Cultural Blind Spots Research Articles

Cultural blind spots: Identifying hidden psychosocial hazards in the workplace.

This article presents a framework to identify hidden psychosocial hazards and emerging mental health risks in the workplace, thereby assisting Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking. The framework adds value to the processes outlined in SafeWork NSW's Code of Practice for Managing Psychosocial Hazards At Work. Specifically, the article documents a framework to analyse microcultures and back stage sites of enactment where psychosocial hazards and risks may be hidden or obscured in workplace settings. The article's framework aims to bring to the surface both the intra and interpersonal tensions employees experience in the social reality they inhabit while they perform their work, thereby positively contributing to organisations and PCBUs by helping them create healthy workplace cultures and psychological safety. Specifically, the article discusses partnering with an organisational ethnographer when a PCBU embarks upon psychosocial investigations to: gain access, select employee participants, start conversations, establish rapport, build trust, collect and analyse data. This article theoretically contributes to health promotion literatures by offering organisations a complementary way of extracting deeper insights and understandings of psychosocial hazards and emerging mental health risks which are not apparent with traditional methods of inquiry.

Confronting Taboo Topics in Communication Sciences and Disorders: How Conversations Can Uncover Cultural Blind Spots

Purpose: An increase in social justice movements has renewed the focus on topics surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the speech, language, and hearing sciences. For example, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association publicly renewed its commitment to advance DEI initiatives. This commitment includes restructuring the certification maintenance standards around these initiatives and the standards of graduate education on cultural responsiveness. Despite these requirements, there remains a slow movement toward impactful and sustainable changes. One explanation is the hesitation to engage in conversations that are difficult and often considered taboo. Conclusion: This article aims to discuss taboo topics in communication sciences and disorders related to race and racism, privilege, and support through allyship.

Collective Inattention in an Online Milk‐Sharing Community: Rules of Relevance and the COVID‐19 Vaccine

This article examines a complete collection of posts made within two of the largest online peer‐to‐peer breastmilk‐sharing communities in the United States, collected during the first month after the COVID‐19 vaccine became available to all U.S. adults. I propose that such communities support not only the circulation of human milk among strangers but also the circulation of widely shared attentional norms alongside interactional rules of relevance and concern. When collectively held attentional norms are violated, Goffmanian face‐saving maneuvers become visible. This case study engages studies of cultural cognition—in particular, those on collective rules of relevance and attention—to make sense of emergent cultural blind spots.

A New Feminist Absurd?: Women’s Protest, Fury, and Futility in Contemporary American Theatre

Absurdism has long been associated with existentialist white male writers like the ones Martin Esslin analysed in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which coined the term that came to define a lasting dramatic genre. More recently, however, several female playwrights have begun to reinvent this movement with an uncanny brand of feminist absurdism in their intimate domestic tragicomedies. In this essay, a close reading of Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad (2015) serves as a touchstone for analysing performances of ludic feminist futility in plays by diverse writers including Ruby Rae Spiegel, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Alice Birch, and others. In their festive moments of anti-structural and non-linear oscillation between rage and glee, these plays mark the messy implosion of an outdated feminist political project, first anticipating and later reflecting the political tensions and crises evidenced in women’s voting, activism, and protest practices since the 2016 US presidential election. Often confining their characters within domestic or interior feminized spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, hidden supermarket aisles, or girls’ locker rooms, these playwrights celebrate failure and madness in the lives and labour of their female characters. By transforming historically feminized sites into dynamic spaces of resistance as well as spectacular failure, these performances of excess, from dieting to devouring, precarity to privilege, force audiences to confront cultural blind spots and failed or incomplete work toward efficacious feminist intersectionality. Furthermore, by bridging contemporary women’s anger research with whiteness and affect studies, this essay identifies a nascent trend in US theatre with a growing international profile that engages an updated absurdist rubric within a larger feminist praxis of political revolt.

Culturally relevant marketing: Conceptualising a critical pedagogical approach to multicultural marketing strategy

In this era of unprecedented political shifts, the global health pandemic, and social justice awakenings, marketing strategists who look to develop effective marketing strategies must be able to navigate an evolving socio-political landscape and the needs of an increasingly diverse population and marketplace. To meet these needs, this paper proposes a new framework: the culturally relevant marketing strategy. For theorists, pragmatists and practitioners operating in this space, culturally relevant marketing offers important features and benefits. Taking cues from education pedagogy, this hybrid approach integrates traditional marketing strategy with multi-dimensional consumer research, discourse, critical interpretation, and analysis, to facilitate meaningful outcomes. It does this by providing the tools needed to overcome cultural blind spots and social justice tone-deafness in strategic development. This paper considers the market factors at play to present a grounding overview, including what distinguishes it from other branded theories, in order to conceptualise a go-to multicultural marketing strategy approach for right now.

Narrar ´e encadear tempos e espaços perdidos: violência de gênero e trauma em "Um amor incômodo" de Elena Ferrante

No presente artigo, pretendemos evidenciar como o romance Um amor incômodo, de Elena Ferrante, é atravessado por um abuso sexual que resvala na relação entre uma filha e sua mãe. Na medida em que se articula à violência de gênero, esse acontecimento apresenta-se como um ponto cego da cultura, configurando-se como traumático. Ao final do livro, após reconstituir a história de sua mãe, é possível para a narradora, Delia, lembrar do abuso que sofreu quando criança e significar pontos de sua trajetória que se apresentam como um mal-estar. O incômodo do título, que diz respeito à relação mãe e filha, atravessa a trama ressoando o incômodo da violência que é desvelada no final do romance. Como aporte teórico, tomamos as considerações da crítica literária Shoshana Felman acerca de literatura, testemunho e traumas culturais. Com o intuito de relacionar o trauma com a violência de gênero, retomamos a perspectiva de Sigmund Freud sobre o tema, assim como a discussões mais atuais, através de Cathy Caruth e Gayle Rubin. Assim, propomos que o romance de Elena Ferrante permite um esgarçamento das possibilidades narrativas do trauma do abuso sexual e da violência de gênero, enquanto pontos cegos da cultura.

Envisioning a Culturally Imaginative Educational Psychology

Culture has mostly been neglected in mainstream educational psychology research. In this paper, we argued for the need to cultivate a cultural imagination and provided seven key recommendations for conducting culturally imaginative research. We explained how these recommendations could prove useful in avoiding the two types of errors that trap cross-cultural researchers. The first type is the cultural attribution error which pertains to attributing any observed difference to culture even if culture is not the relevant factor. The second type is the cultural blind spot error which pertains to the failure to see how culture influences psycho-educational processes and outcomes. We proffered seven recommendations to avoid these twin pitfalls. We reviewed the papers published from 2006 to 2016 in four flagship educational psychology journals including the Journal of Educational Psychology, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Cognition and Instruction, and British Journal of Educational Psychology. Our review focused on how educational psychologists have studied culture over the past decade and how the published studies aligned with our seven recommendations. The content analysis indicated that only a small percentage of the articles dealt with culture, most of the studies drew on Western samples, and that almost all studies relied on an etic approach with very few studies using an emic bottom-up perspective. We ended with a justification for why a culturally imaginative educational psychology is urgently needed in an increasingly diverse world.

Balancing the stigmatization risks of disability labels against the benefits of special education: Japanese parents' perceptions

Stigmatization can dampen the joys and exacerbate the challenges experienced by parents whose children have disabilities. This qualitative study examines the experiences of eight Japanese parents of their children's mild cognitive and behavioral disabilities and any associated stigmatization at public elementary schools. These parents' perceptions reflected Japanese people's general sensitivity to the threat of stigmatization due to individual differences. During individual interviews, parents described how their sensitivity to others' actual or anticipated negative responses led to social isolation. After significant, sustained efforts to support their children by themselves, most of these parents chose to consult with professionals and secure special education services for their children. They preferred support to be holistically and unobtrusively provided by all school staff members during academic and non-academic activities. The experiences of these Japanese parents underscore the importance of emotional and social support for children with disabilities and their parents. Examination of Japanese parents' perspectives on disability and stigmatization highlights our cultural blind spots, allows us to reflect back on taken for granted beliefs and practices, deepens our understandings, and may even lead to new and creative solutions to the persistent problem of stigmatization.

Animals in Contemporary Architecture and Design

What are animals doing in design? How do designers see, care for, and use animals? In this paper we analyze an array of design projects featuring animals, identifying intersections between human-animal studies (HAS) and design studies, and discussing the broader social significance of the figure of the animal or animality in design. First, we review the literature at this convergence between these two fields. Next, we discuss the results of our snowball survey of animal design projects across several prominent design blogs. We consider the distribution of attention designers delegate to certain animals, the standardization of certain animal designs, and which designs circulate in the design public sphere, revealing cultural blind spots and biases of designers. Finally, this paper asks how animal design tactics highlight broader social transformations related to the mobilization of perception, behavior and desire as technical practices with functional outcomes. This paper argues that the study of design as a hybrid aesthetic and technical practice yields unique insights both into studies of technics and technology as well as human-animal relations. This paper proposes such a view helps frame both studies of design as well as human relations with nonhuman animals more broadly.

East Asian and US educators' reflections on how stigmatization affects their relationships with parents whose children have disabilities: Challenges and solutions

Stigmatization is a culturally widespread social justice challenge with broad implications for the development of children. This study examines the reflections of elementary school educators in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the US on how stigma affects their relationships with parents whose children have disabilities and how they respond to these challenges. We conducted cross-cultural analyses of individual, audio recorded interviews with 26 Japanese, 43 Korean, 16 Taiwanese and 18 US educators, including school social workers. Educators from all four cultural groups characterized the development of collaborative relationships with parents as critical to supporting the school success of children with disabilities. They also described challenges posed by stigmatization to those relationships, and solutions to those challenges. Japanese educators watched over, carefully guided, and expressed empathy to parents responding to stigmatization. South Korean educators avoided openly indicating children's struggles to parents, but provided them with education about disabilities to counter misperceptions. Taiwanese educators exercised patience with parents who expressed distress due to stigmatization, and concealed their own negative emotional responses to such displays. US educators engaged parents through fact-oriented, solution-focused responses to children's struggles. The perspectives of educators from diverse contexts can be used to identify cultural blind spots, and develop effective culture- and stigma-sensitive strategies to build relationships with parents to better support children with disabilities.

Common Ground, Multiple Claims: Representing and Constructing Singapore’s “Heartland”

This article examines the various meanings of “heartland” and “heartlander” in Singapore that emerged as the city-state embarked on its transformation into a global city in the 1990s. It discusses the political and ideological nature of these terms, including the way the state has tended to deploy them and the ways they are used in public discourse. The terms’ usage serves as a measure of the state’s not unproblematic attempts to define its citizenry in order to reinscribe its legitimacy. The deployment of the terms by non-state actors and individuals, however, indicates greater civic involvement in national self-identification, which complicates the official state version. The article focuses on two significant Singapore texts that contribute to the cultural imaginary of the heartland and the heartlander – the novel Heartland by Daren Shiau and the film Eating Air by Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng. In implicit opposition to the state view, these creative works seek to convey a sense of the local and of national authenticity through their creative representation of the Singapore heartland and what it means to be a heartlander, disclosing in the process various social tensions, silences and cultural blind spots.

Mind the ‘gap year’: a critical discourse analysis of volunteer tourism promotional material

The volunteer tourism program (VTP) is a popular form of travel for young tourists in which adventure travel is paired with short-term ‘volunteer’ placements in host communities around the countries of the global South. VTPs are now a routine mode of travel or pre-university ‘training’ for wealthy young people from across North America and Western Europe and exist outside of any historical or political context. They promise adventure travel, altruistic volunteer experiences, and an authentic experience of the other, whom the volunteer can help to transform. If not for the long history of intervention and domination that normalizes this new incarnation of the ‘civilizing mission’, the knowledge claims and authority asserted by the VTP would hardly appear so acceptable. The VTP exists in a cultural blind spot made possible by North–South relations structured on intervention and transformation of the other. This paper critically examines the promotional discourses of VTP providers and identifies the discursive strategies employed to normalize, encode, and legitimate the practice of volunteer intervention. VTP discourses legitimate volunteer intervention through representations of the host community that imagine poverty and authenticity as presenting a need for volunteers and through constructions of a volunteer identity that allows for travel outside of political and historical contexts. I suggest that the VTP can best be understood as a manifestation of continuing patterns of exploitation and domination of the global South, whereby VTP intervention discursively positions itself as ‘innocent’ of the very historical and political trends that make it possible.

On Leaving Home and the Flight From Trauma

This paper is both autobiographical and clinical—a psychoanalyst's reflections about important transitional moments in his life. Examples of such moments are the cultural blind spot regarding the affect of the Holocaust experience on the hundreds of thousands of survivors who immigrated to Israel after World War II and his own professional disavowal of that experience and his eventual finding of “shared home” in listening to the trauma discourse of Holocaust survivors and to that of other severely traumatized patients. This paper also highlights the importance for the immigrant analyst of presenting the cultural perspective stemming from his own tradition and background, and the one acquired in his new home, side by side and in dialogue with each other. Finally, the author examines how being a trauma survivor and an immigrant informs his work as a psychoanalyst.

An Essay on Sexual Frustration as the Cause of Breast Cancer in Women: How Correlations and Cultural Blind Spots Conceal Causal Effects

The main premise of this hypothesis is that breast cancer is caused by sexual frustration. Sexual frustration is triggered by multiple forms of dissonance between the absence or lack of sexual reward and the (un)conscious motivation to obtain these sexual rewards. I assume that neural and hormonal processes are capable of adjusting or distorting biologically active forms of specific sex hormones depending on experienced sexual stimuli. I hypothesize that prolonged sexual frustration will ultimately lead via aberrantly metabolized sex hormones to the development of breast cancer. Human female sexual behavior research links sexual frustration with breast cancer risk. The distinction between human female sexual behavior and reproduction is crucial to understand breast cancer risk. Current explanations are focused on reproduction. However, human female sexual behavior is causal in breast cancer development and androgens rather than estrogens are crucial for sexual behaviors in women. Social learning is the main determinant of human sexual behaviors that is why cultural and social processes are very important to understand breast cancer risk. Epidemiologists should evaluate breast cancer risk based on cultural female attitudes towards sexually related issues. Female mate choices should be examined for (un)conscious cultural, ethnic, religious, and socio-economic pressure to make a thorough assessment of breast cancer risk. Closer examination of (un)conscious female copulation strategies reveal that they are potential sources of sexual frustration in specific groups of women. Postmenopausal women seem vulnerable for self-fulfilling prophecies about post reproductive sexuality, body image, and negative perceptions of menopause which may cause sexual frustrations.

Cultural health beliefs in a rural family practice: A Malaysian perspective

Understanding the sociocultural dimension of a patient's health beliefs is critical to a successful clinical encounter. Malaysia with its multi-ethnic population of Malay, Chinese and Indian still uses many forms of traditional health care in spite of a remarkably modern rural health service. The objective of this paper is discuss traditional health care in the context of some of the cultural aspects of health beliefs, perceptions and practices in the different ethnic groups of the author's rural family practices. This helps to promote communication and cooperation between doctors and patients, improves clinical diagnosis and management, avoids cultural blind spots and unnecessary medical testing and leads to better adherence to treatment by patients. Includes traditional practices of 'hot and cold', notions of Yin-Yang and Ayurveda, cultural healing, alternative medicine, cultural perception of body structures and cultural practices in the context of women's health. Modern and traditional medical systems are potentially complementary rather than antagonistic. Ethnic and cultural considerations can be integrated further into the modern health delivery system to improve care and health outcomes.

African Union: Xenophobia as poor intercultural communication

As the world moves toward globalisation, Africa in particular is addressing both intra-national and international communication crises. The author argues that specifically xenophobia, as a cultural blind spot and source of conflict, could be addressed functionally and formally. This article addresses and challenges the role of the mass media in Africa, and calls for changes in training and education. Additionally, it suggests that entire communities – and continents – hold varying degrees of responsibility in relation to the (international) communicative whole. The article presents and discusses such opportunities and challenges, and suggests tangible means by which higher standards of communicative – and subsequently cultural - behaviour might be achieved.

African Union: Xenophobia as poor intercultural communication

As the world moves toward globalisation, Africa in particular is addressing both intra-national and international communication crises. The author argues that specifically xenophobia, as a cultural blind spot and source of conflict, could be addressed functionally and formally. This article addresses and challenges the role of the mass media in Africa, and calls for changes in training and education. Additionally, it suggests that entire communities – and continents – hold varying degrees of responsibility in relation to the (international) communicative whole. The article presents and discusses such opportunities and challenges, and suggests tangible means by which higher standards of communicative – and subsequently cultural - behaviour might be achieved.

Violence: The malignancy of our times! Is there hope?

The article presents the 1992 Karen Horney Lecture of Elissa Benedek. The author argues that violence is analogous to malignancy, that we woefully underrate how much violence hurts. Domestic violence, for example, has emerged only recently from a cultural blind spot generated from consensual ignorance, fear, and helplessness. Spousal violence, along with child and elder abuse, are recent discoveries. Benedek places the matter squarely before us as the ultimate human degradation.

Managing Dilemmas While. Building Professional Communities

I am a teacher. I have taught for a quarietcenţury. Others might classify me as an educator since over a threeand-a-half decade career I have also been a superin­ tendent, a teacher educator, an associate dean in a univer­ sity's school of education, and a researcher. But it is teaching—not administration or research—that has defined my adult life. If teaching has permitted me to be a lifelong learner, performer, writer, and friend to former students and colleagues, it has also forced me to navigate moral conflicts. In teaching, I have had moments when odd tingles ran up and down my back as students' thoughts and mine unex­ pectedly joined and became one; moments when listening to students forced me to rethink a conventional notion after I had closed my mind's door; moments when it became clear that my students had touched me deeply. These rare in­ stances are, for me, like the delicious crack of a bat that sends a ball soaring into the left-field stands. Less treasured moments are those that have left me numb with the repetitiveness of teaching four classes in a row or the nagging sense that the voice I heard coming out of my mouth glazed students' eyes and drooped their heads onto desks. Other moments left me sad when I knew in my heart that I had failed to reach some students. Teachingjύstory for over a decadejn aMlack_schpols from the mid-l95Oslo the early 1970s gave me insights into my cultural blind spots and a deeper understanding of the strengths and ravages of growing up Black in urban America. Those years scrubbed away stereotypes, teaching me to move beyond the then-liberal rhetoric of being colorblind and to recognize openly the dilemmas I faced in teaching Black youth a history that had to make sense to them in their terms as much as mine. Because I was in the minority when I taught in these schools, I came to understand in an intensely personal way how my students and peers viewed Whites. Within these city schools I began my teaching career, learned my craft, and forged both personal and professional values. In the last 35_years, then, teaching has been central to my experiences as an educator. I discovered that in each teaching post I served—high school teacher, trainer of new teachers, and professor—there were common features to the craft of teaching. Moreover, deeply embedded in my teaching, ad­ ministering, policymaking, and researching have beemx>rnmon dilemmas with which I have had to cope. Yet even with these commonalities I found little sense of belongings to a community of scholars and practitioners. This afternoon I will develop these three themes: Professors and practitioners face common dilemmas; they share the practice of teaching; and ncΓprofessional community yet joins them together.