Academic literature has examined how the transformation of a nation’s state power can give rise to shifts in national identity, and how such shifting identity can be represented in the form of the nation’s changing urban landscape. This thesis investigates that topic in the case of Taiwan, a de facto independent country with almost one hundred years’ experience of ‘colonial’ and then ‘settler’ rule. Both colonial rule and settler rule constitute an outside regime. However, the settler rulers in Taiwan regarded the settled land as their homeland. To secure their supremacy, the settler rulers had to strongly control the political, cultural, and economic interests of the ‘native’ population. Democratisation can be a key factor undermining settler rule. Such a political transition can enable the home population to reclaim state power, symbolising that the nation has entered the post-settler era. This thesis explores how the transition from Japanese colonial rule to Chinese settler rule and then to democratisation gave rise to changes in Taiwanese national identity, and to its reflection in the urban landscape of the capital city, Taipei. The thesis reveals the irony of a transition in which the collapse of settler rule has been unable to drive significant further change in the city’s urban landscape. In other words, the urban landscape of post-settler Taipei City is ‘stuck in transition’. The condition reflects the ambivalence in Taiwanese national identity caused by the unforgettable, yet not really glorious memory of settler rule.

Drawing on empirical data, this thesis investigates the interplay of cultural differences in the ways Persians practice, negotiate, and sustain their partnering relationships across cultural differences; reasons for and implications of failure; and the extents to which Persian intercultural partnering practices could be understood in relation to wider social processes. I grounded this analysis on the Pre-Partnering, Prevailing-Partnering, and Post-Partnering Practices, and argue that Persians in intercultural partnering relationships ‘do partnering’ in relation to Internal, External and Intergenerational social positionings. I suggest that participants’ in-between cultural identities help them to sustain their partnering relationships, with negotiations centring on the interplay of five cultural sources: gender, religiosity, relationality, life course, and language. Failure in partnering relationships are usually attributed to shifting positions on the continuum of cultural identities, due to participants seeking their best ‘me’, which is social, and is defined through personal relationships with wider social connections. Partnering practices in the particular context of this study may not align with the claims of detraditionalization theory. I argue that religion should be considered independent from other forms of traditions to understand the wider social processes relevant to construction of contemporary family lives.

Migration to high income countries (such as the UK) has been found to be associated with declining health. The overall aim of the thesis was to advance our knowledge and understanding about migration, health beliefs and behaviours of Ghanaian migrants living in the UK. The thesis employed two approaches: a systematic review and qualitative methodology utilising interviews with a total of 62 participants. The systematic review explored associations between acculturation and body weight in migrants, examining the role of health behaviours. The two qualitative studies, which yielded two datasets, focused on the experiences of Ghanaian migrants living in the UK and also included Indian migrants and White British and Ghanaian home populations as comparative samples. Findings from the systematic review suggested that migrants may be prone to developing obesity, however factors such as socioeconomic status influences this risk. The review also showed that behaviours and beliefs relating to health may be influenced by culture. From the qualitative studies there were three themes that cut across the findings of this thesis: (i) migrant’s knowledge of their environment and how it affects healthy behaviours, (ii) the lay meaning of health, which is embedded in the migrant’s culture and (iii) social/cultural influences on engagement with healthy behaviours. This thesis provides a starting point in understanding the lay meaning of health that can affect the engagement of healthy behaviours. Different cultures have exhibited different health belief systems and knowledge of these differences is important in the design of effective interventions that will be acceptable to patients of different cultural backgrounds.

Considerable historical attention has been paid to the end of Empire in Britain’s East African colonies and the consequences of this for postcolonial states. The forced migration of minority South Asian populations from the new nation-states of East Africa has received considerably less attention. South Asians remain at the margins of African and British national histories, constructed variously as either fringe opponents of anti-colonial nationalist movements or marginalised minorities. Yet re-assessing the history of these ‘refugee’ communities has the potential to enhance scholarly understanding of both colonial and postcolonial power relations and migrant-refugee identity formulation and re-formulation. Moreover, studies of migrant communities in Britain have tended to treat South Asians as a homogenous group, paying relatively little attention to the specific identity trajectories of those who were expelled from the new nation-states of East Africa. In contrast, this research takes as its starting point the transnational experiences of East African Asians as multiple migrants, exploring the reformulation of political and cultural identities during the course of their expulsion, migration and resettlement in and between postcolonial states.

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This PhD thesis develops a critical account of discursive practices of bordering in the EUropean migration regime. By articulating recent advances from the fields of Critical Migration and Border Studies and Discourse Studies, it develops a theoretical and methodological framework that enables grasping discursive borders in their heterogeneity. On a broader level, it is interested in re-approaching post-structuralist and materialist strands of theory and analysis by going back to their beginnings in structural Marxism and psychoanalysis. EUrope’s discursive borders are scrutinised through the lens of different contexts that allow emphasising the entangled nature of policy, academic, and activist discourse. First, the present research scrutinises a set of practices of discursive bordering with a relatively high stability over time. Adopting a post-colonial, macro-historical perspective, it shows how EUrope’s colonial history infuses the conceptual apparatus of the EU’s contemporary migration policy. This serves as a foundation for the following chapters, that examine practices of discursive bordering from a micro-enunciative and a situated perspective. While the second analysis focuses on the construction and supraversion of the labour / refugee divide in German discourses on EUropean migration, the third shows how discursive borders are turned into a political stake in a migrant protest. This allows conceiving of categorisation and differentiation as discursive practices that are scattered in time and space, and characterised by resonances, contradictions, and subversions instead of following a common rationality or having a central point of reference.

In this research I explore artivist performance proposals that lead to an analysis of the spectator position intrinsic to the spectatorial, as a construction linked to colonial discourses of otherness. This investigation presents the encountering processes of the transnational troupe of La Pocha Nostra and the Puerto Rican persona of Freddie Mercado with their respective spectators, where local-global constructs of coloniality become unveiled, made and unmade spectacle through their re-reproduction of otherness. Side by side with performance art-life, I explore the deconstruction and de-linking possibilities of the spectatorial taking the work of these artists to build and develop the dilemmas and alternatives presented. From these complex hyper-othering performance practices I research the social implications on the spectatorial at a local and global level. The artistic proposals discussed are focused under the decolonial lens and researched as practices that make possible the co-creation of decolonial relationalities. I focus in the trans-possibility these ‘other’ encounters produce and are produced by. This work inserts the issue of the spectator within broader social concerns and it is under this umbrella that the ‘question’ of the Other arises within the mechanisms of the modern spectacle. These artistic practices exert diverse tactics that directly imply the figure of the spectator within this social configuration.

Granting family residence rights to third country national EU family members is a controversial issue that has been the object of a lively debate, especially in recent years. The debate has been particularly focused on the role played by the Court of Justice of the European Union in deciding cases involving EU citizens and their third country national family members. The Court has been criticized for inconsistent judgments and providing a lack of legal certainty. The object of this thesis is to analyse the intricate jurisprudential scenario of family reunifications between EU citizens and third country nationals. In order to do so I will place the Court’s case law in its broader historical context. Through my analysis, I will show how the phenomenon of family reunification between EU citizens and third country nationals is the fruit of a development that, starting from the legislation of the first post World War II era reached its climax in the more recent judgments of the CJEU. Using a historical prospective, I will outline that the original meaning of the first family reunification legislative provisions, their more recent CJEU interpretation and the new application of the concept of EU citizenship find their ground on specific trends that have characterized the process of European integration for years. I will look in particular at the development of the Common Market project, focused on eliminating obstacles that would hinder the right of free movement of workers and at the strengthening of the rights deriving from the EU citizenship status. I will also show how since the oil economic crises these two currents begun to clash with the stricter immigration policies adopted by some Member States. I will argue that the approach of the Court can be better appreciated when placed at the interplay of this clash.

My thesis is an ethnographic study of Sierra Leonean living in London. I examine the interrelationships between diasporic orientations and the specific locality in which people are living. As such, my research is at the intersection between literatures on African diasporas, and research on new immigration and diversity, two fields which I argue deal with the same ‘problem' – that of the incorporation of migrants into some form of nation-state identification. In my empirical chapters I explore Sierra Leoneans encounters with diversity in a range of places within London, and engage with Brah's (1996) conception of diaspora space, as well as recent work on the topic of super-diversity (Vertovec 2007) as a way to elucidate such these interactions. I focus on key sites within Sierra Leonean London – a popular street market, the religious spaces of a church and a mosque, and the temporary spaces used for the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Sierra Leonean independence. I explore how individuals manage the twin pressures of incorporation from both the UK and Sierra Leonean states, and how these pressures reconcile in efforts to create lives in the interstices of two cultural systems. I look at how a specific cultural heritage shapes their engagements with each other and with outsiders, and how encounters with others and the experience of life in London affect their relationship with their country of origin. The thesis argues that Sierra Leoneans living in London manage these pressures using a cultural imaginary rooted in postcoloniality – i.e. shaped by the enduring effects of colonialism and its aftermath. This legacy has resulted in a profound ambivalence towards both London and Sierra Leone, as poles of this relationship, with many Sierra Leoneans coming to see the diaspora as “home”: a productive ‘”third space” with resources and opportunities beyond that of their home country. The dependence of these diasporic spaces on the contributions of diverse ‘others'provides broader affiliations, that result in a less tightly-held national identity, with Pan-West-African and African identification, becoming increasingly salient.

Studies of transnational advocacy mainly explore separate processes – e.g. the use of persuasion, socialization, leverage, incentives and penalties – through which specific actors influence policy and law at national and transnational levels. These processes can be seen as strings pulled by the actors involved in order to promote their aims. However, the existing literature stops short of explaining the dynamics of advocacy across time, the number of strings necessary for inducing change and the failure of advocacy. In order to address these shortcomings this thesis analyses the interactions between various processes that constitute transnational advocacy and proposes a conceptual model – labelled the integrated strings model of advocacy – to facilitate the understanding of the dynamics of advocacy. This model suggests that transnational advocacy is constituted by the following interlinked processes, labelled stages and strings in order to emphasize their dynamics: - The stages are: the making of pilot or past solutions-in-practice, problematization, the development of a common frame for possible solutions, the creation of solutions-on-paper and the making of solutions-in-practice; - These stages are constituted by six strings: the creation of social enterprises, the use of expertise, regulations, technology, the formation of alliances and the marketization of ideas and services. This model provides a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of advocacy than the existing literature and explains why some advocacy processes were successful while other failed. The model is illustrated through three case studies of advocacy focused on: (a) heritage conservation and sustainable development in Romania; (b) children's rights in Romania; and (c) access to the UK' labour market for Romanian migrants in Britain. The integrated model was developed through empirical multi-sited research conducted in Romania and the UK. My methodology was influenced by multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1998), grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990) and actor-network theory (Callon 1986; Latour 2005).