Dwelling in Possibilities presents an ethnographic and analytical focus on the intersection of immigration policies, refugee rights, and humanitarian operations from a feminist perspective. It emphasizes the lives of Syrian women refugees who have been resettled in the United States. It delves into the fragmented lives and experiences of the liminality of Syrian women since their displacement due to the 2011 civil war in Syria. It explores their long and arduous journey out of Syria to being accepted as legible bodies and recognized as refugees in the United States.The project critically examines inconsistencies and contradictions within the international norms and the US national legal discourses and practices on “refugee protection'. From the definition of the term refugee to humanitarian operations to managing refugee populations, to admission processes within the UN and the U.S. immigration laws and resettlement policies, I investigate how refugees' stories, sensibilities, and experiences are filtered through an interlinked politics of compassion and suspicion, embedded in humanitarian actions and legal discourses. Simultaneously, I explore how Syrian women navigate and make sense of their gender, sexual, and religious identity in complex times and spaces, creating new forms of life, new homes, and communities.

This project assembles incidences of namāz (daily Muslim ritual prayer) offered in jamāt (congregation) by those worshippers who have found themselves marginalized, disciplined, and disoriented from mainstream Muslim ritual life due to their gender or sexual orientation. It follows assays in, and commitments to, a livable Muslim life as it unfolds from the stories of disoriented Muslim worshippers at prayer together. It looks first at the religious life stories of a network of queer Pakistanis contending with the heteropatriarchal and cisgender norms of mainstream Muslim life, in struggle to continue their orientation towards Allāh alongside their own existential reality. It then narrates the last rites of two Pakistani women by describing the circumstances in which their namāz-e-janāza, i.e. their funeral prayers were performed. These funerals are moments and spaces that alter the received understanding of jamāt so that disoriented worshippers who have been made unwelcome in the larger collectivity can reorient towards compassionate convening with each other and with Allāh.  The portraits of Muslims convened for prayer that are drawn together here bring into conversation multiple ways of being Muslim and describe an emergent queer Muslim praxis that expands the parameters of what is thinkable in Islam. This narrative ethnography sheds light on how it is that mainstream Pakistani religious life disorients women as well as transgender and queer folks by narrowing the space available to these bodies within the jamāt. Deploying multiple methodological approaches in a number of research sites, this dissertation draws on events and lived experiences of ritual and religious convenings to propose and advance an understanding of the jamāt as both a congregation of worship and a congregation of care. This dissertation is an exploration of the conditions of possibility for livable life for those who are disoriented in the space of Muslim communal gathering—a life that is queer, Muslim, safe from harm, and joyful—arguing that for queer and disoriented Muslims, solidarity and a livable life go hand in hand.

What are possibilities for transforming the structural relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers? Research conversations among a set of project partners (Indigenous and settler pairs)—who reside in the Phoenix metro area, Arizona or on O’ahu, Hawai’i—addressed what good relationships look like and how to move the structural relationship towards those characteristics. Participants agreed that developing shared understandings is foundational to transforming the structural relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers; that Indigenous values systems should guide a process of transforming relationships; and that settlers must consider their position in relation to Indigenous peoples because position informs responsibility. The proposed framework for settler responsibility is based on the research design and findings, and addresses structural and individual level transformation. The framework suggests that structural-level settler responsibility entails helping to transform the structural relationship and that the settler role involves a settler transformation process parallel to Indigenous resurgence. On an individual level, personal relationships determine appropriate responsibilities, and the framework includes a suggested process between Indigenous persons and settlers for uncovering what these responsibilities are. The study included a trial of the suggested process, which includes four methods: (1) developing shared understandings of terms/concepts through discussion, (2) gathering stories about who participants are in relationship to each other, (3) examining existing daily practices that gesture to a different structural relationship, and (4) using creative processes to imagine structural relationships in a shared world beyond settler colonialism. These methods explore what possibilities unfold when settlers center their relationship with Indigenous peoples.

Injection drug use can result in a variety of negative health complications, many of which are caused or exacerbated through reuse and/or sharing of used injection equipment such as syringes, cookers, cottons, etc. The purpose of this thesis is to review the impact of the lack of resources such as needle exchange programs (NEPs) and general access to syringes on intravenous drug users in Maricopa County. This review is placed within the larger context to contrast with increased access to sterile syringes in major cities of the United States where there have been policies implemented aiming at harm reduction models of community outreach such as NEPs. To supplement this policy analysis, I conducted seven interviews and analyzed interview data to provide personal insights from the perspectives of users. I also surveyed nine current injection drug users, asking them questions about their use of syringes. Increasing awareness of the perspectives of injection drug users and the harms associated with intravenous drug use, especially when drug users are unable to access sterile, new syringes will help to facilitate increased access to harm reduction resources and reduce stigma.

The meaning of sexuality is not only specific to particular time periods in history; it is also culturally specific. Informed by transnationalism, queer of color critique, postcolonial feminism, and public sphere theory, my dissertation investigates the complex dynamic between what I call "Chinese queer subjects" and their bio-genetic families in a time of queer globalization. By centering the life experiences of Chinese queer subjects through interviewing and rhetorical analysis, this project intervenes in the teleological discourse of "coming out" that is circulated both in transnational LGBT movements and within academia. Through a materialist analysis of the "coming out" discourse in mainland China, I reveal why and how the discourse of "coming out" is prioritized in Chinese LGBT movements in order to foster a domestic queer market in mainland China. Of most significance to this project are the two non-confrontational strategies that some Chinese queer subjects employ to navigate the tension between family and sexuality: first, the reticent "coming with" strategy that engages the home space with queer desires, transforming the heteronormative family institution from within, toward a more livable queer life; second, the xinghun strategy, a marriage arrangement that many Chinese gay men and lesbian women partake in as a means of being gay or lesbian without exiting the family kinship system. The practices of reticent "coming with" and xinghun challenge the binary between family and sexuality, suggesting that queerness can emerge and thrive without exiting the (heterosexual) family; they give us some concrete examples of what AnaLouise Keating calls "post-oppositional politics" among some Chinese queer subjects.

This dissertation integrates humanities with social science methodologies within a critical framework, seeking to explore the relationship between the neoliberal restructuring and the intersection of gender, class and heteronormativity in contemporary China. In this project, neoliberalism is conceptualized as an art of governance centering on the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality to create market subjects and sustain market competition. Focusing on China's recent socio-economic and cultural upheavals, this dissertation tries to address these questions: 1. How have class inequalities, binaristic gender and heteronormative discourses been employed intersectionally by the Chinese state to facilitate China's social transformation? 2. How has this process been justified and consolidated through the intersection of gender, class, sexuality and race? 3. How do the marginalized groups respond to these material and cultural practices? Building on the discursive analysis of China's televised 60th anniversary ceremony and If You Are the One, a popular Chinese reality show, as well as the data from the interview, focus group and participant observation of more than 100 informants, it is found that the intersection of gender, class and heteronormativity is central to China's neoliberal transition. A group of flexible and cheap laborers have been disarticulated and rearticulated from the population as the voluntary servitude to China's marketization and re-integration with the global economy. New controlling images, such as the bourgeois nucleus family, are created to legitimize this process. However, these disparate material and discursive practices have entailed contradictions and conflicts within the intersectional biopolitical system, and created contingent spaces of ungovernability for the marginalized groups. Building on these discursive analyses and empirical data, I reconceptualize intersectionality as a multi-dimensional-and-directional network to regulate and manage power for social organization and regulation, which grounds the biopolitical basics for the neoliberal economy. Thus I argue that we need to engage with the dynamics between the intersectional biopolitical structure and people's emerging experiences to construct a grounded utopia alternative to the neoliberal dominance for substantive social changes.

This paper is seeking to use exploratory factor analysis to construct a numeric representation of Hill Collin's matrix of domination. According to Hill Collins, the Current American matrix of domination, or the interlocking systems of oppression, includes race, gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status, disability, and age. The study uses exploratory factor analysis to construct a matrix of domination scale. The study launched an on-line survey (n=448) that was circulated through the social network Facebook to collect data. Factor analysis revealed that the constructed matrix of domination represents an accurate description of the current social hierarchy in the United States. Also, the constructed matrix of domination was an accurate predictor of the probability of experiencing domestic abuse according to the current available statistics.