This thesis explores the relationship between the colour-blind public philosophy of republicanism and the French state's policies targeting the Roma. It addresses one core research question: how did political actors use neo-republican ideas to communicate and justify policies targeting the Roma? To do this, it examines the discourse of French and European Union (EU) actors involved in the formulation and implementation of polices targeting the Roma from 2010 to 2016. This discourse comprised political speeches, policy reports, memos, media clippings and 50 in-depth interviews with French and EU actors. Building on Christina Boswell and James Hampshire's theory of discursive strategies, this thesis focuses on the strategic deployment of republican ideas, notably the ways in which political actors were able to exploit their polyvalence. This thesis argues that political actors used four key republican ideas to communicate and justify policies targeting the Roma in France. First, a commitment to universalism allowed political actors to deny accusations of ethnic targeting while pursuing policies that disproportionally targeted Roma migrants. Second, political actors deployed the idea of a 'neutral' public sphere to justify the eviction and deportation of residents living in so-called Roma camps. Third, political actors used a logic of administrative selection to predetermine which evicted 'Roma' migrants were worthy of state support. Fourth, recipients of this support were subject to a state-led process of assimilation akin to a modern 'civilising mission', which political actors defended as a necessary step towards integration. This thesis concludes that it was precisely the polyvalence of republican ideas that allowed actors to deploy them to communicate and justify discriminatory policies. In doing so, it builds upon a growing literature on the role of republicanism in contemporary French politics and provides a rich empirical study that captures the influence of a general public philosophy on specific policy decisions. Additionally, it extends recent scholarship on the treatment of the Roma in Europe and contributes to debate about the challenges of free movement in an enlarged EU.

This dissertation uses the Icelandic-Canadian community to discuss alternate media and the production of “ethnoscapes,” or landscapes of ethnic identity, on the prairies from 1875 to the present. Drawing from larger historiographies of food, gender, material culture, oral history, and commemoration, it offers an investigation into power, acculturation, and representation using often-marginalized terrains of Canadian ethnic expression. Each of the project’s five chapters examines the cultural history of the community through a different medium. The first chapter uses clothing, one of the most intimate and immediate ways that migrants experienced transition in North America, to explore the impact of poverty, marginalization, disease, climate, and eventual access to Anglo commercial goods on migrant culture. Chapter two analyses the role of food and drink, specifically coffee, alcohol, and vínarterta (a festive layered torte) in everyday life and the development of migrant identity. The third chapter analyses the growth of conservatism and depictions of women in the Icelandic-Canadian community in the twentieth century, with a focus on the decline of radical Icelandic language publications and the rise of ethnic spectacles. Chapter four analyses the impact of centennial and multicultural heritage campaigns on Icelandic-Canadian life, popular narrative, and domestic space by tracing the emergence of the koffort (immigrant trunk) in intergenerational family commemorative practices. Chapter five continues the discussion of popular memory with an examination of the compelling hjátru (superstitious) narrative tradition in the community. It illustrates that Icelandic migrants imported and adapted this tradition to the North American context in a way that also reflected their understanding of colonial violence as an unresolved, disruptive, and damaging intergenerational inheritance. Providing an alternate view of the community beyond either cultural endurance or assimilation, this dissertation argues that the multiple material, visual, and oral conduits through which members have experienced life in the New World have been crucial to the construction of Icelandic-Canadian identity. It is through these terrains that community members have continually engaged with public expectations and demands for both ethnic performance and suppression. The fluidity of these forms and forums and their facilitation of members’ engagement with, adaptations to, and contestation of images of ethnicity and history have enabled the continual construction of Icelandic identities in North America 135 years after departure.

This dissertation uses the Icelandic-Canadian community to discuss alternate media and the production of “ethnoscapes,” or landscapes of ethnic identity, on the prairies from 1875 to the present. Drawing from larger historiographies of food, gender, material culture, oral history, and commemoration, it offers an investigation into power, acculturation, and representation using often-marginalized terrains of Canadian ethnic expression. Each of the project’s five chapters examines the cultural history of the community through a different medium. The first chapter uses clothing, one of the most intimate and immediate ways that migrants experienced transition in North America, to explore the impact of poverty, marginalization, disease, climate, and eventual access to Anglo commercial goods on migrant culture. Chapter two analyses the role of food and drink, specifically coffee, alcohol, and vínarterta (a festive layered torte) in everyday life and the development of migrant identity. The third chapter analyses the growth of conservatism and depictions of women in the Icelandic-Canadian community in the twentieth century, with a focus on the decline of radical Icelandic language publications and the rise of ethnic spectacles. Chapter four analyses the impact of centennial and multicultural heritage campaigns on Icelandic-Canadian life, popular narrative, and domestic space by tracing the emergence of the koffort (immigrant trunk) in intergenerational family commemorative practices. Chapter five continues the discussion of popular memory with an examination of the compelling hjátru (superstitious) narrative tradition in the community. It illustrates that Icelandic migrants imported and adapted this tradition to the North American context in a way that also reflected their understanding of colonial violence as an unresolved, disruptive, and damaging intergenerational inheritance. Providing an alternate view of the community beyond either cultural endurance or assimilation, this dissertation argues that the multiple material, visual, and oral conduits through which members have experienced life in the New World have been crucial to the construction of Icelandic-Canadian identity. It is through these terrains that community members have continually engaged with public expectations and demands for both ethnic performance and suppression. The fluidity of these forms and forums and their facilitation of members’ engagement with, adaptations to, and contestation of images of ethnicity and history have enabled the continual construction of Icelandic identities in North America 135 years after departure.

The importance of the thesis derived from the perspective offered: issues concerning immigration and integration often have been dealt with approaches which stress the conflictuality between faiths and cultures, or unload on the immigrant, meant as individual, the burden of a failed or successful "integration". ​In countries such as France, where concepts such as integration and assimilation continue to engage in the public debate even though they are dealing with the third and fourth generation of immigrants, the fallacy of these approaches is relevantly shared among scholars. Hence, my choice to highlight the negative inputs entered by the State/society, and perceived as threat and discrimination by the French with Arab origins, is justified by the need for a different approach. In fact, among the final results of the thesis, appears the trend (more or less extended among the young "Beurs") of re-establishing their identity on ethnicity and religion rather than their French nationality, since not always perceived by peers and institutions/authorities as pure French.