Browsing by Subject "Transnationalism"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    The burden of privilege: navigating transnational space and migration dilemmas among Rwandan scholarship students in the U.S.
    (2014-08) Baxter, Aryn Raye
    This dissertation is an ethnography of the transnational education space inhabited by higher education scholarship recipients from Rwanda pursuing undergraduate degrees in the United States. It examines how this space is produced through the representational practices of actors in the U.S. and Rwanda and, in turn, constitutes the relationships, dilemmas, transformations, and representations that occur within these spaces. Employing a transnational lens, the study describes a space of opportunity as well as tension between contrasting narratives of change, national and familial priorities, and the "magical" expectations of various actors that contrast with students' lived experiences of undergraduate education in the U.S. Most centrally, it argues that navigating the diverse expectations associated with a U.S. education is a significant yet under-addressed challenge faced by scholarship students from low-income and post-conflict contexts. Understanding this burden--the burden of privilege--is its primary focus.The study demonstrates that spatial analysis offers a promising approach for illuminating the experiences of internationally mobile students and for informing the design and implementation of international higher education scholarship programs. It concludes that scholarship students would benefit from program designs that create space for open dialogue about the migration dilemmas that accompany international mobility, particularly those related to the weighty expectations of family and nation for those privileged to have received scholarships to study in the U.S. This is particularly crucial for programs involving youth from low-income and post-conflict contexts--a group for whom the burden of such a privilege is particularly pronounced.
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    Civic identity and transnationalism in rural Minnesota
    (2014-08) Thompson, Jessamay Rose
    This 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.
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    From nursing sisters to a sisterhood of nurses: German nurses and transnational professionalization, 1836-1918.
    (2009-08) Soine, Aeleah HeaRan
    Between the 1830s and World War I, German nurses engaged in collaborative efforts with American and British nurses for the purpose of transforming their work into a respectable profession for women. This dissertation reasserts the importance of German nurses in the development of a profession, not only because they were actively involved in the movement, but also because many transnationally-influential nursing ideologies and organizational models originated in Germany. Through archived collections of personal letters, organizational records and publications, government transcripts, and speeches by German nurses, my project brings together artificially-separated national nursing traditions at key moments in their shared history of nursing professionalization. As such, the writings and activities of these German women offer illuminating evidence of the historical intersections among professional class formation, gender relations, and organizational development as they occurred simultaneously on a local, national, and transnational scale.
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    The migrating state: Mexico, migrants, and transnational governance.
    (2010-03) Mackey, Paul Michael
    Since the late 1980s, the Mexican government has been developing a program to assist and defend Mexican migrants that live north of Mexico's territorial borders. Unprecedented in scope and scale, the program has attempted to cultivate in migrants affinity for the Mexican homeland and strengthen the transnational social and economic ties that link migrants to Mexico. This project argues that Mexico's program of "acercamiento" with migrant communities is inextricably linked to Mexico's adoption of neoliberal governing rationalities, and that the government has deployed migration policy as a vehicle for reinventing the reason of state in Mexico. While engaging contemporary issues in political geography and globalization studies, this project explores the rhetorical dimensions of Mexico's outreach to migrants, including rhetoric's pivotal role in rescaling the institution of the Mexican state, in reimagining the governing relationship between the state and migratory subjects, and in disembedding concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and citizenship from their entrenchment in national territory and rearticulating them to transnational migrant flows.
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    A revolutionary crucible: French radicals, foreign expatriates, and political exiles in the Paris commune
    (2014-09) Marshall, Christopher John
    During the Paris Commune of 1871 non-French radicals served the city's revolutionary government both actively and visibly, holding positions of political and military prominence up until the Commune's final hours. By examining three of these foreign radicals, Leo Frankel, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and Jaroslav Dombrowski, this dissertation demonstrates how the Paris Commune constituted a pivotal moment in Europe's transnational radical discourse, particularly for foreign radicals operating within the French capital. Beginning with the French Revolution, Paris became a site of revolutionary pilgrimage for international radicals drawn by its promise of facilitating their own political and ideological aspirations. Inaugurated by the Great Revolution, this process greatly accelerated between 1830 and 1848 as the city's community of foreign radicals, spurred the growth of transnational discourse such as socialism, began to perceive Paris's revolutionary portent as transnational and exportable. Though the efforts of 1848 proved a failure, they served to illustrate to Paris non-French radical community that a truly transnational revolutionary effort could only be facilitated by first consolidating revolution in Paris. This, combined with the deepening of transnational radical ties through the establishment of the International, produced the conditions whereby Paris's transnational potential reached its apex with the Paris Commune. Based on archival research conducted in Paris, this project demonstrates how foreign radicals, specifically Frankel, Dmitrieff, and Dombrowski, came to view the Commune as the historical moment capable of carrying Paris's revolutionary promise to its final fulfilment, thus forging a pathway to an emancipatory future for Europe and beyond.
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    Tambien Bailamos en el norte: sonidero transnational, lives, and Mexican migrants in the Midwest
    (2014-06) Aguilar, Rodolfo
    The United States of America holds a legacy of xenophobic attitudes towards Mexican immigrants dating back to the massive repatriations of the 1930s. In response to anti-immigrant actions, Mexican immigrants have often turned to popular culture to document racial violence and labor exploitation. Currently, popular music serves as a means for Mexican immigrants to proclaim a cultural presence in the United States. Tambien Bailamos en el Norte is an interdisciplinary study incorporating ethnography and lyric analysis to examine the intersections between Mexican immigration to the Chicagoland area and the popular social dances known as sonidero. Sonidero dances consist of a Mexican Sonido (DJesque performer) with enormous sound systems playing popular música tropical such as cumbia and salsa for large crowds. Sonidero was born in the urban Mexico City barrios during the late nineteen-fifties when Mexican Sonidos used humble sound systems and Colombian cumbia records to host street bailes (dances). The pioneer sonidos of Mexico City provided Latin American rhythms to working-class residents originally restricted to elite Mexican socialites. The Sonido eventually incorporated saludos (shout-outs) delivered concurrently with the music. Sonidero's popularity expanded to the Mexican immigrant communities of the Chicagoland area and the rest of the U.S., due to accelerated waves of immigration during the 1990s and 2000s. This dissertation argues that sonidero enthusiasts engage in a unique Mexicanidad fusing Mexican nationalism with adopted Latin American cultural codes to create transnational lives in the Chicagoland area. Chicagoland sonidero enthusiasts challenge how scholars study popular music in U.S. Mexican immigrant communities because the Mexicanidad invoked in sonidero, conflicts with the long-standing musical traditions of rural northern Mexican corridos. I use this unique expression of Mexicanidad found in sonidero spaces and in the lives of my research subjects to theorize new ways of studying community formation, transnationalism, cultural citizenship, political economy, and mass communications among recently-arrived Mexican immigrants. In doing so, the participants of my dissertation demonstrate how Mexican immigrants cross cultural borders as well as geographical ones by forging transnational lives, linking Mexico City with the Chicagoland area.
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    Transformational Festivals and the Enchantment Economy: Performance and Race in Neoliberal Times
    (2019-06) Schmidt, Bryan
    This dissertation examines the phenomenal global growth of music festival culture over the last two decades, with particular emphasis on “Transformational Festivals,” a genre of participatory, for-profit event influenced by New Age ideology and aesthetics. I use ethnographic examination of these festivals in the United States and Costa Rica as a basis for understanding the role that participatory culture and event economies play in territorialization and racialization. I historicize this analysis as a component of liberal and neoliberal culture by examining the lineage of repertoires and event structures in US temporary outdoor communities, which utilized the natural landscape as a basis for creating a White-dominated participatory culture. These communities were crucial to furthering a settler colonial project by creating deeply affective forms of social connectivity among White liberals, while also iteratively and imaginatively overwriting the landscape’s history of conquest so as to render native claims to colonized land pliable and, ultimately, dismissible. Turning to the aesthetics of contemporary festival culture, I trouble the scholarly tendency to examine the festival event as a social interstice that exists “outside” of quotidian time and space. I build a concept of “enchanting performance” that allows the production of event space, and the performance of idiosyncratic festival repertoires to appear as activities self-consciously connected to political and social commitments. This offers an alternative to structural interpretations of festivals as “counter-spaces,” allowing us to consider the complicated role such events play in ongoing movements for social change—especially those that pertain to race. I then outline how festival aesthetics tie in to a wider “enchantment economy” that operates at local and transnational levels. With an examination of the Harmony Park Music Garden in Minnesota, I articulate how struggles over symbolic and material control of the festival space create a fraught politics of Whiteness that manifest through claims of autochtony vis-à-vis the festival grounds. I then examine Envision Festival in Costa Rica to discuss the phenomenon of “Destination Festivals,” with attentiveness to transnational symbolic and material exchange. I outline how Envision utilizes an erotics of the Other to capitalize on the libidinal economy that attends festivalgoing in order to generate identity capital for White tourists. I also discuss the economic and social consequences of this culture mining, which offer up heritage as an object of mass consumption in the service of White identity formation.