Ethnic Experience Research Articles

Teachers’ beliefs of behaviors, learning, and teaching related to minority students: a comparison of Han and Mongolian Chinese teachers

Teachers from mainstream and minority backgrounds teaching in the same school contexts presumably hold different beliefs of learning and teaching about minority students due to their unique prior life and ethnic experiences. Teachers in similar school environments are also assumed to share beliefs of teaching and learning about their students because of the influences of their similar school contexts despite their different prior life and ethnic experiences. This study examines the two contentious assumptions by surveying the beliefs of behavior, learning, and teaching that the mainstream Han and minority Mongolian Chinese teachers in the same school contexts hold about their Mongolian Chinese students. It found that the two groups agreed that teachers’ inadequate planning and management were the major sources of their students’ behavior problems while students’ home backgrounds, abilities, and efforts explained their learning failure or success. Both believed that students’ emotional and social problems were more important than their learning problems for them to attend to, and their expertise in helping students develop self-worth was more important than their expertise in curriculum and pedagogy. Both preferred to vary teaching standards, content, and methods to accommodate students’ differences and offer opportunities for students to discover things themselves.

Neoliberalism, criminal justice and Latinos: The contours of neoliberal economic thought and policy on criminalization

Since the creation of the prison system, the driving forces of criminalization and penalization have been examined by scholars on the right and left with a focus during the last four decades on what some critics characterize as one of the most influential forces shaping the processes of criminalization and imprisonment: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a movement that started in the 1970s and contributed to a sharp increase in poverty, inequality, exclusion and imprisonment. While the influence of neoliberalism has become a central issue in the investigation of criminal justice policy, focusing primarily on race effects, the ethnic experience is yet to be addressed in its totality. Therefore, this article details an alternative perspective for analyzing criminal justice issues as they pertain to Latinos and illustrates a new framework for the influence of neoliberal ideology on the incarceration of Latinos.

Ethnic Classification in the New Zealand Health Care System.

The ethnic or "racial" classification of Maori and non-Maori is a pivotal feature of New Zealand's health system and affects government policy and professional practice within the context of Treaty of Waitangi "partnership" politics. Although intended to empower Maori, ethnic categorization can have unintended and negative consequences by ignoring the causality of material forces in social phenomena. The authors begin by showing how the use of ethnic categories in health policy is justified by the Treaty of Waitangi partnership policies. This provides the context for the argument made in the manuscript that an understanding of the social experience of ethnicity within the complex interaction of sociocultural factors such as socioeconomic location and lifestyle is more useful than using the political construct of ethnic categories in explaining the persistence of low health status for a section of the Maori population.

Interpreting American Ethnic Experiences: The Development of the Balch Library Collections

Interpreting American Ethnic Experiences: The Development of the Balch Library Collections

Iranian-American’s Perceptions of Prejudice and Discrimination: Differences Between Muslim, Jewish, and Non-Religious Iranian-Americans

Recent political events have created a political and social climate in the United States that promotes prejudice against Middle Eastern, Iranian, and Muslim peoples. In this study, we were interested in investigating two major questions: (1) How much ethnic harassment do Iranian-American men and women from various religious backgrounds (Muslim, Jewish, or no religious affiliation at all) perceive in their day-to-day interactions? (2) To what extent does the possession of stereotypical Middle Eastern, Iranian, or Muslim traits (an accent, dark skin, wearing of religious symbols, traditional garb, etc.) spark prejudice and thus the perception of ethnic harassment? Subjects were recruited from two very different sources: (1) shoppers at grocery stores in Iranian-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and (2) a survey posted on an online survey site. A total of 338 Iranian-Americans, ages 18 and older, completed an in-person or online questionnaire that included the following: a request for demographic information, an assessment of religious preferences, a survey of how “typically” Iranian-American Muslim or Iranian-American Jewish the respondents’ traits were, and the Ethnic Harassment Experiences Scale. One surprise was that, in general, our participants reported experiencing a great deal of ethnic harassment. As predicted, Iranian-American Muslim men perceived the most discrimination—far more discrimination than did American Muslim women. Overall, there were no significant differences between the various religious groups. All felt discriminated against. Iranian-American men and women, whose appearance was stereotypically Middle Eastern (i.e., they wore Middle Eastern clothing), who had sub-ethnic identification, and who had lower family income, generally reported experiencing the most prejudice.

Home, Heart, and Being Latina

The authors examine an emergent association between low-income Mexican mothers’ control of housing and power relations in their romantic unions. Guided by valued resource theory, and mothers’ lived racial, ethnic, and gender experiences of navigating access to housing and sustaining intimate unions, the authors used secondary longitudinal ethnographic data on 29 low-income mothers of Mexican descent as exemplar cases to explore (1) mothers’ housing dependencies as they transitioned from their natal homes to coresidential housing with romantic partners, (2) the factors that differentially shaped mothers’ housing options, and (3) how mothers’ control of housing procurement influenced their intimate relationship power. The findings suggest that mothers followed one of five housing dependency pathways, with 25 percent securing housing independently. Most traversed complex and transient levels of dependence on their partners for housing with immigrants and native-born Mexican Americans evincing nuanced differences in their relationship power depending on their housing situations. In most cases, regardless of their national origin (Mexico or the U.S.), mothers’ control of housing procurement directly corresponded to increased relationship power. The importance of considering the impact of race/ethnicity on housing and women’s power in Latino families in future research is also discussed.

IVF outcomes disparities in the United States: do women of Middle Eastern/North African ethnicity experience in vitro fertilization (IVF) disparities compared to a Caucasian cohort?

Health disparities have been demonstrated for ethnic groups undergoing IVF in the United States however outcomes remain contradictory (1-3). There are no studies to our knowledge that address the Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) ethnic group in the U.S. Under SART reporting data, this group is generally categorized under the Caucasian ethnic group. This study investigates IVF outcomes and demographic metrics of MENA women in comparison to a control group of Caucasian women.

How Asian American Female Teachers Experience Racial Microaggressions from Pre-service Preparation to Their Professional Careers

This study investigated how ten Asian American female classroom teachers experienced racial microaggressions (Ong et al. in J Couns Psychol 60(2):188–199, 2013; Sue et al. in Cult Divers Ethn Minor Psychol 13(1):72–81, 2007; Sue in Microaggressions in everyday life: race, gender, and sexual orientation. Wiley, Hoboken, 2010) from their initial-licensure preparation to professional careers as classroom teachers. The findings will focus on three major themes that exemplified how their experiences with racial microaggressions also intersected with gendered dynamics based on their identities as Asian American women: (a) making sense of institutional “cultures of Whiteness” (Lee in Up against whiteness: race, school and immigrant youth. Teachers College Press, New York, 2005, pp. 30–31), (b) encounters with racialized sexualization, (Lee and Vaught in J Negro Educ 72:457–466, 2003) and (c) specific examples where they were racialized as foreigners (Tuan in Forever foreigners or honorary whites? The Asian ethnic experience today. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1998) that also included incidents where Asian cultures were pathologized. Recommendations address implications for teacher-preparation programs and K-12 schools.

The Experience of Ethnic and Racial Group Membership Among Immigrant-Origin Adolescents

Immigrant-origin adolescents in the United States face a number of stressors across different social contexts (e.g., home, school), and yet, distress related to these stressors often goes unnoticed and access to resources is limited. This study examined how racial minority immigrant-origin adolescents in an urban setting construct and negotiate experiences of their ethnic and racial group membership, acculturative stress, and approaches to coping with acculturative stress. Guided by an integrative contextual framework of minority youth development, semistructured group interviews were conducted with 64 adolescents (35 girls and 29 boys) at an urban public high school located in the Northeastern part of the United States. Participants were either immigrants or children of immigrants from Afro-Caribbean (e.g., Haitian), Asian, Latino/a, and South Asian backgrounds. Analyses of the group interview data revealed four major domains related to experiences of ethnicity and race: (a) pride in and connection with heritage culture and language, (b) difficulties in cultural adjustment, (c) stereotypes and discrimination, and (d) coping and relational contexts, along with several themes within each of these domains. The implications of the findings are discussed with a consideration to adolescents’ desire to develop a bicultural identity, challenges to forming such an identity, and the importance of informal sources of support in coping with acculturative stress. Recommendations for future research and for clinical and community-based interventions with immigrant-origin adolescents are provided.

Revisiting the Architectural Message as Social Communication

The identity of the people is an unfinished process, the content of which is changing, is being revised in the era of. A special role in the justification of the identity of the people belongs to myths- poiesis, i.e. the forms of the collective unconscious, derived from the sphere of no-conceived, from not reflexive experience of ethnicity, nation. In modern times the semantic tension tests the identity of the Slavic peoples - Ukrainians, Russians, and the decor of strife leads almost to the rupture of their historical unity. The author raises the question of whether the idea of self-grounding of the people as the ethical, political, ideological goals-societies (West, Russia, Ukraine, etc.) will be saved in today's globalized world. The role of policy of states that change their principles - freedom, equality rights, the observance of the principles of international law and replaced it with the rhetoric of the struggle for power should be noted. In view of the principle of irresponsibility of the state that citizens take responsibility for the future of the people, choosing at the same time not rational foundation of a stability of society, and mythological elements (language, history, tradition, ritual). DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3s4p59

Ask the lyrics: John Fante in music

The crosspollination of literature and lyrics is not a new phenomenon in popular music and classics of world literature continue to inspire songwriters who incorporate them in their art in different ways and forms. Interestingly enough, a not-yet-classic author like the Italian-American John Fante has had an impact on popular culture and music both in Italy and in the United States. Grossly neglected by mainstream American literature, mainly labeled as an “ethnic” writer, John Fante has only recently become widely read in Italy and he has already developed unusual ties with music in both countries. In this article, I will briefly survey the reception of John Fante in the United States and Italy by tracing the history of the publication of his works in translation. I will then present a review of some Italian and American songs that explicitly draw inspiration from Arturo Bandini, the protagonist of Fante’s saga. This article is an exploration of the relationship between literature, music, and society through a reflection on the impact that a non-canonical American writer has on popular culture and how his ethnic experience often reverberates in larger society and in the singer/reader/listener’s life before earning approval from mainstream critics.

Ethnonationalism in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo The effects of local violence and ethnic composition

In this article we examine attitudes of ethnonationalism in two countries that have experienced ethnic civil war: Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. We analyse the strength of attitudes of ethnonationalism on the individual level, and how ethnonationalism is related to local ethnic settlement patterns and previous experiences of local inter-ethnic violence. We combine data at the municipality level with data from the South-East European Social Survey Program from 2003 and conduct a multilevel analysis for each case. In both cases, ethnonationalism dominates, but it is stronger in Kosovo than in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We find a clear difference between members of local majorities and minorities, but the effect in Bosnia-Herzegovina is the opposite of the effect in Kosovo. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, members of both minority and majority groups tend to be more ethnonationalist the larger their group. Contrary to our initial expectations, people express less ethnonationalism in municipalities that were more severely hit by violence, whereas in Kosovo no effect of local violence can be found. The more recent conflict and less consolidated institutions in Kosovo may help explain these divergent results. Still, the lack of consistent findings makes it hard to infer beyond the two cases examined.

The Ethnic Transference of Feminist Thought Involving Colonialism: A Metacognitive Examination of Multi-Cultural Learning

An Asian female immigrant to Canada contemplates how Black African feminist concepts are useful in understanding her own feminist history in another racial setting in a different part of the world. Her multi-cultural learning experience yields parallels between Black African feminist thought and her own ethnic cultural experience, prompts ideas about how feminists of all “shades” may achieve greater strength through recognition of commonalities, and creates questions for future research areas of her Asian cultural experience which may be informed and better understood through the insights of Black African feminist thought.

Ethnic Identity as a Moderator against Discrimination for Transracially and Transnationally Adopted Korean American Adolescents.

Despite the growing practice of international adoption over the past 60 years, the racial and ethnic experiences of adopted youth are not well known. This study examined the moderating role of ethnic identity in the association between racial/ethnic discrimination and adjustment among transracially, transnationally adopted Korean American adolescents (N = 136). Building on self-categorization theory and past empirical research on Asian Americans, it was hypothesized that ethnic identity would exacerbate negative outcomes associated with discrimination. The moderating role of ethnic identity was found to vary by specific ethnic identity dimensions. For individuals with more pride in their ethnic group (affective dimension of ethnic identity), discrimination was positively associated with externalizing problems. For individuals with greater engagement with their ethnic group (behavioral dimension of ethnic identity), discrimination was positively associated with substance use. By contrast, clarity regarding the meaning and importance of one's ethnic group (cognitive dimension of ethnic identity) did not moderate the relationship between discrimination and negative outcomes.

The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South John T.Edge, ElizabethEngelhardt, and TedOwnby, Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South John T. Edge, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and Ted Ownby, Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.The Larder brings together some of the most recognized names in Southern food studies into a collection of essays that is bound to become required reading for any student of Southern culture. Edited by Elizabeth Engelhardt (A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food [2011]), Ted Ownby (Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi), and John T. Edge (Director of Southern Foodways Alliance), The Larder includes work from contributors who individually have authored some of the first and best texts on Southern foodways. The collection's stated mission is to encourage Southern food scholars to claim a national leadership role, to stop fretting about the legitimacy of the field, and to focus on how to grow and strengthen scholarship and methodologies (3). Certainly, this book follows through on that promise, showing that the field of food studies in America is no longer emerging but has indeed arrived.The collection's four sections have been organized methodologically. The first part, Cookbooks and Ingredients, suggests that the study of food texts and food stuffs is one entry-point into food studies. Highlights in this section thus include two chapters on texts (Rien T. Fertel's examination of a century of The Picayune Creole Cook Book; Rebecca Sharpless's reading of fundraising cookbooks from St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas) and two more on foodstuffs (David Shields's history of the economic forces that drove cooking oil development and Wiley C. Prewitt's analysis of the class divisions reified by the legislating, hunting, and eating of game meat). People and Communities offers examples of food studies methods influenced by ethnography, quantitative research, and oral history. The essays in this section generate a complicated picture of the experience of ethnicity in Southern foodways from the influence of Native Americans on foodways in the southern colonies (Reyna Green) to the variety of ethnic food available in suburban Charlotte today (Tom Hanchett). Part three gives examples of studies that take their approach from Spaces and Technologies, examining the significance of food production and consumption spaces. Angela Jill Cooley and Katie Rawson illustrate the aftereffects of Jim Crow which attached great meaning to where individuals ate and how they were served. …

Intragroup Socialization for Adult Korean Adoptees: A Multigroup Analysis

The purpose of the current study was to test a model of socialization among a sample of adult Korean adoptees. Based on the tenants of homophily and social identity theory, it was hypothesized that participants’ early racial and ethnic socialization experiences would account for their current intragroup friendships as adults, and that this relationship would be mediated by early intragroup contact and moderated by early ethnic identity status. The two ethnic and racial socialization variables (i.e., ethnic heritage activities and racial in-exposure) significantly accounted for participants’ relationships with other Korean adoptees and nonadopted Koreans, and the effects were partially explained by early intragroup contact. Results of multigroup testing indicated the proposed socialization model was non-invariant across groups, such that the effects of ethnic heritage activities on intragroup contact and the effect of racial in-exposure on friendships with Korean adoptees were significantly different based on early ethnic identity status.

The Durability of Imposed Democracy

Why do imposed democracies endure and how do policy choices by imposing states affect durability? To study these questions, we formulate expectations linking durability to structural domestic conditions, the level of domestic security in the state into which a polity is imposed, the policies of imposing states, and the regional environment within which an imposed democracy is nested. We use event history to test our expectations on a sample of democracies imposed during the twentieth century. We find that relatively immutable, structural conditions, such as ethnic cleavages, economic development, and prior democratic experience strongly influence the durability of imposed democracies. While some policy choices made by imposing states can impact the survival of imposed democracy, they do so only modestly relative to the environment in which a democracy is imposed.

Views of Mammography Screening Among U.S. Black and Hispanic Immigrant Women and Their Providers

Views of ethnic immigrant women's experiences about mammography screening are important to determine barriers to cancer screening. We explored perceptions and barriers about mammography screening and breast health services among Haitian, Hispanic, Portuguese, and Somali women (n = 51) using semistructured interviews. Providers (n = 19) offered insight into health system barriers. Content analysis was conducted using qualitative data from the 2011 Komen Massachusetts needs assessment. Grounded theory was employed to explore themes and patterns in narratives. Six themes represented knowledge, health care, culture, spirituality, survivorship, and health systems improvement. Results may inform breast health policies that impact ethnic immigrant women in Massachusetts.

Psychoanalysis’s Cultural Dissociation Meets Ethnic Minorities: Reply to Commentary by Kimberlyn Leary

Dr. Leary highlighted variance within ethnic culture in her commentary, but I wished she had spoken instead about cultural trauma. My paper was about trauma-based dissociative process: Some immigrant women attempt to bury their ethnic cultural experiences deeply into their psychic shadows, as elements of their culture’s values and practices constitute aspects of the very nature of their trauma. Leary’s notion of race as an adaptive challenge brings to attention the importance of making explicit racial “loyalties, values, and habits” in clinical situations. I argue strongly that psychoanalysis has dissociated its cultural identity, making its encounters with ethnic minorities that much more problematic. I ask on the behalf of ethnic minority patients (and ethnic minority mental health practitioners and graduate students), What could be gained if psychoanalysis could reveal and own its cultural identity?

An Artist-Scholar Finds Beauty from Ashes: Brazilian Artist Duda Penteado

‭Duda Penteado’s Beauty for Ashes Project addresses the dilemma of contemporary artists finding their own voice after the art movements of the twentieth century. His background as a Brazilian and a believing Christian gives him a unique response. He appropriates and transforms the work of great modern artists without a need for elaborate theoretical justification. Much influenced by Paulo Friere and his belief in the significance of art for social change, Duda is involved in art projects with students and the public around the world. In these projects, ideas are developed, and creative art installations are built that he hopes will inspire people to search deeper for meaning in life. He believes that faith is not a process of convincing but an encounter. Curiosity must be sparked to begin the process for each individual to make the journey. Duda is convinced that art holds a significant role in society and that the artistic image expresses the essence of society. His work represents a genre of artwork derived from ethnic tradition and religious experience. Duda believes that great art comes from within and is the true language of the soul. To create art is an act of faith in itself.‬