Thesis advisor: Hans deWit / Ethiopia has long been affected by the out flow of its educated citizens. In major host countries, like the United States, the Ethiopian diaspora constitutes a considerable number of highly educated professionals, including those who work in academic and research institutions. Meanwhile, the fast-growing Ethiopian higher education severely suffers from lack of highly qualified faculty. In recent years members of the Ethiopian academic diaspora have been engaged in various initiatives towards supporting the emerging Ethiopian higher education. Yet, these initiatives have been fragmented, individually carried out, and challenged by the lack of a systemic approach, among other things. Further, there are only few studies examining diaspora engagement in the Ethiopian context, much less specific to higher education. The purpose of this research is, therefore, to offer deeper insight into the formation and implementation of transnational engagement initiatives by the Ethiopian academic diaspora. The research explores the motivation for and the modalities of engagement, as well as the enabling and challenging factors. This study employs phenomenological approach and Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice as a lens to analyze data from in-depth interviews with 16 Ethiopian diaspora academics in the US. The research departs from previous works by examining the issues from the perspectives of those who have first-hand experience of the phenomenon. Its findings reveal that transnational engagement among academic diaspora is shaped by complex and multi-layer personal, institutional and broader environmental factors, which transcend common considerations in addressing brain drain. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

The following essay argues that Transnational Civil Disobedience may be justified when it is applied to questions relating to global climate change. Civil Disobedience as a politically motivated form of lawbreaking posits questions regarding political obligation and citizenship and such questions are amplified when applied to the transnational level.Furthermore, this essay focuses on the influential account of Civil Disobedience as it has been formulated by John Rawls. The writer argues that there are potential issues with this formulation when it is applied outside of the greater scope of Rawls’s work. Instead, the essay argues for a formulation of Civil Disobedience that includes a politicizing feature, and to view it as an extra institutional form of political discourse that is detached from notions of state belonging.Finally, it is argued that the All Affected Principle may be used as a necessary condition for justifying acts of Transnational Civil Disobedience. The nature of Global Climate change as an event that affects the human race as a whole, gives rise to the potential for non-citizens to claim a level of political agency in matters that affect them despite lacking formal representation.

The purpose of this thesis is to achieve an in-depth understanding of how the Vietnamese people in Poland are involved in mobility within air travel (aero-mobility) for their transnational endeavors. This qualitative study is based on 4 semi-structured face-to-face interviews, 3 text-based interviews with the Vietnamese people living in Poland (VP), and on content analysis of texts and images. Air travel can, surprisingly, play a significant role in migration and ethnic studies. The analysis of this thesis relies on the theoretical frameworks of mobility turn, and transnationalism, focusing on the experiences, customs, and habits of the Vietnamese of Poland engaged in air travel. The analysis also includes how air travel can strengthen the diasporic and transnational links of the Vietnamese of Poland, contributing to ethnic weddings, charity events, and religious activities, securing their cultural identity in Poland. The findings indicate that travel customs and habits, social networks, diasporic activities, movements of goods, and exchange of cultures and ideas can be generated by a combination of mobility, transnationalism, and air travel of the Vietnamese people in Poland.

In the field of migration and development the economic impact of remittances is emphasized more often. The thesis examines remittances regarding social aspects as an important part of migration and development. The main aim is to understand the process of transfer of social remittances between Vietnamese living in the Czech Republic and their family members living in Vietnam. The important theoretical background of this thesis is the concept of social remittances. The process of transferring social remittances is scrutinized through semi- structured in-depth interviews with Vietnamese migrants and their family members in Vietnam. The paper describes the social remittances that are generated by transnational Vietnamese migrants in the Czech Republic and under what conditions the remittances were or were not accepted by their family members in Vietnam. The work uses a qualitative approach for data analysis that allows an insight into the lives of examined individuals. The results reflect the perspective of migrants and their family members. It is apparent that the context of migrants and their personal characteristics and skills - language abilities, length of stay in the destination country, extent of financial stability and level of education - plays an important role in the process of...

Roberto and his family moved to the United States from his native El Salvador after his older brother drowned on a desolate beach. As an adult, he returns to that same beach to reconcile with what his brother’s death has meant to his life and what he missed out on by being raised as an American. On that beach, he encounters Laurencio, an old fisherman who seems to empathize with Roberto and shares with him the legend of Hugo el Maximo, also a fisherman who was dragged away by the ocean but resurfaces and endures a difficult journey as he returns to his village. Entranced by the legend, Roberto listens to Laurencio, and his own difficulties and unresolved issues about origin, immigration, and identity surface as Hugo’s story unfurls.

This dissertation critically examines both the discursive and empirical significances of recent newcomers in the Haitian religious field, namely Korean and Korean American Protestant women missionaries. This confluence of Korean and Haitian Protestantism, which first emerged in the early 1990s, is a compelling case of the diversification of contemporary transnational and even global Christianity. Protestant Christianity was implanted in Haiti and Korea at around the very same time, in the nineteenth century, by North American missionaries who were inspired to work in new national religious fields by the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) and its evangelical fervor. In the eyes of North American missionaries, both countries were religious wildernesses waiting to truly receive and understand the Good Word. Since then, in both Korea and Haiti, westernization, Western hegemony, and Western neo-colonialization have featured strong undercurrents of North-American-derived Protestantism. However, the respective lots and religious fields of each country have been dramatically different overall largely because of national and global economic and political forces. South Korea enjoyed formidable growth both in its economy and its evangelical Christian population after the Korean War (1950-1953), resulting in Korean Christianity’s zealous participation in evangelical Protestant mission overseas, following the models of North American mission enterprises, especially toward the end of the century. Meanwhile, Haiti continued to suffer from natural disasters, political turmoil, and widespread abject poverty. Thus, overseas Haitian Protestant mission work is altogether non-existent, though internally evangelical prosetalization efforts are legion and often aggressive. Vodou and Catholicism, meanwhile, continue to captivate the majority of the Haitian masses, but Protestantism is clearly on the rise across the nation. In is into this socio-religious context that Korean Protestant missions expanded in the Caribbean nation, an expansion that has amplified especially since the tragic 2010 earthquake. Toward understanding these developments, this project investigates the influx of Korean and Korean American Protestant missionaries in contemporary Haiti and the reverberations of North American evangelicalism as channeled through and adapted by Korean missionaries. With all of these historical and contemporary contexts in mind, this dissertation more sharply focuses on a specific group of actors in the Haitian religious field, namely contemporary Korean American Protestant women missionaries. I argue that their activity suggests a new type of examples for current scholarly discourses about the relationship between gender and evangelical missions. By way of historical analyses of both Korean and Haitian Protestant Christianity and oral histories based on interviews with Korean missionaries in Haiti, this study argues that Korean evangelicalism has developed a distinctive gendered praxis that claims both continuity with and divergence from North American evangelicalism. It also shows that in both South Korea and Haiti, twentieth-century U.S. hegemony and military occupation were significant factors in propelling Protestant Christianity. / Religion

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Scholars over the last two decades or so have become increasingly interested in methods of interpreting history, society, and literature that do not rely on nationalistic paradigms. One vein of the transnational analytic trend is interested not only in the multiplicity of cultural geographies but also in the materiality of geography. Such critical work is extremely helpful in challenging myopic nationalist readings; yet the materiality of geography used as a theoretical lens has even greater potential. Using geographical formations as a basis for literary analysis can yield a theoretical base that has nothing to do with the borders of nations (whether it be one nation or many nations) and everything to do with the borders of the planet, a material planet indifferent to national affiliation. Instead of a transnational globe, we inhabit an a-national earth. In order for material geography to be used more fully for a-national readings as opposed to transnational critique, it is essential that the physical aspects of said geography not be subsumed in metaphorical applications. Geographer David Harvey has developed ideas about the different conceptions of space and time, and it is this research that can grant material geography a more precise and accurate definition in literary studies, and thus ensure that issues of materiality are not sidelined by metaphorical considerations. Wallace Thurman's novel The Blacker the Berry, when read through a lens of material geography that is focused with Harvey's space and time conceptions, suggests a method of identity formation complicated by the earth's physical insensibility to humankind (I focus specifically on mountains). Other texts of the New Negro era (namely the work of leading lights such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes) also show evidence of entertaining the planet's a-national characteristics. Members of both the old and new guard of the New Negro era worked to construct an alternative to the "Sambo" image of the Old Negro (Gates 130; van Notten 131-33), even though their views on what this image should be were radically different. While New Negro era writers' efforts to forge a new identity for the black person were explicitly focused on race and its connection to the United States, the mountain trope as used in their texts introduces an a-national perspective that challenges not only the identity building being practiced by New Negro era writers but also current uses of transnationalism which too often result in nationalism re-visited. By using the materiality of mountains in The Blacker the Berry to introduce a-nationalism, I propose that the novel does not simply explore identity (a point made by several other scholars) but also challenges identity-building practices.

Introduction: The African migrants that arrived in Sweden between 2005 and 2010 experienced a lack of regular contact with relatives and friends back home because of different factors due to the tools of communication during that period. Later, the migrants experienced a transition in tools of communication that allowed transnational communication with African countries, using ICTs tools of communication such as Whatsapp, Facebook, and others. Purpose:This thesis is focused on the digital transition in ICTs and aims to provide a better understanding of digital communication and it's impact on the African diaspora in Sweden. The research analyzes a specific timeline between the 2005-2010 period, which is split in three successive stages by the author ( Pre-transition, The transition and Post-transition). The ultimate goal is to provide a contribution to the existing theoretical knowledge with empirical evidence, thereby replenishing the Comdev academic field of studies. Methodology:To explore these questions, the empirical data was collected through semi-structured interviews with members of the African diaspora in Sweden Conclusion and contribution:The results show that the participants could not afford to buy on a regular basis the prepaid cards that were very expensive and ineffective. Emails were used by a few, also the internet was very expensive back home. The African's diaspora relationships with the homeland suffered negative consequences due to a feeling of abandonment felt by the relatives back home. The transition in communication occured after a few years, leading to a process defined as gradual, the learning of the new tools of ICTs and the cost of the smartphones played a role in the transition period. The following post-transition period allowed an interconnectedness on a global level and improved tremendously the relationships with relatives. Results also show that constant communication is becoming overwhelming on many levels and social aspects. The research revealed that ongoing processes during the transition process of digitalization are a broad field for investigation.

This dissertation argues that the interpretive framework from which Fontane's Effi Briest is commonly approached limits discussion to metropolitan core culture and fails to address Fontane's path-breaking accomplishment. After outlining limitations of some prominent approaches to Effi Briest in chapter one, my next four chapters explore alternative reading strategies that instead situate the novel in the imperial context of the new German state inflected by transnational relations and problematize the tendency to see Germany as a space territorially and culturally homogenized and stable. Chapter two reads the novel through Foucault's notion of heterotopia to demonstrate Fontane's heterotopic strategies as a counter-model to the monolithic mapping of novelistic space. In chapters three and four I use Bakhtin's chronotopic strategies to show how Fontane "fuses together" fictional time and space into a productive force for depicting society in motion and change. I demonstrate how this "spatial turn" breaks with the traditional time-paradigm and opens up space for polyphony and dialogism. Chapter five discusses Fontane's Wanderungen contrapuntally to draw attention to Fontane's counter-strategies, which break with the master narrative in favor of small-scale ones, to show their relevance for Effi Briest. The rest of my dissertation focuses on the novel's Eastern Pomeranian/Kessin-based chapters. Chapter six addresses the spatial arrangement of Hinterpommern from the viewpoint of the ruling elites. Chapter seven treats Kessin as a hybridized "third space" that both resists the dominant and represents an unstable and ambiguous alternative to paralyzing dichotomies of opposites. I also look into Hinterpommern as a contested space between Germans and Poles - and their competing claims over the Kasubians, inhabitants of the strategically important Baltic area. In chapter eight I show how the Polish margins impinge on Fontane's fictional representation of Prussia and are articulated in both the content and structure of Effi Briest. In chapter nine I discuss Fontane's representation of Polish/Slavic-hyphenated characters in terms of their different responses/resistance to anti-Slav/Polish prejudices and measures. In revealing the creative and transformative powers of margins this dissertation models alternative ways of approaching canonical writers and contributes to the transnationalization of German studies in particular and cultural studies in general.