Open Collections

Watermeyer, Tsering Dolkar

University of British Columbia

Perennially in process, diaspora dabbles with questions of homeland, displacement and identity, for how it emerges cannot be bridged without traveling at least in part through these conceptual waters. As a form of group kinship, diaspora is tied by mutuality of experiences, trajectories and networks. Grounded in transdisciplinary scholarship, this dissertation explores the development and evolution of Tibetan diasporic social helping practices and organizations. Focusing on Tibetan communities in the metropolitan areas of Vancouver and Toronto, the key ethnographic questions foreshadowing the research are: What purposes do the ethnocultural organizations and the traditional social help systems known as kyidu (skyid sdug) serve Tibetans in the Canadian multicultural state? How do members perceive the role and scope of these organizations? What do the organizational activities reveal about the cultural practices of Tibetan social helping? The fieldwork conducted between March 2019 and June 2022 includes 50 virtual and in-person key informant interviews, 50 informal interviews, document analysis and field notes. Data analysis was conducted using NVIVO qualitative software including domain and thematic analysis. Findings reveal how Tibetan social helping is shaped by group kinship notions, formations and organizing including the political task of cultural continuity. Contrary to the Canadian organizational perspective where the cultural and the political are seen as distinct spheres, in the realm of Tibetan social help organizations, the lines between the two are not simply blurred but in fact inalienable, for the cultural is political. Examining both the resiliency and liminality of the grassroots organizations, the study discusses ways forward including a formative theorizing on Tibetan social helping and the role of ‘diaspora social work’.

Text

2024-09-03

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89146

Social Work

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/