Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Abstract In the past, the main focus of migration studies was the investigation of influences of immigrants on the host society and their integration into the country of settlement. However, transnationalism studies currently place much greater emphasis upon the other side – which is the effect of living in diaspora, in the society of origin with trans-border citizenship. The cultural, social and political interactions and connections between Sweden as a country of settlement and Kurdistan (especially Iraqi Kurdistan), create a transnational social space where the members of the Kurdish elite can play a major role in improvement of Kurdistan. From here, their adoption of a double identity makes it possible for them to permanently define and redefine their position in Swedish society while simultaneously participating in the inherent development of Kurdistan. The merging of the members of the Kurdish elite’s discourse in rebuilding of democracy and development with regard to reconstruction, leads to more focus on the role of diaspora and understanding the Swedish Kurdish elite’s impact on “functionalizing” and major contribution in the current state of Kurdistan. The ways of expression, increasing academic value, multicultural behavior, and the elite’s activities in civil society organization in between two or several states, their appearance in the international scene, experiences of living in both host / home societies, and multi-relations in a diasporic context continuing and re-adjusting national identities are essential indications of trans-border identity formation of Kurdish diaspora. After the liberation of Kurdistan (northern Iraq 2003), members of the Kurdish elite experienced transnationalism mainly through transferring their success in performing various activities for their homeland and at the same time integrating more into the host countries that received them. During this research, the researcher met and interviewed a number of members of Kurdish elites who had very interesting stories about the Kurdish diaspora, and more especially the important role they play in the transnational space that connects the Kurdish homeland to many European countries and the United States. Using a phenomenology method, the researcher classifies the elements that can characterize the practices of Kurdish diaspora elite as transnationalism.  Sweden is one of the main countries where the Kurdish elite diaspora gathered and are organized to contribute to the development of Kurdistan. Since the Kurdish diaspora is the largest nation that lacks a state, the Kurdish diaspora has formed a long-distance nation in host country.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 338-362). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 416-470). Also available on the Internet for UW community only.

Between 2005 and 2009, Iran became one of the most significant immigrant sending source countries to Nova Scotia. My thesis examines the settlement experiences of Iranian immigrants in Halifax to determine whether they plan on staying in the province. I engage literature on multiculturalism and transnationality as a theoretical framework to explore what influences newcomers in developing a sense of belonging to Canada. By conducting interviews with Iranian immigrants, I found that social network sites are an important tool for integrating and facilitating political organization and transnational activism. Other findings suggest that lack of employment opportunities and dismissal of foreign experience are the main reasons for out-migration.

Prospective adoptive parents in British Columbia are required by provincial law to attend workshops on parenting. Key advice given to parents wishing to adopt transnationally, transracially, or both, suggests promoting a positive identity in their children; an identity founded on feelings of belonging within their own family, as well as an acknowledgment of their background. This advice is largely influenced by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, as well as Canada's national policy of multiculturalism. Bearing these external laws, policies, and ideologies in mind, this thesis explores how white Canadian parents who adopt black children from the United States respond to this advice. Within this thesis, I contextualize the adoption of black children from the United States by white Canadian parents in a local, national, international and global historical perspective. / Graduate

Doctor of Philosophy / This work draws on the insights of an anthropology of transnationalism to explore an emergent field of translocal connections, practices and identifications between reformed Vietnam and the post-1975 Vietnamese diaspora in the West. In the post Cold War period, it is argued, we have witnessed a collapse of the geopolitics of exile that once divided diaspora and homeland. In this context, it is not appropriate for Vietnamese migration studies to speak of "two" discrete national and diasporic Vietnamese communities. Rather, the discipline is required to come to terms (theoretically and empirically) with a complex and contradictory field of transnational social relationships through which diaspora and homeland are co-constituted. The thesis charts this field via the study of phenomena such as: the explosion of mobility between Vietnam and diaspora· the emergence of a transnational Vietnamese language commercial music culture; the constitution of translocal Vietnamese urban spaces in the host nations; the enabling of symbolic and market citizenship in a Vietnamese "transnation"; and the flow of overseas Vietnamese "grey" and "green" matter (cultural and material capital) back into Vietnam. Exile and fleturn shows how the state in Vietnam, and elites in the diaspora, have responded to the advent of transnational flows between homeland and diasporic sites by authoring both traditional, border-enforcing and novel, borderexpanding strategies of imagining and governing the "national" community. It argues that overseas Vietnamese have made sense of their own transits to and engagements with Vietnam through a logic of' transnational exilic space" that variously resists and accommodates the claims of capital, the state and diasporic belonging.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-195). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2003. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 416-470).

A number of international documents, NGOs and scholars have predicted that due to global environmental/climate change, the increased frequency and intensity of phenomena such as natural disasters, flooding, sea-level rise, pollution, and drought will be felt particularly in less developed regions of the world, and may force millions of people to leave their homelands. Given the far-reaching humanitarian and security concerns that have arisen with regard to the issue of environmentally-motivated migration, there have been calls for more empirical work to investigate this phenomenon, and particularly with respect to international movement. This thesis project takes a qualitative approach to investigating how environmental conditions in the Philippines are influencing migration to Ottawa, Canada. Using semi-structured focus group and personal interviews, it contributes some of the first ever empirical research on the links between environment and international migration to Canada. In taking a qualitative approach, it focuses on the perceptions and experiences of migrants themselves, and suggests that an emphasis on personal agency should be privileged to a greater extent in the environmental migration field. Additionally, by conducting research from a “receiving” country in the Global North, this research separates itself from the majority of previous empirical work in its field which has primarily been conducted in environmentally marginal areas in the Global South. In so doing, it provides a novel perspective particular to the experiences of long-distance and more permanent migrants. The results show that environmental factors are not currently perceived as migration influences for Filipino newcomers in Ottawa, although environmental factors do interact with political and economic factors in complex ways to influence migration decisions. This paper utilizes a transnational lens to demonstrate that environmental conditions in the Philippines may not act as direct migration influences, but they do impact migrants and their families through the social fields that are created between the Philippines and Canada. Previous work has primarily investigated the environment as a “push” factor of migration, making the transnational perspective an important theoretical contribution for addressing links between environmental change and remittances, family separation, and agency and power in relation to (im)mobility.