Belonging and Homemaking in Wales: Experiences of Young, Female, Asian Migrants in Swansea

This thesis presents empirical findings exploring home for young, female, Asian migrants living in Swansea. The research aims to consider how to best express home and migration for diverse migrants. Building upon post-structuralist approaches, this study adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphorical concept of Rhizome to approach home, utilising concepts of Multiplicity, Becoming and Hybridity/In-betweenness. The research is qualitative, utilising participatory research methods such as photo diaries and interviews with 20 young migrants living in Swansea. The empirical findings demonstrate multiple, fluid and hybrid homes as experienced by young migrants living in Swansea. This research suggests the value of understanding home beyond solid and fixed stereotypes and rethinking ways of approaching home for migrants within migration discourses

CHINESE INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS’ MIGRATION EXPERIENCES: A BIOCULTURAL ANALYSIS OF HEALTH, FOOD, AND MIGRATION

The main purpose of this dissertation is to use both biocultural framework and life course perspective to investigate the dynamic relationship among migration induced stress, health, and culture with a focus on the processual change of foodways among the Chinese international students at the University of Oklahoma, Norman Campus. By using quantitative survey, qualitative in-depth interview, photovoice, and participant observation, this study showed that the most important factors in shaping Chinese international students’ dietary behaviors are cultural factors such as healthy belief and gender roles, life events such as upbringing and critical events, as well as social support and social network. The results of this study also suggested that staying length has impacted the participants’ dietary behaviors. In addition, this research showed that the local food environment did not have a strong impact on their dietary behaviors. This research is to provide useful information for medical anthropologists who are working in the field of immigrant dietary health. Given the fact that there are increasing hostility toward immigrants, a rise of right-wing populism, and a resurgence of Sinophobia, the findings in this study could be used by anthropologist and activists to form policies to protect and help the community in this research and similar communitie

Eating into elsewhere: performing belonging in migrant food-making

My thesis posits food as essential, polysemic and affective material within which humans in displacement do, tell, and performatively shape their belongings. It begins by asking: Can we eat our way home?, but theory and practice have complicated this original research question. I seek to draw out the complexities of this interplay between displacement, estrangement and belonging through practice-as-research, which has resulted in two participatory performances with food: Breakfast Elsewhere, and Unmade, Untitled. In the written component of the thesis I describe how I weave together theories of listening, sensory ethnography (in particular the tool of the cook-along interview), and narrative inquiry, with performance-making and participant feedback in this practice-as-research. This amalgamation of practice and theory enables me to look more closely at everyday kitchen gestures as choreographies that meld uncertainty, repetition and improvisation in migrant narratives as in migrant food-making. I employ the term food-making (including processes such as growing, shopping, preparing, cooking, and even ways of eating, or commensality) to indicate sites of active knowledge transference, a translation of memory of previous ways in which materials are transformed into sustenance, meaning and significance. Seen through a performative frame, I hypothesize that these quotidian gestures of food-making in displacement could be listened to as a type of embodied archive. These embodied archives of food belongings are always in the making, being inscribed with new narratives and adaptations to cater to new practices, ingredients, or changing tastes. I propose that an embodied attentiveness to how and why this is done is key to understanding the extent to which this successfully recreates the sense of homeliness and belonging

Form in the Manner of Landscape: Distillation of a Concept through Language and Literature

Past work on the concept of landscape developed the idea that landscape should be viewed less as a noun than as a verb. This develops the idea that ―landscape‖ can be explored as a concept through the fabric of the word itself. This thesis explores through the ambiguity of language, the potential of a landscape idea that considers landscape a verbal action and practice, but also something that retains the objective sense of a noun in abstract representational terms. The potential in landscape to embody paradoxical ideas of movement and substance brings about the consideration of landscape as a relationship of tensions. The visibly apparent expression of a landscape product is the result of their negotiation. There is no correct ―way‖ of doing landscape but the ways in which it is done may be read as apparent propositions towards an unapparent abstract ideal. Through circumstances in time and experience the proposition is renewed and transformed to express a new proposition. This cycle is at the core of a relationship between human and land. The coherence of diversity is its self-preservation. The idea of diversity ordinarily indicates an idea of landscape framed by deductive thought processes in the sense that disparate branches and off-shoots spread the concept so thinly that it can struggle to find conceptual significance. Considering an inductive approach that draws these disparate branches back into one idea of landscape prompts a renewal in focus, outlining a basic idea or form to which circumstantial performance relates. The thesis moves from the observation of a theoretical outline to the interpretation of that theory in lived experience and finally to its articulation in a particular way through personal reflection. This study seeks a form of landscape, finds meanings in its use, and then lives the form in a meaningful manner

Reading poetry and dreams in the wake of Freud

Adapting the question at the end of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', this thesis argues that reading poetic texts involves a form of suspension between waking and sleeping. Poems are not the product of an empirical dreamer, but psychoanalytic understandings of dream-work help to provide an account of certain poetic effects. Poetic texts resemble dreams in that both induce identificatory desires within, while simultaneously estranging, the reading process. In establishing a theoretical connection between poetic texts and drearit-work, the discussion raises issues concerning death, memory and the body. The introduction relates Freudian and post-Freudian articulations of dream-work to the language of poetry, and addresses the problem of attributing desire "in" a literary text. Interweaving the work of Borch-Jacobsen, Derrida and Blanchot, the discussion proposes a different space of poetry. By reconfiguring the subject-of-desire and the structure of poetic address, the thesis argues that poetic "dreams" characterize points in texts which radically question the identity and position of the reader. Several main chapters focus on texts - poems by Frost and Keats, and Freud's reading of literary dreams - in which distinctions between waking and sleeping, familiarity and strangeness, order and confusion are profoundly disturbed. The latter part of the thesis concentrates on a textual "unconscious" that insists undecidably between the cultural and the individual. Poems by Eliot, Tennyson, Arnold and Walcott are shown to figure strange dreams and enact displacements that blur the categories of public and private. Throughout, the study confronts the recurrent interpretive problem of reading "inside" and "outside" textual dreams. This thesis offers an original perspective on reading poetry in conjunction with psychoanalysis, in that it challenges traditional assumptions about phantasy and poetry dependent upon a subject constituted in advance of a poetic event or scene of phantasy. It brings poetry into systematic relation with Freud's work on dreams and consistently identifies conceptual and performative links between psychoanalysis and literature in later modernity

“A transitory step to someplace else”: the literature of first generation migrants from China to America

This thesis investigates the literature published since 1965 by first generation migrants from China to America. Given the peculiar history of the Chinese in America and the inevitable importance of both superpowers to the twenty-first century, this thesis asks what this group of writers can tell us about China, America, and what lies between them? By combining close reading of key texts with explorations of social, historical and political context, this thesis contributes to the recognition of how migrant writing is central to understanding the modern world. ‘In-between’ and ‘grounded’ spatialities that contain, are evoked by, or are associated with this literature are examined in this thesis. Chapter One explores how Chinatown functions as an imagined space of Chineseness ‘abroad’, and how different representations of the neighbourhood render its essentialised significations always already incomplete. The space of the nation for Chinese migrants in America is complicated by the Cold War and its afterlives, as well as by the racializing and nationalist habits of both nations, and Chapter Two investigates how these histories and discourses have dovetailed. Meanwhile, the ‘transnation’, whilst ostensibly offering to transcend the nation, can become a kind of ‘no man’s land’, as examined in Chapter Three. The life writing produced by these authors brings into question the glocal concerns of the publishing market, and Chapter Four explores the ramifications of ethnic autobiography’s frequent association with the figure of the ‘native informant’. In the wake of the ‘rise of China’ and America’s response to it, by studying China and America side-by-side in the literature of these authors, this thesis overturns the cultural, national, racial and political significations of ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Americanness’ as thought in distinction

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

Stancetaking and identification in transnational families through culinary talk and practices

As global social networks expand, couples are increasingly comprised of partners from divergent sociocultural backgrounds (e.g. Piller, 2007; Dervin, 2013). This unfolding trend inspires research into complex identification processes in such transnational relationships. To explore these processes, I conduct a qualitative discourse analysis of interactions in five UK-based Polish-British families. The data include the families’ interactions during celebratory meals, which they video-recorded, and my semi-structured interviews with the participants, which were audio-recorded. The study focuses on how the participants’ food-related interactions project ‘stance’ (Du Bois, 2007), that is, how talk about food and food practices can discursively and semiotically index the speakers’ positioning towards their own and others’ sociocultural fields. The analysis reveals that as the speakers negotiate their foodscapes, they constantly engage with various sociocultural repertoires and appeal to multiple ‘centres’ of normativity (Blommaert et al., 2005). This negotiation at times occasions contrasting positioning acts, highlighting the dynamism of the speakers’ stancetaking, and thus of their identities. On one hand, the participants reproduce and exoticise what they imagine as their ‘traditions’, ‘cultures’ and ‘nations’, on the other, they echo postmodern discourses of ‘choice’ (Giddens, 1991), individualism and post-national cosmopolitanism. Following the theories of ‘reflexivity’ (Giddens, 1991; Urban, 2001), I demonstrate how in postmodernity even food interactions surface as reflexive spaces. Through culinary performances and meta-talk, the speakers reinterpret cultural signs, creating ‘third spaces’ (Bhabha, 2004 [1994]) – discursive zones with ever-evolving cultural meanings. These reflexively co-constructed ‘third spaces’ display the participants’ identity as hybrid and cosmopolitan families. The family members successfully negotiate the perceived differences between them, which challenges the ideologies of problematic intermarriage (see also Piller, 2002; Gonçalves, 2013). Their complex sociocultural repertoires do not ignite a ‘cultural clash’. They rather offer the speakers versatile vistas for identification and constitute ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1977), thus reflecting the increasing commodification of hybrid forms and pursuit of transcultural identities