Cultural Connections
Imagining Kawthoolei: How Karen Refugees Construct Identity Around a Symbolic Homeland View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session James Chaney
This paper investigates how the Karen refugee community in Smyrna, Tennessee—a suburban area in the Southern United States—employs the notion of homeland and collective memory to preserve group identity and cohesion across generations. Through qualitative analysis, the study explores how different generations of Karen refugees interpret and negotiate their shared pan-Karen identity, focusing on the symbolic homeland of Kawthoolei and their ongoing political resistance against the Burmese government. The study also examines the Karen community's internal diversity—encompassing language, religion, and political perspectives—and its historical fragmentation, to better understand how these elements shape intra-community interactions and identity construction. This research contributes to the discourse on refugee communities by illustrating how these groups sustain ties to their homeland while adapting their identities within a new geographical and cultural environment.
Diaspora Activism of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America since the 2022 Russian Invasion View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nadejda Marinova
This paper focuses on the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), an organization advocating for Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion. UCCA is an association of 29 secular, religious, cultural and professional diaspora organizations. Established in 1940, its wide-ranging representation makes it a unique case study for analyzing how 1 million Ukrainian-Americans have responded to the Russian invasion. The paper posits that the Ukrainian diaspora has actively lobbied for funding for Ukraine on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and has been active in humanitarian initiatives, in conjunction with the Ukrainian World Congress. While the diaspora literature indicates that multiple divisions exist within heterogeneous diasporas, this research has yet to identify such dynamics. The paper draws on the literature’s insights about diaspora mobilization in wartime and diaspora-policymaker relations, eliciting comparisons with Lebanese-American diaspora organizations, particularly regarding the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005 and UN Security Council Resolution 1559 (2004). The comparisons epitomize the conference’s theme of global society, in particularly the role of diaspora NGOs in global society, which includes the study of diasporas across geographical contexts. The paper utilizes UCCA organizational documents, news media articles, YouTube recordings, social media posts, and public declarations of organizational officials. The research contributes to an emerging body of literature that examines the activity of the Ukrainian diaspora since the 2022 invasion.
At the Edge: Pairing Artificial Intelligence with Human Scholarship to Predict and Explain Societal Vulnerability View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Richard Wolfel, Amy Richmond
The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to influence research and change how researchers interface with data and machines. One novel use of AI is to help guide research questions by identifying data trends, especially in public sentiment, that could potentially trigger increased societal vulnerability. While analyzing data using AI is a new development, pairing machines and humans remains a critical aspect of research. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the Modeling Dense Urban Networks (MDUN), an AI-driven analytical model, to identify the critical economic, geographical, environmental, and political influences on the local population’s sentiment that has influenced societal vulnerability in Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso is a region that faces significant societal vulnerability due to economic inequalities, regional instability resulting from the ongoing conflict in the Sahel, substantial environmental challenges acting as a threat multiplier, and a long-standing lack of trust in the government and the former colonial power, France. The internal factors of instability significantly impacted the two military coups that took place in Burkina Faso in 2022. In addition to the internal factors of instability, Burkina Faso is an area of intense competition between several global powers due to the country's significant potential for natural resource extraction. These powers try to manipulate societal opinion around the local vulnerability issues to promote their influence in Burkina Faso while undermining their rivals.
Gendered Nationalism and Migrant (M)othering of Multicultural Family Services in South Korea : Migrants’ (M)othering Under a Neoliberal Gaze to Promote the Korean Nationalism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eunjung Lee
To address significant care deficits and the lowest birth rate in the world, foreign brides have been actively recruited and subsequently a series of state-initiated/nation-wide policies and services for marriage migrants and their families were implemented. Scholars criticize this Korean multicultural policy (that locates marriage migrants as reproductive labor force and their children as social capitals) as sexist, patriarchal, and pro-nationalistic. This study illustrates how the multicultural services devised to support marriage migrants, and their families reify cultural paternalism and xenoracism while inferiorizing their mothering practice and even legitimize the state surveillance in everyday institutional practice. Using ethnographic research as a method, one Multicultural Family Support Center was recruited as a field site in Seoul, Korea. After receiving Ethics approval, ten service providers, five marriage migrants, and a government officer participated in the study (N=16), along with various field observations of the research site and its programs. The findings illustrated through multiple forms in service delivery (e.g., service pledge forms and absence reports) and numerous scientific tests for program outcome measures, the surveillance of and intrusion into migrant mothers’ parenting were legitimized while promoting gendered intensive parenting as an unmarked norm; However, no frontline workers raised any concerns about some of the required tests that problematized multicultural children as ‘disabled’ or ‘inferior.’ Also, the intensification of multicultural children’s language education that was presented as cultivating and augmenting children’s development under the name of the national good, continued to maintain cultural hierarchy and marginalization between natives and migrants.
