ThesisOpen Access
Iskandaryan, Gayane, 2023
MA thesis, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); eScholarship
Examines how the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988–1994), the 1988 Spitak earthquake, and the collapse of the USSR triggered a mass wave of Soviet Armenian refugees and migrants into the diaspora, especially Los Angeles County. Argues these crises 'broached the Iron Curtain,' reconnecting a polarized diaspora with the homeland while simultaneously driving a mass exodus out of it. Explores the nuanced, sometimes tense relationship between long-settled Armenian-Americans and newly arrived Soviet Armenians. Places Artsakh and homeland crises at the center of modern diaspora-homeland dynamics.
ThesisOpen Access
Avetyan, Madlen, 2017
M.A. Thesis, Department of Anthropology, California State University, Northridge (advisor Sabina Magliocco); xi, 147 pp.; handle 10211.3/192578
A CSUN master's thesis in anthropology on 'ethnodoxy' — the fusion of ethnic and religious identity — among Armenian-Americans in Los Angeles, the largest Armenian community in the diaspora. Avetyan argues that the Armenian Apostolic Church has functioned since the fourth century as a unifying national institution in the absence of statehood, and that both its practical and its symbolic religiosity remain central markers of Armenian identity in the diaspora today. The study fills a gap in scholarship that had examined Armenian cultural identity without seriously weighing its ethno-religious dimension. Committee members included Vahram Shemmassian.
ThesisOpen Access
Karapetian, Shushan, 2014
PhD dissertation, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles; eScholarship. Winner, Society for Armenian Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award
Introduces Armenian, specifically Eastern Armenian in Los Angeles, into the landscape of heritage languages in the United States, filling a gap in both heritage-language research and Armenian studies. It assesses the linguistic landscape of Armenians in Los Angeles, including the presence and use of the language and the visible signs of its loss, then examines incomplete acquisition among heritage speakers across phonology, morphology, register, and English borrowings, proposing domains of linguistic compartmentalization to describe patterns of use. A central finding concerns the persistent anxiety attached to speaking the heritage language and the damaging cycle that anxiety produces. The study closes on the inconsistent attitudes and beliefs surrounding Armenian, analyzed through competing majority and minority language ideologies. Data come from a corpus of in-depth interviews with college-age Eastern Armenian heritage learners.
ThesisOpen Access
King, Melissa Ruth, 2013
PhD dissertation, Anthropology, University of California, Riverside; eScholarship
In Armenian American youth activism, the practice of memory of woundedness and genocide is conceived as a form of resistance tied to claiming a subjectivity as diasporan Armenians and as a US minority. Young activists position themselves in history as remnants and freedom fighters, demanding recognition of the Genocide in a struggle for justice that simultaneously demands their own recognition as survivors in a context of perceived denial. The activist tradition studied here tends toward anti-assimilationism and the display of woundedness as a means of obtaining perceptibility. Youth claim survivorship through diasporan institutions that structure commemorations, cultural events and political protests. The study rests on eighteen months of field research in the Los Angeles region.
