The Structuration of Cultural Identity Through Everyday Space: Understanding Second Generation Chinese American Children's Life Experience in an Ethnoburb Context.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation project is an examination of how 2nd generation Chinese American children’s cultural identity is constructed and reconstructed through a geographic lens across children’s everyday space including home, school and community. Interdependent relationships are also examined between cultural structures and children’s agency when children’s space is considered geographically, and collectively at various levels. Drawing upon a multidisciplinary perspective, this project analyzes immigrant children’s cultural identity in a middle class ethnoburb context in a southern city in the U.S. Building on structuration theory, the notion of children’s agency, and the geographical interpretation of identity and social boundaries, this study asks: how children’s life is culturally structured at home, in school and community; if there is any, how children’s agency is enacted through social interactions within their environment at those places; and how cultural structure and agency as well as space are interdependent, explaining the discourse of 2nd generation immigrant children’s construction of cultural identity. Through online survey, in-depth interviews, observations and field notes, ethnographic data was collected on 30 participating children and their parents, community leaders, institutional officials, local event organizers and other relevant adults at children’s everyday spaces of homes, school and various community locations. Analysis of the data demonstrated that these children’s everyday life is differently structured at home, school and community in terms of cultural orientation, and children have to frequently compare, reinterpret and switch back and forth between different cultural expectations and norms to make sense of their social world, expressing their sense of cultural identity. It was highlighted that the resistance between cultural structures and children’s agency across space are ever changing, reflecting children’s sense of belonging to their ethnic and national identities “here and now”. The results imply that immigrant children’s childhood experience can be seen as a reflection of social structures simultaneously at local, national and global levels.