strongest at low levels of a communal goal endorsement and the indirect effect gradually became weaker until it was nonsignificant as racially and ethnically URM postdoctoral scholars’ communal goal endorsement increased. The results suggest that in the face of microaggressions in the workplace, racially and ethnically URM postdoctoral scholars’ high value of communion serves as a protective factor, which reduces the indirect effect of work demand on work-family conflict.Limitations of the study and recommendations for future research are presented alongside implications for counseling practice.</p>

<div> <p>In the last several years, it has become apparent that racial/ethnic minority graduate students face an increased risk for mental health issues (Clark, Mercer, Zeigler-Hill, & Dufrene, 2012; Paradies et al., 2015). Contextualizing their experiences and determining what factors play a role in increasing this risk specifically for racial/ethnic minority graduate students could help provide information about areas for intervention. However, there is a lack of literature on the experiences of racial/ethnic minorities in graduate school and the implications of those experiences for their mental health. It is important to understand their experience in the context of minority status stress through the use of Stress Process Theory (Pearlin, Menaghen, Lieberman, & Mullan, 1981). As such I hypothesized several positive and unique contributions to depressive symptoms by career and education barriers and minority status stress. Additionally, I hypothesized that minority status stress would mediate the relationship between career and education barriers and depressive symptoms, and that perceived family social support would moderate the relationships between career and education barriers, minority status stress, and depressive symptoms. To this end I used this regression-based, quantitative study to examine the associations between the perception of career and education barriers, minority status stress, perceived family social support, and depressive symptoms among a sample (<i>N</i> = 311) of domestic racial/ethnic minority graduate students currently enrolled in degree granting programs. The results revealed that the perception of career barriers uniquely contributed to depressive symptoms, although not in the hypothesized direction with career barriers being a negative predictor of depressive symptoms. Minority status stress uniquely contributed to depressive symptoms in the hypothesized directions and serves as a mediator between the perception of career barriers and depressive symptoms. The perception of education barriers did not uniquely contribute to depressive symptoms. Additionally, perceived family social support moderated only the relationship between the perception of career barriers and depressive symptoms; a moderator effect was not found in any other relationship. Implications for future research and practice, as well as the study’s limitations are discussed<b></b></p> </div> <b><br></b>