Critical Multiculturalism Research Articles

A Unified Theory of Value-Based Reasoning and U.S. Public Opinion

Public opinion research shows that American citizens utilize domain-specific political values to guide opinion formation in the key issue areas that comprise the American political agenda. One set of political values operates on economic welfare opinions, a different set of values applies to cultural issue positions, a third set shapes foreign policy preferences, and so on in other policy domains. Drawing on Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic human values, this paper argues that two socially focused values—self-transcendence and conservation—guide opinion formation across all major policy domains. By contrast, the personally focused values of self-enhancement and openness-to-change should play a more limited role in preference formation. These hypotheses are tested using data from a novel 2011 national survey and the 2012 General Social Survey. The statistical results affirm expectations. We show that self-transcendence and conservation values predict scores on symbolic ideology, economic conservatism, racial conservatism, cultural conservatism, civil liberties, and foreign policy opinions. Self-enhancement and openness-to-change values play a modest role in shaping preferences.

Multicultural Feeling, Feminist Rage, Indigenous Refusal

This article discusses the persistence of figuring Canadian multiculturalism as a success story, in the face of growing international attention to the degradation of Indigenous life and sovereignty in Canada. It examines three issues: nationalist investments in and scholarly/activist critiques of multiculturalism; dehumanizing bodily and discursive violence directed at Indigenous women by way of government policies, interpersonal violence, and media narratives; and recent activist expressions of anti-settler colonial politics diffused through social media. Gender is central to the interrogation of difference-making in Canada; it is conspicuously absent in mainstream formulations of multiculturalism, grievously present in gender-based violence, and a key basis for resistance to settler colonialism. The article’s aim is to complement the growing body of writing that connects multiculturalism and the politics of recognition to dismissals of Indigenous claims to political sovereignty, cultural self-determination, and freedom from bodily harm. The connection is not paradoxical—It is correlational.

‘Being’ a critical multicultural pedagogue in the art education classroom

ABSTRACTArt educators continuously struggle to understand what multiculturalism ‘looks like’ in the art classroom. This has resulted in multicultural art education becoming superficial, in which art teachers guide students through art projects like creating African masks, Native American dream catchers, Aboriginal totems, and sand paintings, all without communicating the context of the art. This type of multiculturalism essentializes cultures, and builds Western, myopic narratives about groups of people, specifically about their ‘Art’. Critical multiculturalism is a power-focused upgrade of multiculturalism that calls for a critique of power and demands recognition that racism and other discriminations are enmeshed in the fabric of our social order. Teaching through a critical multiculturalism framework helps teachers dismantle Western, normalized narratives and produce counter-hegemonic curriculum that contextualizes culture and reveals its fluidity. In this article, the author shares a teacher action research study in which she describes what critical multiculturalism looks like in her art education classroom. The study focuses on ‘being’ a critically multicultural educator versus ‘doing’ critical multiculturalism. Such a position counters the idea that critical multiculturalism is a thing to complete, but instead is an ongoing process that rests on specific ways of thinking and considering the classroom, curriculum, and students.

Dialogic Pedagogy and Educating Preservice Teachers for Critical Multiculturalism

The study investigates the potentials of educating preservice teachers for critical multiculturalism through dialogic pedagogy. The study findings suggest that dialogic pedagogy experienced some successes in encouraging preservice teachers to revise their worldview about certain topics in the multicultural curriculum about which they were not initially open to dialogue. The study should contribute to the literature of dialogic pedagogy and multicultural education in terms of suggesting more democratic educational approaches toward teaching the controversial topics of the multicultural curriculum.

Guest Editor's Introduction

Guest Editor's Introduction

Only Human: Critical Reflections on Dance, Creation, and Identity

In this article, we consider the relationship between artistic creation and the negotiation of social identity in multicultural contexts. Our discussion is largely grounded in the scholarship on critical multiculturalism, socio-cultural theories of artistic production, and on dance identity and education. Through an arts-based, narrative analysis of our re-viewing of select performance DVDs from the amateur dance collective of which we were both members, we take the position that dance in multicultural contexts can create important opportunities for a critical reflection on how an artistic identity (i.e. “dancer”) and a form of cultural production (i.e. “dance performance”) - can both challenge and reinforce normative understandings about social identity (i.e. “gender”, “race”, “class”, etc.). We discuss the implications of this contradiction for dance creation, performance and education through the analytical themes of “Training, Technique and Choreography”; “Social Organization and Hierarchy”; and “Diversity and Inclusion”.

Social justice leadership in multicultural schools: the case of an ethnically divided society

This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study focusing on the perceptions of elementary school principals who espouse a critical multicultural approach and show signs of a social justice leadership style. The study has taken place in an ethnically divided society (Cyprus) in which the political situation seems to influence the ways in which school leaders perceive issues of justice and multiculturalism. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 principals who espoused a critical multicultural approach and subscribed to values of social justice leadership. The analysis of these principals’ interviews reveals two important findings—one concerning the conceptualization of critical multiculturalism in a society that suffers from ethnic division and the other concerning the contextualization of social justice leadership in this setting. The paper discusses the implications for leadership preparation programmes and for future research on social justice leadership and critical multiculturalism.

Interpretation in Terms of Critical Multiculturalism on the Multicultural Education Policy in Korea

Interpretation in Terms of Critical Multiculturalism on the Multicultural Education Policy in Korea

Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience ed. by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary Cohen (review)

Reviewed by: Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience ed. by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary Cohen John E. Fahey Johannes Feichtinger and Gary Cohen, eds., Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience. Austrian and Habsburg Studies 17. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. 246 pp. Multiculturalism is the core of the Habsburg monarchy’s appeal to students of history, cultural studies, literature, linguistics, and politics. The monarchy’s diversity often is used as a test case for theories about multiethnic societies across the world, and it is often cited as a precursor for European integration. Multiculturalism is also the focus for a significant percentage of the scholarship on the monarchy and its successor states. Some of this scholarship uses the monarchy to appeal to a bygone era of peaceful multiethnic coexistence lost due to whatever factor is the bogeyman of the day. The benefits of Habsburg multiculturalism and integration have been touted by scholars like Alan Sked and David Good, to a statesman like Otto von Habsburg. These benefits of multiculturalism in the Habsburg monarchy were, of course, extremely mixed. Scholarship in the last few decades, led in part by Gary Cohen, has emphasized the contentious and contested nature of multiculturalism. Emphasizing the potential disadvantages and dangers of multiculturalism, Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience is an excellent primer on Habsburg society and is highly recommended for students of the monarchy as well as multicultural societies in general. Bringing new insights to the issues of identity creation, multiethnic politics, memory, language use, and personal representation, Understanding Multiculturalism is a useful critique of multiculturalism in the Habsburg monarchy and its successors. [End Page 141] Understanding Multiculturalism, a collection of essays resulting from a group research project entitled “Multiculturalism: The Central European Experience and Its Impact on Identity Formation in a Globalized World” and edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary Cohen, is the latest examination of the discourse around East Central Europe’s defining characteristic. Feichtinger and Cohen point to recent scholarship to illustrate the ambivalent nature of multicultural societies. They argue that multiculturalism can not only bring cultural exchange but also oppression, unjust social practices, and an othering of minority groups. It is often used to perpetuate or allow unjust social practices and power imbalances. When multiculturalism is used to preserve the power of a majority group or create artificial barriers between communities, it is counterproductive to the healthy functioning of society. Even within the most integrated and supranational institutions of the Habsburg monarchy, army, and bureaucracy, nationality often determined the role, associations, and expectation of soldiers, officers, and bureaucrats. Idealized Habsburg multiculturalism was often very militarized and rigid, with German-speaking officers dispensing instruction and correction to the various subdivided, regimented peoples. As is common with collections of essays, the authors of Understanding Multiculturalism have chosen widely disparate topics, but the book is held together well with a common objective of reevaluating nation-based descriptions of identity. Sections address topics including identity formation, state and political dynamics, and identity expression within multicultural societies. The bulk of the work focuses on the Habsburg monarchy and its successor states, with excellent essays by Pieter Judson on nationalist frontiers in rural Austria in the late Habsburg era; Michael John on migration in Austria during the twentieth century, and Patrice Dabrowski on interwar Poland. As is common for these topical collections, the geographic and intellectual focus stretches profitably, as in Michael Rössinger’s examination of the cultural memory of Europe among Latin Americans and Moritz Csáky’s discussion of cultural studies. There are also more focused micro-histories of locations, people, and practices. Individuals illustrate the flexibility of ethnic boundaries, particularly within imperial institutions like the army. By way of illustration, Oto Luthar provides an example of a Slovenian noncommissioned officer who wrote his diary in Slovene when referring to home, German when discussing official matters, and, oddly enough, Hungarian when writing about his sexual fantasies. Examples such as this illustrate the fluidity of language and culture even within individuals. [End Page 142] Understanding Multiculturalism’s critique of multiculturalism fits well with books like Cohen’s Politics of Ethnic Survival or Tara Zahra’s Kidnapped Souls. Cohen, Zahra, and others have shown...

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: two responses on the British left to the rise of identity politics – the cases of Class War and Red Action

The 1980s may be seen as an era where a profound shift occurred on the British left. The anti-racist and multi-cultural approach of Ken Livingstone's Greater London Council (GLC) and other local authorities, was accompanied by a developing women's movement and the positioning of questions of gender, race and sexuality at the centre of left wing politics. This paper focuses on two revolutionary organisations emerging in this period – Class War from within the anarchist movement and Red Action in the marxist tradition. Both developed broad intellectual justifications concerning the overwhelming primacy of class and as such serve as important footnotes in any historiography of twentieth century left politics in the United Kingdom. Whilst these groups can be styled as a 'lost left,' focusing on the broader working class in an era where revolutionaries increasingly found other sources of oppression, more subtle positions emerge. As Red Action developed a strong, and indeed rare, critique of multiculturalism from the left, the influence of cultural politics saw some in Class War question first the make-up of their organisation, then consequently the viability of the organisation itself.

Language Policies and Programs for Adult Immigrants in Canada: Deconstructing Discourses of Integration

This chapter examines current issues in English as Second Language (ESL) policies and programs for adult immigrants in Canada from a critical multiculturalism perspective.

Four Diverse Educators Chronicle Challenges in a Christian-Centered Society

Culturally responsive teaching requires that students be perceived holistically and part of student culture is religious beliefs. The purpose of this research is to offer insight into experiences and understandings of four preservice and inservice teachers', from diverse religious backgrounds, Muslim, Judaism, Sikhism, and Mormonism, experiences and understandings as they studied and worked in colleges of education and elementary classrooms that are rooted in Anglo Christian traditions. We relied on aspects of critical multiculturalism and social identity theory to guide the qualitative case study. In this case study, we analyzed reflexive journals and interviews of four participants using withincase and cross-case analysis. Within-case and cross-case analyses included four themes: separation of church and state, teaching for equity and awareness, respect for religious diversity, and personal beliefs. These findings suggest teacher educators incorporate religious and spiritual issues into diversity discussions and continue to support preservice teachers' development of conscious self-awareness and culturally responsive pedagogy.

Whitened rainbows: how white college students protect whiteness through diversity discourses

This qualitative study investigates white students’ attitudes toward campus diversity at a large, multiracial public university. Drawing upon focus group data gathered from a larger campus climate study, we identified four themes: participants voiced that: (1) racial diversity fosters campus tolerance; (2) diversity fragments into de facto racial segregation; (3) institutional support of diversity undermines and excludes whites; and (4) the university should avoid acknowledging white identity. Employing critical multiculturalism as a theoretical lens, we argue that these discourses maintain white dominance within a framework that promotes inclusion. These findings suggest that without more direct institutional guidance, white students will protect white supremacy even as they celebrate diversity in multiracial spaces.

Caring multiculturalism: Power and transformation in diverse societies

This article offers an alternative approach to multicultural theories, called ‘caring multiculturalism’. It argues that, despite good intentions, multicultural theory reproduces rhetoric that constructs groups as substantive entities, which leaves little room to accommodate changing power relations. Caring multiculturalism, drawing on caring ethics, feminist critiques of multiculturalism and discursive social psychology, advocates instead the contextualisation of groups’ claims to diversity and of governments’ practices of multiculturalism. As a framework rooted in discursive psychology, caring multiculturalism sees individual and collective identities as relational, negotiated and political, and therefore non-totalising and changeable. As a feminist approach to multiculturalism, it analyses and attempts to change gendered power asymmetries embedded in intra- and intergroup relations by advocating an attentive and responsive approach to the needs and claims of minority groups and of the individuals within them. The article outlines the main tenets of caring multiculturalism with illustrations from multicultural practices in three European municipalities.

The Place of the Niqab in the Courtroom

Abstract This paper analyzes the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R v NS, 2012 SCC 72 where the Court considered if a witness who wears a niqab for religious reasons can be required to remove it while testifying. The Court identified the two Charter rights engaged: the witness’ freedom of religion and the accused’s fair trial rights, including the right to make full answer and defense. This paper focuses on those aspects of the Supreme Court’s decision that relate to religious freedom, multiculturalism and reasonable accommodation. Analyzing the Court’s reasoning through the lens of critical multiculturalism, I consider the potential of the reasonable accommodation framework to forward minority rights. I suggest that had the Supreme Court applied an intersectional framework to adjudicating NS’s claim, it could have crafted a more contextual response based on her location along multiple axes of discrimination: gender, religion and racialised minority. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of mediating individual and group tensions, to move towards a more inclusive notion of citizenship than can foster a commitment to a shared multicultural future.

Youth Work in Gay Straight Alliances: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Activist Development

Critical pedagogy empowers Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) advisers facilitate reflective, activist-oriented learning. Its use in school clubs has broad implications for both teachers and youth workers. Informed by critical multiculturalism, this study draws on ethnographic fieldwork from one school year and in-depth interviews with GSA participants. Data reveal that the GSA advisor's understanding of critical pedagogy is characterized by expanding students’ knowledge, facilitating students’ activism, and encouraging students’ reflection on significant interactions with peers and family. The author concludes these pedagogical practices help create long-term GSAs, where engaged student learning and activism promote a “third space” in youth development work.

The emergence of black British social conservatism

Historically, to be a black public intellectual in Britain has, almost by definition, meant being located on the liberal-left spectrum, in terms of analyses of race and class. However, in the past decade a number of high-profile black British thinkers have explicitly positioned themselves at odds with black liberal and radical traditions of thought. This has been particularly apparent in their critiques of multiculturalism, youth and education. This paper uses recent documentary sources to analyse the discursive features of this emergent black social conservatism, examining its claims to authenticity, its claims to offer rethinking of multiculturalism and identity, and its objects of racialization. Drawing upon critical discourse analysis and critical theories of race and black intellectual production, it identifies internal tensions in this emergent discourse.

Foreign Animation Films and the Rising of Anti-Multiculturalism among Parents

As the impact of globalization, foreign animation films such as Shin Chan from Japan, Krishna from India, Upin-Ipin from Malaysia, Batman and many others from the US are very popular in Indonesia. Those films supposed represent cultures of each nation, so that people can learn multiculturalism. However, those films create inversely. This study aims to know how foreign animation films affect on the rising of anti-multiculturalism among Indonesian parents. Survey is conducted on parents with kindergarten or elementary children in Yogyakarta. The results show that children prefer to watch foreign animation films compare to domestic one. They are more likely to imitate their favorite animation stars by behaving violently, speaking harshly, and disrespectfully to parents. As a result parents tend to blame their children changing behavior on foreign cultures as bad and impolite compare to their own culture. Instead of encouraging better understanding on multiculturalism, foreign animation films has raised anti-multiculturalism among parents.Sebagai dampak globalisasi, film animasi asing seperti Shin Chan dari Jepang, Krishna dari India, Upin Ipin - dari Malaysia, Batman dan banyak lainnya dari Amerika Serikat sangat populer di Indonesia. Film-film seharusnya mewakili budaya masing-masing negara, sehingga orang dapat belajar multikulturalisme. Namun, film-film ini dapat pula berakibat sebaliknya. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui bagaimana film animasi dari luar bisa berpengaruh pada peningkatan anti-multikulturalisme pada orang tua di Indonesia. Survey dilakukan pada orang tua yang memiliki anak TK atau SD di Yogyakarta. Hasil menunjukkan bahwa anak-anak lebih memilih untuk menonton film animasi asing dibandingkan dengan film dalam negeri. Mereka lebih cenderung untuk meniru bintang animasi favorit mereka dengan berperilaku keras, berbicara kasar, dan tidak hormat kepada orang tua. Akibatnya, orang tua cenderung menyalahkan anak-anak mereka perilaku yang berubah pada budaya asing sebagai buruk dan tidak sopan dibandingkan dengan budaya mereka sendiri. Alih-alih mendorong pemahaman yang lebih baik tentang multikulturalisme, film animasi asing telah meningkatkan anti-multikulturalisme di kalangan orang tua.

Unpacking (white) privilege in a South African university classroom: A neglected element in multicultural educational contexts

Multiculturalism currently aims for the political accommodation of difference instead of the subversion of the resulting privileges of difference. In the South African context such a distinction is especially important since the economic and symbolic subjugation of the majority of Black South Africans continues despite political transformation, and is exacerbated by an unwillingness to reflect on privilege and inequality. Drawing on Biko and Soudien’s critique of multiculturalism and vision for anti-racist education, this paper describes a classroom activity set for 164 nationally and culturally diverse second year sociology students at a university in Cape Town, South Africa. The activity tasked students to reflect on texts by Peggy McIntosh and Khaya Dlanga (one canonical, the other contextual) and reports on these students’ nuanced understandings of personal biography, experiences of privilege and self-reflexivity that connects personal experience to social structure and historical contexts. It concludes by offering modest implications for moral education in a multicultural university classroom.

The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865–1944 by Glenn Feldman (review)

Reviewed by: The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865–1944 by Glenn Feldman Joshua D. Farrington (bio) The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865– 1944. By Glenn Feldman. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013. Pp. 480. $49.95 cloth) Glenn Feldman’s brilliantly edited compilation of essays, Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why, and How the South Became Republican (2011), stands out among a multitude of contemporary books as one of the most nuanced accounts of the rise of the Solid Republican South. His most recent work, The Irony of the Solid South, on the other hand, approaches the subject with a determined focus that ignores, trivializes, and dismisses historical nuances and takes a rhetorical sledgehammer to demolish any contrary interpretations. To Feldman, historians should not be shocked that a region that once was the heart of the Democratic Party so rapidly has become the soul of the Republican Party. Instead, he enthusiastically and doggedly, though not always convincingly, lays out a case that rather than representing a new phase in southern politics, the “switch” in southern voting patterns did not represent a change at all. Instead, it denoted the continued persistence of a conservative ideology that has dominated southern political coalitions from the Bourbon Democrats of the late nineteenth century to the Tea Party Republicans of today. Although the title of the work implies a focus on “the South,” this study confines itself almost exclusively to Alabama. Using an impressive array of political sources that range from speeches delivered by leading politicians to unpublished writings of average citizens, Feldman argues that southern elites successfully “melded” economic conservatism to racial conservatism, creating a post-Reconstruction ideology that ultimately destroyed any hopes of southern liberalism. [End Page 524] He is at his best when he systematically (through a series of chapters on the New Deal) demolishes the historiographically popular notion that the 1930s and 1940s represented the apex of southern “liberalism.” Although southern politicians initially supported the New Deal out of necessity and loyalty to the Democratic Party, by the time Franklin Roosevelt (and his wife) became associated with the aspirations of blacks, even the most “liberal” Democrats began to abandon ship. Feldman further obliterates the notion within much of the current literature that there existed meaningful differences between racial demagogues like J. Thomas Heflin and their more genteel “paternalist” counterparts. Both, as Feldman persuasively argues, were white supremacists adamantly opposed to any changes in the racial status quo—the only difference between them existed in style, not substance. Although The Irony of the Solid South offers a brilliant analysis of Alabama politics during the first half of the twentieth century, it fails to make a case that extends throughout the South. This is particularly true as it relates to Kentucky, a state Feldman himself lists as “southern.” Racism and white supremacy certainly infected Kentucky’s body politic, but unlike in Alabama, its African American residents could vote. By the 1920s, even Democrats, particularly in Louisville, had to temper their approach to racial politics. Moreover, Republicans—even moderates and liberals such as Thruston Morton and John Sherman Cooper—found electoral victory in statewide races by supporting civil rights measures and actively courting black voters. Because Feldman’s focus is strictly on Alabama, a state that systematically disenfranchised African Americans, black actors are completely absent from his story. Had he extended his reach to the entire South, he would have been forced to address pockets of influential black voters that dramatically reshaped the direction of local politics by the 1930s in some cities, including Louisville, Memphis, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Baltimore. One of Feldman’s overall objectives is to challenge the plethora of recent works that seek to minimize the role of race in the rise of the Republican Party. Historians in the mold of Donald Critchlow have [End Page 525] dominated recent historiography by emphasizing non-racial factors that account for the rise of the modern right. Feldman, on the other hand, describes this same post-1968 incarnation of conservatism as “New Racism.” Although he seeks to challenge opponents who downplay racism as the foundation of the New Right, Feldman does not engage...