It is a qualitative study about political socialization of first-generation ethnic Russian immigrants in Central and South Florida. The method used is a constructivist grounded theory with two-level coding. Based on data collected in forty in-depth interviews, I constructed a model of political socialization. It incorporates a starting point (the legal status in the US), triggers (English language proficiency, spousal support, and parenting), political socialization agencies (English as Second Language classes, a spouse, volunteering, the church) and output structures (bureaucratic institutions). Using respondents’ opinions about American vs. Russian political systems and mass media, their political participation, and views about political efficacy, I created an original classification of immigrants’ political attitudes and behavior. The classification consists of four groups: the Admirers, the Skeptics, the Incurious, and the Recluses. This study fills the gap in the literature about Russian-speaking immigrants in the US. It also contributes to the cache of micro-theories on immigrant political socialization.

The thread between the immigrant experience and the concept of silence has survived centuries of migrant stories, proving itself as one of the largest cultural barriers challenging the immigrant's sense of belonging. Scholars and essayists have thoroughly examined silence as a theme in immigrant and diaspora literature. Yet, the work that immigrant poets have performed to navigate silence and negative space through the manipulation of language has received little academic attention. This thesis studies the work of Latinx and Asian-American poets and their interpretations of silence as either a source of empowerment or oppression. When considering silence's contrasting functions in poetry—to either mute or heighten the possibility of language—the thesis found that silence can establish tensions that complicate the immigrant experience, evidenced further by the poets' use of themes representing loss, fear, place, and memory as negatives and positives in the immigrant's journey. The creative part of this thesis follows a chapbook of poems that examine and apply restrictive form into the study of silence and negative space as poetic devices. These poems form a Latinx quilt that embraces silence as a means for communication—like a brother to language—rather than as an oppressor. The resulting work will delineate the journey out of shame and out of hiding that undocumented immigrants must traverse to achieve the freedom of identity in their own self-carved third space.

A qualitative research design served to explore the effects of human resource policies in the workplace with narratives developed from a group of 15 women comprising African immigrants and their U.S counterparts in Oregon through analysis and interpretation of data from one-on-one interviews. The findings suggest that human resource policies in the workplace greatly impact women's work experiences. This study explored major factors such as pay difference, language and communication proficiency, cultural/religious differences, skill transferability and employment skill prejudice and discrimination and working conditions. Despite women's qualifications, competence and belief that equal skill mean equal opportunity, the strictures of human resource work policies makes it harder to excel in the workplace. Work experience and policies in Africa and America differ, and life circumstances of African women are distinctively different from those of their U.S counterparts. The analysis concludes with recommendations and implication for employers, managers, and human resource personnel.

No description available.

abstract: This project examines the intersections between sexual/cultural cross-dressing and un/documented immigration from the point of view of folklore and immigration studies using Sui Sin Far's short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Tropic of Orange. Using the lenses of folklore theory and cross-dressing highlights aspects of immigration (and its intersection with gender and race) that are otherwise missed; it is necessary to examine the evolving ways in which fictionalized cross-dressers re-craft and occupy the spaces from which they are barred in order to address and redress questions of immigration today. Incorporating anthropology, history, folkloristics, and gender studies, this project shows that historical forms of cross-dressing and immigration lead to the development of unstable identities and pressures to "re-dress" and return to one's original space. More recent studies about gender, however, reveal a historical change in how cross-dressers negotiate their identities and the space(s) they inhabit. Therefore, it is crucial to inspect cross-dressing and immigration as both historical and contemporary phenomena. While Mrs. Spring Fragrance (published in 1912) represents more conventional ideas of cross-dressing and immigration, Tropic of Orange (published in 1997) offers alternative ways to navigate borders, immigration, and identity by using these concepts more playfully and self-consciously. Although sexual/cultural cross-dressing and un/documented immigration are not the same in every case, there are enough similarities between the two to warrant investigating whether some of the solutions reached by modern cross-dressers and gender-ambiguous people might not also help un/documented immigrants to re-negotiate their status, identities, and spaces in the midst of an unstable and at times hostile environment. In fact, an examination of such intersections can address and redress immigration by changing the perceptions of how, and the contexts in which, people view immigration and borders. Thus, this project contends that it is the combination of folkloristics, gender and immigration studies, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and Tropic of Orange together that precipitates such a reading. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2013

My research studies immigrants’ learning experiences as socially organized practices. Informed by the sociocultural approach of learning and institutional ethnography, I treat learning as a material and relational phenomenon. I start by examining how fourteen Chinese immigrants learn to fit into the engineering market in Canada. I then trace the social discourses and relations that shape immigrants’ learning experiences, particularly their changing perceptions and practices and personal and professional investments. I contend that immigrants’ learning is produced through social processes of differentiation that naturalize immigrants as a secondary labour pool, which is dismissible and desirable at the same time. My investigation unfolds around four areas of learning. The first is related to immigrants’ self-marketing practices. I show that core to immigrants’ marketing strategies is to speak to the skill discourse or employers’ skill expectations at the “right” time and place. The skill discourse, I argue, is culturally-charged and class-based. It cloaks a complex of hiring relations where “skill” is discursively constructed and differentially invoked to preserve the privilege and power of the dominant group. The second area is immigrants’ work-related learning. I find that workplace training is part of the corporate agenda to organize work and manage workers. Amid this picture, workers’ opportunity to access corporate sponsorship for professional development is contingent on their membership within the engineering community. To expand their professional space, the immigrants resorted to learning and consolidating their knowledge in codes and standards, which serve as a textual organizer of engineering work. The third area is related to workplace communication. My participants reported an individualistic communication ‘culture’, which celebrates individual excellence and discourages close interpersonal relations. Such a perception, I argue, obscures the gender, race and class relations that privilege white and male power. It also leaves out the organizational relations, such as the project-based deployment of the engineering workforce that perpetuate individualistic communicative practices. My last area of investigation focuses on immigrants’ efforts to acquire Canadian credentials and professional licence. Their heavy learning loads direct my attention to the ideological and administrative licensure practices that valorize Canadian credentials and certificates to the exclusion of others.

My research studies immigrants’ learning experiences as socially organized practices. Informed by the sociocultural approach of learning and institutional ethnography, I treat learning as a material and relational phenomenon. I start by examining how fourteen Chinese immigrants learn to fit into the engineering market in Canada. I then trace the social discourses and relations that shape immigrants’ learning experiences, particularly their changing perceptions and practices and personal and professional investments. I contend that immigrants’ learning is produced through social processes of differentiation that naturalize immigrants as a secondary labour pool, which is dismissible and desirable at the same time. My investigation unfolds around four areas of learning. The first is related to immigrants’ self-marketing practices. I show that core to immigrants’ marketing strategies is to speak to the skill discourse or employers’ skill expectations at the “right” time and place. The skill discourse, I argue, is culturally-charged and class-based. It cloaks a complex of hiring relations where “skill” is discursively constructed and differentially invoked to preserve the privilege and power of the dominant group. The second area is immigrants’ work-related learning. I find that workplace training is part of the corporate agenda to organize work and manage workers. Amid this picture, workers’ opportunity to access corporate sponsorship for professional development is contingent on their membership within the engineering community. To expand their professional space, the immigrants resorted to learning and consolidating their knowledge in codes and standards, which serve as a textual organizer of engineering work. The third area is related to workplace communication. My participants reported an individualistic communication ‘culture’, which celebrates individual excellence and discourages close interpersonal relations. Such a perception, I argue, obscures the gender, race and class relations that privilege white and male power. It also leaves out the organizational relations, such as the project-based deployment of the engineering workforce that perpetuate individualistic communicative practices. My last area of investigation focuses on immigrants’ efforts to acquire Canadian credentials and professional licence. Their heavy learning loads direct my attention to the ideological and administrative licensure practices that valorize Canadian credentials and certificates to the exclusion of others.

No description available.