Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The aim of this study was to examine the discourse of asylum seekers in Sweden from January 2009 to December 2013 in the newspapers Helsingborgs Dagblad and Dagens Nyheter. By using discourse analysis as a theory and method, combined with the theory of orientalism, I have analysed and compared news articles from these two newspapers. The findings of the study shows that asylum seekers are often portrayed as a group rather than individuals. Included in the group identity are several subgroups, for example asylum seekers are portrayed as victims, as a cost to society and as a highly suspect group that cannot be controlled. Furthermore, asylum seekers are depicted as “the other” in contrast to the Swedish “we”, where differences in culture and tradition are frequently mentioned. The analysis also highlights the differences between what the two newspapers believe are the main difficulties in taking in asylum seekers into the community. Whereas articles in the nationwide Dagens Nyheter see the resistance in municipalities as the major problem, the local newspaper Helsingborgs Dagblad describes how municipalities are being forced to take in asylum seekers even though they do not have the resources to manage them.

The Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum opened in the summer of 1872, and was abandoned in 1994. The number of women who passed through its walls remains unknown. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, a system of religious-run female penitentiaries founded to incarcerate society’s so called ‘fallen’ women, is a part of the country’s past traditionally met with reticent silence. For the atonement of their perceived sins, the inmates worked in the Magdalen laundries for no pay. The arduous labour was symbolic; the washing of soiled linen, for the purging of one’s soul. The inmates were held under no legal authority, had committed no crime, and were assigned no sentence; many women, unaware of their rights, were held in the laundries until they died. These institutions existed in Ireland over the span of three centuries, the last closing in 1996. Though a dialogue has begun to surround this chapter of Irish history, the issue remains far from resolved. The government has made no official acknowledgment or apology for their role in perpetuating such a shocking stance on social policy, while the Catholic orders responsible will not recognize the suffering caused at their hands. The Church refuses to release archival records that document the identities and numbers of the Magdalen women who worked in the laundries during the twentieth century. It is estimated that 30 000 ‘fallen’ women were put through this system - women who, with no records of their lives available, remain erased by anonymity. This lack of archival information has rendered the laundries, in Ireland’s collective consciousness, more in story than in history. The architecture that witnessed this past has since fallen victim to time. Whitewashed over with redevelopments, or left to fall into decay, the laundries, and their stories, are disappearing. Their place in the collective memory hangs in the balance, dwindling in the walls of their ruins. The sense of place, or memory, that is recorded in architecture, lingers in the folds of the ruin. Hovering like a ghost over its ashes, it becomes orphaned. As such, the preservation of place becomes laden with a sense of urgency. It becomes a problem of representation. Taking what remains of the Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum as a point of entry, I have endeavoured to decipher the fragments of the ruin as a reference to the whole, to, as Victor Hugo writes in Notre-Dame de Paris, turn the mountain of architecture into the imperishable flock of birds – the petrified memory into the narrative one. This is done in three parts. The first introduces the site’s historical and social context, composing a portrait of the building through the ephemera of its past. The second addresses the presence of absence in the return to the ruin, focusing its investigation on the imaginary space that stretches out between the shadow of the past-self, embodied in the built world, and the return of the present-self to this embodiment once it has fallen into ruin. This is followed by a series of meditative narratives constructed from the historical, latent, and projected memories contained within the ruin of the Magdalen Asylum in Cork. Part three is a rumination on the ruin, speculating on its role within human consciousness. The ruin of the Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum testifies to a dark history - one that remains largely unresolved, one that many would rather forget. This history has yet to find its place in Ireland’s collective memory and, with the vestiges of its past rapidly dissolving, it is in danger of erasure.

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The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’, and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888. It explores the way that particular, albeit contested, images of Aborigines ‘became legislative’. It surveys the declining influence of liberal and Evangelical ‘philanthropy’ at the end of the 1830s, the pragmatic moral slippages that transformed humanitarian gestures into colonial terror, and the part played by the Australians in the emergence of the concept of race as the chief vector of colonial power. (For complete abstract open document)

Thesis (LL.M.). / Written for the Dept. of Law. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/05/13). Includes bibliographical references.

Written for the Institute of Comparative Law. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2010/04/20). Includes bibliographical references.

In today’s society media constitutes an arena with the opportunity for social communication. The arena is made up of subjective opinions that often leads to free debates about the subjects written about. The recent refugee situation has been highlighted in Swedish media during 2015 and has received widespread attention from various media outlets. The purpose of this paper is to examine how different Swedish newspapers chooses to portray the arriving asylumseekers. The material used is a selection of editorial pages in five daily newspapers. The theories used to evaluate how the newspapers are portraying the asylum seekers is the framing theory and agenda-setting theory. This research uses a qualitative case study approach that is complemented with a media analysis. The results of the research indicate that editorial writers do not differentiate in their description between different ethnic or cultural groups that are seeking asylum. Rather, there is a strong focus in writing about how the refugees are contributing negatively in the development of the Swedish society. The results also showed an indication that the content differs depending on the political standing of the newspaper.

This thesis is a multi-sited ethnography of sub-Saharan migrants' journeys through Libya and by boat to Malta. Its overall aim is to understand how undocumented migrants make and conceptualise their complex journeys through shifting regulatory landscapes. The thesis draws upon, and consequently develops, understandings of migrants' mobilities, both within anthropology and wider migration studies. Over the course of their journey through Libya and Malta, sub-Saharan migrants move across uneven topographies in place and time, from the vast expanse of the Sahara Desert to the turbulent Mediterranean Sea, from situations of detention to everyday houses in society, from the hands of smugglers to the arms of the law. To this end, the thesis is guided by three wider objectives. First, investigating how different forms of mobility are part of migrants' journeys. Second, examining how migrants navigate such journeys. And third, understanding the ways in which migrants encounter and negotiate borders en route. These objectives are engaged with through a multi-sited ethnography tracing migrants' journeys through five contexts: sites of confinement and detention in Libya, everyday spaces of Libyan society, the boat crossing, and finally the legal framework in Malta. These varying contexts prompt comparisons across particular sites, processes and practices on a journey, highlighting elements that might be generalized and those that are specific. The ethnography is presented in five chapters, their sequence mirroring the overall journey of migrants through Libya and Malta. Unpacking the journey and mobility, this thesis develops a set of interrelated arguments. First, it deconstructs the notion of migrants as a homogenized group of people on a linear trajectory aimed at Europe. It goes beyond typologized understandings of migrants, such as legal, illegal, refugee or asylum seeker, that fix migrants into static categories linked to the state or specific crisis situations. Second, it front-stages the journey as a focal point of inquiry, thereby addressing a theme under-acknowledged in the anthropology of mobility and migration. This enables a move beyond state-centric and isolated understandings of migrants' mobilities to one that accounts for the multiplicity of journeys and processes en route. Third, this emphasis on the journey highlights the importance of thinking through relations involving multiple actors and bordering encounters. Taken together, these arguments advance important insights into the anthropologies of mobility and migration. The thesis makes wider contributions by conceptualizing an 'architecture' of the journey, constituted by three inter-related components: mobility, navigation, and borders. They offer a more nuanced understanding of migration and mobility in (post-)conflict settings, one that not only has implications for understanding sub-Saharan migrants' journeys through Libya and by boat to Europe, but one also relevant to other crisis contexts as well.

Research with refugees tends to be dominated by mainstream medical and trauma models. However, development of resilience theories and research on coping increasingly find that such constructs can open up currently limited understandings of the refugee experience. This research took a culturally relativist approach to explore experiences of coping in young unaccompanied refugees in the UK. Following extensive consultation, five young refugees were recruited, who were living independently or semi-independently having arrived in the UK without their family, at the age of 15 or 16. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to explore experiences and understanding of 'coping', whilst acknowledging the relative contributions of their own and my own cultural frameworks and the limitations of language; three participants made use of having an interpreter present. The accounts are presented idiographically, under three major themes that were apparent on multiple levels of the refugees' lives, from the individual to the cultural: 'Adaptation in the context of hardship and loss', 'Beliefs and worldview in shaping a new life', and 'Building strength and self-reliance'. These findings contribute to research finding resilience in refugee lives, whilst not to the detriment of incredible loss and pain. The research attests to the significance of cultural frameworks in refugee coping, with religion playing a key role. The themes are discussed in relation to existing literature and relevant texts, with implications for further research and clinical practice. The role of professionals as allies of refugees is suggested, in promoting socially inclusive practices that involves work both in the clinic and on community and social levels.