Browsing by Subject "Oral History"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Mobility, community and identity: Chinese student/professional migration to the United States since 1978 and transnational citizenship.
    (2009-07) Liu, Lisong
    Between 1978 and 2002, China sent 580,000 students and scholars to study abroad. About two thirds of these students and scholars adjusted their immigrant status and became permanent residents of their residing societies, especially the United States that has received around forty to fifty percent of Chinese students abroad. This dissertation focuses on Chinese student migrants as a case of contemporary international professional migration and studies their mobility, identities, and community formation from historical and transnational perspectives. It begins with 1978 when China began its open-door and reform policies and U.S.-China relations were normalized. It examines the changing Chinese policies on migration and the increasing attention China paid to student migrants, revealing how student migrants' transnational mobility was tied to China's political and economic reforms. It then discusses how the preference for skilled and professional migrants in U.S. immigration laws developed over time and what Chinese and Asian student and professional migration revealed about post-1965 U.S. national identity and international relations. It also examines how professional migrants, with better social mobility than past generations of migrants, faced both opportunities and challenges in forming their local communities in post-1965 U.S. society. This dissertation in the end looks at the return and circular migration of Chinese student and professional migrants. It revises the conventional framework of studying immigration as a linear process and argues that for a large number of returning Chinese student migrants, citizenship is not a signifier of assimilation or of permanent settlement but a status used for transnational mobility transcending the national boundaries which define and justify citizenship. This dissertation draws from sociological, anthropological, and political science studies of recent migrants while providing historical perspective on the recent past. Its analysis is based on a wide variety of written documents in both Chinese and English, including censuses, surveys, immigration policies and laws, congressional records, government publications, media reports, immigrant organization records, as well as migrants' online discussions. Another key source is fieldwork in both China and the United States, including visits to migrants-related organizations and sixty interviews with student migrants and returnees in the two countries.
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    Remnants of Hope: (Re) member, (Re) claim, (Re) new
    (2023) Kpetay, Shakita
    School closure is one of the most controversial issues in education. Cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York City, and New Orleans have closed a large number of schools at one time while opening the doors of many charter schools (Buras, 2013; Lipman, 2012; Stovall, 2016; Watkins, 2012). Remnants of Hope: (Re) member, (Re) claim, and (Re) new is a critical ethnohistorical study that centers the experiences of students and educators who attended a public school that experienced school restructuring and later closure. Drawing from the Black heretical tradition, neoliberalism, and school closures, this dissertation examines how students and educators make sense of the school restructuring, closure, and highlights the ways that the political economy continues to shape education opportunities for Black/African American communities. Through archival analysis and interviews with students and educators who attended or worked at a school that was impacted by school closure, I explore the processes and problems associated with teaching and learning in these communities. I found that school closures are not just a one-time occurrence. It is a process that is impacted by race, gender, class, and geography. These closures can also lead to a disruption of community bonds and increased violence. I argue that scholars, educators, and policymakers need to ignite their critical historical collective consciousness and use intersectionality in the form of memory work to understand modern-day school closures and their impact on students and educators, more specifically Black/African American communities.
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    “This is our home!” Chicana Oral Histories: (Story)telling life, love and identity in the Midwest
    (2010-12) Creel, Kandace J.
    Tracing the lives of eight Midwestern Mexican American women, my dissertation interrogates the role of stories and storytelling in familial relationships and community building. I engage with Chicana feminist understandings of identity through these Midwestern Chicanas' stories of growing up in the Midwest (in the 60s and 70s) and their lives as women – while paying particular attention to the intersectional categories of gender, race, class and sexuality. Chapter One situates a “mestiza methodology” and the process of collecting oral histories with three women who are immediately related to me and five who are not. Weaving in women's stories, Chapter Two deals with Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the borderlands (as an in–between space of creative strategies for survival and affirmation) in relation to Midwestern Mexican American woman's experiences. By situating Anzaldúa’s metaphorical borderlands in the Midwest (Kansas and Minnesota), I argue that while the physical border may be miles away the cultural clashes/borders that exist due to isolation, racism, and initially small communities of color have nevertheless mapped the borderland onto Chicanas in the Midwest and yet, their narratives are full of opportunities for re–envisioning politicized identities through the firm planting of roots, self–definition, and claiming an alienating space as home. Chapter Three uncovers the complicated understandings of silence in relation to Chicana sexuality and la familia. I explore how these women often resist the gendered roles they might feel constrained by in order to move the reader to think about their actions as underground feminist acts. Lastly, the conclusion synthesizes these eight Midwestern Chicana voices around the theme of storytelling. It reiterates the importance and value of the family and how storytelling has served as a means to pass on cultural knowledge. In exploring the bonds that women specifically build through storytelling I characterize the sharing of stories for these greater purposes as actos de amor, (acts of love). I assert that through dissolving the strict borders between ethnography and oral history, or testimonio and storytelling we can write Midwestern Chicanas into larger histories and explore alternative meanings of feminist identities in these geographic places far from the U.S./Mexico border.