The health care setting and available health resources impact the health seeking behavior of people. The transnational migrants from Bangladesh find the health care system of the U.S. fundamentally different from that of their place of origin. This study aims to explore the health seeking behavior of Bangladeshi transnational migrants living in Atlanta, USA. Through analyzing data obtained from interviews, participant observation, and autoethnography, this research explains how their transnational status impacts their perception of health and health seeking behavior.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

Re-Reading the American Renaissance in New England and in Mexico City is a bi-national literary history of the confluence of concerns unevenly shared by new world liberal intellectuals in New England and in Mexico City. This dissertation seeks to fill a gap in our understanding of the complex history that informs the multi-faceted public and private spheres of the United States and Mexico in the twenty-first century. I introduce translations of nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals from the interior of Mexico who were preoccupied with many of the same ideas and problems characteristic of US American literary nationalism: the nation in moral crisis, the post-/neo-colonial onus of originality in the new world, the hypocrisies of race-based romantic nationalism, and the inherent contradictions of economic and political liberalisms. These inter-textual juxtapositions shift the analysis of US American liberal nationalism from a nation-based narrative of success or failure to the study of the complex, unequally distributed failures of liberalism across the region. Each chapter offers a new contextualization of the US American renaissance that demonstrates the period to be a complex palimpsest of provincial prejudices, liberal nationalisms, and cosmopolitan strategies. In Chapter Two I read the trans-american jeremiads of Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, and Henry David Thoreau and Carlos María de Bustamante, Mariano Otero, and Luís de la Rosa in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Chapter Three focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Ignacio Ramírez's incommensurate preoccupations with the origins of language and their inter-related post/neo-colonial bids for national recognition on a Eurocentric geopolitical stage. The travel accounts of William Cullen Bryant’s trip to Mexico City in 1872 and Guillermo Prieto’s overnight stay in Bryant’s Long Island home in 1877 set the scene in Chapter Four to explore the bi-national tensions inherent in their oddly inter-related romantic nationalisms. Furthermore, the insights of this bi-national literary history invite us to recognize the contours of our own geopolitical positions, and in recognizing them, to re-orient nationalist epistemologies and literary histories as deeply conversant with contemporaneous traditions otherwise considered peripheral and/or foreign. / text

Tensions exist in the way that the European Union is conceptualised. How do we reconcile the persistence of a Europe of fragmented nation-states and the European integration project based on the principle of free movement? This duality is indicative of different geographical visions: between space defined as places and space defined as unifying flows. While places tend to be associated with fixed territories and borders, it is argued that complex global flows and connections may disrupt such notions. Addressing these theoretical tensions, this thesis examines transnational frameworks for discussing the reconfiguration of borders and spaces within the European Union. The aim of this research is to explore the extent to which European Union citizens, with freedom of movement, experience mobility between member states in a frictionless manner. The thesis adopts a “bottom-up” approach of migrants’ experiences and perceptions of internal borders, as barriers or opportunities to their movement and settlement. This is illustrated through the case of Britons resident in France. The thesis draws on data generated through qualitative methods, including fifty-three in-depth interviews undertaken in an ethnographic setting. The case study demonstrates how a frictionless European space does not exist for ordinary European Union citizens, for a variety of political, legal, economic and socio-cultural reasons. The analysis reveals how Britons recreate (national) state borders, by adapting to French politico-legal structures, and identifying boundaries between “us” and “them”. The thesis also identifies how transnational spaces are created through immigrants’ social networks. By exploring the everyday lives of intra-EU migrants, the thesis contributes to literature on British migrants in France, and provides an original contribution to studies of EU integration, focused on ordinary citizens on the move.

Den här uppsatsen undersöker den kurdiska diasporan i Sverige, utifrån intervjuer med studenter vid Stockholms universitet som engagerar sig i den kurdiska diasporan genom medlemskap i kurdiska föreningar och genom online-nätverk. Syftet är att undersöka transnationella aktiviteter och gränsöverskridande relationer i diasporan utifrån en intressant väl avgränsad grupp och hur de förmedlar positiva och negativa implikationer, samt känslor utifrån Irakiska Kurdistan som referens. Frågeställningen och utgångspunkten för uppsatsen är: Hur förhåller sig studenter vid Stockholms universitet som engagerar sig i den kurdiska diasporan till Irakiska Kurdistan genom transnationella aktiviter och gränsöverskridande relationer? Metoden som används är semistrukturerade intervjuer, analyserade med diasporabegreppet som ett teoretiskt ramverk. Genom att se hur respondenterna förhåller sig till Irakiska Kurdistan genom aktiviteter och relationer undersöks den kurdiska diasporan. Studien redovisas med citat från intervjuerna och det framgår tydligt att det finns ett engagemang för Irakiska Kurdistan hos respondenterna. Resultatet visar att flera respondenter är medlemmar i kurdiska föreningar och alla respondenter är engagerade i den kurdiska diasporan via online-nätverk. Alla respondenter svarar att de följer politiska och ekonomiska händelser i området. Flera av respondenterna har röstat i Irakiska val, en transnationell aktivitet som visar ett starkt kollektivt engagemang och hur viktig relationen mellan Sverige och Irakiska Kurdistan är. Att Irakiska Kurdistan är viktigt för den Kurdiska diasporan i Sverige tydliggörs också genom resor till området och genom en uttryckt återvändarrörelse där människor flyttar till eller tillbaks. Det uttrycks även att Irakiska Kurdistan är en fristad för människor och en arena för kurdisk kultur. Kritik som framgår är relationerna till grannländerna som ett nödvändigt ont och kritik om korruption, något som bidragit till ökade klyftor i samhället. Den kurdiska flaggan som symbol behandlas utifrån respondenternas olika perspektiv. En respondent nämner drömmen om Kurdistan som ett arv. Tydligt för studiens resultat är att Irakiska Kurdistan utgör en referens där varje individ i diasporan upprättar sin egen kontext. Något som innefattar gränsöverskridande relationer, transnationella aktiviteter och en ständigt föränderlig identitet.

This thesis examines the role of internet use in migrants’ participation in, and articulation of, rising Chinese modernity. It explores the ways in which transnational subjectivity is produced through this process. It investigates how migrants’ various uses of the internet construct and make sense of their connections with China. It demonstrates a new generation of subjectivity among Chinese transnationals that is tech-savvy, modern and triumphal – a subjectivity embedded in the exchange between the (macro) political economy of China’s rise and the (micro) everyday practices surrounding the internet. This is an ethnographic study focusing on an emerging population within the broader Chinese diaspora; that is, mainland Chinese professionals who migrated for higher education and professional training in recent years as a result of China’s reform and economic power. This study locates its enquiries in three offline-grounded institutions – ethnic organisations, states and families. These institutions pre-date the internet but increasingly turn to the technology for transnational and local connections. Regarding Chinese organisations, utilising the internet to build co-ethnic sociality is read as a symbolic practice that signals the users’ belonging to a technologically-advanced, mobile and wealthy sector within the broader idea of the Chinese community. On the role of the state, internet use provides new modes of migrants’ access to China’s state-led development projects, thus opening up new spaces for the state’s disciplinary power to be exercised. This digital governance is enabled by a discourse of Chinese triumphalism constructed by both the state and the migrants. Regarding families, the digitalisation of the gendered division of labour in transnational families provides evidence of the segmented nature of China’s digital modernity and disrupts the triumphal portrait of transnational modernity constructed among the elite-stratum migrants. Overall, this study develops a dialogue between two literatures. On the one hand, it adds to diasporic internet studies by introducing an offline-grounded, geographically-informed approach and by bringing transnational modernity into its research agenda. On the other hand, it draws on Nonini and Ong’s (1997) theorisation of Chinese transnationalism as alternative modernity and further adds to this theorisation with a focus on internet technology and a discussion of the impacts of China’s rise. It contributes to human geography by revisiting a key concept in this discipline – transnationalism – with a discussion of the interweaving impacts of information technology and the geopolitical shift of China’s rising modernity.

Situated on the north-eastern coast of Morocco, the Spanish enclave of Melilla is a paradigmatic case of an unusual yet increasingly common kind of community. These are small, rather isolated communities with no industry or natural resources of their own, which rely heavily on capital and labour drawn from outside. Together with Ceuta, Melilla is one of the two only land borders between Europe and Africa. The enclave’s economic and political set up reflects its geopolitical importance. Across the border from Melilla lies the Moroccan province of Nador, home to one of the largest communities of Moroccan emigrants in Europe and a steady source of unskilled labour on which the Spanish enclave relies. Connections across the border are strong, including kinship links, employment networks and a wide range of both legal and illegal commercial transactions. Based on twelve months of fieldwork conducted on both sides of the border, this thesis departs from prevailing images of the borderland as either an abstract space of ‘creolisation’ and ‘hybridity’ or a locus of resistance to state power, and suggests, instead, that we carefully consider the large-scale political and economic processes through which places like Melilla and Nador are produced, and analyse the ways in which such global structures shape local reality. A fundamental aim of the thesis, therefore, is to elucidate the nature of the relations between space, place and capital at the Spanish-Moroccan frontier, and understand how such relations affect the lives of those who inhabit the region. This involves thinking about the language of a ‘community’ and the discourses and practices of morality that sustain it; analysing discourses of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ in contexts of institutionalised economic inequality; and understanding local conceptions of identity, morality and legitimacy, and how the three interact.

This thesis examines the role emotions play in the practice and sociality of Palestinian solidarity activism in Israel and Palestine. It finds that emotion is a subtle and sophisticated, and often ambiguous, form of knowledge and perception which is implicit in forming, appraising and adjusting the relationships participants have with intimates, fellow dissenters and public discourses on identity and the regional conflict. Fieldwork was based in and around Jerusalem and carried out over twelve months in 2011-12. This is a highly diverse transnational field where Palestinians, Israelis and Internationalists come together at specific times and places to practice various forms of dissent, largely but not exclusively against the socio-political conditions of the Palestinians vis-à-vis Israeli State policy. I present three separate propositions on Weirdness, Wrongness and Love, which relate to three different affective dimensions; perception, morality and loyalty. Each proposition also develops upon what Hannah Arendt defined the innate political faculties or activities of the human condition; thinking, action and judging. The perceptive quality of finding something Weird is found to produce doubt in the subjective mind, the purpose for which Arendt believed thinking to be a political act. The moral appraisal that something is Wrong, underwrites concerted political action in the public realm. Finally judging, as the attempt to understand the world from the perspective of another, is facilitated by the discourse of Love in the long-term loving relations activists have with friend and family, who are antagonistic to the aims of solidarity activism. Taken together these feelings are found to flow through and inform one another, constituting a nuanced affective understanding and appraisal of our world, one that is producing and maintaining a politically engaged transnational community of dissent. This community has been fostered to a large degree by the insistence and perseverance of a small number of Palestinians in villages across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, who call upon peoples of all creeds, colours and places to witness and experience the repression of non-violent resistance. If as researchers we are to understand the complexities of human life and practices, I believe we must carefully attend to this sophisticated form of emotional reasoning and begin to think not just about feelings, but also with feelings.

This thesis examines how different persons origin from Eritrea express their diasporic belonging in Sweden and how this appears in their stories about their former homeland. This has been done by five qualitative interviews that has been processed using a narrative analysis. The diasporic belonging is operationalized to the three diaspora indicators; Dispersion, Homeland Orientation and Boundary-Maintenance. These indicators help us to understand the persons dispersions in the transnational social field and different levels of long-distance nationalism in their homeland orientated positions. The result shows that the diasporic belonging differs depending on self-perceived events and stories among people of the Eritrean diaspora in Sweden. The narratives in the study discern different beliefs about religion and political participation in the direction to Eritrea, which indicates that the Eritrean diaspora in Sweden is dynamic and multifaceted.

This multi-sited ethnographic case study examines how transnationalism shapes the everyday lives of young immigrant children, particularly their literacies, identities, and learning. This study involved three second-generation Korean immigrant children whose lives encompass multiple languages, cultures, and countries through close connections with their parental homelands. Informed by a transnationalism framework and sociocultural perspective on literacy, I focused on three specific questions: How do second-generation immigrant children engage with language and literacy in and across various spaces? What transnational funds of knowledge do they build as they move across contexts? How do they position themselves and represent their identities? I employed a multi-sited ethnographic stance and collected data for one year in two locations: North Carolina, United States, and Seoul, South Korea. The data collected include participant observations, fieldnotes, parent questionnaires and interviews, child-centered interview activities, artifacts, documents, photographs, and a reflective journal. Findings from the research indicated that second-generation immigrant children play crucial roles in building, maintaining, and extending transnational networks. As these children moved across geographical boundaries, they flexibly drew on multiple languages, linguistic features, and modes. As active agents, they engaged in the circulation of care by circulating love, support, and educational resources with family members across national borders. The children also mobilized their transnational funds of knowledge beyond local-global contexts through playful engagements that I refer to as transcultural play. Finally, the children presented complex and evolving transnational ways of belonging, which demonstrated that active participation in transnational practices does not necessarily lead to strong identification with the parents’ home culture. This study provides a more comprehensive and nuanced picture of young immigrant children living in a transnational and transcultural world and challenges previous claims that second-generation immigrants lose meaningful connections with their parental homelands. By demonstrating the flexibility and mobility of young immigrant children’s literacies, identities, and learning, I provide theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical insights that are essential for researchers and educators interested in cultivating a transnational curriculum and honoring young immigrant children’s mobile experiences.