Digital Commons Network^™

From Victims And Villains To Protagonists: Immigration And Citizenship In Modern Italy, Rachel Gleicher

Honors Theses

The Italian media, political parties, and immigrant-related social service organizations on all sides of the spectrum have contributed to the creation of various one-dimensional perceptions of Italy’s immigrant communities which have functioned to deny immigrants’ formal citizenship status and consequently, attempted to impede their access to the basic rights and privileges national membership guarantees. While left-leaning media outlets, organizations, and individuals tend to portray immigrants as victims draining Italy of its social, economic, and material resources, the Italian right often characterizes Italy’s immigrant population as villainous intruders incapable of integration due to cultural difference and in some cases, a natural …

Cultural Competence In Urban Affairs And Planning, Tom Angotti, Marly Pierre-Louis, Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Sigmund Shipp, Angela Tovar

Publications and Research

In the Fall of 2009, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) undertook the Centro Cultural Competence Initiative (CCI) with the support of a one-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). The goal of the CCI is to address the need for culturally appropriate work in a variety of professions by training students to be culturally competent practitioners. In the Fall of 2010, the Urban Affairs and Planning Department at Hunter College joined CENTRO as a partner in this initiative. Full time Professors Sigmund Shipp, Laxmi Ramasubramanian, and Tom Angotti worked …

Gringotenango : The U.S. Retirement Migration To Antigua, Guatemala, Katherine Wilnelia Platt

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation documents the migration of U.S. retirees to Antigua, Guatemala. Antigua is a charming Spanish colonial city in the middle of the Guatemalan highlands with beautiful volcano views, cobblestone roads, the presence of Mayan and Ladino cultures, and an eternal spring climate. The physical and cultural beauty of Antigua allows U.S. citizens to enjoy a permanent vacation-like retirement experience. Antigua, however, is located in a country whose recent history is characterized by 36 years of civil war, and current events are stressed by new violence criminal activities. Despite the beauty of Antigua, this colonial city is an odd retirement …

"Like An Ox Yoke": Challenging The Intrinsic Virtuosity Of A Grassroots Social Movement, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalization fostered an upsurge of grassroots social movements in Latin America that sought alternatives to increasing poverty and social exclusion. Social movement scholars often interpret these movements as morally noble models of democracy given their claims to social justice and equity. My research examines the forced seizure of a closed Mexican sugar mill and establishment of a cooperative, worker-run factory by a grassroots movement whose cultural politics aimed at creating more democratic processes. Yet in 2009, after 11 years of success, movement leaders declared the mill bankrupt and shut it down. The façade of unity presented …

Entrapment Or Freedom: Enforcing Customary Property Rights Regimes In Common-Law Africa, Sandra F. Joireman

Political Science Faculty Publications

This chapter examines customary property rights and the role of customary leaders in enforcing those property rights from an institutionalist perspective. The issue of societal benefit is at the forefront of this chapter, which proceeds in three parts. Subchapter 13.2 discusses the pervasiveness of customary tenure and customary authority structures throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and their genesis in the colonial era. Subchapter 13.3 notes the lack of consistency between statutory law and customary law, which leads to a pluralistic legal setting. This part also identifies the winners and losers within customary legal systems. Subchapter 13.4 discusses how we can evaluate customary …

Schooling And The Everyday Ruptures Transnational Children Encounter In The United States And Mexico, Edmund T. Hamann, Víctor Zúñiga

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Using examples of students in Mexico who used to attend US schools and examples from Georgia of students who used to and might again attend Mexican schools, this chapter considers how an unremarkable, quotidian activity—the act of attending school—can become means for transnationally mobile children to experience shock, disconnection, and a reiterated sense of dislocation if schools are incompletely responsive to learners' biographies.

Memoryscapes: Place, Mobility, And Memory In The Post-Dicatorial Southern Cone, Rebbecca M. Pittenger

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

The urban landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay lay bare the markings of these countries‘ turbulent political and economic pasts, their transition to democracy, and diverse efforts to preserve memory. Claudia Feld‘s observation that these countries have experienced a 'memory boom‘—not a deficit—in recent years manifests itself as much culturally and politically as it does spatially, through the creation of memorials, memory parks, museums, and memory-related performances and discourses. Along these same lines, narratives of memory recur among artistic and cultural works of the post-dictatorial Southern Cone—not exclusively among memorials and other designated sites of recollection, but along the everyday …

Immigration And Identity Politics: The Senegalese In France, Justine Dodgen

CMC Senior Theses

As immigrants arrive in a new culture, they must modify their behaviors to adapt to their host society. Through a review of current literature, I will examine the psychological and sociological aspects of immigration and the effects on migrant identity. I will argue that migrants most desire a bicultural identity, in which they retain some elements of their ethno-cultural identity while adopting some values of French society. The construction of a bicultural identity presents a challenge due to the particular philosophical foundations of the French nation-state and French culture. In the next chapter, I will analyze the challenges Senegalese migrants …

Foreword, From Holy Places And Pilgrimages: Essays On India, Robert H. Stoddard

Geography Program: Faculty Publications

This collection of twelve articles continues a long and rich body of information about pilgrimages. Written materials in the form of pamphlets, guidebooks, manuals, itineraries, and treatises about pilgrimages date from antiquity (see, e.g. the discussion in this volume by Rana Singh about ancient epics, pp. 15-20). Travelling to places regarded by worshippers as having extraordinary spiritual power is a phenomenon permeating all religious traditions so it is logical that it appears in various literary forms.

The Border Mural In The Electronic Age: Xican@ Literacy As Rhetorical Agency, José Angel Maldonado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Border Mural in the Electronic Age is a project that responds to blanket statements, not only about a people's literacy (or illiteracy), but to the ways in which we define and measure literacy in the electronic age. In this study, literacy is located on the US-México border, and this specific location serves as the social, political, and economic grounds on which to study the types of literacies used by the local population. A cultural ecology approach is necessary when studying niche literacies, and in today's world, traditional literacies coexist among emergent forms of literacy most likely attributed to technological …

Choque Cultural In Higher Education: The Lived Experiences Of Two Transnational Doctoral Students On The U.S. Mexico Border, Lyn Mckinley

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the experience of transnational students in higher education in a U.S. public university. The setting for the study is the U.S.-Mexico border between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. While numerous studies examine the experience of transnational K-12 populations in U.S. schools, there is limited research on students in advanced levels of higher education in this context.

The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth perspective of the experiences of two transnational doctoral students enrolled at the doctoral level at a U.S. university on the U.S.-Mexico border. The …

Pacto Por La Cultura: The Power And Possibility Of Cultural Activism In Ciudad Juárez, Kerry Doyle

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This paper is a qualitative study of Movimiento Pacto por la Cultura , a group of cultural activists that operate in the hyper-violent reality of 21st century Ciudad Juárez. This work looks at Pacto as a case study to explore the possibilities of culture as a tool of activism in a particular time and place, exploring in the ways in which economic development policies, deficiencies in infrastructure, and rising violence both effect and can be affected by cultural processes. Through analysis of the group's original documents and qualitative interviews with organizational members, the paper documents both the successes of the …

A Missiological Study Of The Phenomenon Of Dual Allegiance In The Seventh-Day Adventist Church Among The Yoruba People Of Nigeria, Paul Adekunle Dosunmu

Dissertations

Problem

Many Africans and members of other traditional societies of the world who still hold to a supernaturalistic and spiritualistic worldview visit diviners, shamans, spiritualistic herbalists, and the traditional medicine men and women who use enchantments, divination, charms, invocation of the spirit world, etc. They engage in such practices for various reasons which include, to diagnose and treat various ailments, both physical and psychological which plague their clients, a quest to know the future through divination, and also for the preparation of different kinds of charms and medicines. Christians, including some Yoruba Adventists, also engage in such consultations, a practice …

Indigenous Political Participation: The Key To Rights Realization In The Andes, Stephanie Selekman

Human Rights & Human Welfare

"There is no way back, this is our time, the awakening of the indigenous people. We'll keep fighting till the end. Brother Evo Morales still has lots to do, one cannot think that four years are enough after 500 years of submission and oppression,” said Fidel Surco, a prominent indigenous leader, reflecting on Bolivia’s first indigenous president entering his second term (Carroll & Schipani 2009).

The Andean region is particularly appropriate for examining indigenous political rights because 34-40 million indigenous people reside mostly in this region. The actualization of human rights for Andean indigenous groups is an inherently complex issue, …

Towards A Cleaner Singapore: Sociological Study On Littering In Singapore, Paulin Tay Straughan, Narayanan Ganapathy, Daniel Goh, Everold Hosein

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Keeping Singapore clean has always been the priority of the National Environment Agency (NEA). We have made much progress over the years, but as Singapore's population grows amid changing demographics, littering remains a concern.

Assessing (Multi)Culturalism Through Public Art Practices, Anru Lee, Perng-Juh Peter Shyong

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Speaking In Thai, Dreaming In Isan: Popular Thai Television And Emerging Identities Of Lao Isan Youth Living In Northeast Thailand, Catherine Hesse-Swain

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This is an ethnographic study of how Lao Isan youth living in the northeastern provincial capital Khon Kaen and nearby town Mahasarakham experience Thainess or khwampenthai in its most popular form – television. People who inhabit the northeast of Thailand interchangeably label themselves and are labelled by others as Isan, Thai Isan, Lao Isan, Thai or Lao, depending on the ethnic, political, social or familial nuances of any given situation. I use the term Lao Isan to refer specifically to Isan people of Lao origin or ethnicity. Lao Isan are subject to complex and often competing notions of Isanness, Laoness …

Disjuncture Among Classic Period Cultural Landscapes In The Tuxtla Mountains, Southern Veracruz, Mexico, Wesley Durrell Stoner

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Teotihuacan was the most influential city in the Classic Mesoamerican worldsystem. Like other influential cities in the ancient world, however, Teotihuacan did not homogenously affect the various cultural landscapes that thrived in Mesoamerica during the Classic period (300-900 CE). Even where strong central Mexican influences appear outside the Basin of Mexico, the nature, extent, and strength of these influences are discontinuous over time and space. Every place within the Classic Mesoamerican landscape has a unique Teotihuacan story. In the Tuxtla Mountains of southern Veracruz, Mexico, Matacapan, located in the Catemaco Valley, drew heavily upon ideas and symbols fostered at Teotihuacan, …

Nationalism And Its Expression In Cuba’S Art Music: The Use Of Folklore In Mario Abril’S “Fantasia (Introduction And Pachanga)” For Clarinet And Piano, Nikolasa Tejero

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

In the centuries since the colonization of the New World, the people of Cuba created a strong musical tradition. Initially, their music mirrored the European composition canons of structural, melodic and harmonic order. The eventual confluence of its distinct cultural elements (i.e. the European, African, and, to a lesser extent, Amerindian) led to the emergence of a new, distinctly Cuban musical tradition.

The wars for independence that began in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth century created a surge towards political and cultural autonomy that swept across the Latin American colonies, generating a wave of nationalism during the …

Ua12/2/5 Student Affairs - Wku Amateur Radio Club, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about WKU Amateur Radio Club and WB4DQM. The collection consists of certificates, QSL cards received from other clubs around the world and a brief run of Radio Watch.

Re-Reading Chalmers Johnson, Daniel Little

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Chalmers Johnson, co-founder and president of the Japan Policy Research Institute at the University of San Francisco and long-time professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Diego, died on November 20, 2010. (Here are several notices — The Atlantic, theNew York Times, and The Nation.) In the past ten years or so Johnson has become widely known for his critical books about American empire (Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2004), The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2005), Nemesis: The Last Days of the …

Écriture Et Oralité Dans L’Oeuvre De Calixthe Beyala, Gloria Nne Onyeziri

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

A reading of several works of Beyala will help us consider the way orality works for African women and to suggest new forms of the symbolic representation and of narrative framing drawn from the speech of the people. Reference to their African culture, to their consciousness of cultural identity, helps characters such as Édène, Loukoum and Beyala to define themselves and to lay claim to a critical and self-confi dent voice. They learn from orality the ways of saying of the wise, what is to be retained and transmitted through traditional culture and what aspects of collective memory are better …

Mapping 'Chinese' Christian Schools In Indonesia: Ethnicity, Class And Religion, Chang Yau Hoon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Schools are not ‘‘innocent’’ sites of cultural transmission. They play an active and significant role in transmitting values and inculcating culture. Schools also serve as a site for the maintenance of boundaries and for the construction of identities. Previous studies have recognized the relationship between education and identity. Building on existing literature, this study examines the ways in which Christian schools can be a site for the construction and maintenance of religious, ethnic and class identities of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. The study surveys four prestigious ‘‘Chinese’’ Christian schools in Jakarta. Through a brief but thorough profiling of the …

Money, Power And Landscapes Of Consumption, Ana Miscolta-Cameron

Geography Capstone Projects

This paper explores the phenomenon of national parks and reserves in Tanzania as a product of early colonial ideology and the evolution of that ideology into a post-independence capitalist enterprise. Serengeti National Park, Selous Game Reserve and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area are examined as historically contested sites in which indigenous people have been denied customary use rights by successive regimes of power keen on profiting through resource exploitation and tourism. Though this paper’s focus is Tanzania, it attempts to reveal a pattern of colonial and neo-colonial environmentalism widespread throughout the developing world.

The Role Of Language In Defining Afghan Nationalism, Farid Zareie

Middle Eastern Communities and Migrations Student Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

The Colombian Population Of New York City, 1990 — 2008, Haiwen Chu

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This study examines demographic and socioeconomic factors of racial/ethnic groups in New York City between 1990 and 2008 – particularly the Colombian population.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: The Colombian population of New York City, which increased nearly 25% between 1990 and 2000, declined to 97,580 in 2008 from 109,710 in 2000, representing a decline of about 11%. While in …

Dominicans In New York City, 1990—2008, Howard Caro-López, Laura Limonic

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This report examines demographic and socioeconomic variables among different racial/ethnic groups in New York City between 1990 and 2008 – particularly the Dominican population.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: Between 1990 and 2008 the Dominican population of New York City increased to become the second largest Latino national sub-group behind Puerto Ricans. The Dominican population grew by nearly 73 percent …

Peruvians In The United States, 1980—2008, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This report examines demographic and socioeconomic factors concerning Peruvians in the United States between 1980 and 2008.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: The Peruvian population of the U.S. increased dramatically between 1980 and 2008 from about 70,000 to over 550,000 people. Migration increased in each decade and there is no reason to believe that migration from Peru will decrease in …

The Future Of Tradition: An Ethnographic And Comparative Study Of Social Preference And Medicine In Rural Ghana, Shannon Dick

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In Ghana, there are currently two prevalent forms of medical treatment: traditional and Western medicine. Since Ghana was colonized by the British, Western medicine has spread throughout the country, essentially from south to north. In this ethnographic study, two rural villages are compared, one located in the Central Region and the other in the Upper West Region, in order to evaluate what type of medical treatment people prefer and the reasons for their decisions. The research assesses the social inclination in terms of medicine in these two locations, indicators of Western influences, and gleans a sense of what the future …

Body Politics Within The Body Politic: Ghanaian Disabled Communities And Their Relationships To Power, Conner Chivone Spinks

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

I chose as my research topic disabled communities within Ghana and their relationships with different sources of power in Ghanaian society. To begin my analysis, I deconstructed the „disabled body‟ and established disability as an axis of identity that has bearing on social positioning. I explored the power dynamics that dictate the lives of minorities, particularly the lives of those with non-normative bodies. Using my interviews of disabled Ghanaians and my observations of disabled Ghanaians in public spaces, I analyzed how systems are felt in everyday life.