abstract: This study aimed to explore the relationship between international backpackers and local communities in the developing world. By investigating the role of technology design in a backpacking trip, this research analyzed the potential to improve Sustainable Tourism for both international backpackers and local communities. The idea of achieving sustainability in this research is to assess both economic and cultural impact through the assistance of technology. This study originates from a grounded theory approach triangulated from literature reviews and the researcher’s observations. The research tested the suitability of this theory by using qualitative research methods, then analyzed the appropriateness of its applicability. The findings suggested some useful standards for proposing design solutions to enhance sustainable tourism within the backpacker segment / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Design 2016

abstract: This dissertation examines how Indian polities have resisted and accommodated nuclear energy into their existing culture, politics and environment from the 1960s to the present. I document sites of friction between the nuclear establishment, urban activists, and local communities to trace how their engagements changed because of key ruptures in Indian nuclear history, namely Chernobyl, the US-India nuclear deal, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I interrogate the concept of ‘civic epistemologies,’ which was developed by comparative regulatory policy analysts in STS to explain how different national regulatory systems follow distinct cultural modes of evaluating the objectivity and credibility of policy-relevant scientific knowledge, evidence and expertise to arrive at different conclusions about similar technologies. By following how various actors are mobilizing cultures and institutions of knowledge production and deliberation to further political goals around nuclear power in India, as well as how these goals shape knowledge practices, I demonstrate that citizens’ desire to ‘scientize’ politics by creating a political culture of scientific debate around nuclear matters—thereby creating the forms of public reason as seen in Western nuclear debates—requires politicizing science to render it a publicly accessible rationality. As such, I argue that the creation of science- based, policy-relevant knowledge and politics should be seen as part and parcel of a particular variant of liberal democratic nation-building—albeit one that is inherently exclusionary, coercive and politically fraught. Using a mixed-methods approach of multi-sited ethnographies of five villages opposing nuclear energy, interviews with a wide range of actors, event ethnographies, oral histories and document collection and analysis, I discovered that urban and rural activists, politicians and regulatory officials articulate and enact different imaginaries of nuclear energy and democratic politics and participate in competing processes of knowledge-making and political formation. Democratic maneuvering and full access to the privileges of civil society are allowed actors who share the state's imaginary of nuclear power's role in achieving sovereignty and self-reliance, while others are not granted such affordances. Moreover, the state reproduces colonial sociopolitical categories in how it deals with the differential knowledge politics espoused by its rural, agrarian constituents and its urban elite citizens. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology 2016

This thesis focuses on Nepalis living in Oslo and Ås, Norway, and ethnographically explores their food perceptions, habits and practices in relation to health and maternal health. With pre-existing experience of both biomedical and other understandings of health and wellbeing, the majority of my respondents could and did move between paradigms, on an individual basis deciding which to apply and when. Consequently, several demonstrated certain reasoned divergences from Norwegian state-endorsed dietary norms and expectations; differences that were, however, not simply reducible to ‘culture’. ‘Culture’ is shown here to be a favoured strategy of explanation within Norwegian public health research, which has dominated state health perceptions of all South Asians. Overall, four key arguments are advanced. Firstly, the need to disaggregate the category of ‘South Asian’, currently readily employed within public health research and policies worldwide to describe and problematise the foodways of highly diverse diaspora populations. The middle-class status of my Nepali respondents is delineated as a central example exposing the inaccuracy of such a homogenising generalisation. Secondly, that despite the hegemony of biomedical models of nutrition within health and ante-/postnatal wellbeing in Norway, my interlocutors moved between these and other ideas and practices of health and wellbeing. Describing their dietary habits and practices makes plain the narrowness of applying purely biomedically-predicated thinking to understanding these Nepalis’ foodways. Thirdly, that in ante-/postnatal care the biomedical model overprivileges the individual mother’s responsibility for her own health in order to benefit her child, ignoring the potential for alternative distributions of responsibility for, as well as emphasis on, both offspring and mother: the Nepalis I encountered showed a notable commitment to the mother’s wellbeing and also sense of pregnancy and postnatal care as a collective enterprise, relationally shaped. Fourthly, my Nepali respondents’ accounts provide a useful example demonstrating limitations to the perceived authority of Norwegian state advice on health in general. Well-informed and often highly educated, these Nepalis engaged only selectively with the state-endorsed guidance and services, instead drawing on other (re)sources – Nepali family and friends especially – to maintain health and wellbeing.

This project delineates a cultural history of modern Hinduism in conversation with contemporary Indian literature. Its central focus is literary adaptations of the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata, in English, Hindi, and Bengali. Among Hindu religious texts, this epic has been most persistently reproduced in literary and popular discourses because its scale matches the grandeur of the Indian national imagining. Further, many epic adaptations explicitly invite devotion to the nation, often emboldening conservative Hindu nationalism. This interdisciplinary project draws its methodology from literary theory, history, gender, and religious studies. Little scholarship has put Indian Anglophone literatures in conversation with other Indian literary traditions. To fill this gap, I chart a history of literary and cultural transactions between both India and Britain and among numerous vernacular, classical, and Anglophone traditions within India. Paying attention to gender, caste, and cultural hegemony, I demostrate how epic adaptations both narrate and contest the contours of the Indian nation.

By focusing on women’s lived experiences of family abuse, this thesis argues that state policy shows a lack of understanding of the nature of family abuse in one of Scotland’s largest minority communities: South Asian Muslims. Through a combination of a critical exploration of mainstream conceptualisations of domestic abuse, empirical research and policy analysis, I argue that by focusing on one-dimensional explanations such as gender and culture, state policy and some research evade the more practical and structural issues that operate against women. By adopting an intersectional approach, I focus on the complex interplay between factors such as socio-economic status and structural inequalities at the micro- and macro-levels bound up with experiences of family abuse. Through in-depth interviews with South Asian Muslim women, this thesis highlights the specificity and complexity of South Asian Muslim women’s experiences of family abuse within the home, framed through the impact of kinship structures and immigration status. Furthermore, my focus on the macro- as well as the micro-level brings to light structural inequalities and harmful policies, such as immigration rules, that act as additional constraints on women in abusive relationships. This thesis then examines women’s strategies and choices within abusive relationships by exploring the relationship between agency and oppression. I identify a crucial point: access to resources, such as economic support, ultimately shapes women’s strategies, including if, when and how to exit. I do not posit an overarching theory to explain family abuse, nor do I offer one key solution to the problem. I do, however, argue for nuanced and sensitive policymaking not only for South Asian women, but for all marginalised women, By underlining the specific experiences of one group of women I emphasis that needs are likely to differ in other groups of women.

"Troubling Breath," the product of fourteen months of fieldwork, examines the experience of tuberculosis sufferers in rural Rajasthan, India. In it, I engage the Indian national tuberculosis control program, local health institutions, informal biomedical providers, non-biomedical healers and sufferers to consider how global tuberculosis control initiatives interact with social life and subjectivity among the rural poor. I ask how tuberculosis affliction and healing builds and reveals the diversity and limit of relationships between state and citizen, individual and kin, body and social, global and local, and formal and informal healthcare. / Anthropology

This thesis aims to shed light on the cultural and aesthetic implications of the relationship between Italy and India on and off the screens of Italy, following the expansion of Bollywood in Europe during the 90s. Bollywood's propagation abroad affected the identity of the South Asian diaspora, urban spaces and aesthetics which generated what Le Guellec - describing the arrival of Indians and Bollywood cinema to Paris - named as Bollywood/India mania. The study began with the exploration of the historical meaning of the term aesthetic in order to offer a contextualization on the sense of the aesthetic as a philosophy of art; furthermore, it established a background for further theoretical debate on South Asian diasporic identity formations within the entertainment industry of Italy. The research methods that predominated throughout this work were those of textual argumentation, aesthetic analysis, quantitative and qualitative questionnaires and interview data. The reasons for using different and interdisciplinary methods and approaches to offer an account on diasporic cultures, resided in the attempt to reveal the multiplicities of the "cultural and social" visible. The theoretical frame that this research intends to follow is through two quite distinct disciplines: aesthetic and cultural studies. The aim is to capitalise on the productive intersection of these two disciplines to analyse parts of the South Asian cultural text on the screen and beyond it as producers of transnational images imbued with melancholic memories and melancholically conceived spaces. This work will attempt to individuate the existence of representational patterns based on the aesthetic of melancholy with its nuances and metamorphoses, which represents, narrates and constructs South Asian and/or fused identities socially and culturally on the screens of Italy. The notion of semiosphere as elaborated by Jury Lotman, was utilised to define the cultural and dialogic dynamics of mainstream products that move constantly closer to each other generating original "formats" characterised by novel transnational and multiple identities. Throughout this thesis, the emphasis was placed on the "encounters", the "journeys" and the "sharing" of cultures, hence highlighting the possible conditions of belonging contemporaneously through multiple modalities: mentally, psychologically and experientially to multiplicities of cultures. In addition, the notion of "world culture" was contemplated in an attempt to practically support what Gilroy, in Black Atlantic, shaped as "inter-cultural" and translational formations.

Community cohesion in Britain has been an issue of policy concern in recent years in which the role of migrants in the UK has been scrutinised in terms of their sense of belonging, integration and their economic and social contribution to society. However, much of the existing literature, in this area relates to the experiences of low/unskilled labour migrants. This thesis redresses this imbalance and examines the experiences of overseas-trained South Asian doctors. It provides unique insights into the debates about integration, cultural identity and community cohesion based on an empirical study of overseas-trained South Asian General Practitioners who are elite migrants. A mixed method approach was employed that included secondary data analysis of the GP Workforce Statistics and in-depth interviews with 27 overseas-trained South Asian doctors in three different geographical locales in England with varying ethnic populations. The quantitative analysis shows that a significant and increasing proportion of NHS doctors continue to be overseas-trained South Asian doctors. It also provides evidence of geographical clustering with South Asian doctors being over represented in deprived areas with high and low ethnic minority concentrations. The case studies and interviews with the GPs reveal a complex intertwining of macro-, micro- and meso- structures in the migratory process, related, in part, to the legacy of empire and also to the inner workings and opportunities provided by an organisation such as the NHS. In order to overcome blocked social mobility within the NHS hospital structure, entry into General Practice appears to be an entrepreneurial step for overseas-trained South Asian doctors, also facilitated by regional NHS institutional structures like Primary Care Trusts. Evidence shows that doctors have integrated their cultural/religious values creatively in their adaptation to Britain importing innovation into their everyday experiences. The findings show that there are parallels to be drawn with the experiences of low/unskilled South Asians, in particular, in the area of structural integration. However, there is variation as to how these elite professionals approach issues related to socio-cultural integration thus adding a new dimension to our existing understanding of community cohesion in the UK.

International migration flows have increased at a rapid pace over the past decade and are often accompanied by emergent and evolving global realities, fluid and permeable borders, (re)negotiation of identities and familial bonds, anticipated challenges, as well as unforeseen exigencies. Concomitantly, advances in public health and chronic disease management have resulted in longer lives with an increasing proportion of the global population now 65 years and older. While these demographic shifts have received considerable research attention over the past few decades, little attention has been paid to aging Muslim families and the ways in which they adjust and adapt to shifting global realities and social circumstances. Of the roughly 3.45 million Muslims in the US, nearly six-in-ten US Muslim adults are first-generation Americans. And among US Muslim adults who were born abroad, more immigrate from South Asia (35%) than any other region. This demographic trend, along with the aging of the US population, implies that South Asian Muslims will comprise a large segment of the US population aged 65 years and older in the coming years and greater attention needs to be paid to the lived experiences of mid- to late-life South Asian Muslim families in the US in order to better support their health and social care needs. This qualitative study addresses these issues, specifically focusing on the intersections of faith, culture, gender, age, and immigrant status, as well as intergenerational care and support exchanges within the family, and the ways in which everyday lived experiences and seminal life course events shape processes of meaning-making and sense of self in immigrant South Asian Muslim families. Building on findings from 30 in-depth narrative interviews with three generations of South Asian Muslim women living in the US, and using an intersectional lifecourse perspective, I explore the re-negotiation of familial bonds and the enactment of religious beliefs and practices such as those around filial expectations in a transnational Islamic context. In so doing, I highlight how, for the women in my study, their Islamic faith was a part of both the public sphere and a collective ideology as well as a deeply personal and intimate attachment that provided structure and continuity in their everyday lives. I suggest how attitudes, behaviors, and meaning-making processes related to kin-work and exchanges of support between generations may be shaped by categories of gender, age, time of and since immigration, and degree of religiosity. Finally, I situate these attitudes and behaviors within the broader framework of Islamophobia and salient structural barriers to accessing available health and social support services for immigrant South Asian Muslim women and their families. / Graduate / 2021-12-07

This thesis studies the history of the National Associations of Canadians of Origins in India (NACOI) and its role in helping to shape and impact federal policy relating to immigration reform and multicultural policy in Canada. Ethnic political associations in Canada have a long and extensive history of impacting federal policy. However, the role of NACOI has been underreported when looking into the history of South Asian political advocacy in Canada. The institutionalization of multicultural policy created a framework for ethnic associations to discuss issues that mattered to them. NACOI’s establishment in 1976, five years after multiculturalism became government policy, allowed it to take the helm of these new discussions. Furthermore, NACOI is significant because it represents one of the first attempts to create an organization that aimed to federate all South Asian groups under one umbrella with a solely political goal. This thesis aims to understand whether NACOI was successful in its endeavours to impact federal policy as well as which struggles led to the decline of the organization. Alongside these questions, this thesis also seeks to explore whether NACOI aided in the integration of East Indians in Canada by the mid-1970s to the early 1990s through their efforts as a political advocacy group. Using NACOI’s quarterly publications, published material produced by the group, internal reports, and interviews with some of the founding members of the organization, this thesis also attempts to provide a micro-history of the organization by detailing its formation, growth and eventual dissolution by the early 1990s.