The uninitiated do not realize the complexity of the punk rock sub-culture. Outsiders may find it hard to distinguish the subtle lines by which differentiation occurs within the so-called subculture. The "punk rock subculture" is a misnomer; it is not a salient community. The experience of being "punk" is fractal; what it means to be punk and what classifies one as punk is in constant redefinition and there are various different communities with varying ideologies and identities. The punk subculture has absorbed various epistemologies in its 40+ years of existence, modified them, and made them their own. Within this milieu of experience there is a segment of the punk rock population that takes the anti-authoritarian, do-it-yourself ethos of the subculture to its logical conclusion: they drop out of society and "hit the streets" relying upon their wits, the good nature of strangers, and a vast interconnected support network of peers for their survival. There is very little documentation of the lives of this unique population and due to the precarious circumstance that they live in (i.e., the far margins of society), the risk of losing their history is a real threat. To understand why these punks became transient, one must ask them about their life history, ideological beliefs, views on life, family history, and personal experiences within the community (i.e., their story). My unit of analysis is the transient punk community. I have created a qualitative analysis of this community by collecting oral narratives of self identifying transients via participant observation. Data was collected by utilizing informal interviews and by snowball sampling.

Financial Transfers among New Legal Immigrants to the United States

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: B, page: 3826. Adviser: Ying-Yi Hong. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-52) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Nancy Abelmann. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-212) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Notwithstanding its significance as a communicative apparatus for social interaction, the general mechanism of politeness has been less clear partly because a wide variety of realization patterns of politeness strategies exist across cultures and languages. Researchers who are sensitive to the cultural and linguistic diversities of communication styles have claimed that politeness varies in its conceptualization and practices across cultures and languages, whereas linguists in pragmatics have assumed that politeness is a part of a universally rational communication system that operates in the same way for any language user. This study attempts to investigate the universal mechanism of politeness presumably built into any language system. At the same time, potential cross-cultural differences in values assigned to politeness are explored to determine what interferes with people's universal competence in perceiving politeness. In comparing native and nonnative speakers of English, people's judgments of politeness and other notions closely related to politeness were assessed for several speech act types in English. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

It is estimated that by 2025 the Asian population in the United States will be over 40 million; it will represent nearly 10% of the total U.S. population. Currently Chinese immigrants are the largest Asian group and constitute 22.6% of all Asian immigrants. With the Chinese immigrant population growing steadily, the Chinese elderly population will increase in the future. Historically, "Hsiao" (filial piety in English), rooted in Confucianism, teaches Chinese people to pay respect to living parents and provides rules for culturally defined intergenerational relationships and family caregiving, and putting family needs above individual interests. Among the Chinese, family caregiving is perceived as a duty, obligation, responsibility, and cultural virtue. The purpose of the study was to test a theoretical model specifying how factors including subjective beliefs of traditional filial obligation, subjective feelings about role requirements, perceived burdens, perceived rewards and use of coping affect Chinese caregivers' health in the United States. The aim of this study was to understand how caregivers' cultural background and the appraisal of family caregiving affect caregivers' well-being. Data from 137 caregivers were used to describe sample profile and for model testing. The original model failed to explain the data adequately. Two revised models were developed. Results suggest that data fit better with physical health, as indicated by CFI = .91 and the χ²/df ratio = 2.9, than mental health model, as indicated by CFI = .90 and the χ²/df ratio = 3.5. Findings suggest caregivers' beliefs of traditional filial obligation is a primary predictor for caregivers' physical health. Caregivers' subjective beliefs of traditional filial obligation affect caregivers' physical health not only directly but also indirectly. Implications for nursing research, practice, education and theory construction, and policy making were addressed. Limitations and recommendations for research design and interpretation of model fit were described. Further studies are needed to compare differences in cultural influences among different ethnic groups, identify effective coping style and test the effect of intervention caregivers' health.

The aim of the study was to develop a culturally sensitive Grounded Theory of Navajo parenting for families who are living with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)/Fetal Alcohol Effects (FAE). The research question was: What are the social and cultural factors and processes that Navajo families use to mange care for a child with FAS/FAE? The philosophical perspectives that guided the study were: the Navajo philosophy, or view of life; resilience (middle range theory); the Family Stress Theory; and the Resiliency Mode of Family Stress, Adjustment, and Adaptation. Resilience was used as the over arching conceptual perspective for the study. A Grounded Theory of Navajo Parenting emerged from the data. Key categories to support the emerging theory were identified. The core category was Versatility through Transcendence. The supporting categories were: Strategies for Managing Challenges; Transcendence in Parenting; Intergenerational Alcohol Abuse, Violence and Suffering; and Knowledge/Acquisition of Needs. The families described their stories of transcendence through substance abuse, suffering, and violence to be able to parent their children who were living with the primary and secondary challenges of prenatal alcohol exposures. Further research is needed to test and expand this emerging theory of Navajo parenting of children with FAS/FAE. The challenges that were related to FAS/FAE were more easily managed with patterns of resilience within the families. Factors that influenced family's abilities to parent will be disseminated to assist other families who are managing the problems associated with FAS/FAE.

States maintain order through the production and maintenance of classification systems that divide groups of people through boundaries, intentionally or inadvertently. The successful continuation of this boundary-work depends on the maintenance of state domination and hegemony. However, hegemony is always susceptible to challenge, and domination is a costly way to maintain power in a democratic system. In a case study of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, this research asks how the boundary-work of political elites, as a sense-making process meant to ensure order, was initiated, maintained, and altered during a crisis of racial hegemony. I examine how this organization, formed in 1956 by the Mississippi legislature to protect state sovereignty and segregation, transformed itself from an agency obsessed with the maintenance of a racial boundary to one committed to racial moderation. I also ask how the process through which the Commission responded to a crisis in racial hegemony informs our understanding of how elites accommodate change to stay in power. Files from the Sovereignty Commission regarding public relations and investigations are analyzed to understand the publicly visible and privately hidden strategies of the organization. Particular attention is paid to the discourse of these files, which provides insight into how cultural schemas are related to response. The analysis shows that a context of multiple audiences, and lack of full sovereignty, makes domination costly and the generation of consent complicated. White political elites lost the battle to maintain segregation, but ultimately retained power through the transformation of mutually constituting schemas and resources that composed the racial boundary between blacks and whites.

This dissertation reports on an exploratory study conducted to better understand the social construction of Native Americans by new student affairs professionals in the Southwest and the ways in which professional socialization experiences impacts on that construction. Data were generated from interviews with student affairs professionals at institutions in the Southwest with significant Native American enrollments. Data were also generated from the professionals' graduate preparation program web sites and from the journals and conferences of two student affairs professional associations. Native Americans were constructed by professionals as coming from isolated, impoverished reservations where they lived a traditional lifestyle. Native students were seen as struggling to succeed as a result of culture shock and deficits including alcohol issues, different styles of communication, and different senses of time. The aspiration of Native students who graduate was believed to be returning to the reservation. References to Native Americans were rare in graduate program web sites reviewed and limited to the sites of two programs at institutions with significant Native enrollments. Interview data indicated discussion of Native Americans in graduate courses was very limited. Two programs, both with several Native American students enrolled in them, included more substantial discussion of Native Americans. References to Native Americans in the associations' journals and conferences were not uncommon but few articles or conference sessions focused substantially on Native Americans. The professionals interviewed had relatively modest knowledge of Native Americans and almost no knowledge of indigenous-based resources upon which to draw in working with Native students. However, student affairs professionals interviewed felt qualified to work with students who are Native American based on the professionals' cultural sensitivity, a shared sense of in group experiences, and the belief that knowledge of theories for other minority groups or minority groups in general would suffice. Data generated during the interviews indicated diversity and multiculturalism were absent from performance reviews and would enter into reviews on when there were problems. Professionals participating in the study constructed multiculturalism as a quality to be imbued in students and institutions for reasons of social justice and the marketplace.

This dissertation describes interactions between tribal and federal program bureaucrats of an education and labor training program for Indian youth, and tribal members on a reservation in the western United States. The goal of the program was to prepare Indian youth to enter the workforce through education, and training and then maintain employment. This goal was undermined at the program site by non-Native executive program personnel and tribal bureaucrats whose definition of "success" and expectation of youth achievement were culturally different than that of tribal youth workers and youth. Systems in which Indian people participate are in many cases socially disruptive as well as psychologically violent---they are often, quite literally, "out of control." Yet indigenous communities resist compliance within these systems. The focus of this study is on the complex nature of this historical matrix of power, control, resistance, and compliance. This dissertation uses a combined focus of social and psychological analysis to document the social history of Indian education administered as a ritual of assimilation, the bureaucratic processes that constrain Indian people from using education as a ritual of empowerment, and critically examines the people's resistance within the bureaucracies. The primary research questions are: (a) What are the bureaucratic processes that hindered the youth workers in successfully in advocating for their youth? (b) How do the youth workers resist these bureaucratic machinations? Through participant and non participant observation and ethnographic interview I describe how the bureaucratic processes which hinder collectively manifest from a deficit paradigm projected upon the workers. The youth worker's most consistent form of resistance was to voice their opinions about what was going on, and to explicitly name the actions of oppression.