Matching Items (9)
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- All Subjects: Social Research
- Creators: Colbern, Allan
- Creators: Arzubiaga, Angela
- Status: Published
Description
In this dissertation I present data gathered from an eleven-month qualitative research study with adolescents living and working on the streets of Lima, Peru. Through the pairing of photovoice with participant observations, this work incorporates distinctive methodological and theoretical viewpoints in order to complicate prevailing understandings of street life. In this dissertation, I examine the identities that children and adolescents on the street develop in context, and the ways in which photography can be a useful tool in understanding identity development among this population. Through a framework integrating theories of identity and identity performance with spatial theories, I outline how identity development among children and adolescents living on the street is directly connected to their relationships with the urban landscape and the outreach organizations that serve them. The organizations and institutions that surround children on the street shape who they are, how they are perceived by society, and how they view and understand themselves in context. It is through the interaction with aid organizations and the urban landscape that a street identity is learned and developed. Furthermore, as organizations, children and adolescents come together within the context of the city, a unique street space is created. I argue that identity and agency are directly tied to this space. I also present the street as a thirdspace of possibility, where children and adolescents are able to act out various aspects of the self that they would be unable to pursue otherwise. Weaved throughout this dissertation are non-traditional writing forms including narrative and critical personal narrative addressing my own experiences conducting this research, my impact on the research context, and how I understand the data gathered.
ContributorsJoanou, Jamie Patrice (Author) / Swadener, Beth B. (Thesis advisor) / Margolis, Eric (Committee member) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Committee member) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The increasing job opportunities abroad as spa therapists attract significant numbers of young Indonesian women. Although the placement process is conducted by licensed recruitment agents and supervised by government officials, migrant workers might be at high risk of experiencing work exploitation and physical or sexual abuse. To investigate the phenomenon of documented, yet still vulnerable, female migrant workers, this research conducts interviews with several former spa therapists who were working in Malaysia and some civil servants. This study highlights that individual or personal resistances could be a collective political struggles. Specifically, this research connects individual experiences with the bigger picture of social, economic, and political condition, which, together, constitutes a gender-based labor migration system. To do this, the research employs qualitative-interpretive research methods through discourse analysis and in-depth and open-ended interviews. It also employs an intersectional feminist approach to data analysis to reveal how Indonesian female migrant workers are marginalized and oppressed and the power dynamics at play.
ContributorsNabila, Asma Zahratun (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Behl, Natasha (Thesis advisor) / Goksel, Nisa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The primary question driving this research regards how individuals in mixed-citizenship couples employ different strategies and/or tactics to access and maintain valid immigration status during processes of Adjustment of Status through marriage in the United States. A dominant narrative prevails in the US that immigration through marriage to a citizen confers immediate or an easy pathway to citizenship. For roughly two-hundred thousand immigrant spouses that currently navigate adjustment annually, however, this narrative falls short of and obscures the reality of adjustment processes. There is a lack of focused academic study to help contribute to more accurate public understandings of what these realities are. To combat this false narrative and help fill a gap in research, this work examines how such dominant ideology stems from historic legal inequality and hegemonic discourse, reified through Enlightenment-centric thinking and becoming tangled with state power through Foucault’s conception of the body politic. The day-to-day actions, interactions, and transactions within the body politic and adjustment processes are then put into conversation with De Certeau’s strategies and tactics, providing a means for accentuating how individuals, society, and the state enact specific practices to support or resist Foucauldian technologies of oppression and control. As an exploratory case-study, this work engages four individual partners from two mixed citizenship marriages in a series of three semi-structured, in-depth phenomenological interviews each. Reporting is centered on participant’s histories and adjustment narratives, told through their own voices. Evidence supports that easy pathway public narratives are inaccurate, that adjustment processes assert state power on citizen petitioners and migrant spouses alike, but in different ways, and that they in turn enact complicated and intertwined strategies and tactics to achieve adjustment and resist the oppressive power of the state that is carried through adjustment processes.
ContributorsFurnish, Daniel Robert (Author) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Thesis advisor) / Lara-Valencia, Francisco (Committee member) / Broberg, Gregory (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This qualitative exploratory study examined how young people from refugee backgrounds were formulating thoughts on a sense of belonging, and social change through activism, during their participation in the Making Worcester Home youth participatory action research (YPAR) project. Nineteen young people from refugee backgrounds participated in the project, sixteen were in high school, and three were first-year college students. The study employed a narrative perspective premised on a postmodern social constructivist model. This study gathered data from students' class journal entries, transcriptions from interviews conducted by the students, class discussions, interview questions for their YPAR projects, and final project presentations. Inductive content analysis was used to code the data, and emerging themes were recorded. Six themes described the participants' formulation of a sense of belonging, 1) spatial belonging - relationship to place, 2) intersectionality and social location, 3) boundaries - inclusion and exclusion, 4) dual identities - ethnic, 5) feeling supported and well resourced, and 6) belonging through activism and community change. The emerging themes are discussed in context to existing migration and transdisciplinary scholarship on belonging to determine how new thoughts on newcomer belonging might be formulated. The study highlights several critical considerations that educational institutions, community-based organizations, and cities can adopt to support young people from refugee backgrounds to achieve a sense of belonging.
ContributorsMortley, Craig Merrick (Author) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Thesis advisor) / Flores-González, Nilda (Committee member) / Lopez, Vera (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The thesis for this study is that structural racism within the U.S. criminal system causes Black mothers to assume the emotional work of caring for incarcerated sons. This project was designed using an interpretive approach that employed a combination of qualitative and auto-ethnographic methods, drawing on grounded theory principle. Six interviews were conducted with mothers in order to gain in-depth insight into their lived experiences. An auto-ethnographic method was used to analyze the author’s own personal experiences as a family member of the incarcerated in dialogue with the experiences of the broader research population. Studies on the key finding of the psycho-social impacts on mothers with incarcerated sons have explored the relationship between the mental depression of mothers and their son’s incarceration. They have found that financial challenges, dwindling social connections, lousy parenting evaluations, as well as the burden of care of the grandchildren of the incarcerated sons are some of the mediating factors of this relationship. A second key finding also showed that incarceration have had social-economic effects on the prisoner’s families. These families experience extreme financial hardship as a result of incarcerated loved ones. Another finding showed the unique coping strategies for mothers included assuming care taking responsibility, maintaining family relationships, and budget control. Finally, this study found that there are challenges to re-entry experienced by mothers with incarcerated sons when their released. Research findings and original contribution to scholarly knowledge uncovered that Black mothers of the incarcerated in addition to working the Second Shift, are experiencing the phenomena of what is coined to be the “Third Shift.”
ContributorsWhite, LaTonya C (Author) / Keahey, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Colbern, Allan (Committee member) / Murphy-Erfani, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
ABSTRACT
Elite experience and careers in judged female sports complicate the binary categories of retirement while they are especially exposed to cultures of abuse, pressure and subjectivity. This thesis is comprised of multiple voices and experiences from the elite female athletic perspective, including my autoethnographic narrative. Highlighted and discussed are the topics of sexual assault and abuse, family pressure on children to do and excel at sport, the National Team experience representing the United States and subjected bodies and judging. It is an aim of this thesis to culminate all of those factors in the final chapter and hold that the experience and the cultures of athletic identity within synchronized swimming, gymnastics and figure skating not only cannot be explained by current research on athletic identity through retirement but have the capability to retire undeveloped young women by overdeveloped athletic identities. Through a sampling of voices and experiences across different female judged sports, over three decades, the reader will observe similarities that cause these sports to have a culture of solidarity through the aspects they hold in common with each other. The narrative highlights pivotal moments in the lives of the elite female athlete within these sports, which add to the calculation of their athletic identities and the lack of their personal identities. Through reflection and analyses of not only my story, but the interviewees from my original research and that of Joan Ryan’s as well, I aim to voice a mutual experience of elite athletes. Consisting of multiple factors throughout many years we will see through my autoethnography, paralleling with other voices and experiences, how it all intersects and contributes to this: Who am I now and where do I go from here?
Elite experience and careers in judged female sports complicate the binary categories of retirement while they are especially exposed to cultures of abuse, pressure and subjectivity. This thesis is comprised of multiple voices and experiences from the elite female athletic perspective, including my autoethnographic narrative. Highlighted and discussed are the topics of sexual assault and abuse, family pressure on children to do and excel at sport, the National Team experience representing the United States and subjected bodies and judging. It is an aim of this thesis to culminate all of those factors in the final chapter and hold that the experience and the cultures of athletic identity within synchronized swimming, gymnastics and figure skating not only cannot be explained by current research on athletic identity through retirement but have the capability to retire undeveloped young women by overdeveloped athletic identities. Through a sampling of voices and experiences across different female judged sports, over three decades, the reader will observe similarities that cause these sports to have a culture of solidarity through the aspects they hold in common with each other. The narrative highlights pivotal moments in the lives of the elite female athlete within these sports, which add to the calculation of their athletic identities and the lack of their personal identities. Through reflection and analyses of not only my story, but the interviewees from my original research and that of Joan Ryan’s as well, I aim to voice a mutual experience of elite athletes. Consisting of multiple factors throughout many years we will see through my autoethnography, paralleling with other voices and experiences, how it all intersects and contributes to this: Who am I now and where do I go from here?
ContributorsHaylor, Alyson (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Mean, Lindsey (Committee member) / Kassing, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This project seeks to explore how organizations work toward refugee and immigrant integration through forming different types of coalitions and strategic networks. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to identify when coalitions emerge between refugee organizations and immigrant rights groups in order to examine their development, from how the coalitions broadly conceive of refugee and immigrant rights, to how they organize resources and information sharing, service provision, policy advocacy, and policy implementation. The project is guided by the question: What explains the formation of coalitions that advocate for both immigrant rights and refugee rights? Through examining the formation and development of these coalitions, this thesis engages at the intersections of immigration federalism, refugee studies and human rights scholarship to reveal deeper complexities in the politics of immigrant integration. The project sharpens these three scholarly intersections by three multi-level jurisdictions – California and Arizona in the United States and Athens in Greece – and by employing comparative analysis to unpack how national governments and federalism dynamics shape coalition building around immigrant integration.
ContributorsAmoroso-Pohl, Melanie Hope (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Keahey, Jennifer (Committee member) / Walker, Shawn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This paper assesses the obstacles faced by immigrant aid groups on the U.S./ Mexico border and the resiliency used to challenge these obstacles. The borderlands of the United States and Mexico is a unique landscape for activists and humanitarians to work given the prevalence and amount of entities that police the area and the suspension of certain constitutional protections. The criminalization of activists on the border provides a unique lens in understanding how social movements and nation-building are linked to immigration in the United States. This research aims to provide a rich description of what criminalization is and how it plays out between the government and activist groups along the border. My findings critique the United States and its claim that it is a liberal democracy because it breaks norms and international laws in its assault against activists and humanitarians, many of whom are U.S. citizens. This attack further demonstrates that the violence migrants endure on the border is not just an unfortunate side effect of border policies but very much intentional and by design. In addition to criminalizing activists, this thesis examines the activists’ mental health and exhaustion as they relate to their humanitarian work and how this is also intentional violence the U.S. Government inflicts in order to maintain itself as a nation-state.
ContributorsRoether, Nichole (Author) / Colbern, Allan (Thesis advisor) / Firoz, Malay (Committee member) / Redeker-Hepner, Tricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The purpose of this study is threefold: highlight the present health, self-sufficiency and integration needs and assets of asylum seekers in Phoenix, Arizona during the asylum seeking process phase (while an asylum claim is awaiting a decision); understand the City of Phoenix’s response to asylum seekers; and contextualize and compare the city’s present response to increased arrivals of asylum seekers against municipal responses in other contexts and academic discussions of the “local turn.”. Through semi-structured in-depth interviews with asylum seekers and community leaders, this study finds that asylum seekers’ physiological healthcare needs are sometimes met through emergency department admissions and referrals to sliding scale services by caseworkers in the International Rescue Committee’s Asylum-Seeking Families program in Phoenix. Mental and behavioral health service needs are less likely to be met, especially for women who want to speak with a medical professional about their traumatic experiences in Central America, trip through Mexico, detention in the United States (U.S.) and their often-marginalized lives in the U.S. This dissertation concomitantly explores how other municipalities in the U.S. and internationally have responded to increased immigration of asylum seekers and refugees to urban centers, and how certain approaches could be adopted in the City of Phoenix to better serve asylum seekers.
ContributorsSchlinkert, David (Author) / Velez-Ibanez, Carlos (Thesis advisor) / Lara-Valencia, Francisco (Thesis advisor) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020