Nationhood in the city: Assimilation, citizenship, and national belonging among college-educated, second generation Turks in Berlin and Dominicans in New York City
Item
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Title
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Nationhood in the city: Assimilation, citizenship, and national belonging among college-educated, second generation Turks in Berlin and Dominicans in New York City
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ab64ec2bba2a:12049
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identifier
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12733
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Creator
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Sezgin, Utku,
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Contributor
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John Mollenkopf
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Ethnic studies | Demography | Assimilation | Berlin | Citizenship | Immigration | National Belonging | New York
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Abstract
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The main question posed by the study is: "How are university-educated immigrant-origin young people from disadvantaged backgrounds responding to the social and political opportunities provided by their cities and nations?" Through in-depth interviews and secondary research, my project sheds light on how local and national institutions, and the historical context, of host societies shape the outlook of upwardly mobile second generation immigrants on questions of citizenship and national belonging. It focuses on interviewing college-educated individuals from similarly disadvantaged groups in two similar locales: Turks in Berlin and Dominicans in New York. My hypothesis is that New York City and the United States offer an institutional package of opportunities and responses that provides a more favorable context of reception for these individuals; and that this in turn fosters a stronger sense of commitment to and membership in the U.S. polity than is the case in Berlin and Germany. This package includes: the civil rights culture/laws, the relatively liberal and pluralistic citizenship regime, an immigration-oriented national and local political culture and institutional history, and the relatively penetrable and inclusive local and national political system that accommodates immigrants.. The project goes beyond segmented assimilation theory to critique its overly structural and deterministic views of race, immigration, and class. The dissertation also takes issue with the view that citizenship and nation-states have been decoupled in our globalized age, a view that has by now largely superseded traditional notions of citizenship tied to the nation-state. My primary means of data collection have been 61 face-to-face, in-depth, semi-structured interviews in the two contexts. The interviews aimed to identify how respondents' identity construction and citizenship practices operate within the host context.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Political Science
