This study is a qualitative interview study that examines antagonism, identity and collective memory among second generation immigrants from Bosnia & Herzegovina. The study is based on an existential history use-perspective and social constructivist socialization theory. The study shows that the Bosniak identity is seldom defined by their history and the Yugoslavian wars but rather by language and traditions. In addition, the results indicate that the Bosniak identity has been assimilated to a large extent into the Swedish majority culture. The results also show that antagonism against other ethnic groups in the Balkans mainly occurs among first-generation immigrants while the descendants do not relate to a large extent to the war crimes and atrocities that occurred against Bosnian Muslims. Instead, they express empathy and sympathy for their parents’ experiences of these traumas. The respondents also experienced a nonchalance towards their background in Swedish history teaching where their history was neglected in favor of other wars and genocides. While the respondents suspected a fear of conflict among teachers to account for the area, they also told examples when teachers failed in the relational pedagogy and homogenized the individuals by letting them represent an entire conflict and ethnic group. Overall, the study shows that the use of history is not a recurring phenomenon among second-generation Bosniak immigrants, and their attitude focuses on individuals rather than groups. In the didactic part of the study, the results emphasize that history teachers might need to self-educate based on the students' background to create a meaningful education and create a history awareness among students.

This research is an attempt to understand the living experiences of young adult Muslim SGIs, in Britain. This research advocates to understand their living experiences from the perspective of social identity approach which discusses multiple dimensions of identity, unlike acculturation theory which focuses on a mono dimension of identity. This research introduced a multiple social identity model for Muslim SGIs. Contrary to the previous literature, the first study, the interview study, revealed that they explained their conflicts with their non-Muslim British peers and with their parents on the basis of non-shared identity. With their non-Muslim British peers they shared cultural (national) identity, therefore, they explained their conflicts in terms of different religious values (practices); with their parents they shared religious identity, therefore they explained their conflicts in terms of different cultural (ethnic) values and practices. They argued that their parents practise various cultural practices in the name of Islam, and Muslim SGIs distinguished Islam from their parents' culture, and identified with the former, not the latter, and attributed their conflicts to their parents' cultural values. In addition, they explained that their religious identity enables them to deal with conflicts with peers and parents. The second study, the focus group, successfully validated the findings of the first study, and it broadened the understanding of the fact that SGIs and their parents both explained their religion in their own cultural context. Their religious (Muslim) identity also promotes their relationships with their non-Muslim British peers and parents, which contributes positively towards their British identity, and more specifically they define themselves as British Muslims. In the third study, the survey study, the hypotheses were developed on the bases of the qualitative studies. It was expected and found that British and Muslim identities were positively correlated; they had non-significant identity differences with the Muslim identity and significant identity difference with British and ethnic identities from their parents. Ethnic identity difference from their parents was the only found predictor of their attribution of their conflicts to their parents' cultural values.

Chapter 1: The Impact of Culture on the Second-Generation Immigrants’ Level of Trust in Canada Trust is one of the main elements of social capital; it determines the extent to which an individual cooperates with others. In this chapter, I assess whether cultural factors influence the level of trust in the population of second-generation immigrants in Canada. This paper is related to two strands of empirical literature. The first analyses the determinants of trust and the second studies the cultural transmission of values, attitudes and beliefs. I follow closely the literature on the cultural transmission and use an epidemiological approach to assess whether trust of second-generation immigrants is affected by their cultural heritage. This approach consists of comparing information about the outcomes of second-generation immigrants with that of the country of origin of their ancestry. We apply this approach using the Ethnic Diversity Survey (EDS), the World Value Survey (WVS) and the European Value Survey (EVS). Estimation results show that the average level of trust in the countries of origin of the ancestors of the second-generation immigrants has a strong significant impact on their level of trust. Thus, individual whose country of ancestry displays a high level of trust, tend to have a high level of trust. This provides evidence that individuals’ level of trust is not only explained by their personal experiences, characteristics, and the environment in which they live; but also by the culture in their country of ancestry. This means that culture does matter! I find that the results remain robust even if certain key countries are omitted or a different data set is used. Chapter 2: Decomposing Health Achievement and Socioeconomic Health Inequalities in Presence of Multiple Categorical Information This chapter presents a decomposition of the health achievement and the socioeconomic health inequality indices by multiple categorical variables and by regions. I adopt Makdissi and Yazbeck's (2014) counting approach to deal with the ordinal nature of the data of the United States National Health Interview Survey 2010. The findings suggest that the attributes that contribute the most to the deviation from perfect health in the United States are: anxiety, depression and exhaustion. Also, I find that the attributes that contribute the most to the total socioeconomic health inequality are ambulation, depression and pain. The regional decomposition results suggest that, if the aversion to socioeconomic health inequality is high enough, socioeconomic health inequalities between regions are the main contributors to the total socioeconomic health inequality in the United States. Chapter 3: Accounting for Freedom and Economic Resources in the Assessment of Changes in Women Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa This chapter assesses the importance of freedom in women’s wellbeing in twelve Sub-Saharan Africa countries by using data from Demographic Health Surveys. This paper presents a poverty comparison by using the stochastic dominance approach and relies on the economic resources and freedom as the two aspects of wellbeing which evokes the multidimensionality of poverty. This study is related to the following three pieces of literature: the sequential stochastic dominance, the multidimensional poverty, the Sen’s capability approach which is based on freedom. This paper is built on Makdissi et al. (2014) but differs from it in a number of respects. First, it focuses on poverty instead of welfare. Secondly, it applies the Shapley decomposition to determine the contributions of the economic resource distribution and the incidence of the threat of domestic violence to poverty changes over time. Consistent with previous work on the importance of freedom, I find that more freedom, i.e. less threat of domestic violence, affects women’s wellbeing positively since it decreases women’s poverty. The results indicate that women’s wellbeing has improved in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Senegal, and Zimbabwe and deteriorated in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania.

“Här kommer våra svenskar!” är en turismvetenskaplig studie som undersöker hur andra generationens invandrare från det forna Jugoslavien beskriver sina motiv till diasporaresor samt hur diasporaresorna påverkar andra generationens invandrare från det forna Jugoslavien identitetsupplevelser. Studien har hållit en kvalitativ ansats där nio informanter intervjuades om deras erfarenheter av diasporaturism. Den tidigare forskning om diasporaturism har legat till grund för vår studie. Majoriteten av den tidigare forskningen om diasporaturism fokuserar på första generationens invandrare. Forskning om andra generationens invandrare i allmänhet och andra generationens invandrare från det forna Jugoslavien i synnerhet är bristfällig. Denna studie påvisar att det finns indikationer på att diasporaturism har en påverkan på identitetsupplevelsen hos andra generationens invandrare från det forna Jugoslavien. Utöver att studiens informanter bekräftar den tidigare forskningens resonemang om diasporaturisters resemotiv kan studien även presentera ett outforskat bakomliggande resemotiv hos informanterna vilka är intressanta implikationer för den framtida forskningen. / “Här kommer våra svenskar!” is an tourism study that studies how second generation immigrants from former Yugoslavia describe their motives for diaspora tourism as well as how diaspora tourism effects the individuals perception of identity. This study has used a qualitative methodological approach where the empirical data was collected through nine interviews with second generation immigrants from former Yugoslavia concerning their experiences of diaspora tourism. This study shows that there is some indication that diaspora tourism has an effect on second generation immigrants from former Yugoslavias perception of identity. In addition to confirming previous diaspora tourism studies travel motives, this study also puts forward a previously unexplored underlying travel motive which has interesting implication for future tourism studies.

Ce mémoire vise à comprendre comment les personnes de minorité vietnamienne de deuxième génération au Québec négocient leur rapport au groupe majoritaire au prisme de leur expérience socioscolaire. Cette recherche part du constat d’un écart entre l’image de la communauté vietnamienne au Québec comme une minorité modèle, c’est-à-dire un groupe minoritaire qui a connu une intégration réussie, et la présence d’une barrière entre le « nous » vietnamien et le « eux » québécois. Je m’intéresse ainsi à saisir ces tensions sous l’angle de rapports majoritaires-minoritaires. Deux concepts principaux ont été mobilisés pour rendre compte de ces négociations : celui de la blanchité et de la racialisation. Les concepts des frontières ethniques et de l’identification ont aussi été retenus dans le but de comprendre comment ces négociations s’articulent au processus d’identification de cette population. Cette recherche qualitative se base sur treize entretiens semi-dirigés et sur une analyse thématique de ceux-ci. Les résultats de la recherche montrent des négociations avec la blanchité et le vécu d’expériences de racialisation dans les interactions avec les acteurs significatifs de la sphère scolaire, tels que les pairs et le personnel enseignant. La blanchité est principalement vécue comme une norme imposée et inatteignable pour les personnes racialisées. Les témoignages des jeunes Vietnamien·ne·s soulignent par ailleurs la racialisation des personnes asiatiques comme étant à la fois des minorités modèles et des éternel·le·s étranger·ère·s. De plus, les récits des participant·e·s mettent en évidence les processus d’exclusion, d’infériorisation et de hiérarchisation auxquels font face les personnes de minorité vietnamienne de deuxième génération au Québec. Ces processus s’articulent également au processus d’identification des participant·e·s et limitent leur choix d’identification. Ces négociations affectent aussi la manière dont les personnes de minorité vietnamienne de deuxième génération appréhendent la culture vietnamienne et la culture québécoise. / This master’s thesis aims to understand how second-generation Vietnamese people in Quebec negotiate their relationship with the majority group through the lens of their socio-educational experience. This research begins with the observation that there is a gap between the image of the Vietnamese community in Quebec as a model minority, that is, a minority group that has successfully integrated, and the presence of a barrier between the Vietnamese “us” and the Quebec “them.” I am interested in understanding these tensions and will be examining them through the lens of majority-minority relations. Two main concepts have been mobilized to examine these negotiations: whiteness and racialization. The concepts of ethnic boundaries and identification were also used in order to understand how these negotiations relate to the identification process of this population. This qualitative research is based on thirteen semi-structured interviews and a thematic analysis of them. The research results show negotiations with whiteness and lived experiences of racialization in the participants’ interactions with key actors in the educational sphere, such as peers and teachers. Whiteness is primarily experienced as an imposed and unattainable norm for racialized individuals. The participants’ stories also highlight the racialization of Asian people as both model minorities and perpetual foreigners. In addition, the participants' narratives bring to light the processes of exclusion, inferiorization and hierarchization faced by second-generation Vietnamese people in Quebec. These processes are also articulated in the participants' identification process and limit their choices of identification. These negotiations also affect the way in which second-generation Vietnamese people view Vietnamese culture and Quebec culture.