<p><italic>Virgin Capital</italic> explores the impact of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) program in the US Virgin Islands and asks, "How do contemporary circulations of capital and people alternately build upon and complicate long-present hierarchies?" This dissertation approaches the EDC, a tax holiday program that has attracted a number of primarily American bankers to the island of St. Croix, as a space in which struggles over quasi-offshore capital produces tensions rooted in race, class, color, gender, and generation. These clashes surrounding `appropriate' financial and social investment have both integrated St. Croix into the global financial services market and produced a great deal of tension between EDC community and residents of St. Croix. Moreover, the presence of this program has generated new categories of personhood that in turn have sparked new debates about what it means to `belong' in a territory administered by the United States. These new categories of personhood are particularly gendered and alternately destabilize and shore up long-standing hierarchies of generation, gender, and place. </p> <p>The ethnographic basis of <italic>Virgin Capital</italic> is 16 months of fieldwork I conducted on St. Croix, USVI. Throughout the dissertation, I bring academic writing together with the perspectives of Crucians and `EDC people.' These interviews, both formal and informal, are central to this project as they make clear the ambivalent positioning of the EDC program and its participants in the current moment of increasingly global circulations.</p> / Dissertation

Hair is a remarkably complex material-semiotic entity. Caught on the cusp between self/society, meticulously contrived and purposely styled, hair is crucial in the articulation of identity and difference. However, although scholars have focused a great deal of attention on the body as a site of cultural production and identity politics, discussions surrounding hair have been largely ignored and relegated to the realm of the trivial or inconsequential. Addressing this void, this project places hair at the centre of examination in a two-part qualitative analysis. First, hair is reconfigured as sign and examined as a socio-cultural performance achieved through the reiteration of historically contingent practices, and materialized through the body. Particular attention is paid to Black women’s hair/styling practices as a vital site of cultural production, identity negotiation and radical subversion. Following this is a critical discourse analysis of the representation of hair within popular culture, with a specific focus on the way in which Black women’s hair/styling practices are fundamentally implicated in the production of identity and difference. The possibility of resistance through transgressive hair stylizations is also explored. Overall, hair is found to be intimately involved in the (re)constitution of sexed/gendered beings, integral to the process of racialization and a potential locus of resistance. However, this investigation also finds that popular culture displays –even those that purport to offer a critical analysis – fail to destabilize the underlying regimes of domination and oppression that limit and sustain the systems of meaning through which hair is understood. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2010-06-21 23:24:38.111

This thesis investigates the continued hostilities and increasing backlash against the American Muslim community in the United States from a critical perspective that centralizes the racialization of Muslims and Muslim looking-people. The increasing anti-Muslim backlash against American Muslims warrants the need for a critical examination and analysis of the roots of this backlash and why, almost 11 years after September 11th, 2001, conditions for Muslims and Muslim looking-people are worsening. The term Islamophobia has been conceptualized and defined differently by various scholars, contributing to an analytical dilemma of how Muslims rationalize and resist anti-Muslim backlash. Therefore, the concept of racialization provides a fuller perspective and understanding as to why Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs, South Asians, and African Americans have been subjected to rising suspicion, surveillance, imprisonment, and violence in a post 9/11/2001 era. This thesis posits the notion of the white Christian Normative, an inherent Christian bias embedded deep within the racialized social system of the United States. This Christian Normative has its roots in the colonial confrontation between European colonizers and Indigenous populations in what is now considered the United States and has maintained its significance in impacting the life chances of non-white non-Christian minorities ever since. This thesis argues that it is the Christian normative that drives and sustains the anti-Muslim backlash in the United States. The anti-Muslim backlash that is growing stronger in the United States is also theoretically conceptualized within this thesis. This thesis utilizes qualitative data collected from 23 in-depth interviews with Arab and South Asian American Muslim college students between the ages of 18 to 35 years from the Midwest as its empirical basis.

Vietnamese Americans are the children of refugees. While some are middle-class and upwardly mobile, many are not. As an ethnic group, Vietnamese Americans are often grouped, by the mainstream and academics, with other high status and high achieving Asian Americans. In this study, I look at middle-class and upwardly mobile Vietnamese American students and alumni and their voluntary association with a vast network of ethnic organizations. I ask the question, how do these Vietnamese Americans respond to their racialization when their local ethnic resources are not consistent with their racial status? In my analysis, I draw on concepts from literature on segmented assimilation, minority cultures of mobility, and ethnic boundary work. Additionally, I frame my analysis in terms ethnic capital formation, social capital, and cultural frames. I found that Vietnamese Americans collectively responded to racialization via the organization and its programming. Additionally, they constructed and promoted a “cultural frame of indebtedness” to rationalize the discrepancy between their success and the marginalization of their co-ethnics. / 10000-01-01

This dissertation maps the roots of systemic inequality within Seattle’s housing market, zeroing in on the residential mobility of Japanese and African Americans over the course of the 20th century. It analyzes the experiences that have led Japanese and African Americans to occupy distinctive positions within the city’s housing market, as they fought for belonging in a segregated city. Though they shared the burden of living in segregated neighborhoods through much of the first half of the 20th century, Japanese and African Americans occupied distinct economic positions within the city. While Japanese Americans far outnumbered African Americans until World War II, the segregation of African Americans within the city followed a separate trajectory. Shaped by the legacy of slavery and the nation’s Jim Crow order, African Americans became increasingly set apart within the housing market. Seeing how Japanese and African Americans have navigated a segregated housing market is crucial to understanding the racial dimensions of Seattle’s development. While the ghettoization of Japanese Americans facilitated their incarceration during World War II, the city’s fixation on restricting black mobility during the 1950s and 1960s opened up spaces for Japanese Americans. Rather than simply refuting the model minority image, this dissertation examines how it came to shape Seattle’s housing market after World War II. The city’s open housing movement brought about fair housing laws but also a renewed commitment to property rights and the exclusion of African Americans. Weak and unenforced fair housing legislation – though it opened doors to those of a particular class – led to growing divides. These divides are explored in the last part of this dissertation, which highlights the dimensions of post-civil rights era segregation and the struggles waged by low-income black renters to challenge the city’s raced, classed, and gendered boundaries.

This thesis addresses the ambiguous role of Malmö’s latest megaproject in the context of the city’s racializing urban development trajectory. The project is a public/private congress center, concert hall and hotel complex called Malmö Live. Malmö Live is problematized as the height of spectacle and challenge as it is expected to be the city’s most prominent cultural and social meeting place. The inquiry is directed to how its expectation of relevancy came about and utilizes a Foucauldian inspired genealogical methodology. The result stems from an investigation of the historical, present, local and global conditions that constitutes the expectancy of its relevancy. The investigation notes the divisiveness of tourism and how it affects ways of thinking and doing government on multiple scales, and in particular how it motivates the case in question. The result shows that there are affinities between tourism- during-colonialism and the contemporary tourism industry. Where the former was appropriated by colonialism and overtly racializing, the latter is allowed appropriacy by a currency ascribed to selected geographies and histories. By describing the becoming of this megaproject and the use of tourism knowledge and technology, the how-question about the expectation of Malmö Live’s relevancy leads to a genealogical reconstruction of Malmö Live as a wager on whiteness. The wager on whiteness hold no guarantees, but the power of it is the ability to be persuasive and believed, and the currency it holds for those who perform it. The thesis ends with a discussion on what is at stake with Malmö Live, i.e. Malmö’s whiteness.

Despite recurrent academic interest in the study of race in both South Africa and in Brazil, little work has been done in Anthropology about the two countries of the Global South in relation to each other. This thesis is situated in that gap and presents an ethnographic study about the racialised experiences of Brazilian migrants in South Africa, in order to explore the different processes of racialization that occur in South Africa and Brazil. The first part of the investigation focuses on the conflictual encounter between informants’ internalized racial habitus as learned in Brazil with the one they encounter in South Africa. The second part examines the impact that such racialization has on the racial identity of Brazilian individuals. Informants found themselves in situations of racial ambiguity in which they did not fit perfectly in any of the local racial categories, and were classified by South Africans in different (and sometimes multiple) racial categories from their previous one in Brazil. I use the theoretical lens of intersectionality to explore informants’ reflections on 'what they are’ as they socially adapted to South African racial categorisations and habitus.

This study aims to examine positive attitudes towards a certain group of immigrants in a group that is normally negative against them. Furthermore creating an understanding of their perception of what a “real” refugee is. The refugees chosen are Ukrainians due to the Russian invasion in 2022, and the empirical field of attitudes is studied on the online forum Flashback. To answer this, two questions were formed; how can the Ukrainian refugees' established status be understood, despite not being established in Swedish society? and how do the users on Flashback define what a “real” refugee is?  The study has used a qualitative approach with a netnographic method. A thread with roughly 1500 posts about whether Sweden should accept Ukrainian refugees was the main source of empirical material. The posts in the forum were analyzed by using Elias and Scotson's (2011) theory “the established and the outsiders”, and the “racialization” theory. The results showed that the Ukrainian refugees' established status can be understood through cultural ideas about a shared western race with the same values. When the users applied a race on the Ukrainians and on themselves, they also did it to the existing immigrants in the country, which can be understood as a way to elevate their own status through the idea that like-minded people will come into the country and improve it. The Ukrainians were defined as the “perfect” refugee, with qualities that the users believed the Swedish society needed. These qualities were easy to integrate, well-educated and toughness.

In this thesis, I examine the global implications of the "War on Terror" by exploring how China exploits the discourses of the "War on Terror" to justify the internment of Uyghur Muslims. In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Chinese government is responsible for human rights abuses, violations, and genocide of Uyghur Muslims and other Turkic minority groups. In 2018, it was reported that approximately more than one million Uyghur Muslims and other Muslim minorities in China have disappeared and are subject to arbitrary detention, surveillance, forced labour, forced sterilization, and regulations which restrict religious and cultural expression in supposed "counter-extremism centers" allegedly committed to political indoctrination fighting terrorism (Human Rights Watch, 2021; United Nations Human Rights, 2018). This study explores the processes and practices used to deny the internment of the Uyghur Muslim population. I achieve this through my research question, which aims to explore: How the Chinese government manufactures and justifies its own "War on Terror" by suppressing Uyghur Muslims and simultaneously denying the use of internment camps? I analyzed pro-government national China Daily English newspaper articles from 2001-2020 using qualitative content analysis to answer this research question. As a result, my main argument is that the Chinese government has manufactured and exacerbated a domestic "terrorism" problem by exploiting the discourses of the "War on Terror" to justify its internment of Uyghur Muslims. Simultaneously, the Chinese government has produced a deflection campaign committed to diverting criticisms and denying the use of internment camps under the guise of the "War on Terror." I conclude this thesis by presenting the need for additional research to explore how other countries in the East might also suppress different racialized groups in the context of the "War on Terror."

This study explores how the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ relate to the visual representation of these individuals and groups in five Danish newspapers. This study is particularly concerned with how the visual representation constructs an ‘us’ and ‘them’ between Danish society and these individuals. This study draws on a conceptual outline of ‘racialization’ that understands the concept as a ‘lens’ that ‘race’-thinking operates through in the process of constructing group boundaries. This study will draw on Gillian Rose’s visual discourse analysis in the study of Danish newspaper images. It is argued that the ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ are represented as a racialized ‘Other’ to the Dane, in particular the Muslim identity. It is shown that a Muslim identity is a main racialized identity. Moreover, it is pointed out that the use of the term ‘refugee’ is dominant which indicates that this term is in danger of becoming a catch-all category.