This dissertation explores the transnational care perspectives and practices of black immigrants working on the frontlines of eldercare in Greater Boston. Responding to the critical shortage of caregivers for the burgeoning aging population, first-generation immigrants from African and Caribbean countries find work in this field, performing physically and emotionally grueling work as Home Health Aides and Certified Nursing Assistants for low pay and few benefits. At the same time that these caregivers provide the most intimate care for older Americans and adults with disabilities, they often take on caring responsibilities for their aging relatives abroad. Evidence from fifty in-depth interviews with African and Caribbean caregivers reveals that these immigrants are changing the climate of eldercare in the U.S. as well as in their countries of origin by providing eldercare-specific economic and social remittances to their families abroad and fictive kinship through creative emotion work for their clients in the United States. These practices are informed by their transnational social location and work experiences which expose these caregivers to different state systems and care cultures. A dual evaluation of the perceived strengths and weaknesses of national eldercare systems produces for them a general definition of compassionate eldercare as the delivery of life saving medical care and skillful emotion work that ensure elders feel dignity in body and mind. Along with perceived cultural differences, these caregivers identify income inequality and weak welfare regimes as producing atmospheres of resource deficit and emotional deficit in the countries of origin and country of settlement, respectively. These perceptions provoke these caregivers to attend to the observed deficit and provide well-balanced compassionate care for their dependents, whether family member or client. These immigrant caregivers derive a sense of agency and pride from "filling the voids" in care for their clients and family members, arming them with a positive transnational caring identity strategy that helps guard against racism and marginalization they often experience on the job. Taken together, these findings reveal new ways of thinking about eldercare best practices and illustrate how actors at the micro level can inform institutional change at the global level.

This dissertation analyzes the role of missionaries in the inception of the transnational adoption movement between East Asia and United States from 1949 to 1960. While copious psychological and social scientific scholarship on adoption exists, the history of the adoption movement is relatively understudied. Recent research has accentuated adoption history from a geopolitical perspective, yet it fails to note the complex and diversified theological distinctiveness among the missionaries associated with the movement. By examining archival materials written by missionaries, this study narrates a more nuanced historical account of the transnational adoption movement, with a significant emphasis on racial issues and the theme of global friendship. Chapter one provides historical context by situating the transnational adoption movement between America and East Asia in the decades after the Second World War. Chapter two argues that Robert Pierce and Everett Swanson solidified the link between child sponsorship and adoption, consequently establishing the foundation for the later adoption movement. In chapters three and four, the study demonstrates that Pearl Buck and Helen Doss alleviated racism in America by opposing “racial matching” via their potent prose and adoption narratives. Chapter five examines Harry and Bertha Holt’s unconventional method of placing adoptees exclusively in Christian homes and the conflict with social workers that ensued. This study departs from the dominant perspective that the formation of the transnational adoption movement was directly related to the creation of neo-colonial relations between America and East Asia. Simultaneously, it refutes the prevalent hagiographic accounts that depict missionaries’ engagement as rescue missions focused exclusively on child welfare. By situating missionaries’ stories in the context of postwar America, the study demonstrates that the transnational adoption movement was part of a broader social phenomenon. Changing definitions of families, postwar prosperity, missionaries’ active anti-racism propaganda, and their increasing interest in global friendship all contributed to the inauguration and spread of transnational adoptions in the United States. / 2024-03-31

Authoritarian states have an extended reach on their populations residing outside of the country borders due to globalization and digitalization. This is part of the explanation of the increase of transnational repression globally. The aim of this paper is to investigate how authoritarian regime type affects the incidence of transnational repression. A bivariate hypothesis test is conducted using large scale quantitative methods and mediation analysis in order to conduct the study and investigate how the effect of regime type on transnational repression is mediated by domestic repression. Personalist regimes are expected to repress more domestically than for example single party regimes and therefore engage more in transnational repression. The results are inconclusive for the different measures of personalist rule. It is also suggested from the results that the effect of regime type on transnational repression is partially mediated by the level of domestic repression in the country.

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This dissertation explores the importance of tourism and tourability to contemporary global politics. I argue that the global movement of tourists (declared by the UN World Tourism Organization as a ‘right to tour’) is made possible in part through what I call the production of tourability – the capacity of particular places, bodies, or experiences to be toured and to be seen as worthy of touring. Rather than a natural result of difference, tourability is a political process that involves contestations over what and who counts, how space should be organized, and how and what histories are told. I show that touristic movement is based on a specifically neoliberal mobility – a form of free movement that lays claim to ‘borderlessness’ and infinite access along lines eerily familiar to those claimed by contemporary capital – and use this to argue that the work of making places tourable is also designed in specific ways to facilitate this kind of movement. Thus, being tourable is part of the transnational politics of contemporary governance and is useful to constructing the boundaries of (in)appropriate movement. At the same time, the continual expansion of tourism across the Global South has given ‘being tourable’ important economic and political stakes for life, subjectivity, and land. To understand the interweaving of these stakes and the transnational mobility being produced, I examine two sites where tourability has been thrown into question by those whose work produces it. The first is situated at the tri-border region of the Colombian Amazon on the shores between Brazil and Peru that has, in recent years, seen a boom of tourism development and visitors. This boom has largely operated on the neoliberal designs of movement and contemporary development that promote access to tourable places as an enactment of freedom. Against this backdrop, a story circulating in early 2011 highlighted the decision by members of Nazaret, an indigenous community along the river, to refuse tourists and tour companies entry. Taking up this small and messy act, I interrogate around this refusal to examine how touristic mobility is being made (im)possible in this small corner of the Amazon. The second site is a tour designed by the indigenous Hñähñu community of El Alberto, Mexico, that takes participants on a simulated border-crossing to experience, as so many of these community members have, what it is like to cross the U.S.-Mexico border as an undocumented migrant. Impressive, provocative, complex, and controversial, this tour throws into question both how mobilities are addressed within touristic sites and the creative potential of those who are toured to make use of its practices in ways that further other aims. Using concepts of work, landscapes, circulation, and friction, I explore both production and refusal to elaborate on the transnational politics of tourism as neither a panacea nor as an afterthought, but as a sticky, messy, and significant part of global political life. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)