In this thesis, transnational adoption is used as an illustrative example to address the tension between caring and differentiating aspects of the discursive practice of Swedish welfare. Drawing mainly upon postcolonial conceptualizations of nation and family, the discursive constitution of transnational adoption, transnational adoptees, and transnational adoptive families as objects of knowledge is explored. The analysis focuses on how national and familial belonging and difference are constructed. The empirical material consists of political reports, research reports, social work handbooks and educational material, published between 1997 and 2008. As the relationship between discourse and knowledge is of particular interest, Michel Foucault’s archeology is used as a methodological perspective. While the knowledge produced on transnational adoption could be read as well-intended concern, it may at the same time be read as a process where normalization and racialization come into effect, and where a particular image of Sweden is constructed. I suggest a reading that can be summarized in terms of the logic of blood and roots. Transnational adoptees are racialized through essentialist notions of national, cultural and ethnic belonging. They are ascribed a split identity, and are advised to cultivate their belonging to their birth families and birth places. Transnational adoptees of color are ascribed a difference in relation to their adoptive families as well as the Swedish national family, both imagined as white. Within the adoptive family, the assumed lack of family resemblances is portrayed as a continuous source of problems. These problems are naturalized by the way this knowledge on transnational adoption is institutionalized. Seeking psychological counseling is constructed as a responsible parental act. In the discursive practice of Swedish welfare, the national inclusion of the adoptive family is conditioned by a differentiating logic.

This research examined notions of belonging and sense of community through a set of layered lenses that integrated a social model of aging with phenomenology to gain a better understanding of the lived experiences of individuals residing in a long-term care (LTC) home. Conducted in a for-profit LTC home in Ontario, this study analyzed messaging in marketing materials supplied to potential residents and their families in anticipation of a move to a LTC home and in the staff policies and procedures manuals using document and narrative analysis. Themes emerging from this phase were then compared with the first-hand experiences of living in a LTC home as told by residents through the use of a focus group (n=6) and individual interviews (n=6) and experiences of working in a LTC home as described by interviews with staff (n=6). Analysis of marketing documents revealed the theme of let us be your caring community. As messaged in these documents, the LTC home supported residents by caring, embodying the ideals of home through natural living spaces, and supporting meaningful personal connections. This contrasted with messages found in the staff policy manuals. Divided discourses highlighted the tangible complexities of implementing a person-centered philosophy within a business model by describing the industry of care, prescribed customer service, fabricating normalcy and, to a much lesser extent, promoting the practice of person-centered care. Residents’ phenomenological stories illustrated variable un/belonging within a LTC home. Personal experiences of the institutional erosion of belonging, congregate nature of living in a LTC home, changing nature of personal relationships and the prescriptive living environment routinized day-to-day experiences and provided a stark contrast between belonging in community and un/belonging in a LTC home. Weaving belonging into daily tasks described how staff members laboured daily at working to personalize LTC home living, and how they were helpless to prevent losses in community and belonging. After completing the research and analysis of the promotional materials, policy and procedures manuals, and resident and staff transcripts I conducted a broader level analysis of all four sets of themes in order to get a sense of the whole. I concluded there were five tensions of: constructing home from the outside; person-centered care within a biomedical, business model; promoting individuality in a congregate structure; synthetic connections at the expense of long-standing relationships; and fostering living in a death-indifferent culture which justified society’s need to divide and regulate. Incorporating a range of data including promotional materials, policy and procedures manuals, and the voices of both residents and staff, these tensions are not only implicit in the culture of Manor House but within the overarching structure of LTC homes in general and have deep implications on the standing and status bestowed upon older adults in Canadian culture. My intention was to bring to light the contextualized lived experiences of individuals living at Manor House and highlight the structural and social barriers that continue to produce discrimination by “problematizing” aging and subsequently fostering notions of presumably acceptable dividing practices (Foucault, 1982) within society. By examining meanings and experiences of community in a LTC home, and also recognizing the systemic, structural and cultural factors that may shape those experiences, I sought to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the lifeworlds of individuals living within a LTC home.

Community colleges continue to experience high levels of student attrition and low degree/certificate completion rates. Given extant literature, there appears to be a need to reexamine how interactions between students and the institution, and students and institutional agents are taking place, with the aim of identifying institutional practices that deleteriously or positively impact degree completion and thus guide colleges to develop action plans to improve conditions for student success. This study examined how factors such as institutional commitment to students, mattering, sense of belonging, interactions with diverse peers, perceptions of the campus climate, engagement/involvement, socio-academic integrative experiences, and goal commitment collectively affected community college students’ intent to persist to degree completion. The proposed model tested the tenability of seven propositions examining how the above constructs interact to influence intent to persist. The sample consisted of 2,088 multiply diverse community college students. The conceptual model was grounded on Astin’s (1991) Input-Environment-Outcome model and was tested in the context of structural equation modeling. Multiple group invariance analyses for race/ethnicity were conducted. The conceptual model explained 28% of the variance on intent to persist for Asian students, 21% for White students, and 19% for Latino/a students. Results indicated that transition support from family/friends exerted the highest effect on intent to persist across all racial/ethnic groups, followed by engagement/involvement, perceptions of mattering, interactions with diverse peers, GPA, goal commitment, and socio-academic integrative experiences, albeit varying by group. This study was the first in the literature to empirically demonstrate a causal effect between institutional commitment to students and perceptions of mattering. Mattering, in turn, exerted a moderate to strong influence on engagement/involvement, socio-academic integrative experiences, sense of belonging, and indirectly on intent to persist. Evidence in support of an omnibus “student development and success” construct, as alluded to by Wolf-Wendel, et al. (2009) is also presented. Of import to these findings is that while this construct explained a significant proportion of the variance for engagement/involvement, belonging, mattering, and interactions with diverse peers, the individual factors exerted an independent effect on intent to persist. Implications for theory, research, and practice are also discussed.

Uppsatsen syftar kartlägga den känsla av social tillhörighet som individer med utomsvensk bakgrund upplever i dagens Sverige. Hur Sverige och svenskhet erfars och utefter vilka villkor vardagen struktureras. Kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes och den subjektiva verklighetsupplevelsen analyserades med hjälp av en abduktiv ansats. Det empiriska materialet tolkades mot bakgrund av ett socialkonstruktionistiskt ramverk kombinerat med stigmabegreppet och behovet av tillhörighet för skapandet av identitet.   Resultaten visar att det i Sverige existerar en strukturell diskriminering baserad på etnicitet och ett andregörande av individer med utomsvenskt påbrå, ett andregörande vilket har sin grund i ett förgivettaget vitt tolkningsföreträde. Maktobalansen tvingar individen in i en avvikande roll som paradoxalt nog krävs för att integreras. Att vara svensk är därför ingenting lätt att bli då kategoriseringarna är starkt etablerade och svårförenliga med en blandad nationell bakgrund, något bristen på adekvat terminologi i det svenska språket belyser. Språkkunskaper, socialt engagemang och meningsfulla relationer visar sig ha en signifikant effekt på skapandet av sammanhang och tillhörighet. / This paper aims to identify the feeling of social belonging which individuals of non-swedish descent are experiencing in Sweden today. The relationship to Sweden and it’s citizens and which structural terms the individual is living after. To answer this qualitative semistructured interviews were performed and the subjective interpretation of reality was analyzed with an abductive method. The empirical material was viewed against a background made of social constructionism, stigmatization and the need of belonging for the creation of identity.   The results show that in Sweden there exists a structural discrimination based on ethnicity and an othering of individuals of non-swedish descent, an othering which has a ground in a preconception of a white definition of reality. This power imbalance forces the individual into a position as a deviant, which paradoxically is required for integration. To be swedish is therefore nothing which comes easy as the categories are tightly constructed and hard to integrate with a mixed national background, something the lack of adequate terminology in the swedish language portraits. Knowledge of language, commitment in various settings and meaningful relationships are shown to have a significant effect on the creation of context and belonging.

The discourse on education for Aboriginal people has long been limited to a curriculum of cultural assimilation often resulting in an erosion of self-esteem and disengagement. Consequently, this research puts forth narratives of how fiddle programs in northern Manitoba work as a culturally responsive curriculum that in turn address such curricular erosions. As a research methodology, Metissage afforded me pedagogical opportunities to weave the various perspectives of community members, parents, instructors, and former students into an intricate story that attempts to represent some of their social, cultural and historical experiences within the north. Braiding stories of the historical and present impacts of fiddle playing reveals the generative possibilities of school fiddle programs in Canadian Indigenous communities. In addition to building intergenerational bridges, the stories put forth in this thesis demonstrate how the fiddle has become a contemporary instrument of social change for many communities across northern Manitoba.

This thesis examines the everyday experiences of Anglophone communities in three different regions of Quebec – the Gaspésie, Gatineau and Eastern Townships – with the aim to understand their sense of place. Specifically, the focus is on the role of different geographic contexts on everyday access to social services, particularly healthcare, and how these experiences contribute to Anglophones’ place attachment. Data collection involved semi-structured personal interviews with ten participants in each region. Comparative analysis yielded three main findings: (1) issues with accessing healthcare in English reinforces Anglophones’ minority status; (2) in spite of the challenges faced as a linguistic minority, Anglophones demonstrate a strong sense of place to their region; and (3) feelings of home, heritage, and rootedness constitute elements in Anglophones’ place attachment and contribute to their sense of place in Quebec. The study also concludes that age, mobility, and location are important variables in influencing everyday experiences in each of the three regions.

The thesis provides a political analysis of a position paper on government programming recently adopted by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) a national ethno-cultural organisation that ostensibly represents over one million Canadians of Ukrainian heritage and a historically important player in the development of multiculturalism in Canada. The impetus for such an analysis is to explore whether there are alternative policy directions available to the UCC that could satisfy its mandate developing and enhancing the Ukrainian-Canadian community while taking into account the reality that Ukrainian-Canadians culturally resemble more and more the broader Canadian society. <p>In a wide-ranging analysis that criticizes both, official Canadian multiculturalism for falling short in meeting its commitment to cultural pluralism and the UCC for upholding a position that relies on a static or retrograde version of culture, the thesis makes the case for a multiculturalism that can recognize cultural differences while allowing for change. <p>The thesis is significant because it asks relevant questions concerning how multiculturalism in Canada takes into account an increasingly heterogeneous citizenship characterized by cultural change. In this regard, the thesis is of particular importance to Canadians who claim a multiplicity of cultures rather than a single ethnicity and yet still express a desire to be included in the discourse on Canadian national identity.

Researchers have demonstrated that students who had a strong sense of school belonging exhibited greater academic motivation and performance (E. Anderman, 2002; Faircloth & Hamm, 2005), had fewer emotional and behavioral difficulties (Furrer & Skinner, 2003; McMahon, Singh, Garner, & Benhorin; 2004), and were less likely to dropout of school (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Knesting, 2008). Limited attention has been given to the potential factors that promote school belonging, especially in high school students. The purpose of this research was to examine the unique influence of adult connections on high school students’ sense of school belonging utilizing the framework of self-determination theory. The role of adult connections was examined as a moderator of the relations between five student risk factors (behavior problems, peer problems, minority ethnicity, male gender, and poverty) and school belonging. This cross-sectional study analyzed data from a survey completed by 368 ninth grade students. The survey consisted of items from existing instruments, including the Psychological Sense of School Membership (Goodenow, 1993a), the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (Goodman, Meltzer, & Bailey, 2003), and the Basic Need Satisfaction in Relationships Scale (La Guardia, Ryan, Couchman, & Deci, 2000). Hierarchical regression analyses confirmed study hypotheses by indicating that adult connections was a significant predictor of the students’ sense of school belonging and significantly moderated the relationship between school belonging and behavior problems (p < .05). Additional analyses indicated that adult connections accounted for more of the variance in school belonging for males than for females. These findings supported the importance of adult connections in high school students’ sense of school belonging. Future research should address the relationship between adult connections and school belonging as it evolves over students’ high school careers.

A study was conducted among a sample of Korean American students to investigate the potential moderation of the risks related to English proficiency by the protection of school belonging. Perceived scholastic competence, self-reported school grades, and academic expectancies were used for dependent variables. It was hypothesized that students with higher sense of belonging would be less affected by English proficiency than their peers with lower sense of belonging. The risk of English proficiency was confirmed. However, school belonging did not have as much of an effect as expected and students with higher English proficiency seemed to gain more benefit from increased school belonging. This finding reminds educators of the pressing importance of English proficiency, and future research is suggested to investigate the unique effects of belonging among students of Korean, and perhaps other Asian, backgrounds.

The discourse on education for Aboriginal people has long been limited to a curriculum of cultural assimilation often resulting in an erosion of self-esteem and disengagement. Consequently, this research puts forth narratives of how fiddle programs in northern Manitoba work as a culturally responsive curriculum that in turn address such curricular erosions. As a research methodology, Metissage afforded me pedagogical opportunities to weave the various perspectives of community members, parents, instructors, and former students into an intricate story that attempts to represent some of their social, cultural and historical experiences within the north. Braiding stories of the historical and present impacts of fiddle playing reveals the generative possibilities of school fiddle programs in Canadian Indigenous communities. In addition to building intergenerational bridges, the stories put forth in this thesis demonstrate how the fiddle has become a contemporary instrument of social change for many communities across northern Manitoba.