This thesis brings a focus to food and its cultural geographies by examining the ways that diasporic communities forge networks of distribution and the role of homesickness in shaping tastes in consumer societies. It also adds food (as material and immaterial culture) to diasporic geographies by highlighting the importance of food practices for migrant identities and sense of belonging. Through an investigation of food practices among Brazilians in London this research also contributes to an understanding of how this recent, numerous but under researched South American group experience migration in an everyday basis in London. The investigation undertaken includes desk research on food provision systems, semi-structured interviews and documentary field research with Brazilian food providers across London, focus group discussions with Brazilian migrants, periods of observational research in case study shop and restaurant outlets, and ethnographic domestic research with case study Brazilian households in Harlesden, Brent (an area of London with marked Brazilian immigration over the last decade). My analysis considers ‘Brazilianess' as a category and cultural-culinary form being made and contested in London. An overview of the dynamics of Brazilian food provision in London shows that this making and contesting operates through both the material culture of food provision and the social lives of public spaces such as restaurants, cafes and grocery shops. Brazilian food consumption thus operates in a number of different registers linked to practicality, emotion and ethnic identification. A closer look at public Brazilian food consumption spaces reveals how such places create collective migrant spaces of belonging by translocalizing Brazilian life. In the domestic settings, food narratives and observation reveal the materialities and practices of migrant home making in mixed households and the processes through which consumption practices are negotiated and contested by different household members.

According to estimates by Bosnian authorities, there are two million Bosnians and their descendants living in diaspora, the highest number recorded since the end of the conflict in 1995. Most of these individuals are forced or involuntary migrants who fled the genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign of Serb nationalists who sought to destroy Bosnia as a historically multiethnic homeland in order to create ethnically homogeneous Serb territory. Over twenty years after the war, many of those that were displaced have not returned to their former homes and are unlikely to ever return. This study contributes to deepening understanding of the challenges faced by those displaced as they struggle to rebuild their lives and future in a new context. It does so through a theory-based analysis of the notion of home and constructions of identity in diaspora following conflict, and the narratives of members of the Bosnian diaspora about their experiences of conflict and violence in the places they called home. The strategy of violence used by nationalist Serbs physically destroyed places and people's homes, but it also impacted long-existing social structures and relationships, transforming the images of those places. As a consequence, the dispersal itself and the causes behind it became a central element in displaced Bosnians' redefinition of home and identity, where the place of resettlement developed as the best place to be, a new home, based on a search for 'cool ground' and 'normal life.' Two processes have played critical roles in this reconceptualization. First is the expansion of the family network, allowing for a regeneration of family structures that were fragmented by conflict. Second is translocalism, referring to the community-specific ways individuals maintain attachments to their former home. The places of resettlement and their particularities influence these processes and activities, producing distinct conditions for a reconceptualized home. The study's findings suggest that further research into translocalism as an enduring solution to the condition of displacement would be of benefit, as contemporary refugees from Syria and other places of conflict try to re-establish life outside of their home countries. The findings also provide a foundation for research on the children of refugees, specifically on how memory and trauma are being communicated and passed on to them by their parents. / Ph. D.

This thesis is an ethnographic and gender-sensitive account of the identities urban Palestinian youth perform through their self-defined ‘alternative’ scene-based musical practices in the post-Oslo era. Departing from the problematic that Palestinian folkloric identity and/or the classical Palestinian national resistance paradigm dominate studies of popular and expressive musics in the Palestinian context, I ask instead how scene affiliates’ musical practices do, or do not do, political work, and in what way – if even at all – these relate to the nation, resistance, and Palestinianness. My approach is ‘bottom-up’ and qualitative, drawing on thirteen months of fieldwork in the interdependent cities of Ramallah (1967/West Bank), Haifa (1948/modern-day Israel), and Amman (Jordan). I carried out sixty-four in-depth interviews and fifteen focus groups with young musicians, bands, audience members, fans, DJs, beat-makers, emcees, producers, party planners, bar and club owners, and other related persons in the scene; as well as over eighty participant observations at concerts, parties, gigs, raves, and bars scenesters frequent. I conclude that their musics perform political work contingently, shifting according to the narratives and practices research lenses focus on, as well as the institutional and geopolitical backdrops hosting them. I argue that in a local Palestinian context, musics perform political, anti-colonial work beyond, and sometimes even against, the classical national resistance paradigm. Given Oslo’s failed ‘peace’ process, scene-affiliates critique the Palestinian Authority (PA), its institutionalisation of the national movement, and territorially-based two-state solution, re-drawing their community instead on the regional lines of bilad al-sham. However, while politicised content is foreground, it is not the only issue youth are concerned with. Many are reluctant to narrow their aesthetic positionalities to political frames, instead pushing musics’ social role as a site of conviviality where new (gendered and other) identities are imagined and enacted. Since Palestine’s globalising ‘turn’ in part enabled these emerging identities and social contexts, leisure and consumption play central roles in their embodiment. Hybrid and translocal in formation, scenesters use localised tropes of Palestinianness (dabke dancing, wedding musics), and globalised ‘hip’ fashions (tattoos, androgynous dress), musics (psy-trance, electro, reggae, hip-hop), and social practices (clubbing, raving, bar-hopping) to perform their imaginaries of alterity. Such translocalisms uncouple Palestinianness from Palestinian national identity, upholding Palestinian particularity while making room for internal differences. However, shifting research focus to a transnational context, I contend that when musicians are branded to London, their self-representations, or the representations their international hosts make of them, often foreground the national resistance, and/or folklorising identity paradigms disavowed locally. Reducing their complex subjectivities to narrow national-territorial frames, in this global circuit of consumption, Palestinian cultural practices perform British multicultural tolerance to ‘ethnic’ otherness on international stages. This, I argue, highlights that Palestinian musics’ reiteration of the nation, resistance, and/or Palestinianness often stems from the operation of geopolitical power, more than the musical content itself. My core argument in the thesis thus is twofold. Firstly, I make the case that scencesters’ musical practices express and enable neither merely resistance, nor solely submisson to the intwertwined status quos of settler-colonial occupation and neoliberal hegemony. Their musics are instead important sites of modest meaning-making. Moving beyond the revolution/co-optation binary reveals scenesters’ everyday and situated negotiations with various political and social powers. Secondly, I argue that since the transnational political economy of images often shapes how Palestinian musics travel in international spaces, we need not ask what Palestinian musics convey, but rather, why we are invited to take up a particular rendering of Palestinian art and culture, and – importantly – what can this tell us about the operation of geopolitical power translocally? Adopting transnational and translocal lenses to analyse how power shapes and normalises conceptualisations of Palestinian musics, my thesis thus calls for the need to see Palestinian cultural production beyond narrow national frames, and position it instead in the global contexts that inform, and are informed by, such aesthetic practices.

Set within discussions of gender, migration and social practices, this thesis explores the ways in which Thai women migrants to Sweden build connections between rural areas through their daily activities. Arriving in Sweden primarily through marriage ties, Thai women migrants are more likely to live in Swedish rural areas than in urban areas. Rural areas are typically not seen as a site of globalization or as receivers of international migrants. In contrast to these perceptions, the case of Thai women migrants in the Swedish countryside reveals a complex and vigorous set of social practices that connect rural Sweden across spatial and temporal scales. The aim of this study is to explore the ways in which Thai migrant women construct and implement social practices spatially and temporally. Drawing on the life stories of 16 Thai women living in Sweden, along with other sources of empirical data analysed within feminist epistemologies, this thesis discusses: In what ways does gender shape migrant social practices? How are social practices constructed within individual migrant micro-geographies? By what means are migrant social practices contextualized by spaces and places? Thai women migrants are gendered agents of these social practices and are utilizing specific resources, objects and networks to bridge the distances found in their daily lives. The empirical material examined in this thesis points to the importance of women’s everyday social practices in connecting and linking rural areas globally at different spatial and temporal scales. The results highlight the importance of a translocalism perspective to understanding gendered social practices. This study adds to the translocal discussion by demonstrating that social practices are embedded in multiple geographic sites and scales. Thai women migrants, in this study, emerge as significant actors in global countrysides and do the functional work of bringing spaces and places together daily and through their life course. This thesis consists of an introductory chapter and five papers. The introductory chapter outlines the context and theoretical approaches to understanding Thai migration flows to Sweden. The papers share an emphasis on local sites: homes, workplaces and community. They examine different ways that women construct and build social practices – for example, through food, community projects and in developing their businesses. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Submitted. Paper 5: Submitted.</p>