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This article explores significant notions of home and belonging among first- and second-generation Cuban immigrants in South Florida. The analyses are derived from biographical narrative interviews with six Cuban Americans. Three key subjects were in the biographical life stories—the notion of escape or leaving, the sense of home, and constructions of Cuban identity. In assessing these themes, we found there to be profound differences between the generations. Moreover, these Cuban biographies demonstrate how differing stories of migration provide new theoretical perspectives on immigration, transnationalism, and ethnicity. The experiences presented and discussed here connect to the ambivalence and complexity of belongingness and interpretations of Cuban-ness. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0903134

This article provides an overview of an interdisciplinary qualitative study that explored the personal meanings and public expressions of home, ethnicity and belonging among Cuban, Haitian and Guatemalan immigrants to Florida. We present the theoretical bases for the study, a description of the interview and observational methods employed, and the major themes discerned in the analyses of the biographical interviews. This paper provides a gateway to the four articles in this special issue, which will then focus specifically on one major theme found to be important for each of the sub-groups. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0903122

URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0903E12

Historically, young women have been the object of social control, often in the name of filial honor. This article addresses a particular phenomenon of such social control as it is experienced by first- and second-generation female immigrants from Cuba and Haiti who are living in South Florida in the United States. This theme is explored by analyzing the life stories of six immigrants from these countries. The biographical stories of immigrant women reveal how social control operates in the context of transnationalism through controlling processes, internalization of gender expectations, and dominating discourse. It is also argued how social control manipulates and restricts female spaces and operates across spaces in a transnational manner from homelands to host nations. The main conclusion of the study is that a family's relocation to the United States for the purpose of political, social, or economic freedom does not necessarily result in liberation from restrictive social control for young women from such immigrant families. The "transnationality of social control" is therefore understood as the hegemonic domination of female bodies and behaviors through the mimesis of reified and remembered spaces of homelands in host societies. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0903142

This article explores methodological issues central to the undertaking of joint Palestinian-Israeli research, work that is impacted by the violent conflict between the two peoples. Four issues are discussed: (a) collaborating under conflict, that is, how the conflict impacts relations between the researchers on either side of the border, (b) issues of power and equality, as they impact the research process, (c) relationships with participants, that is, how the conflict influences relations between the researcher and the research participants, and (d) rethinking standards, that is, whether the normative standards of research quality are relevant for Palestinian-Israeli collaborative research. The article presents examples from joint research and offers preliminary ideas for dealing with these methodological issues.

In this article, the author looks at the use of the methods of life stories or biographical interviewing in research on personal and social identity. She presents the rationale behind the use of the method and its basic procedures and then moves on to a discussion of the concept of identity. To demonstrate the relevance of this method for the study of identity construction, she presents examples from three life story interviews with Jewish Israeli young adults, all born in the mid 1970s. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of using life stories for understanding an individual's sense of identity.