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[eng] This doctoral thesis investigates identity, ageing, and migration through an intersectional approach to retirement and later life migration from the UK to Spain. Through an in-depth exploration of the experiences of British expatriate retirees in Costa del Sol, Andalusia, and Costa Brava, Catalonia, Spain, the thesis analyzes the generation of experiences between privilege, vulnerability, and precarity, and its contingent effects on the construction of these identity processes. The trend of British retirees moving to Spain has a long-standing history and has been studied in Anthropology, Gerontology, migration studies, and more. Yet, in the period between 2019 and 2020, when this research took place, the confluence of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic reinvigorated the field of study. Said geopolitical and sociosanitary shifts put the experiences and identities of British expatriate retirees in question; altering the material foundations upon which their privileged migration life projects were constructed. Like this, creating a unique context where privilege and uncertainty meet in the crux of intersecting experiences of migration and ageing. Through the latter, the thesis contributes to anthropological debates on the contextualized construction of identities between the self and society; on Global North ageing discourses and its’ effects on later life identity projects; and questions the use of migration categories on the ground. Since identity, ageing and migration are polysemic concepts that have mutated over time with their subsequent analytical repercussions, this thesis adopts an intersectional lens that recognizes and develops the debates these terms are involved in, as well as captures the everyday connections between micro experiences and macro structures that evidence relationships of power and the perpetuation of inequalities. This involves the study of labels and their adjacent prejudices and stigmas, exposing how these travel from one sociocultural context to another, while also exploring how feelings of belonging are built abroad. By examining through the seemingly privileged retirement migration experiences of informants, this doctoral thesis exposes the intricacies between privilege, vulnerability, dependence, and precarity through the minutiae of the quotidian, contributing to wider empirical and conceptual debates regarding identity, ageing, and migration., [spa] Esta tesis doctoral investiga la identidad, el envejecimiento y la migración a través de un enfoque interseccional de la gerontomigración y la migración en etapas vitales tardías des del Reino Unido a España. Al explorar en profundidad las experiencias de jubilados expatriados británicos en la Costa del Sol y la Costa Brava, España, esta tesis analiza la generación de experiencias entre el privilegio, la vulnerabilidad, y la precariedad, y sus efectos contingentes sobre la construcción de estos procesos identitarios. El fenómeno de jubilados británicos que migran a España tiene una larga historia y se ha estudiado en antropología, gerontología, estudios de migración y más. No obstante, en el período entre 2019 y 2020 cuando se llevó a cabo esta investigación, la confluencia del Brexit y la pandemia de COVID-19 revitalizó el campo de estudio. Dichos cambios geopolíticos y sociosanitarios cuestionan las experiencias e identidades de los jubilados expatriados británicos; alterando los cimientos materiales sobre los que se construyeron sus privilegiados proyectos de vida migratoria. Así, creando un contexto único donde el privilegio y la incertidumbre se encuentran en la intersección de experiencias migratorias y de envejecimiento. A través de esto último, la tesis contribuye a debates antropológicos sobre la construcción contextualizada de identidades entre el yo y la sociedad; sobre los discursos acerca del envejecimiento del Norte Global y sus efectos en los proyectos identitarios en la vejez; y cuestiona los usos de las categorías migratorias tradicionales sobre el terreno. Dado que la identidad, el envejecimiento y la migración son conceptos polisémicos que han mutado a lo largo del tiempo, con sus subsecuentes repercusiones analíticas, esta investigación adopta una aproximación interseccional que reconoce y desarrolla los debates en los que están involucrados estos términos, y, asimismo, también capturando las conexiones entre las micro experiencias y las macroestructuras que evidencian las relaciones de poder y la perpetuación de desigualdades. Esto implica el estudio de etiquetas y sus prejuicios y estigmas adyacentes, apuntando cómo éstos transitan de un contexto sociocultural a otro, además de explorar cómo se construyen los sentimientos de pertenencia en el extranjero. Al examinar las experiencias migratorias de jubilación aparentemente privilegiadas de los informantes, esta tesis doctoral expone las complejidades entre el privilegio, la vulnerabilidad, la dependencia y la precariedad a través de las minucias de lo cotidiano. Así contribuyendo a debates empíricos y conceptuales más amplios en torno a la identidad, el envejecimiento y la migración.

Màster Oficial en Construcció i Representació d'Identitats Culturals (CRIC), Facultat de Filologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2021-2022, Tutora: Cristina Alsina, [eng] Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993) follows the life of Jess, a Jewish, working-class, and butch protagonist. Through first-person narration, the novel explores issues of intersectional community-building, negotiation of difference and sameness, and the possibility of queer alternatives to home and domesticity. Amidst constant and unbearable police brutality, social punishment and verbal threats, the characters of the novel struggle to survive both on a physical level—keeping their bodies alive—and on a psychological one—developing a sense of self and self-worth. This Master’s thesis analyzes both the novel’s depiction of police violence, framed as torture, and the survival strategies that develop around it, which involve community-building and intimacy between traumatized characters. The analysis is structured in two parts: the first part explores what makes community necessary and how it works through close readings of the text alongside theoretical works on community, such as Zigmunt Bauman’s, and on torture, such as Elaine Scarry’s. The second part of the analysis focuses on the limitations of community, the delineation of its boundaries, and the consequences of being without community through works on queer and bisexual theory, such as Jack Halberstam’s and Claire Hemmings’. Lastly, this thesis turns to the utopic drive of the novel, focusing on hope and the celebration of difference as essential to queer, class-conscious politics.

We have studied how leaders emerge in a group as a consequence of interactions among its members. We propose that leaders can emerge as a consequence of a self-organized process based on local rules of dyadic interactions among individuals. Flocks are an example of self-organized behaviour in a group and properties similar to those observed in flocks might also explain some of the dynamics and organization of human groups. We developed an agent-based model that generated flocks in a virtual world and implemented it in a multi-agent simulation computer program that computed indices at each time step of the simulation to quantify the degree to which a group moved in a coordinated way (index of flocking behaviour) and the degree to which specific individuals led the group (index of hierarchical leadership). We ran several series of simulations in order to test our model and determine how these indices behaved under specific agent and world conditions. We identified the agent, world property, and model parameters that made stable, compact flocks emerge, and explored possible environmental properties that predicted the probability of becoming a leader.

In the present work we focus on two indices that quantify directionality and skew-symmetrical patterns in social interactions as measures of social reciprocity: the Directional consistency (DC) and Skew symmetry indices. Although both indices enable researchers to describe social groups, most studies require statistical inferential tests. The main aims of the present study are: firstly, to propose an overall statistical technique for testing null hypotheses regarding social reciprocity in behavioral studies, using the DC and Skew symmetry statistics (Φ) at group level; and secondly, to compare both statistics in order to allow researchers to choose the optimal measure depending on the conditions. In order to allow researchers to make statistical decisions, statistical significance for both statistics has been estimated by means of a Monte Carlo simulation. Furthermore, this study will enable researchers to choose the optimal observational conditions for carrying out their research, as the power of the statistical tests has been estimated.

This paper explores the existence of negative peer-group pressures derived from the concentration of foreigners in French lower secondary schools. Using different dependent variables (number of years spent in lower secondary education, grades in 4th ‘and 3rd year and track election in upper secondary schooling) the analyses indicate that the much disputed existence of significant and negative effects of the concentration of foreign students in schools depends on the methodused for the estimation. If we assume that the concentration of foreigners is a random and exogenous process, then the multivariate analyses confirm negative interactions. If, on the contrary, we question the assumption that this contextual information is not end the result of prior sorting mechanisms of individuals across social spaces, the concentration of foreigners has no statistical impact on attainment.