Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, History

The following dissertation presents a narrative overview of Afghan immigration to the United States. It focuses on the manner in which political turmoil in Afghanistan influenced relations between the U.S. Afghan community and Afghanistan from 1890 to 2016. It also tests whether this relationship conforms to some of the most prominent scholarly models and theorizations of diasporas. In this study, the term “relations” encompasses individuals' interactions and associations with Afghanistan's society and government. This study finds a long history of diasporic relations between the United States and Afghanistan during this time-period. Historical events such as the British exit from South Asia in 1947, the 1978 coup in Afghanistan, and 2001 U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan have had profound effects on the U.S. Afghan community, influencing the feasibility of travel to Afghanistan, the nature of diasporic relations, and U.S policy toward Afghan immigration. As a result, U.S. Afghan diasporic relations can be broken into generalizable eras between these critical historical events. Furthermore, the era's politics influenced how the U.S. public perceived Afghans' presence in the United States. This dissertation also examines how immigrants and ethnic communities such as Afghans in the United States have pursued activities they believed advanced the interests of both their country of origin and adopted country.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

This research explores intentional food practices and journeys of consciousness in a network of people in The Bahamas. Intentional food practices are defined as interactions with food chosen for particular purposes, while journeys of consciousness are cumulative successions of events that people associate with healing, restoration, and decolonization personally and collectively. This research examines (1) experiences and moments that influenced people's intentional food practices; (2) food practices that people enact daily; and (3) how people's intentional food practices connect to broader spiritual, philosophical, and ideological perspectives guiding their lives. The theoretical framework emerges from a specific lineage of theories and philosophies of hybridity, diaspora, creolization, poetics, critique, and aesthetics from the Caribbean. The research explores how intentional food practices reflect expressions of emerging foodways and identities in the Caribbean and joins them with the history of consciousness and intentional food practices in African and Caribbean diasporas. Ethnographic research methods, poetic analysis, and constant comparative analysis provided a foundation for an exploratory approach grounded in the realities of everyday lives. A purposeful snowball sample of twenty-seven (27) in-depth semi-structured interviews provided a primary method of data collection, supported by personal journals, field notes, and document review. No food security research has been published that explores intentional food practices in The Bahamas generally or on the island of New Providence specifically. Key findings suggest a broad variation in people's intentional practices. The intentions underlying these practices reflect desires for individual and collective healing, restoration, and decolonization in their daily lives. By exploring their food practices, interviewees express how they find restoration and healing through visceral experiences with their bodies.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2016, American Culture Studies

This dissertation analyzes how African immigrants from nations south of the Sahara become affective citizens of a universal Africa through the consumption of Nigerian cinema, known as Nollywood, in digital spaces. Employing a phenomenological approach to examine lived experience, this study explores: 1) how American media aids African pre-migrants in constructing the United States as a paradise rooted in the American Dream; 2) immigrants' responses when the `imagined paradise' does not match their American realities; 3) the ways Nigerian films articulate a distinctly African cultural experience that enables immigrants from various nations to identify with the stories reflected on screen; and, 4) how viewing Nollywood films in social media platforms creates a digital sub-diaspora that enables a reconnection with African culture when life in the United States causes intellectual and emotional dissonance. Using voices of members from the African immigrant communities currently living in the United States and analysis of their online media consumption, this study ultimately argues that the Nigerian film industry, a transnational cinema with consumers across the African diaspora, continuously creates a fantastical affective world that offers immigrants tools to connect with their African cultural values. Nollywood films culturally appose traditional values with both the delights and dilemmas of globalization to reveal a recognizable and relatable fictional realm for many Africans dealing with the vestiges of colonial rule. With hyper-dramatic plots that glorify and critique life on the continent, Nollywood becomes a means to an end for African immigrants residing in the often unfamiliar culture of the United States. Surfing YouTube for Nollywood films or logging into subscription based platforms like IrokoTV and Amazon Prime, which carries Nollywood titles thanks to partnerships with IrokoTV, can foil the incongruity between the paradise America is supposed to b (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2016, Mass Communication (Communication)

This dissertation explores the interplay between diasporic life of transnational Indonesians in the United States and their use of media to engage in the long-distance politics of their home country. It aims to investigate how, and to what extent, that people in diaspora use media to perform mediatization of transnational-homeland politics. In this dissertation, I also exemplified the theory of mediatization of politics by examining the appropriation of various media platforms by Indonesian diaspora in two metropolitan areas, Washington, D. C. and Los Angeles, both in their electoral and non-electoral political engagement. Utilizing a multi-sited media ethnographic, which includes ten months of participant observations and thirty in-depth interviews between October 2014 and July 2015, I examine the complexity of Indonesian diaspora's relationship with media and transnational politics. In my empirical chapters, in addition to the discussion of increasing availability of homeland media content in diaspora, I analyze how the presence of diaspora spaces enabled these displaced nationals to foster their sense of community, which eventually would help them to maintain their relationship with their country of origin's matters, including politics. While Indonesian diaspora exhibited dual-nature of media use, accessing both host land and homeland media, it was the consumption of homeland political news that I found as the most prominent practice demonstrated by overseas Indonesian to mediatize their long-distance political participation. Furthermore, in various diasporic political engagements, media practice was not only amalgamated with non-media political activism, but to some extent, also was considered to be the preexisting condition of transnational Indonesians' involvement in their home country's political sphere. Finally, this dissertation argues that the degree of mediatization of transnational politics was amplified by both media and non-media factors. While (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Music Ethnomusicology

In this paper, I investigate the Karen and Chin ethnic groups' use of the Internet, specifically social media, to create a virtual sonic space that is specifically Chin and Karen. I approached this topic by attending and interviewing people at the events of Karen New Year and Chin National Day and examined how those events were being uploaded to Internet sites such as YouTube. My initial findings led me to examine the ways that the Internet functions in Burma and how the Burmese government's approach to the Internet affects the ways indigenous groups such as the Chin and the Karen use the Internet within the country of Burma and within the Karen and Chin diasporas. My preliminary examinations pointed to the Karen and Chin communities utilizing two main online sources: exile news media, such as Kwe Ka Lu and Chinland Guardian, and social media sites, such as Facebook and YouTube in which music videos play a primary role in communication. In the chapters of this thesis, I describe the interrelationship between exile news media and Chin and Karen music videos, examine how these videos constitute forms of communication, and discuss how the uploading of live events such as Karen New Year and Chin National Day allow for the formation of a connected and imagined virtual community that encompasses both homeland and diaspora within sonic borders of Chin- and Karen-ness.

Bachelor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2008, School Of Interdisciplinary Studies - Interdisciplinary Studies

This project explores the recent shift in focus of popular Hindi (Bollywood) films from domestic characters encountering social issues, to members of the South Asian diaspora (primarily in the West) negotiating their ethnic identities. This project offers insights into the evolution of the Bollywood narrative where identities are being renegotiated and connections with traditional Indian culture are being challenged. Acknowledging the economic liberalization of India as catalyst, this paper examines the representation of the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and their connectedness with the diasporic reality in which they live. The representation is discussed in terms of the impact that religion, gender, sexuality, and regional/national politics have on the creation of a hybridized ethnic identity. Moreover, recent NRI-centric films are openly utilizing the diasporic characters as a safer experimental platform to negotiate these complex issues. The 2003 release of Kal Ho Naa Ho acts as the central example of a film that follows all the Bollywood conventions, yet due to its complete focus on the diaspora, can also be seen as non-Bollywood. The film's multiple subplots, tackling a wide range of issues among the diaspora, offer an engaging explanation of India's portrayal of its expatriates as a socially liberal, affluent, culturally liminal, and hybridized ethnic population within their host societies. Finally, the project delves into the visible shift of Hindi cinema from a dominantly India-centric industry to the realm of transnational cinema via images of the NRI.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Spanish and Portuguese

Barrio Chino de Lima (Lima's Chinatown) and Bairro "Oriental" da Liberdade (Sao Paulo's Japantown) represent orientalization and touristification experiences in Latin American metropolises. The Asiantowns' urban development is the result of national urban policies targeting Asian populations in Lima and Sao Paulo called ethnic cleansing and ethnic touristification. The ethnic cleansing policy was carried out through the displacement of Asian residents, exemplified by the demolition of Callejon Otaiza in 1909 (Peru) and the evacuation of Rua Conde de Sarzedas in 1942 (Brazil). The ethnic touristification policy was implemented through the political alliance between Lima's and Sao Paulo's local politicians and the Asian economic elite from the 1970s onwards. The Orientalist tourification process in Peruvian and Brazilian Asiantowns was shaped by two primary waves of urban renovation: the first, marked by the inauguration of the Chinese and Japanese Gateways under the influence of developmental ideologies by Latin American military regimes in the 1970s; and the second, characterized by the intense architectural Orientalist renovation and gentrification driven by the neoliberal ideologies since 1990s on. Thus, the contemporary tourist experience in Lima's and Sao Paulo's Asiantowns is almost exclusively through the commodification of Asian culture. Using a mixed-method approach that combines urban ethnography, historical archive research, and social media analysis on digital platforms, I conduct a comparative and panoramic study of Orientalized ethnic enclaves in Lima and Sao Paulo from the 1880s to the 2020s. I integrate theoretical approaches from urban sociology and anthropology, comparative race and ethnic studies, media studies in Latin America, and tourism studies. My argument is that the historical transformation of Asian urban communities into tourist and gentrified Orientalist urban areas reflects a shift in the imaginaries about Asian populations in Lat (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

Kurdish cinema represents a vital transnational and global art form that bridges the Kurdish community, uniting a stateless people through cultural expression. This dissertation explores common narrative threads of Kurdish cinema relating to identity, statelessness, trauma, and women's issues, despite the differences between Kurds of various nationalities in both the ancestral Kurdistan region and the diaspora. The first chapter examines how these artworks confront issues of identity, exile, and homeland. The second interrogates depictions of individual and collective trauma in Kurdish cinema, especially generational trauma resulting from racism, conflict, and displacement. Chapter 3 analyzes Kurdish cinema from a comparative perspective through the lens of Indigenous studies, examining how Kurdish cinema confronts settler-colonial oppression. The fourth and final chapter addresses the portrayal of Kurdish women's issues in Kurdish cinema, contrasting how male and female directors represent these issues and emphasizing the vital contributions of Kurdish women filmmakers especially with regard to telling Kurdish women's stories. Ultimately this work positions Kurdish cinema as a powerful artistic movement spanning national and international boundaries driven by the efforts of a distinct filmmaking community united in the desire to represent Kurdish identity and culture through cinematic storytelling.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, History

This ethnographic study is situated at the confluence of the enduring scholarly discourse on Black retention or loss of their African culture and identity resulting from their enslavement and slavery. Thus, this thesis identifies and explores the manifestations of Africanisms among Black Americans regarding their cultural resilience, retention, and adaptation. With the case study of Oyotunji in South Carolina, an African (Yoruba) village in America, this thesis underscores how Black people reclaimed their identity by invoking, appropriating and preserving their African cultural traditions and values through the agency of spiritualism and the adoption and veneration of the Yoruba gods. Besides, Oyotunji was a product of Black cultural protests and the search for authentic identity and nationalism in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. The study is significant in highlighting Oyotunji's place in fostering the connection and genuine immersion of African Americans to their African ancestral roots while navigating the complexities of identity rediscovery in the Americas

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation analyzes the phenomenon of transatlantic homeland return in African and Afro-diasporic cultural productions. The studied works comprise six literary and cinematic texts, intersecting the genres of novel, memoir, historical fiction, and speculative fiction. The time periods depicted in the texts range from 1835, beginning with the reverse migration of Africans who participated in the Male slave uprising of Bahia, to recent experiences in the twenty-first century, and they depict literal and metaphorical returns to motherland Africa by Africans and diasporic Afro-descendants from Brazil, and the United States. Whereas dominant discourses on the topic of return in the Afro-Atlantic diaspora by scholars such as Frantz Fanon (1961), Edouard Glissant (1989), Stuart Hall (1990), Paul Gilroy (1993), and Saidiya Hartman (2007) have diminished its cultural and ideological significance due to the possibility of ambivalent experiences, I push back in this dissertation to argue that notwithstanding the ambivalences, the phenomenon of return through its motif in cultural productions constitutes an empowering paradigm within Afro-diasporic cultural imaginary that allows diasporic Afro-descendants to both negotiate their past, as well as reinvent their future through its creative affordances to rethink diasporic belonging, challenge diasporic alienation and assert the freedom and subjectivity of once displaced Africans. The arguments of the critics of return, particularly of the postmodern classification, can be said to mostly revolve around the nationalist character of return as an antithesis to the postmodern hybrid identity thesis. However, a closer look into the motivations of Afro-diasporic returnees, as I demonstrate in this dissertation, shows that their quest for a homeland is not so much based on a nationalistic impulse, but one motivated by a deeply ingrained ontological clamor for desalienation amidst their crippling diasporic otherness. Consequently, t (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2023, English

A comparative and interdisciplinary study, this dissertation examines corporeal forms of nostalgic recollection in twentieth- and twenty-first-century global South Asian literature and performance. Studying a range of cultural material, I illustrate how writers and performing artists negotiate ideological constructions of the past through nostalgic narratives articulated in corporeal terms and through embodied acts. To this end, I first call for a theoretical reconfiguration of nostalgic recollection as a performative act that can “break and remake” narrations of the past, in keeping with Homi K. Bhabha's definition of performance as “kinesis.” Such a reconfiguration also accounts for nostalgia's cross-temporality, since the process of recollecting the past hinges on a disruption of the present and the ideation of the future. Secondly, building on the work of performance theorists like Diana Taylor and Rebecca Schneider, I study how memory is anchored to the body, where the body becomes both the means of recollection and the site for the projection of the past. The dissertation unsettles dominant historiography by calling attention to forms of nostalgia that posit the corporeal as its theoretical, epistemological, ontological nucleus. Thinking through Anuk Arudpragasam's novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), the first chapter theorizes the performativity of nostalgic recollections in the face of nationalist, imperialist, and heteropatriarchal narratives of history. In Chapter 2, I explore how Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake (2003), Asif Mandvi's play Sakina's Restaurant (1988), and Shyam Selvadurai's novel The Hungry Ghosts (2013) deploy corporeal nostalgic recollection to underscore the unfulfilled neoliberal promises of the first world where the bodies of diasporic women, queer, and working-class individuals are often gendered and sexualized. The third chapter focuses on the performativity of the war-torn body in Sri Lankan performance art by Janani Coora (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2023, Educational Leadership

The lived experiences of African immigrants in the Nordics are rich and complex, but the literature available on this population is lacking. To counter the deficit thinking and oppressive literature available on Africans in Norway, this paper is created to uplift the African community by highlighting the important work of the first Pan-African youth organization in Norway Afrikan Youth in Norway (AYIN), our elders in the community, and other Africans in Norway while telling the stories through a critical lens. I used Africana Critical Theory to look at the growth, education, and identity formation of us, outside of the Eurocentric lens. This is drawn from critical thought and philosophical traditions rooted in the realities of continental and diasporan African history, culture, and struggles. This exploration includes interviews with former AYIN members, focusing on their experiences growing up and the influence the youth organization had and still has in their lives. This inquiry is a celebration of us, the population in Norway that have over generations worked towards going beyond tolerance by the Norwegian society, towards inclusion and acceptance.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Dance Studies

Bharata Natyam in the US Diaspora: Staging Indian American Identity through Performance at Classical Indian Dance Festivals, Competition, and Online Platforms examines how second-generation Indian Americans develop, advance and make Bharata Natyam visible and relevant through concert stages, festivals, competitions, and online platforms in the United States and India. The term “second-generation” refers to the children of immigrants who were born in the United States or who arrived here before the age of seven or eight. I argue that second-generation Indian American practitioners make Bharata Natyam a relevant practice in the US for audiences in the South Asian diaspora by transforming Indian cultural attitudes around gender, religion, tradition, and nationalism through practices manifesting cultural hybridity. These second-generation artists rework Bharata Natyam techniques, compositions, and themes through contemporary issues and media to reflect their experiences of growing up in the US. There are two aspects to the way I analyze what it means to make Bharata Natyam a “relevant” practice. On the one hand, this term comes from the practitioners I interviewed: when they say that they want Bharata Natyam to be a relevant practice, they mean they want it to be recognized as an important American mainstream dance form, with increased performance opportunities, platforms, and resources for Bharata Natyam practitioners to showcase their work. Additionally, “relevant” relates to maintaining legibility for the intrinsic values of the practice even—and especially—when practitioners expand the boundaries of the form. Thus, the stakes of Bharata Natyam being a relevant practice in the United States for its practitioners and audience members leads to more classical Indian dance representation on American concert stages. In reworking Bharata Natyam to reflect their political, social, cultural context in the US, second-generation practitioners challenge who holds power and has (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Portuguese

This dissertation examines the thematic connections and the formal structure shared between the literary texts written by several black women authors in Portugal and Brazil over the last five years. Since literary and academic events transitioned to virtual platforms in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, black women writers from Portugal and Brazil, both Portuguese speaking countries, found a place online, in the form of a kind of virtual diaspora, where they could come together to discuss their lives as black women in their respective countries through their written literary works. Here, I analyze the texts of seven prominent black women writers: Bianca Santana, Conceicao Evaristo, Cristiane Sobral, and Cidinha da Silva from Brazil, and Djaimilia Pereira, Telma Tvon and Yara Monteiro from Portugal. My analysis shows that several similar themes (e.g., racism against blacks, recognition of the importance of African culture, and constructing of a multicultural identity), the use of Polyphony, Magical Realism, Animism Realism, and an Autobiographic style of writing all work to shape these women's narratives, while alluding to the oral tradition of African culture. The stories of these black women, enriched by their experiences, share a common objective – combating racism and sexism and understanding their multicultural identity. Taking from an idea described by Professor Conceicao Evaristo in her 2003 talk at the Federal University of Paraiba, I frequently use the concept of “escrevivencias”, which translates to “writings about their experiences”, and include additional supporting evidence from other authors such as Lelia Gonzalez, Teofilo de Queiroz Junior, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha to understand, in depth, how individuals from African diasporas are described in each analyzed text. I also provide examples of the use of Magical Realism described by Alejo Carpentier, Animism Realism by Pepetela, polyphony by Mikhail Bakhtin a (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the process by which the American Yazidi ethno-religious community of Lincoln, Nebraska preserves and transmits its culture and identity in a diasporic setting. This research seeks to contribute to new knowledge on how ethnic and religious immigrant communities negotiate questions of identity and cultural preservation, particularly in the context of historical or ongoing persecution in their native homelands. Utilizing ethnography, participant observation, and unstructured interviews, this research examines the mutually supporting individual and collective efforts to preserve Yazidi identity and cultural attributes, including heritage language instruction, civil society participation, artistic expression, trauma processing, and both local and transnational social relations. The research also canvasses the attitudes of Yazidis to better understand the centrality of inter-generational cultural transmission and the challenges of maintaining a distinct ethno-religious identity while integrating into a new society.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, French and Italian

Literature from the French-speaking Caribbean is renowned for the heterogeneity in language writers use to question the relationship between the oral tradition and writing, the stories of the people in the face of official chronicles of the region, and the place of writing in relationship with other cultural discourses. In this dissertation, I radically question what type of heterogeneity in language the writer utilizes to problematize these varying questions. Authors from the region have been popularly praised for the linguistic heterogeneity or opposition between the 'higher' French and 'lower' Creole languages. But literary critics have also remarked other forms of heterogeneity in language in French Caribbean literature: the plurality and diversity of points of view certain writers employ; the multiple and irreducible voices some make heard; the heterogenous discourses different writers bring into 'dialogue'; as well as often overshadowed topics such as the relations between sexes or what the male-dominated, post-colonial ‘counter-narratives' leave unseen and unheard. In the individual chapters of this dissertation, I've selected four novels which exemplify or embody four different types of heterogeneity in language. Patrick Chamoiseau's award-winning novel has been touted as a 'polyphonic' novel of a collective voice. Utilizing linguistic polyphony, I examine Texaco in terms of the kinds of relations between heterogeneous 'voices' as well as how each is constructed. I demonstrate that the 'collective' voice is globally hierarchical and each so-called voice is reducible to a transparent point of view. Edouard Glissant's both severely criticized and vociferously celebrated novel has also been considered a novel of the collectivity. In the second chapter of the dissertation, I draw on research from the margins of the paradigmatic model of polyphony in linguistics to study both the relations and the constructions of particular voices in Mahagony. I find that hi (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Public Health

Asian-Americans and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islanders (NHOPIs) experience health and healthcare disparities compared to their white counterparts. In both communities, which are often jointly described as Asian-American Pacific Islanders (AAPIs), college students represent a vulnerable subpopulation in regard to mental health outcomes and healthcare. Unfortunately, relatively little is known about the mental health outcomes and experiences of Asian-American and NHOPI undergraduate students. This dissertation sought to evaluate how race, gender, and the intersection of the two affect the mental health outcomes and lived experiences of Asian-American and NHOPI undergraduate students. Three separate, but interconnected, studies using both qualitative and quantitative methods were completed. First, a secondary data analysis of the Healthy Minds dataset (2018-2019) provided a characterization of depression, anxiety, and psychological well-being outcomes for Asian-American and NHOPI undergraduate students across the United States. Second, a qualitative semi-structured interview study was conducted among Asian-American undergraduate students; this allowed me to explore and analyze their lived experiences of filial piety and how it intersected with mental health, race, gender, and other macro-level factors. Finally, a cross-sectional quantitative survey of Asian-American and white undergraduate students was launched. This survey was developed using survey input from research experts in public health, survey methodology, and/or Asian-American health and input from focus groups with Asian-American undergraduates. The survey collected information on filial piety and mental health to determine how race, gender, and the intersection of the two impacted filial piety, depression, anxiety, and psychological well-being. This research had three main conclusions. First, the mental health outcomes of AAPI undergraduate students are heterogenous. Differences between Asian-Amer (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2021, English

This thesis examines violence as a point of orientation in the formation of postcolonial Sri Lankan diasporic subjectivities within the contours of ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and (trans)national citizenship, particularly in relation to the ways in which such identity categories are deployed for political and cultural constructions of 'sameness' and 'difference' and the in-group solidarities and out-group animosities produced through such constructions.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2021, Leadership and Change

There is a widely held and mainly fair view that Africa's contemporary leadership is deeply flawed. Reform is needed and this dissertation takes the position that the challenges to and desirable characteristics of leadership are understood and can be influenced by Africans living in the Diaspora. To explore the challenges and possible solutions, four focus groups were convened drawing on Diasporic Africans living in Rhode Island in the United States. Each group meeting was facilitated by the researcher and discussed several questions about the most needed changes in leadership in Africa today. These concerned the most desirable characteristics in political leadership in Africa and how Diasporic African leaders can support leadership improvement in Africa. All group discussions began with consideration of the philosophy and relevance of Ubuntu a tradition-based perspective that has re-emerged through Africa in the last 30 years. Groups discussed how leadership renewal and improvement related to reviving practices based on Ubuntu. Transcripts from these sessions were analyzed for the number of mentions of particular ideas. Results were condensed into clusters of related ideas and themes for purposes of discussion. The top responses to the first question about challenges were about incompetence; corruption; and the exclusion of good leaders and officials because of sexism, tribalism, and nepotism. The leading responses to the second question on desirable leadership characteristics emphasized honesty, personal qualities of leaders, achieving visionary leadership, and enacting democratic values. In response to the third question of involving the Diaspora, a diverse range of ways in which help would be given were enumerated. This work concludes with a synthesis of the perspectives of Diasporic Africans on how to restore sound leadership in home countries. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, https://aura.antioch (open full item for complete abstract)

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2021, Anthropology

Within the United States, Ohio has the fifth largest population of Ukrainian Americans in the country (DADS, 2010). Ukrainian Americans and immigrants living in Ohio show evidence of active community and identity engagement, through their maintenance of several historically significant community organizations. They participate in many dedicated cultural associations, community organizations, and churches which have exhibited an increase in internal diaspora networking and public events in recent years. In particular, The Ukrainian Cultural Association of Ohio displays a noticeable revitalization of culture and nationalism. This increased and revitalized interest in Ukrainian culture and nationalism appears to indicate a shift in collective identity construction and a restructuring of historical memory. This study, conducted from November 2020 through March 2021, explores the ways in which Ukrainians in Ohio negotiate their identities in relation to current events in Ukraine. Using literature on identity formation, nation states, and collective historical memory, this study analyzed semi structured interview data to examine Ukrainian immigrants' conceptualizations of identity. Specifically, it analyses how conceptualizations of identity have changed in the seven years since the Revolution of Dignity and the annexation of Crimea, and how those events affect Ukrainian immigrants in Ukraine.