Though LGBT people have been able to seek asylum in the United States since the ‘90s, they still face a multitude of challenges upon arrival in the US as well as in their application process, leaving an air of uncertainty for many whether they will be successful in their cases. This thesis seeks to understand these challenges and how they relate to the perception of identities of LGBT asylum seekers, especially as it relates to Western stereotypes of gender and sexuality. To examine these issues, this thesis includes in-depth interviews with four officials who work closely with asylum seekers to incorporate their input on the asylum system as a whole and how the system impacts LGBT asylum seekers. Based on the analysis of court cases and supplementary qualitative data, this thesis aims to reveal the implications of relying on “consistency” as evidence of credibility based on the stereotypes and how this can harm LGBT asylum seekers as well as others outside of the LGBT community. Finally, this thesis proposes an intervention to alleviate these challenges not only for those in the LGBT community but for everyone seeking asylum in the US and suggests a new framework for how to understand and communicate identities of asylum seekers without limited definitions of their sexual identities or stripping them of autonomy.

There are many historical inequities regarding housing in the United States, such as the lack of access to affordable and secure housing for people of color, which is a result of centuries of exclusion. These problems remain ineffectively addressed or unaddressed by policy. Indeed, many community-based organizations report that housing policies fail to address the needs of the people—especially those in marginalized communities. Top-down approaches are efficient and more broadly applicable but miss important community-specific problems. Meanwhile, bottom-up approaches excel in highlighting community perspectives and the lived experiences of residents, but they are challenging to generalize across jurisdictions. This thesis captures community-based understandings of policy through in-depth interviews with community-based organizations (CBOs) and applies these understandings to develop a new quantitative framework for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of housing policies that can be applied across the United States. The thesis also explores various housing policies through a multi-dimensional, intersectional, and forward-thinking analysis that centers marginalized communities.

International relations scholarship in recent years has given great attention to the rise of China. In the developing countries of the Global South, China’s presence has increased significantly, challenging the dominating Western presence that existed hitherto. Of the developing regions, Oceania often warrants the least attention, as it receives the lowest share of trade, aid, and investment under China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Despite this marginal role in China’s purview, international scholars offer the same, unbending conclusion: China is set out to challenge Western leadership and gain great power status in the region by incorporating countries into its sphere of influence. At the same time, Oceania has spawned anti-status quo sentiment against dominant western paradigms through the adoption of alternative regionalisms. Scholars attribute the rising anti-status quo sentiment to a ‘China Alternative,’ yet Pacific Islands continue to adopt positions counter to Chinese political and development tenants. In order to investigate the implications of China’s rise in Oceania, I depart from traditional realist and liberal models of the balance of power and soft power capabilities to explain international relations in Oceania. Through a constructivist theoretical framework conformed by an analytical process of Global IR, I set out to explain that anti-west sentiment does not signal the rise of China as a regional hegemon, but rather it grants more autonomy to the Pacific Islands that is sustained by islander agency.