Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Diasporic Networks and Processes of Incorporation among the Hmong in the US and Germany

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With the guidance of Dr. Caroline Brettell, Southern Methodist University graduate student Faith Nibbs will conduct research on how refugee populations are or are not incorporated into the host societies to which they migrate. She will pursue this question through a comparative case study of two Hmong refugee populations, of similar backgrounds and from a single rural site in Southeast Asia, who have settled in two different nation states, the United States and Germany. At each research site, the researcher will interview a sample of Hmong and examine Hmong interactions with American and German citizens, with the different state policies embodied in officials, and with their diasporic network resources and human connections. These micro-level data will be contextualized with relevant aggregate statistics and archival data. Diasporic networks will be investigated and analyzed through the use of social network analytical methods. To examine the social processes important in the affirmation of extra-local Hmong culture, the researcher also will conduct participant observation at two major Hmong events, one in Europe and one in the United States.The researcher poses the hypothesis that over time, even among a second generation of refugees in the host country, the diasporic networks (international connections to Hmong elsewhere) will continue to be important and generate identifications that resist local incorporation. If found to be true, the research would challenge the more usual argument that schooling and socialization in the host culture significantly affect the identities of young first-generation and especially second-generation members of diasporic populations. Thus this research will contribute to the development of dynamic and multi-level theoretical models of immigrant incorporation. The research also will help develop more appropriate social policy for immigrant populations, and will contribute to the education of a social scientist.