Malaysians’ journeys to pursue graduate education in the U.S. generate more than just degree attainment. This dissertation looks at how experiences in the U.S., both in graduate school and in the workplace, influenced highly educated Malaysians, especially in their exploration of push and pull factors that influence their decisions to remain in the U.S. or to return to Malaysia. This study focuses on twenty-two participants comprised of those who have returned to Malaysia, those who are working in the U.S. on non-immigrant visas, those who became Permanent Residents and those who are naturalized U.S. citizens. The first major finding demonstrates that decisional turning points emerged mainly based upon national policies and employment opportunities prompted by the high demand for talented human capital. Such turning points are crucial telling moments of when individuals make decisions. The second major finding is that push and pull factors -- which include economic conditions and opportunities, quality of life, social justice and freedom perspectives, as well as social network/ social capital -- are assessed through the comparative views acquired between living in Malaysia and in the U.S. The third major finding is that the challenges and experiences participants encountered in the U.S. prompted the formation of transnationalism, wherein their identities, behaviors and values are not limited by the location in which they live. They use a dual frame of reference to evaluate their experiences in the U.S. and the continuous relationships with their family and communities in Malaysia. Understanding the notion of transnationalism in the process of individuals’ decision making could help states develop policies that promote brain circulation. Policies that support this global mobility of the highly educated and skilled workforce would not just benefit those nations that send and receive students for higher education enrollment. Because 1) the knowledge economy demands the global flow of highly educated workers and 2) people who study transnationally develop a flexible sense of identity and location, policies that enable international mobility for brain circulation are significant for all nations.

Appropriate housing with security of tenure is an important factor in the immigrant settlement and integration process. However, many studies of immigrant settlement and the housing careers of immigrants do so within the borders of a nation-state without reference to transnationalism – immigrants’ ties and cross-border connections with the country of origin. This case study of the transnational ties and housing careers of Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto aims to increase our understanding of one recent immigrant group’s settlement and integration process in Canada. Using a mixed-method approach involving both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods, this study explores how transnational housing activities influence the housing careers of Ghanaians in Toronto. The findings include insights into the immigration history and the socio-demographic characteristics of Ghanaians in Toronto; the nature and extent of transnational ties between Ghana and Canada; the nature of housing careers among Ghanaians in Toronto; and the influence of transnationalism on housing careers of Ghanaians in Toronto. Although Ghanaians’ immigration to Canada dates from the late 1950s, Ghanaians started coming to Canada in noticeable numbers after the 1960s. Ghanaian immigration to Canada generally and to Toronto particularly surged in the 1980s and beyond. Deteriorating economic and political conditions in Ghana and relatively favourable immigration policies and a good economic climate in Canada were the driving forces behind Ghanaian migration to Canada. However, the Ghanaian settlement process in Toronto does not culminate in a complete break with the homeland. Rather, Ghanaians in Toronto have engaged in a range of transnational activities with the country of origin, including contacts with family and friends, travelling to or visiting Ghana, following Ghanaian politics, investing in housing or property in Ghana, running businesses in Ghana, attending funerals in Ghana, and making regular remittances to Ghana. With respect to Ghanaians’ housing careers, the study reveals that during their initial settlement period, most Ghanaians lived in public subsidized rental housing or poor-quality private rental housing. They considered their housing conditions as inadequate and unsuitable and were not satisfied with their neighbourhood’s safety and security. At the time of the survey, however, respondents were more likely to own homes and were more likely to feel safe and secure in their neighbourhoods. However, housing affordability remains a major problem for Ghanaians in Toronto. With respect to the influence of transnationalism on housing careers of Ghanaians in Toronto, the study finds that transnational housing activities, especially Ghanaians’ attitudes to and preference for investing in housing in Ghana, affect their housing careers in Toronto. Sending regular remittances to Ghana and investing in housing in the homeland involve mobilizing huge financial resources from Toronto to achieving their housing needs in the country of origin, while many Ghanaians struggle to meet their own needs in Toronto. A logistic regression analysis shows that personal income and strong ties with Ghana are statistically significant predictors of investing in housing in Ghana. At the same time, significant predictors of Ghanaians’ propensity to own a house in Canada include loyalty to Canada and household income. The study contributes conceptually and empirically to three areas of research – transnationalism, housing careers, and immigrant settlement and integration – which hitherto have been studied as separate themes. Conceptually, it breaks away from the traditional way of researching immigrant settlement and housing careers by introducing a new conceptual dimension, transnationalism. Further, this research has added new insights about a recently arrived immigrant group in Toronto. Finally, the study contributes to the social work literature by identifying an emerging field of international social work. It has drawn attention to the fact that in the era of transnationalism, the emergence of a population of migrants whose needs and lives transcend national borders will affect the future of social work research and practice.

This study aims to account for the high degree of influence and intensity displayed in bi-lateral relations between Russia and the other post-Soviet states - specifically Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan (BUK.) It seeks to do so by employing an analytical framework based around the concept of 'post-Imperialism,' arguing that persistent legacies of the imperial past have both ensured a high degree of intensity in bilateral relationships as well as providing pathways of influence over certain policy areas - primarily for Russia, but in some instances for BUK as well. It also seeks to examine imperial legacy issues as distinct 'types' - from physical economic and military infrastructure, to cross-border constellations of elite personnel to the normative and cognitive inheritances of imperialism amongst both the elite and the population at large. It concludes that Russia has been able to mobilise and employ power resources not available to alternative actors in order to 'punch above its weight' when competing with other powers for influence in the post-Soviet space, and preserve certain Soviet era patterns of relations. It is not the focus of this study, but it is to be hoped that the framework will prove useful for researchers in other former imperial polities in future.

In this project, I look at the work of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) and the role that brokers at the organization play in constructing, promoting, and institutionalizing a body of LGBT human rights. While a great deal is being written about the diffusion of LGBT politics and human rights discourses from the Global North, there are few ethnographic analyses of who is doing the exporting, how, and toward what ends. Based on a year of fieldwork in IGLHRC’s New York and Cape Town offices, I look at the history of IGLHRC, the interactions among brokers and how these shape their daily work, how brokers understand their mandate and the hybridity that it so often requires, and how partnership with groups in the Global South, the production, verification, and circulation of information, and the possibilities and constraints of the formal human rights arena all shape the work that brokers do. Ultimately, I conclude that human rights advocacy must be understood holistically if it is to be understood at all. Such advocacy always necessarily involves a degree of theoretical elaboration, promotion, and codification by human rights defenders and NGOs, and focusing exclusively on one or another of these aspects paints a skewed portrait of what it means to work within a human rights framework. Drawing from the anthropology of sexuality, queer theory, literature on brokerage, and interdisciplinary studies of transnational advocacy networks, this project aims to deepen understandings of how LGBT NGOs and the brokers that animate them regularly engage in the construction, promotion, and institutionalization of particular understandings of sexuality and the claims that can be made by sexual subjects globally.

Esta tese estuda o movimento social contra o livre comercio nas Américas, num esforço de defini-lo como tal, identificando seus limites e suas diversas e complexas dinâmicas de ação dentro do campo transnacional. A abordagem do objeto - como estudo de caso - é feita, primeiramente, a partir de sua reconstrução histórica, através de métodos qualitativos de análise de fontes primárias documentais, entrevistas em profundidade, bem como a própria observação participante do autor. Intencionalmente, apenas num segundo momento dá-se o dialogo com o corpus teórico dos movimentos sociais e a literatura recente sobre a ação coletiva na arena transnacional. Produto dessa discussão é a construção de um arcabouço analítico que termina por fazer dos conceitos de identidade social e estratégia/ação coletiva as peças centrais da definição de movimento social. Em um terceiro e último momento, o conceito é utilizado para retornar ao objeto e dar conta de sua complexidade. / This thesis studies the social movement against the free trade in the Américas. Its an effort to define it identifying its limits and diverse and complex dynamics within the field of transnational collective action. The approach of the object - as a case study - is made, firstly, through its historical reconstruction, based on qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, archival studies and participant observation. Intentionally, only in a second moment is presented a dialogue with the social movement\'s theoretical corpus and with recent literature on collective action in the transnational arena. The outcome of this discussion is an analytic framework that puts the concepts of social identity and collective strategy/action as both key pieces of the broader definition of social movement. At a third and final moment, this concept is used to return to the object and explain its complexity.

Victimes des persécutions du régime national-socialiste, près d’un demi-million d’Allemands et d’Autrichiens furent contraints à l’exil entre 1933 et 1945, en Europe puis outre‑mer. Plusieurs milliers d’entre eux trouvèrent refuge en Bolivie, le pays le plus pauvre d’Amérique du Sud. Nous nous proposons d’étudier la crise identitaire provoquée par la rupture de l’exil chez les personnes concernées ainsi que les stratégies identitaires qu’elles mirent en place pour tenter de la dépasser. Nous avons ainsi choisi d’interroger les difficultés spécifiques des exilés de langue allemande qui furent confrontés dans la république andine à un environnement socio-culturel très différent de celui qu’ils connaissaient en Europe et qui n’offrait que peu de repères identificatoires. Devant l’impossibilité d’une acculturation rapide, les exilés germanophones en Bolivie durent activer des mécanismes de défense et de (re)construction identitaire qu’ils mirent en place dans des espaces interstitiels transnationaux recréés sur place. Cette étude a pour objet l’analyse de la nature de ces espaces et des processus de recomposition identitaire différents, parfois divergents, mis en place chez les exilés de langue allemande en Bolivie. Notre réflexion s’inscrit ainsi dans le cadre de la sociologie des identités en contexte migratoire centrée sur les espaces socio-culturels et politiques collectifs ainsi que sur la (re)définition d’individus victimes d’une assignation identitaire discriminante. / Nearly half a million of German and Austrian nationals, fleeing persecution at the hand of the national‑socialist regime, were forced into exile in Europe and overseas. A few thousands of them found refuge in Bolivia, then the poorest country in South America. In our study, this dissertaition will analyse the identity crisis caused by the rupture of exile as well as the identity strategies those who were affected developed to overcome this crisis. We chose to focus on the specific difficulties of the Germann speaking exile who in Bolivia had to face a sociocultural environment widely different from what they had known in Europe and in which they couldn’t find any references to relate to. Since fast acculturation was nearly impossible, the exiles had to recreate transnational in-between spaces that would enable them to activate defensive mechanisms to (re)build their identities.Our study aims to analyse the nature of these spaces as well as the different - or even divergent - processes of identity reconstruction the German–speaking exiles established in Bolivia. Our work relies on the sociology of identity in a migratory context with a specific focus on collective sociocultural and political spaces and on the redefining of identities for people who were the victims of a discriminating label.

This study examined Americans' perceptions of immigrants as threats and their implications on immigration policy views as well as immigrants' actual involvement in crime. Images of immigrant groups result from the perceived threats they pose to the crime rate, economy, political power, and nativism (Blumer 1958). I argued that these perceptions result in opposition to immigrants and support for stronger measures to exclude undocumented immigrants. Of special interest for this study was the "criminal immigrant" stereotype. Previous studies demonstrate that immigrants are not highly crime-involved even when they experience additional stressors during their adaptation processes. Yet, according to Agnew's (1992) general strain theory, immigrants may be prone to criminality due to additional strains they experience while adjusting to the new country. However, many immigrants, through transnational activities maintain ties with family and friends overseas, thereby making the immigration experience less stressful. I argued in this study that immigrants' underinvolvement in crime is partly due to their transnational ties, which may serve a protective role as social support and thus condition the effects of strains. To examine the implications for policy views of perceptions of immigrants and immigrants' actual crime involvement, the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) and the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey (CILS) were used. The hypotheses were tested by conducting univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analyses. Overall, perceived immigrant threat affects opposition to immigrants and support for stronger measures to exclude undocumented immigrants. Among the various groups examined, the levels of opposition to immigrants differ from that of support for stronger measures to exclude undocumented immigrants. In terms of immigrants and crime, immigrants were not disproportionately involved in crime, as is widely believed by the American public. Contrary to hypotheses, however, immigrants' strains were not significant predictors of crime, and transnational ties did not condition the effects of strains on crime. It is recommended that future research be designed using more comprehensive data set(s) that represent and reflect the growing immigration population in the United States. Particularly, research should include measurements of micro-level social dynamics specific to immigrants such as additional measures of transnational ties and resilience.

This project considers the ways in which English authors and a diverse group of Japanese subjects co-produced literary representations of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that Anglo-Japanese encounters were defined by imbrication: by a number of overlapping phenomena that developed both coincidentally and as a result of contact between the two countries. Among coincidental developments, I include urbanisation and the development of a prosperous middle class in both Japan and England. Developments that appear to arise as a result of Anglo-Japanese contact include the prevalence of Social Darwinism in intellectual circles in both countries, as well as the growth of transnational bureaucratic networks. I refer to these phenomena collectively as "Japanglia," The literary implications of these overlaps--some highly ephemeral, others longer lasting--form the focus of this dissertation. In the four case studies presented here, I find that Japanglian phenomena compel us to adopt variously intertextual, inter-artistic, tropological, and somatically-focused approaches to our reading. My first chapter focuses on intertextuality in the work of Sir Christopher Dresser and Meiji bureaucrat Ishida Tametake. I find that the existence of Japanglian bureaucratic networks (formed in the overlap of English and Japanese bureaucracies) resulted in the publication of interpenetrative English and Japanese accounts of the same events. Japanglian texts may also be inter-artistic, using culturally blurred visual and decorative artforms as models for their own representations of Japan. This becomes apparent in my second case study, which considers the relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado and Japanese ukiyo-e prints . Tropologically focused reading is also of use when reading these texts, for common tropes circulated between writers of English and Japanese origins. This common tropology features in the work of Rudyard Kipling and Okakura Kakuzo ̄. Finally, as my study of the Japan writings of Marie Stopes suggests, blurring between the categories of Englishness and Japaneseness may register in the phenomenology of somatic experience.

Increased urban diversity in the metropolises of North America urges us to examine the different forms of mobility of transnational communities in cosmopolitan societies. Recent technological advancements, including developments in transport and communication networks, have significantly influenced participation in transnational activities and belonging to transnational social spaces. This study examines the relationships between long-term mobility (migration) and short-term mobility (tourism) by investigation the “visiting friends and family” travel of immigrants that best exemplifies the nexus between the two contemporary phenomena. As increasing levels of globalization and international migration are likely to be accompanied by increased transnationalism, the research uses transnationalism as a conceptual framework to study immigrants’ overseas travel. Research into the relationship between tourism and migration requires engaging with issues of citizenship as different categories of migrants have different rights in the country of settlement. This has implications for travel as revealed in the movements that occur between the places of origin of immigrants (which become destinations) and the new places of residence (which become new origins). These movements are likely to be influenced by the rights and duties of immigrants as citizens living within and moving around different states. This study examines the relationship between the overseas travel patterns of immigrants and their citizenship status. It also examines the role of ethnic and family reunion in shaping these travel patterns. The study also provides a deeper theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of ethnic reunion in shaping the travel patterns of immigrants and of the social and cultural meanings associated with the travel to the ancestral homeland. All of these issues are tackled by examining Palestinian immigrants in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and by employing a mixed methods approach engaging both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. Major research methods that are employed in the research include key informant interviews, questionnaire surveys, in-depth interviews, observation and field notes, and the use of secondary data. The study explored the politics of mobility for Palestinian-Canadians, an understudied population in terms of transnational practices and issues of identity and hybridity. It also explored issues of citizenship and belonging using extensive interview data with Palestinian-Canadians in the GTA. Throughout the thesis the highly politicized aspect of mobility/immobility, national identity, and national autonomy in the Palestinian case was present. The research highlighted the continuing role of state actors in determining mobility and rights, despite the increasing rhetoric of borderless mobility. The study reveals that the majority of the Palestinian Canadians travel overseas regularly and their outbound travel patterns demonstrate a significant ethnic component. Palestinian Canadians travel to their country of birth as their dominant outbound travel destination for the purposes of visiting friends and relatives and maintaining social and cultural ties, indicating strong ties with homeland that have ethnic links. However, Palestinians holding Canadian citizenship have a higher propensity to travel overseas than permanent resident. The return visits have social and cultural significance to the first and second generations. However, these return visits do not facilitate return migration.

This thesis tries to explore the effects of socio-economic status, gender and generation of Turkish migrants living in Berlin on their participation into transnational social fields established between Berlin and Turkey. In addition to this, evaluating transnational approaches used in international migration studies critically and acquiring a critical transnational perspective in the context of global capitalism are also in the interest areas of this study. This study is based on a qualitative field research conducted with 30 Turkish migrants in Berlin in 2006. This study maintains that, as well as global restructuring of global capitalism, new technological advances and nation state policies, migrants&rsquo / socio-economic status, gender and generation differences are vital elements to understand the way and content of transnational social fields in daily life of migrants. This study concludes that, apart from being liberatory, nation- state- based inequalities are reproduced in transnational social fields in macro and micro levels as dependent on migrants&rsquo / socio economic status, gender and generation differences.