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The twentieth-century brought a rapidly increasing global mobility and is causing a de-territorial effect on the world. The borders of countries are becoming more fluid. The bounds of cultures that were based on nationality, have become blurred, contested, open-ended, and unstable. These frequently modified cultural boundaries have created multiple cultural diasporic groups. A diaspora is a large group of people with a similar heritage or homeland who have since moved out to places all over the world. Globalism, with its elusive cultural identity, leads to a seemingly unified world culture and the once static sense of nation-state-based cultural identity is now mobile. This mobility and replacement of our locations destabilize our traditional sense of identity that traditionally has been deeply rooted in a sense of nation-state. As a reaction and resistance to the global forces, “localism,” or “nativism,” have simultaneously increased. Thus, the cultural diaspora can be understood as a journey through multiple magnitudes of cultural boundaries. This thesis reviews cultural identity with an emphasis on cultures that are undergoing a diasporic condition. I specifically emphasize notions of the nationality of a selected diasporic group of Bangladeshi people living in New York City over the past few decades. The vehicle of the research is the study of their current cultural identification, considering the varied struggles of this group in their new host land. After assembling and acquiring a holistic understanding of the current condition (economic, social, and political) of this group, a set of appropriate programs will be proposed to be incorporated into the design for a cultural center. The primary goals of this project are to encourage the socio-cultural, economic, and educational enhancement of Bangladeshi people living in New York City. The project will also raise a sense of unity among the diasporic group and enable a better understanding of cultural interchange.

This thesis addresses the question ‘how can breastfeeding support services best meet the needs of women of Bangladeshi origin living in the UK?’ Breastfeeding is important for health, potentially contributing to reducing health inequalities. National surveys show that women of Bangladeshi origin have high initiation rates but low rates of continuation and exclusive breastfeeding. An initial literature review revealed that existing research relating to breastfeeding and the Bangladeshi community was descriptive and essentialist representing ethnic groups as homogenous and failing to recognise the influence of structural factors. Quantitative analysis of 357 Bangladeshi women in the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) provided a more detailed national context for the qualitative research.A cumulative qualitative design underpinned by reflexivity was used comprising focus groups and interviews with grandmothers, fathers, mothers and health practitioners. Sampling was purposive for the family and practitioner phases and theoretically-informed for the mothers’ interviews. Analysis used ethnographic and narrative approaches to make sense of individual experiences within social context.The main finding was that the breastfeeding support needs of women of Bangladeshi origin were generally similar to the majority population. However to improve breastfeeding support practitioners need to understand where cultural context makes a difference. Practitioners misrecognised diversity of the Bangladeshi population in the UK including how ethno-religious identities as a minority group within a hostile majority were constituted and impacted on women’s lives. The family context of breastfeeding, including living arrangements, household responsibilities and family relationships mediated women’s access to time and space for breastfeeding. While practitioners recognised these pressures on women, they were used to affirm stereotypes of women as passive. This combined with lack of confidence and organisational constraints led to practitioners feeling powerless to support breastfeeding. Alongside implementing good practice for breastfeeding and culturally competent care, health services could engage with families, provide bilingual advocacy workers and involve women in designing accessible breastfeeding support services.

The right to participate and express a view is an intrinsic right afforded to all human beings, regardless of age (Lundy, 2007). Explicitly, Articles 12, 13, 14 and 15 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) grant participatory rights to children and young people in decision-making. One of the forms of participation academics and practitioners have studied over the past decades, the engagement of children and young people in participatory processes, is moving away from the understanding of children as passive recipients of research to active participants. However, literature has paid scant attention to research led directly by children and young people (Thomas, 2015). Child-led research is understood, as starting definition from literature, as an approach in which children and young people are involved in all stages - from planning, fieldwork and analysis to dissemination. The aim of this research is to critically explore how the process and outcomes of children and young people's participation in their own child-led research contributes, positively or negatively, to decision-making processes in the context of international development programmes. The research questions are: Question 1: What are children and young people's motivations for, expectations of and experiences with engaging in their own child-led research as a way to influence decision-making? Question 2: What are the processes of child-led research that positively or negatively influence decision-making? Question 3: In what ways does child-led research influence decision-making? (And why and how do they do so?) This research project used a case study approach to examine two cases where children and young people claimed they conducted child-led research. The first, Bekaa and Irbid, investigated the research conducted by a group of children and young people on issues relevant to their situations as refugees in the host countries of Lebanon and Jordan. The second, Dhaka, reviewed child-led research focused on the lack of birth certificates issued for Bangladeshi children and the possible effects of not having this legal registration. A group of children and young people who are members of a Children's Parliament in Dhaka led this project. The research participants for this project are defined as (1) the children and young people, aged 12 to 18 (when I interviewed them), who are associated with World Vision programmes and engaged in the child-led research projects within their constituencies in the Irbid and Bekaa and Dhaka case studies and (2) the adult professionals who acted as facilitators of child-led research projects and those who worked in the design of these projects or dissemination of their findings. These participants were those who were best suited to provide the information needed as they were fully involved in the child-led research projects and had in-depth knowledge to contribute answers to the research questions. This project adopted several methods for data collection, including focus groups, semi-structured interviews, observations and documentary review. The study followed ethical research guidelines to ensure the safety, rights, dignity and well-being of both the children and young people and adult participants (Morrow, 2009). The research took into account the special considerations required to gain informed consent, ensure confidentiality and anonymity, acknowledge the cultures of the research sites, and refrain from presenting information that may potentially harm participants (Marshall and Rossman, 2006). The findings of the study show that the child-led research approach is considered an adequate participatory approach that creates spaces for children and young people to engage in their own research and influence change based on their findings. Thus, this approach enabled participants to gather together and pursue collectively a research project in which they were able to explore issues about their lives using research methodologies that were appropriate to their experiences, abilities and expertise. This conversion, however, highlights a variety of tensions around the understanding and legitimacy of child-led research. Findings from this study supports the view that child-led research generates empirically grounded knowledge, which produced through data collection and personal experiences of the young researches and its analysis as a whole. Findings also reveal that the young researchers' motivations and expectations were to make an impact on their own lives, as well as the lives of their peers and change a situation that they perceived as unfair. Findings show that the adult facilitators played an important role in facilitating the young researchers but not managing them. However, this study evidenced some tensions between participation and protection rights. The study found manifestations of power amongst the children and young people during the child-led research projects, which were based on age, gender, religion, language and ethnicity. This confirms children and young people can replicate power relations within their participatory projects, which are deeply embedded in their traditions and cultures. Findings show that child-led research has different levels of impact; on decision-making and in the individual lives of the young researchers. This is connected to the contexts where children and young people conducted their research, which was conducive in one case study and more challenging in the other case. Overall, the findings of this study contribute to the body of literature that challenges the dominant conceptualisation that children and young people are unable to conduct their own research. Instead, the findings of this research project contribute to the study of children and young people's participation by providing different perspectives on the debate around the children and young people's abilities and motivations to engage in their own child-led research projects. The findings contribute to knowledge about the nature of child-led research as an approach that supports children and young people in their struggle to participate in society. These findings contribute to the substantial gap of understanding about what is knowledge and expertise by exploring the ways in which children and young people conduct their own research and create knowledge with the aim of making a change in society. Specifically, the findings provide empirical evidence of the impact that their work has had on policy and practice and their personal lives.

Bangladeshi Bengali migration to Canada is a response to globalization processes, and a strategy to face the post-independent social, political and economic insecurities in the homeland. Canadian immigration policy and the Multicultural Act that were adjusted to meet labour demands in local job markets encouraged the building of a new and growing Bangladeshi Bengali immigrant community in Canada. The general objective of this research is to explore how Bangladeshi immigrants’ national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and class identities that were shaped within historical and political contexts in Bangladesh are negotiated in new immigrant and multicultural contexts in Toronto. By looking at various identity negotiation processes, this research aims to critically examine globalization theories in social science, and multicultural policies in Canada. More specifically, the objective is to determine whether transnational migration to Canada as a global process creates homogeneity, disjuncture, hybridity, or inequality in Bangladeshi immigrants’ lives in Toronto, and how Bangladeshi Bengalis as an ethnic and cultural group relocate their identity within Canadian multiculturalism. In order to address these objectives and issues, one year of in-depth anthropological research was conducted among the Bangladeshi immigrants in Toronto between 2007 and 2008. The core research location was the Danforth and Victoria Park area, but in order to address class diversity, respondents from Dufferin and Bloor Streets, Regent Park, and Mississauga areas were incorporated. Applying snowball and purposive sampling techniques, and identifying key informants, 75 Bangladeshi immigrant families were selected from three religious groups – Muslim, Hindu, and Christian. In-depth personal interviews, case studies and focus group discussions were conducted among these Bangladeshi immigrants. This research underscores that, on one hand, Bangladeshi Bengali immigrants negotiate and re-define their “proper” ethnic, cultural, nationalist, and religious identities by imagining, memorizing, simulating, and celebrating local traditions. On the other hand, immigrants define “authentic” identity by creating “separations” and “differences” based on colonial and nationalist histories. Religious differences, the ideology of “majority and minority”, and social classes play major roles in shaping identity. This study finds that multicultural diasporic immigrant space is neither a disjointed, nor an in-between space, nor a place where ethnic cultures are only “consumed”, but it is a battleground to resist and challenge religious and gender inequalities in a globalized location. Bangladeshi Bengali identity is both fixed and contextually variable; identity is shaped in response to political contexts of both global and local.

Bangladeshi Bengali migration to Canada is a response to globalization processes, and a strategy to face the post-independent social, political and economic insecurities in the homeland. Canadian immigration policy and the Multicultural Act that were adjusted to meet labour demands in local job markets encouraged the building of a new and growing Bangladeshi Bengali immigrant community in Canada. The general objective of this research is to explore how Bangladeshi immigrants’ national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and class identities that were shaped within historical and political contexts in Bangladesh are negotiated in new immigrant and multicultural contexts in Toronto. By looking at various identity negotiation processes, this research aims to critically examine globalization theories in social science, and multicultural policies in Canada. More specifically, the objective is to determine whether transnational migration to Canada as a global process creates homogeneity, disjuncture, hybridity, or inequality in Bangladeshi immigrants’ lives in Toronto, and how Bangladeshi Bengalis as an ethnic and cultural group relocate their identity within Canadian multiculturalism. In order to address these objectives and issues, one year of in-depth anthropological research was conducted among the Bangladeshi immigrants in Toronto between 2007 and 2008. The core research location was the Danforth and Victoria Park area, but in order to address class diversity, respondents from Dufferin and Bloor Streets, Regent Park, and Mississauga areas were incorporated. Applying snowball and purposive sampling techniques, and identifying key informants, 75 Bangladeshi immigrant families were selected from three religious groups – Muslim, Hindu, and Christian. In-depth personal interviews, case studies and focus group discussions were conducted among these Bangladeshi immigrants. This research underscores that, on one hand, Bangladeshi Bengali immigrants negotiate and re-define their “proper” ethnic, cultural, nationalist, and religious identities by imagining, memorizing, simulating, and celebrating local traditions. On the other hand, immigrants define “authentic” identity by creating “separations” and “differences” based on colonial and nationalist histories. Religious differences, the ideology of “majority and minority”, and social classes play major roles in shaping identity. This study finds that multicultural diasporic immigrant space is neither a disjointed, nor an in-between space, nor a place where ethnic cultures are only “consumed”, but it is a battleground to resist and challenge religious and gender inequalities in a globalized location. Bangladeshi Bengali identity is both fixed and contextually variable; identity is shaped in response to political contexts of both global and local.

There is no full-length investigation of postcoloniality in Bangladeshi Bengali literature. This is partly because Bangladesh had no separate identity under colonial rule, being just another part of greater India. Then, at partition, it became one section of the unnatural union that was Pakistan. These two identities have kept Bangladesh as a relatively unknown domain, at least to the Western academy. The other reason in the context of literary postcolonial studies is that these have concentrated on writing in English, whereas Bangladeshi literature is almost completely in the national language. This study offers a discussion of the postcoloniality of contemporary Bangladeshi theatre via analysis of selected playtexts.

There is no full-length investigation of postcoloniality in Bangladeshi Bengali literature. This is partly because Bangladesh had no separate identity under colonial rule, being just another part of greater India. Then, at partition, it became one section of the unnatural union that was Pakistan. These two identities have kept Bangladesh as a relatively unknown domain, at least to the Western academy. The other reason in the context of literary postcolonial studies is that these have concentrated on writing in English, whereas Bangladeshi literature is almost completely in the national language. This study offers a discussion of the postcoloniality of contemporary Bangladeshi theatre via analysis of selected playtexts.