Browsing by Subject "Refugee"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Assessing the Feasibility of Implementing a Parenting Intervention with Karen Refugees
    (2017-05) Ballard, Jaime
    Parents and children exposed to war and relocation have high rates of negative relational and mental health outcomes. This dissertation tested the feasibility of implementing an adapted evidence-based parenting intervention for contexts of traumatic and relocation stress. In the first phase of the feasibility study, I conducted three focus groups with Karen caregivers (N = 12, 5, and 12) to assess parenting practices in the Karen refugee community. Key themes identified related to mothers’ physical care for their children, parenting difficulties after relocation to the U.S., and practices of discipline, direction-giving, and encouragement. In the second phase, I adapted the evidence-based intervention and assessed its feasibility. Two groups comprised of eleven female Karen refugee caregivers participated in the intervention. Participants and a focal child completed structured assessments at baseline and follow-up as well as an ethnographic interview at follow-up. Caregivers reported changes in their teaching, directions, emotional regulation, discipline, and in child compliance. Children reported changes in teaching, directions, discipline, their own compliance, and in positive parent involvement. Caregivers reported higher mental health distress immediately after the intervention, potentially due to increased awareness. Children reported a decrease in mental health symptoms.
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    A Case Study of the Academic Success of Somali Refugee Students in a Two-Year Community College.
    (2015-08) Ibrahim, Mustafa
    Abstract This is a mixed-method, qualitative study of 36 Somali students to uncover key factors affecting their academic success in a two-year community college in the Twin Cities of Minnesota/St. Paul. The Twin Cities metropolitan area has become a preferred location in the US for Somali diaspora to settle because of the rich social, economic, and educational opportunities offered. A purposive sample of 18 current and 18 drop-outs male and female students were selected from a population of 234 Somali students who attended one of the largest and well-known community and technical colleges in the Twin Cities area. All 234 students participated in a screening questionnaire consisting of questions about socio-cultural conditions. Thirty-six students in the purposive sample were selected based on their responses to the screening questionnaire, were asked to participate in a semi-structured focus group interview and an individual interview. Three major themes emerged from the data related to cultural identity and sense of place, language use, and motivation. Somali students who were most successful academically had acculturated additively keeping their "Somaliness" while at the same time actively adopting American cultural values, skills, and practices. In addition, the most successful students valued persistent, committed educational progress whether their goals were modest or ambitious. Most who succeeded also had the most substantial and consistent family support, university financial, social integration, and years of English language exposure.
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    Negotiating Educational Identities: Life Histories of Karen Women in Minnesota
    (2015-05) Yang, Maiyia
    The ways in which educational identities have been presented and understood is incomplete. An educational identity should be how individuals or groups identify themselves and others as educated based on their understandings of what it means to be an educated person. In applying this concept of an educational identity, the purpose of this life history study is to understand how Karen women in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area negotiate their educational identities from their lived experiences in Burma, Thailand, and the United States. The guiding research questions in this study are: 1) How do Karen women negotiate their educational identities in different sociocultural contexts, and 2) How do Karen women's lived experiences in Burma, Thailand, and the United States shape their understanding of what it means to be educated? Using primarily interviews and participant observations, this study elicits insight about the educational experiences of nine Karen women to understand how they construct and negotiate what it means to be educated in different sociocultural contexts. The participants are between 21-43 years old and have been or are currently enrolled in formal or non-formal education. The findings in this study reveal that the Karen women negotiate their educational identities using two main components: level of education and experiences. Level of education refers to years of formal schooling, whereas experiences refer to non-formal and informal ways of learning. Moreover, the women's life histories illustrate how sociocultural contexts shape how they negotiate their educational identities. In answering the second research question, the findings elucidate that what it means to be educated in Karen culture is when the educated person demonstrates respect, maintains a good reputation, gives back, and is independent. In addition to contributing to the literature about educational identities, refugee women, the Karen in Minnesota, and the educational experiences of refugees and immigrants, the findings from this study can also inform educational policies and programs.
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    Queer Refugeeism: Constructions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Hmong Diaspora
    (2017-08) Pha, Kong Pheng
    Queer Refugeeism examines how the “refugee” figure relates to Hmong American racial, gendered, and sexual formation, belonging, and politics in the U.S. Examining various discourses around gender and sexuality such as rape, abusive transnational marriages, polygamy, and underage marriages, Part I crafts out ideological formations of race, gender, and sexuality in Hmong American communities. Queer Refugeeism uses texts such as newspaper documents, Hmong American ethnic cultural productions, and legislative bills to explicate a discourse of hyperheterosexuality that renders Hmong American culture and Hmong Americans as racially, gendered, and sexually deviant subjects. Part II turns to the material as I weave in youth narratives and community activism with secondary sources to expound how queer Hmong American youths are intertwined within dominant and Hmong American cultural discourses regarding race, gender, and sexuality. I argue against essentialist framinings of culture that posit Hmong Americans as perpetual refugees incompatible with queer modernity while showcasing how queer Hmong American youths are remaking culture and belonging on their own terms. Overall, Queer Refugeeism tackles how race, gender, and sexuality are integral to Hmong American refugee and queer youth belonging within the U.S.
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    The resettlement of the Karen in Minnesota
    (2015-01) Lytle, Kathleen J.
    Minnesota has a long history of welcoming immigrants and refugees into its communities. Following the Vietnam War large numbers of Southeast Asian (SEA)refugees came to Minnesota. With the implementation of the Refugee Act of 1980, a formal refugee resettlement program was created nation-wide. As part of the Refugee Act of 1980 Voluntary agencies (VOLAGs), were established to help the refugees with their resettlement process. Soon after the arrival of refugees from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, refugees from other countries began coming to Minnesota. In the 1990s refugees from the former Soviet Union began resettling in Minnesota. In the mid 1990s refugees from East Africa began arriving. In the early 2000s, large numbers of Karen refugees from Burma began coming to Minnesota. In order to help the Karen refugees in their acculturation, it is important for the community within which they are living to understand them and their culture. Using an ethnographic approach, this qualitative research project is aimed at understanding the lived experiences of the Karen and their resettlement. It describes sources of stress the Karen experience during their resettlement, and it describes the experiences of key informants who have worked in the resettlement of the Karen to Minnesota. This research suggests that, for the Karen, the development of a social capital network of community support, established prior to their arrival, has been an important part of their resettlement experience. Although the Karen have a well-established network of social support in Minnesota, they continue to experience significant acculturative stress in all areas of their lives.
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    Response strategies in forced migration: Women refugees’ narratives of health, identity and mothering
    (2016-06) Hoffman, Sarah
    The year this dissertation was submitted there were more individuals forcibly displaced around the world than at any other point in history. Research describing the vulnerabilities, human rights violations, and challenges individuals, families, and communities encounter across the spectrum of migration is readily accessible. Less available are studies that document the strengths-focused response strategies women refugees engage to navigate systems and experiences associated with displacement. This research, developed with the purpose to answer questions residing in this gap, is a series of ethnographic case studies documenting experiences of resilience, identity construction, and mothering among Karen refugee women from Burma. I define a response strategy as a tool engaged by an individual or community to navigate forced migration and promote the resilience of interpersonal connections, and cope individually and collectively with the challenges inherent to cultural transformation. Through this conceptual model I explore the experiences of women refugees from Burma living in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border and post-resettlement in the United States. Discourse, positional identity and hybridity frame, from a theoretical perspective, the tension inherent to the transformation of systems and structures. In particular, in this research I engage hybridity theory and the space of cultural difference to articulate the intersection of this transformation with the migration narratives of Karen women. The total study period was eleven months and characterized by two distinct phases of data collection. In the first phase I spent three weeks in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border conducting participant observation and informal interviews with Karen refugee women. In the refugee camps I partnered with the American Refugee Committee (ARC). The maternal-child health focus of ARC programs in the camps along the Thai-Burma border is highly regarded. In the second phase of data collection and analysis, I recruited and interviewed repeatedly a cohort of twelve Karen women post-resettlement in the United States over a seven-month period. An essential community partner in this phase of research was the Karen Organization of Minnesota (KOM). The KOM was the first Karen run organization in the United States advocating and supporting the experiences of refugees from Burma in resettlement. I formally approached the analysis of each phase of data collection using Spradley’s levels of analysis, a classical method of analysis in ethnographic research. In working through the four levels of Spradley’s analysis I reconstructed, from the narratives of refugee women, processes integral in self-understanding, identity, and the negotiation of factors associated with migration. This method of analysis supported an intricate approach to the data. I was able to establish broader categories of meaning, such as response strategies that support the health of individuals, families, and communities. Spradley’s analysis was also a mechanism through which I captured finer characteristics in the data, such as contrasts and silences. In the analysis I also drew from Critical Discourse Analysis and Grounded Theory to elicit patterns and politics embedded in language that influenced position, as well as to identify spaces between language where participants actively shifted meaning. Findings suggest that the response strategies women engaged as they navigated migration, the unique space of the refugee camp, and mothering post-resettlement facilitated the negotiation of the social, cultural, political, and legal structures they encountered. I assert that within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, a shift in cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women. To filter support through these spaces in ways that preserve them, also preserves the balance that women have constructed through the transitions and unknowns of migration. As public health practitioners, engaging in a caring response to refugee experiences, we need to seek out these spaces and find ways to funnel support through them without taking them over. Understanding ways refugees negotiate transition is not a phenomenon unique to the Karen. This is a facet of migration for all migrant groups, those with legal status such as refugees, and those without.