Browsing by Subject "Citizenship"
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Item Circulating citizenship practices: Bolivian routes of migration, hometown associations, and development.(2012-07) Strunk, ChristopherInternational migration has become a widespread phenomenon across the Andes in recent decades. In Bolivia, where approximately 20 percent of the population lives abroad, long-term routes of migration have transformed cities and rural areas within the country and beyond. This dissertation examines the lives of Bolivian migrants from the Valle Alto of Cochabamba in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Drawing on Bolivian scholars, I analyze the non-linear paths taken by migrants and the varied nature of indigenous experiences through the vertical archipelago model. Using a collaborative multi-sited ethnography of migrant organizations, I explore the circulation of money, values and practices between migrant settlement nodes and places of origin. I show that Bolivian hometown associations have adapted rural organizational practices to a suburban U.S. landscape while also transforming places in the Valle Alto. I also analyze migrant efforts to negotiate their belonging within changing citizenship regimes in Washington D.C. and Cochabamba. By playing soccer, performing folkloric dance in public spaces and constructing transnational houses and public works projects, Bolivian migrants are able to be recognized as members of communities in Cochabamba and the Washington D.C. metro area even if they are not physically present or formal members of the national polity. Finally, I analyze the decisions of migrants to stay in the Washington or return to Bolivia through the lens of gender and the family, highlighting the importance of family responsibility and fatherhood for male migrants. The case of migration from the rural municipality of Arbieto offers important insights into both the struggles and opportunities confronting migrants as they traverse international, regional and local boundaries and put down roots in multiple places. Ultimately, I argue that migrant practices are changing what it means to be a campesino (peasant) from the Valle Alto. While Bolivian migrants are using collective remittances and the intention to return to construct a reformulated rural identity based on long-distance ties and investment in the rural economy, migrant identities also have to be located within a broader understanding of belonging that takes into account the deep roots that migrants have developed in multiple communities.Item Civic identity and transnationalism in rural Minnesota(2014-08) Thompson, Jessamay RoseThis embedded case study was conducted in two racial and culturally diverse seventh grade Civics classrooms taught by the same teacher at a small town high school in rural Minnesota. Beginning in the 1990s, the high school and community experienced a rapid demographic change due to immigration. This study examined how young people from various cultural backgrounds (Bosnian, Latino, Vietnamese, and White) living in the town construct and negotiate their civic identity. Data were collected over the course of five months, from October 2013 through February 2014. I utilized qualitative research methods, including interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis, with the purpose to investigate how the curriculum, instruction, classroom climate, social interactions, family, and cultural backgrounds factor into how youth living in a rural community conceptualize their civic identity. Bronfenbrenner's (1979, 1988) ecological model of human development, transnationalism (Ong, 1999) and imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) form the framework that guides this study.Item Commodity, Citizen, Copy: Bollywood and the Aesthetics of Consumption(2018-12) Banerjee, KoelThis dissertation seeks to provide a conceptual critique of the new horizon of Bollywood that comes into view in post-1990s filmic texts and their attendant discourses. I examine the penetration of a logic of consumption into Bollywood – its institutions, products, lifestyles, personalities, and above all, narratives. As India underwent neoliberal reforms that introduced ideals of wealth, leisure, and glamor into a society previously shaped by nationalist restraint and utilitarian thrift, Bollywood cinema emerged as the template for a new visual economy of excess and spectacle. Central to this inquiry is the problem of “commodity aesthetics” (Warenästhetik), a methodological perspective developed by the German philosopher of the interwar Frankfurt School, W. F. Haug. Taking my initial theoretical cue from Haug, I explore the ways that neoliberal ideas have not only been successful in transforming ideologies of the market into a new moral order, they have also made consumption into an ethical responsibility. Focusing on the representational strategies of popular Bollwood films, I show how they solicit a different kind of attention from spectators – one that is geared towards cultivating desire for newly available commodities. By tracing the evolution of the spectacular aesthetics of Bollywood, my dissertation takes up a threefold set of theoretical concerns. First, I elaborate how neoliberal imperatives have, since the 1990s, transformed the Hindi film industry and its cultural production. Second, I map the extent to which these transformations, in turn, enable Bollywood to symbolize the epicentre of a new visual and affective economy. And finally, I explore the ways that Bollywood, through various cinematic and extra-cinematic manoeuvres, engenders what I designate as “consumptive citizenship.” The resulting amalgam, I argue, expresses an ideal of the citizen based on conspicuous consumption of both newly available global commodities and a reified notion of Hindu identity.Item Critical Understanding of U.S. Youths’ Citizenship: Community Belonging and Engagement of “Successful Citizens”(2011-07) Josic, JasminaAs today's youth is growing up and developing new civic attitudes in societies made more complicated by globalization, the argument grows for expanding the discussion about citizenship education. Unpacking the outcomes of democratic schooling and citizenship education in the United States through youths' experiences, this study examines this generation's ideas of citizenship in three ways: inquires about the meaning of citizenship for young people, within the institutionalized relations and social processes of schooling; develops a critical understanding of youths' citizenship through their constructions of citizenship; and problematizes implications of youths' citizenship constructions and experiences for future citizenship education programs. Viewing citizenship as a membership in a society, this study applies a conceptual framework consisting of three interrelated dynamics that shape the position of one's citizenship: the politics of institutionalized social relations, social processes and practices, and an individual's struggle for self-definition and identity formation as a citizen. The research is rooted in qualitative interpretive design with elements of critical ethnography and informed by poststructural feminist theory. The study explores the perspectives of youth in two public schools located in New York City and in northern New Jersey. Using two purposive samples of 28 high-school juniors and seniors exposed to advanced social-studies curriculum, the data were collected during a 12-week period through class and school-activities observations, researcher journaling, small group interviews of students, and follow-up interviews with individuals. The use of countertopographies to metaphorically represent analytical findings brings the processes that shape youths' experiences as citizens to the forefront. The study reveals the spaces of belonging for these youth as citizens, and the processes of learning versus experiencing citizenship occurring in the space of schooling. This research recounts the construction of their citizenship as occurring within individual struggles to balance social expectations of success and one's motivation to learn and engage opportunities in their communities. In translating the findings into a discussion about the needs of citizenship education programs and possibilities of developing critical citizens, this study assists in positioning young people as individuals capable of developing agency and their voices as citizens in their own right.Item Divided loyalties: citizenship, regional identity and nationalism in Eastern India (1866- 1931)(2008-12) Mishra, Pritipuspa AmarnathThis dissertation poses the following question--What does the co-existence of profound linguistic difference and unitary nationalism reveal about the nature of the Indian nation and the relationship between the region and the nation in India. To this end, I focus on the period when a tactical resolution between the demands of the region and the nation occurred in India. My contention is that at the root of this resolution is the need (both at the regional and national level) to imagine a new citizen of emergent India. Through detailed studies of cultural and intellectual engagement of regional political, literary and historical organizations in early twentieth century Orissa, this dissertation traces the resolution of regional and national interests. I argue that in the period between 1900 and 1920, the emergence of the idea of a universal and politicized Indian citizen occasioned this resolution of the tension between the region and the nation. As the meanings of politics, statehood, rule and subject-hood changed due the colonial state's efforts to introduce franchise in India, both the Indian National Congress and the major regional political organization in Orissa, the Utkal Sammillani were forced to elaborate a clear relationship between Orissa as a region and the broader Indian nation in order to define the universal Indian citizen.Item Elites’ conceptualization of issues of social cohesion.(2010-08) Figueroa, ChantalThe purpose of this qualitative research study is to understand, compare and contrast elite perspectives of understanding of national identity and citizenship in Guatemala in the new environment of policies for social cohesion. In-depth interviews of six key personalities in Guatemalan elite society provide insights into the understanding of the construction of these concepts and the cultural logics underlying the initiative of the introduction of the Cabinet for Social Cohesion led by the first lady Sandra de Colom. Critical pedagogy is used as a theoretical framework to understand the future development and implementation of a policy for social cohesion and to pull together and analyze the similarities and discrepancies of elites’ perspectives. Finally, the study seeks to highlight the importance of identity politic when developing educational policy and social cohesion, especially citizenship education within the Guatemalan context. Key Words: social cohesion, citizenship, national identity, GuatemalaItem Everyday landscapes of immgrant integration in post-socialist Berlin: integration projects, othering and meanings of work.(2011-02) Matejskova, TatianaThis research examined everyday landscapes of belonging and responses of local population to recent immigrants in one of the new urban areas of immigrant settlement in Germany, namely neighborhoods of eastern Berlin, Marzahn. Once the largest socialist-era housing estate in the former East Germany, now severely socio-economically marginalized, central and northern Marzahn has over the past 15 years become home of the largest concentration of post-Soviet immigrants of German ancestry (so-called Aussiedler) in the former East Germany, the second largest migrant group by now in Germany. The project focused first, on what I call integration practices, that is practices through which local integration projects and policies seek to enable greater social inclusion of recent immigrants as well as acceptance of immigrants by the local society. And second, I sought to understand how such projects as well as immigrants and local residents themselves understand what "integration" - a vague but increasingly ubiquitous and contested term - entails and how they construct belonging in everyday urban contexts. The study is more broadly situated within the context of Germany's new regime of immigrant integration, which promotes neoliberalized, work-based understanding of belonging. These research questions were approached through a mixed-method qualitative case study, which entailed ethnographic work focused on northern and central Marzahn, including volunteering in two integration projects, focus groups conducted with local residents and Aussiedler immigrants, semi-structured expert interviews with local integration practitioners and experts, as well as document analysis. Findings point out in the first place to the myth of an integrated national society that immigrants encounter and in which they strive for belonging. Namely, I show that local practices through which Marzahner Other Aussiedler immigrants in everyday spaces as Russians hailing from backwards East and thus non-belonging in Marzahn and in Germany, are strongly entangled with and embedded in the national landscape of citizenship, in which Marzahn and Marzahner themselves occupy a very precarious position. Second, this project finds that while local integration projects in Marzahn play an important role in supporting immigrants' process of settlement through creating linguistically and socially familiar social spaces, crucial for regaining social confidence in a new environment, they often fail in achieving their goal of providing spaces of increased contact between immigrants and local residents. Rather, such sustained encounters are enabled within the spaces of larger community centers housing integration projects, mostly because they employ often significant numbers of otherwise unemployed residents through workfare programs. While such engagements do tend to increase empathy and more positive attitudes of local residents towards individual Aussiedler, I have cautioned against overoptimistic expectations for increased contact to also bring about reduced stereotyping and prejudice against the Aussiedler as a whole group and category. And finally, this dissertation shows that, quite in line with Germany's neoliberalized norms of belonging as based on employment and work contributions, especially middle-aged and older Aussiedler perceive their long-term exclusion from labor market as an obstacle to their feeling integrated in Germany. As I show, their insistence on the centrality of work for their feelings of belonging in a society is less a result of an influence of local integration practitioners or community leaders - for whom the importance of work for Aussiedler integration is instrumental rather than ideological - or from Marzahn's residents, many of whom do not see steady employment as a precondition for immigrant integration, in part also because of their own strong experiences with long-term unemployment. Rather, as I argue, this centrality of work draws primarily on the persistence of dividual conceptions of personhood and self as deeply socially embedded and emerging through a practice and experience of work, that these subjects internalized during their Soviet-era socialization.Item Forced migration processes and global refugees at the borders of Europe in Ukraine(2014-08) Rechitsky, Raphi KonstantinAs of 2013, nearly half of the world's refugees stay in camps adjacent to countries of origin, largely in the Global South. Yet it is those people on the move able to seek asylum near Global North countries that have become objects of control and exclusion. This dissertation explores this asylum paradox with an extended case study of refugee migration to Ukraine, asking why do refugees stay or move again from this buffer country to the European Union (EU). It does so by exploring the impact of social network formation, household resources, and international refugee policy on the capacity, motivation, and execution of either onward mobility or settlement. Using interviews and observation in three Ukrainian cities with urban refugees from 25 countries, triangulated with legal aid case files, this project shows that questions of social action, such as why people move, are best answered by taking seriously first person narrative research methodologies. Specifically, findings demonstrate (1) the security of social networks drives capacity to move or stay; (2) access to different resources influences exit, voice, or adaptation; and (3) refugees seek to settle or move on regardless of EU-funded humanitarian policy for their local integration. This study challenges the transnational paradigm in migration studies, bridging literatures on how migration is sustained with political sociology and refugee studies. The contribution links micro and macro levels in the sociology of migration, building on recent studies of migration trust networks, Bourdieu's view on the transfer of capital in everyday life, and the role of international institutions in the extraterritorial "remote control" of asylum.Item Health on the Line: The Politics of Citizenship and the Railroad Bracero Program of World War II(2013-07) Rodríguez, Chantel ReneeDuring World War II the railroad bracero program generated a series of transnational legal debates centered on the regulation of guest worker health rights. Between 1943 and 1945, an estimated 135,000 Mexican men were recruited to participate in the railroad bracero program, a guest worker program co-sponsored by the U.S. and Mexican governments, as temporary track maintenance workers to assuage the labor shortage and support war transportation. These Mexican guest workers, known as braceros, moved back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border and labored on an expansive network of tracks across the United States. When railroad braceros experienced injury, illness or unsafe working conditions, they engaged in a process of claim-making in which they requested railroad employers cover medical costs and/or rectify workplace safety and health issues. This study examines how four sets of historical actors--the U.S. state, the Mexican state, U.S. railroad employers, and railroad braceros--relied on the relationship between work, health and citizenship to define, negotiate and contest guest worker health. In doing so, it seeks to understand the forces that culminated in the railroad bracero program to cause workplace health discrimination against guest workers. I argue that the legal framework regulating bracero health preserved the functionality of the program as a cost-effective labor recruitment program by simultaneously guaranteeing health rights and creating a loophole to deny them. The U.S. state's capacity to extend health rights to guest workers allowed the program to fulfill in its primary goal--to secure Mexican guest workers through diplomatic agreements with Mexico. While the U.S. state had the capacity to extend health rights, it was the railroad employer that retained the power to distribute guest worker health benefits. The railroad industry's well-developed legal system for minimizing costs paid in injury compensation (injury culture) and protecting corporate autonomy made it difficult for guest workers and the Mexican state to navigate the bracero contracts and succeed in the process of claiming health rights. Railroad braceros were vulnerable in the American workplace not only because of their deportability, but also because they were unfamiliar with railroad injury culture.Item Imperial Medicine: An Ethnography of Immigrant Experiences after the Affordable Care Act(2019-07) Jimenez, AnthonyMy dissertation illustrates affinity between the US health care system and border control. I conducted 11 months of ethnography at Justicia y Paz (JyP), a volunteer-run NGO based in Houston, Texas that provides free food, clothing, basic medical services and temporary shelter to hundreds of undocumented immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia each year. I supplement this data with hundreds of informal interviews and 36 semi-structured in-depth interviews with migrants, volunteers, and city employees affiliated with Houston's medical district. I find that immigrant health care is premised less on legality (i.e., being documented) and more on legibility (i.e. being recognizable to health care practitioners in particular ways). Drawing on Harsha Walia's theory of border imperialism, which draws insights from critical race theory, Marxist analysis, feminist studies, and poststructuralism, I argue that illegality is not simply a determinant of but also determined by health disparities. Today's health care system operates like a border where the racialized terms of illegality are regulated, (re)produced and actively contested. My research illuminates these processes through examining how health care is understood, provided, and received at the medical district, NGO, and migrant levels. In doing so, I make several theoretical contributions to the areas of medical sociology and immigration and develop practical considerations for health practitioners and NGOs with health equity aims. On a theoretical level, I illustrate convergence between the welfare and carceral state, advance theoretical debates around medicalization, and add nation to analyzes between caregiving and masculinity. On a practical level, I implicate health practitioners and equity-oriented NGOs like JyP in different forms of migrant suffering and offer considerations for becoming social justice allies.Item Interest group citizenship: LGBT politics from the closet to K Street(2013-01) Hindman, Matthew DeanHow has the "interest group explosion"--i.e. the meteoric rise in number and influence of national advocacy organizations since the 1960s--transformed the meaning of democratic citizenship for historically marginalized groups? While a long tradition of "post-pluralist" research has broadened our understanding, and perhaps deepened our skepticism, of interest group activity, these accounts typically highlight how today's professionalized advocacy organizations tend to suppress participation and benefit their relatively advantaged constituents. However, the formative effects of interest group representation have largely remained underexplored. Using the LGBT movement as an exemplar of broader trends in political advocacy, I chart the role that national advocacy organizations played in transforming how their constituents understand their role as democratic citizens. Through this process, individuals who historically viewed themselves, for example, as "deviant," "immoral," or "neurotic" began to view themselves in politicized terms--more specifically, as liberal subjects of the pressure system striving to present themselves as upright and worthy citizens. My data, which come primarily from LGBT advocacy organizations' communications and correspondences with constituents, reveal that the advocacy system's expansion has generated a "politics of affirmation" among marginalized constituencies, characterized by interest groups' support for neoliberal governing procedures.Item Minnesota 4-H Youth Development Program Outcomes: Leadership and Civic Engagement(University of Minnesota Extension Center for Youth Development, 2008) Haugen, Heidi; Harrington, BeckyAnnotated bibliography on leadership and civic engagement developed to inform program outcomes for Minnesota 4-H Youth Development.Item Privatizing Biomedical Citizenship: Risk, Duty, and Potential in the Circle of Pharmaceutical Life(Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology, 2014-05) Kahn, JonathanGenomic research is at an impasse. In the decade since the completion of the first draft of the human genome, progress has been made, but few of the grandest promises of genomics have materialized. Biomedical researchers largely agree that one critical thing is essential to propel genomics into the future and maintain its legitimacy: more bodies. This Article will examine recent efforts at massive recruitment of subjects to participate in biomedical research and will argue that such efforts, while clearly motivated by a desire to drive biomedical research to its next stage of promised critical breakthroughs, also promote a privatized conception of citizenship that configures citizens’ duties as serving the public good primarily through serving the good of private corporations—pharmaceutical manufacturers in particular. This reconfiguration of citizenship, in turn, implicates the allocation of related public resources to support drug development.Item Reassessing 4-H Programming Strategies: A Study of Minnesota 4-H Region Six(2014) Neaton, Nicholas J; Zak, Kevin; Rauschenfels, Diane4-H youth development provides opportunities for youth in grades K-12 to explore new learning opportunities and community service. This study consisted of two parts. Part One measured members’ experience with the 4-H mission mandates of citizenship, healthy living, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). Part Two examined 4-H members’ attitudes towards 4-H, as well as their ideas for improving the organization. The study included 95 youth ages 14 – 19 who had at least three years of 4-H experience and who lived in Minnesota 4-H Region Six, an area comprised of Benton, Meeker, Sherburne, Stearns, and Wright counties. 4-H members had the most experience in service, leadership, and prevention of substance abuse. The project areas with the least amount of reported experience included citizenship, engineering, and consumer science. 4-H members also shared ideas for improving the 4-H program, including highlighting community service opportunities; and creating more opportunities to develop practical skills. These results provide 4-H researchers and staff with a sound basis on which to build future programming initiatives.Item Redefining citizenship: lessons from environmental theory, practice, and rhetoric(2011-06) Prody, Jessica MaryRedefining U.S. citizenship for our current global sociopolitical context is necessary. Drawing on environmental theory and practice, I argue for a community-building project that encourages citizenship built on forethought and emphasizes participatory justice, an inclusive notion of security, and sustainable intergenerational justice. The theoretical claims of the project are supported by six case studies that use textual analysis to examine how social movement and governmental discourse has paired environmental concerns and citizenship. These case studies demonstrate and need for and challenges of constructing a citizenship around the above principles. Throughout the project I illustrate the need for global and local consideration of citizenly issues and highlight the tension between urging immediate action on environmental problems and the need for action to be undertaken in a way that addresses philosophical questions of justice, fairness, sustainability, and democratic participation.Item Sitcom Citizenship: Civic Participation within Postwar Suburban Sitcoms, 1952-1972(2014-05) Cheyne, MichaelPostwar suburban sitcoms such as Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show are traditionally thought of as wholly focusing on themes of domesticity. This project argues that such programs also served as instruments of good citizenship, modeling civic participation within neighborhoods. In their depictions of this activism, suburban sitcoms emphasized the importance of individual responsibility and the family, themes which both compelled viewers to become civically engaged and also restrained the potential radicalism of their behavior.