Nearly twenty years after the brutal conflict that occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), ethnosectarian ideology continues to permeate all structures and institutions of Bosnian society, from political and educational institutions to religious and cultural ones; most of all, it is significantly embodied in the everyday life of people in Bosnia. It is these everyday practices that I investigate in order to unravel how ethnicity is (re)produced, performed and experienced through mundane practices of moving through space. Specifically, this dissertation asks: What socio-spatial practices and emotional experiences are involved in the processes of solidifying, as well as dissolving, ethnic identity in BiH? The study is a primarily qualitative investigation of daily life, based on deployment of multiple methods such as participant observation, interviews and a photography project. The site of the study is the town of Mostar in southwestern BiH. It has been formally and informally divided between "Croat/Catholic" west Mostar and "Bosniak/Muslim" east Mostar for over 15 years. The findings point to the ways identity and space emerge as performative effects of practice, as well as how different processes of bordering (between "us" and "them"; between "our" and "their" side) are materialized through different affective intensities.

Recognition of the world food crisis has increased popular and scholarly work on alternatives to corporatized agriculture. Among many alternatives, fair trade and food sovereignty are two movements that have received a substantial amount of attention. Scholarly work on these topics, however, has focused on larger-scale issues of policy, access and benefits accrued to producers and consumers within such alternative food systems. Producer-focused studies of fair trade--a broader certification system designed to ameliorate inequalities in the marketplace--have examined access to markets, producer benefits and fairness. Analyses of struggles for food sovereignty in the developing world--which are directed at producer control over agricultural systems--are focused on creating radical alternatives to neoliberal food systems. However, very little is known about the everyday agricultural and food production practices which farmers deploy as part of their involvement with these broader politics. Attempts to create secure livelihoods and food resources do not exist in a vacuum; they take place alongside other strategies for survival. This is a situation that is well illustrated by indigenous farmers living in self-declared autonomous communities in Chenalhó, Chiapas, Mexico, where, cultivating subsistence crops and cash crops represents an effort to advance a political agenda for indigenous autonomy and create secure sources of food and income. Based on research and fieldwork from 2010-2013, in this dissertation I examine how farmers who are linked up with broader networks (such as fair trade certification) understand and practice autonomy. Drawing on a feminist geopolitical approach, this research presents a `scaled-down' analysis of autonomy, fair trade certification and practices of food sovereignty which is focused on the experience of farmers in self-declared autonomous communities. This approach provides critical insight into the daily negotiations of farmers as they interact with a range of networks. / 2015-10-17

This dissertation examines the experiences of Latina immigrants in Atlanta, GA in accessing and receiving reproductive healthcare. Although Atlanta is a new destination city for immigrant labor, the state of Georgia has passed anti-immigrant legislation, including a 2011 law that allows local police to check immigrants’ documentation while investigating unrelated violations. This localization of immigration policing heightens immigrants’ risk of detention and deportability. In combination with media discourses of illegality, local immigration policing instills fear in immigrants, which deters them from going out in public in order to perform everyday tasks such as seeing a doctor. Latinas immigrants’ ascribed illegality is not only an issue when trying to access reproductive healthcare, however, but also inflects their interactions with health service providers. Moreover, legal and pragmatic barriers to reproductive healthcare are bound up with ideological notions of Latinas’ reproduction. Drawing from 68 interviews with recent Latina immigrants and immigrant advocates, I detail how experiences of receiving reproductive healthcare foster a “biological citizenship” – which can be defined as the ways in which an individual or group claims inclusion through biological means – that eases Latinas’ outsider status. By enacting biological citizenship through the care of their bodies, which are often viewed and treated as undeserving of care, I contend that undocumented immigrants act politically via one of the few avenues that is open to them, albeit one – the care of the body – that is often overlooked. Additionally, they are creating a bit of security in an overwhelming insecure environment. This research finds that Latina immigrants’ access to reproductive healthcare is impeded not only by anti-immigrant laws and inflammatory discourse, but also by pragmatic issues such as lack of health insurance and language differences. Moreover, legal and pragmatic barriers to reproductive healthcare are bound up with ideological notions of Latinas’ reproduction. For example, Latinas are frequently portrayed as “hyperfertile” in anti-immigrant discourse. Latina immigrants’ reproduction is viewed as threatening to the nation-state and is thus often blatantly or covertly treated to render Latinas as “undeserving” of citizenship and the welfare state. Interestingly, however, in the context of the aging population of the U.S., there are other discourses making their way onto the scene. These discourses reveal that Latina reproduction, though much maligned, was concomitantly viewed as the solution to revitalizing the eroding lower rungs of the U.S. population pyramid. Additionally, political pundits drew on the trope of the hyperfertile Latina immigrant to construct the hopes of an eventual permanent Democratic majority, which would be facilitated by the exponential breeding of Hispanic immigrants. However, this research corroborates 2015 statistics from the Centers of Disease Control that show that Hispanic fertility is steeply declining, thus undermining the demographic and political dreams which relied on tropes of the hyperfertile Latina. This study aims to expand conceptions of citizenship by examining reproductive healthcare as a site where risk is negotiated and borders of membership are both constructed and broken down. The lens of biological citizenship emphasizes the political nature of healthcare access and allows for analyzing Latina immigrants’ everyday experiences with reproductive health as they are shaped by state policies, anti-immigrant legislation, and gendered portrayals of illegality. In doing so, this study complicates healthcare access and draws out both the non-biological determinants and non-biological implications of this access.

This doctoral dissertation examines the lived experiences of refuge in Denmark from the perspectives of Syrian refugees. Situated within feminist political geography, it moves beyond examining geopolitics merely from the perspective of the law, the state, and policy makers. Instead, it seeks to grasp the ways in which geopolitics are encountered, experienced, and negotiated on the ground – by the people who are most affected by state policies and practices. It draws on more than ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark with Syrian refugees, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, as well as interviews with state and non-state actors providing assistance to Syrian refugees in Jordan. This dissertation brings insights from feminist political geography into conversation with those from critical refugee studies, border studies, geographies of law, and postcolonial studies in order to unsettle core ideas and terms of reference surrounding what refuge is and how it is practiced. This dissertation makes three distinct but closely related arguments. First, focusing on family reunification of refugees and how this form of protection became a target in the Danish state’s efforts to prevent refugee immigration, I argue that the geopolitics of refuge needs to be examined in a way that includes but also moves beyond the actual territorial border line as well as the legal border (i.e. the moment a person obtains protection and legal status). Second, through an examination of Syrian refugees’ everyday encounters with the Danish state, I draw attention to the disjunctures between idealized notions of refuge with its ostensible ‘humanitarian’ ethos and the practical articulations of refuge as manifested in the everyday lived experiences of refugees. This is what I term lived refuge. I argue, however, that the dissonances between idealized and actually existing refuge point to the persistent presence of governance within refuge, rather than a lack or an absence of ‘true’ humanitarianism - i.e. a promise of freedom, betterment, and prospect that did not fully materialize. Instead, the state practices, which refugees are subject to within refuge, are enabled and normalized through the asymmetrical relationships between the state and the refugee. Third, calling attention to how Syrian refugees experience, articulate and locate war, I trouble prevailing geographical imaginations of “Europe” and Denmark as spaces of peace, safety, and prosperity. Drawing on Syrians’ experiences of war, I argue that attending to everyday experiences of war in refuge prompts a re-articulation of where war is, what counts as war, and who decides.

Often pointed to as the region’s model secular state, Turkey provides an instructive case study in how nationalism, in the name of conjuring ‘unity’, often produces the opposite effect. Indeed, the production of nationalism can create fractures amongst, as well as politicize, certain segments of a population, such as minority groups and women. This dissertation examines the long-term and present-day impacts on nationalist unity of a largely understudied event, the annexation of the border-city of Antakya from Syria in 1939, and its implications on the Arab Alawite population. In doing so, it deconstructs the dominant Turkish narrative on the annexation, rewrites the narrative drawing on oral history from the ground, and it shows how nation-building is a masculinist project that relies on powerfully gendered language through studying the national archives. The heart of the project, however, remains the investigation of the political, social, and religious subjectivity of Arab Alawite women, with an emphasis on resistance to the structures and practices sustained by the state and patriarchy. The Arab Alawites, once numerically dominant in the Antakya region, are now an ethno-religious minority group within the Turkish/Sunni-dominated state structure. Although Antakya was the last territory to join Turkey in 1939, ever since that time many of its Alawites have resisted assimilation through covert, yet peaceful, methods. Through this research, I show that a multiplicity of forces have increased the politicization of the Antiochian Alawite community and broadened their demands upon the Turkish state. My research highlights Alawite women’s leadership as a key driver of this process, thanks to the large-scale out migration of Alawite men, the increased socio-economic independence of Alawite women, and the perception of more progressive gender ideals being held by the members of this Muslim sect, when compared to those of nearby Sunni Turkish women. This dissertation relies on a postcolonial and feminist geopolitical analysis of the Turkish nationalist project to examine how the Turkish state has historically viewed Antakya and the Arab Alawites and how, in return, the experience and collective social and political memory of Alawites was formed. By utilizing innovative methodologies, this research shows how Alawite women are resisting/rewriting/reconfiguring political and social structures through everyday actions that shift the discourse on minorities and women on local and national scales.