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The proposed study aims to capture the unique experiences surrounding grief of first-generation Indian-American undergraduate students. Tummala-Narra (2013) defines immigrants as having been raised in the country of origin and migrating to the United States in late adolescence or adulthood and first-generation as those born in the United States or arrived to the United States as young children. Research has shown that bereavement can have profound emotional health consequences for those surviving a loss (W. Stroebe & Stroebe, 1987). Additional components such as loss of expectations, traditions, and culture (Price, 2011) may contribute to mental health challenges for the South Asian population that are often overlooked across the immigrant and first-generations (Tummala-Narra, 2013). The United States Census Bureau (2010 ) stated that the total U.S. population on April 1, 2010 was 308.7 million, out of which 14.7 million or 4.8 percent were Asian. South Asians (i.e., people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal) were the fastest growing subgroup among the Asian population. (United States Census Bureau, 2007). Trends in Education shifted for Asians over time. In 1988, at least 38% of Asians had earned at least a bachelor’s degree, whereas in 2015, 54% of Asians who were 25 years old or older had a bachelor’s degree or higher (Ryan & Bauman, 2016) implying that there is a continued increase in the Asian undergraduate student population. Content includes a description of immigrant demographics, reasons for immigration, impact of immigration to the United States on family dynamics across generations, mental health stigma for this population, a review of the literature, gaps in the literature, theoretical foundation for the proposed study, purpose and relevance of the study, and future implications of this research.

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Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is primarily based on a corpus that was created during a total of fifteen months of original fieldwork, while building on and expanding on research reported by Grüßner in 1978. While the exact phylogenetic status of Karbi inside TB has remained controversial, this dissertation points out various putative links to other TB languages. The most intriguing aspect of Karbi phonology is the tone system, which carries a low functional load. While three tones can be contrasted on monosyllabic roots, the rich agglutinating morphology of Karbi allows the formation of polysyllabic words, at which level tones lose most of their phonemicity, while still leaving systematic phonetic traces. Nouns and verbs represent the two major word classes of Karbi at the root level; property-concept terms represent a subclass of verbs. At the heart of Karbi morphosyntax, there are two prefixes of Proto-TB provenance that have diachronically shaped the grammar of the language: the possessive prefix a- and the nominalizer ke-. Possessive a- attaches to nouns that are modified by preposed elements and represents the most frequent morpheme in the corpus. Nominalization involving ke- forms the basis for a variety of predicate constructions, including most of Karbi subordination as well as a number of main clause constructions. In addition to nominalization, subordination commonly involves clause chaining. Noun phrases may be marked for their clausal role via -phān `non-subject' or -lòng `locative' but frequently remain unmarked for role. Their pragmatic status can be indicated with information structure markers for topic, focus, and additivity. Commonly used discourse constructions include elaborate expressions and parallelism more generally, general extenders, copy verb constructions, as well as a number of final particles. Audio files are available of the texts given in the appendices, particular examples illustrating phonological issues, and phonetic recordings of tone minimal sets. Supplemental files are located at: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/13657

As a Religious Studies and Humanities: Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture major, I have noticed several striking similarities between South Asian religious philosophies and Continental philosophy. However, this also brought my attention to the severe lack of representation of South Asian philosophies. I began to see the resonances with Jainism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism. Therefore, my thesis explores the similarities between atheism, subjectivity and responsibility as common concepts between Sartrean Existentialism and Jainism.

This paper examines the acoustic characteristics that differentiate the four tones of Burmese: high, low, creaky and stopped. The majority of previous work on Burmese tone is impressionistic but recently has become experimental. There are conflicting analyses of how the tones are distinguished. In particular, there is disagreement about the f0 contour of the high and low tones, the consistency of creakiness in the creaky and stopped tones, the role of f0 in distinguishing the creaky and stopped tones, and the vowel quality of the stopped tone. Recordings were made of four native speakers of Burmese, aged 24-30, who read sentences containing a carrier word with one of the four tones and one of two vowels, /a/ and /i/. Seven variables were measured: f0 contour (onset, offset, peak f0, peak delay), duration, voice quality, and vowel quality. It was found that the high and low tones are differentiated from the creaky and stopped tones by onset f0, peak f0, relative peak delay, duration, and voice quality. The high and low tones are distinguished from one another by offset f0, peak f0, relative peak delay, and voice quality. The creaky and stopped tones appear to be differentiated from one another mainly by vowel quality. This paper adds necessary acoustic analysis to the literature on Burmese tone, with the finding that a variety of characteristics is used to distinguish each tone. The findings of this experiment also add to the current understanding of the interactions between tone and phonation, as well as phonation and vowel quality. / text

India is celebrated as the largest democracy in the world but is it truly democratic? Is it the nation-state that its founder’s envisioned it to be? Has it addressed it ancient issue of social diversity? This paper seeks to assess the present problem faced by the Indian Democracy; problems based on India’s inherent social diversity. Furthermore the paper seeks to recommend a solution based on Amartya Sen’s Open Impartiality approach that will allow the country to reassess its democratic platform. The paper also aims at providing a starting point to execute Sen’s approach by exploring the vision of two of India’s independence leaders: Mohandas Karamchandra Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

Inspired by my personal experience as a South Asian-American, I chose to create a series of paintings that seek to analyze the relationship between South Asians and a Western environment. I was further influenced by Bollywood painted posters, which I argue encapsulate postcolonial aesthetics in the form of fair skin, colored eyes, and exoticism. Moreover, I believe that Bollywood has continued to disseminate these aesthetics to the South Asian collective community. Bollywood and its implicit fascination with the West, in addition to its inherently South Asian identity, embody the struggle that many South Asians face. This struggle, which I as a South Asian-American woman painter have also experienced, includes a constant internal conflict between desiring to fit into Western culture and trying to maintain one’s cultural heritage within a Western environment. Ultimately, through these paintings and this essay, I seek to shed light on this complex relationship between South Asian culture and a Western context.