Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.
Ameena Abid
MSW candidate, King’s University College
Longing for Home: Exploring Second-Generation Immigrant Identity with Nostalgia
What relationship do the children of immigrants have to their parent’s homeland? Using the concept of nostalgia (from the Greek, pain “algia” for the homeland “nostos”), I wanted to explore how second-generation immigrants, who now make up a third of children in Canada, long for a place of belonging and identity. Using autoethnography, I mapped my own experience growing up in-between cultures, as the daughter of a Pakistani Muslim father and Punjabi Sikh mother, growing up in Canada. This study led me to trace my roots back to my two grandfathers, men of different cultures but the same subcontinent, partitioned into countries that did not exist when they were born. I discovered that the children of immigrants often become nostalgic for their parent’s homeland in adulthood; a longing which can be mediated by meaningfully exploring the long answer to the common question: Where are you from?
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