Multicultural Ideology Research Articles

Constructing nursing practice: country of origin, culture and competency.

This study explored the everyday experiences of a group of overseas qualified female nurses from non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) entering the New South Wales health-care system. Migrant women from a variety of NESB participated by describing their experiences in the hospital environment as qualified nurses. Analysed data suggest that the experience of being a migrant woman has a profound effect on how these nurses construct nursing practice. National wealth and the dominant government ideologies operating in a nurse's country of qualification shape the practice of nurses. Nursing therefore is socially and culturally constructed, yet nurses seeking to practise in New South Wales (and other parts of Australia) are assessed against the Australian Nursing Council (Inc) competencies. Do these competencies support the current ideology of multiculturalism or do they reflect a monocultural view of the world? This paper raises questions concerning the use of competencies as an assessment tool for locally qualified and overseas qualified nurses.

Piecing Together Multicultural Community: Cultural Differences in Community Building among Grass-Roots Environmentalists

This paper draws on a participant-observation study of two grass-roots environmental movements to illuminate difficulties in multicultural alliance building between activists. It focuses on different, taken-forgranted cultural patterns in the ways grass-roots movements create group bonds, and it conceptualizes these patterns as different forms of “movement community.” A “personalized” form of movement community in local U.S. Green movement groups contributed to difficulties in multicultural alliance building. These difficulties arose despite the U.S. Greens' explicit multiculturalist ideology and their validation of the “environmental justice” ideology upheld by some activists of color. The paper suggests that U.S. Greens share with other contemporary activists a way of building movement community that places cultural barriers in the path of multicultural alliances. It also suggests that the personalized form of community may be a reasonable, if problematic, response by activists like Greens to difficult cultural predicaments in multicultural alliance building.

Multi.Ethnic Coalition Building in a Diverse School District

With rapid demographic changes occurring in communities and schools, there is a need or studies that focus on strategies for building cooperative relations between racial and ethnic groups. Using the methodology of critical ethnography, this article examines the process of coalition building in a school district where Latinos and Asian-Pacific Americans have become the majority. Although racial incidents led to conflict between the different racial/ethnic groups in the district, a multi-cultural leadership and ideology emerged to focus on the structural foundations of conflict.

Healing the Border Wound: Fronteras Americanas and the Future of Canadian Multiculturalism

Guillermo Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas, a very successful one-person show which premiered in Toronto in 1993, deals with two kinds of borders: those within the American continent, which result in stereotypes of the south; and those within the individual, which bring about a personal struggle to find home. In this essay I look at how Fronteras both reproduces and subverts what can be called "the ideology of Multiculturalism, " an ideology which has instituted acculturation behind a liberal discourse of integration. The negotiation between ideological compliance and challenge is found in the content of the play as well as in some of its means of production, such as venue and language. Fronteras's most powerful ideological subversion, however, is its final suggestion for a new way to imagine Canada.

Healing the Border Wound: Fronteras Americanas and the Future of Canadian Multiculturalism

Guillermo Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas, a very successful one-person show which premiered in Toronto in 1993, deals with two kinds of borders: those within the American continent, which result in stereotypes of the south; and those within the individual, which bring about a personal struggle to find home. In this essay I look at how Fronteras both reproduces and subverts what can be called "the ideology of Multiculturalism, " an ideology which has instituted acculturation behind a liberal discourse of integration. The negotiation between ideological compliance and challenge is found in the content of the play as well as in some of its means of production, such as venue and language. Fronteras's most powerful ideological subversion, however, is its final suggestion for a new way to imagine Canada.

Canadian Immigration Policy and the Voluntary Sector: The Case of the Edmonton Immigrant Services Association

This case study of the Edmonton Immigrant Services Association (EISA) focuses on the mid-1980s, when the organization was in the process of achieving an innovative multicultural model of service. Background information on the voluntary sector in Canada and federal and provincial immigration policy is presented in terms of structural power. Then an ideology and charter approach is used to document the internal dynamics. or organizational power, of EISA. It is shown that the organization's adoption of a multicultural ideology led to a substantial expansion of its charter. The organization's original settlement mandate did not contract as a result, but was intensified and bridged via a broader range of citizenship services to the new multicultural programming. Dissension did accompany the expansion, yet external evaluation was initiated as a possible remedial measure. The case study concludes by suggesting that ideology and charter are essential analytical tools in the documentation of voluntary sector organ...

Language and Culture in Australian Public Policy: Some Critical Reflections

This article examines the rationale and philosophical underpinnings of Australian public policy relating to language and culture, especially as they have emerged in relation to nonindigenous ethnic minorities, i.e., migrants and ethnic groups. An underlying theme is that the concepts of language and culture as they have evolved in relation to the ideologies of multiculturalism are not neutral but contested concepts which need understanding and critical analysis. The article has three main objectives. The first is to show how, historically, language—in particular English—has been an important public issue in matters of migrant settlement. Second, it examines the hidden and often unstated assumptions of social theory implicit in policies relating to language and culture by analyzing the way in which the key concepts of culture and ethnicity have been used in policies. Third, it presents the case for a paradigm shift in public policy and argues that the issue of language and culture should be re-examined and restructured to serve new and emerging social needs.

Dilemmas of Immigration — Australian Expectations, Migrant Responses: Germans in Melbourne

The paper argues that from the early days of white settlement Australia's racial and ethnic relations operated with two distinct but fundamentally related concepts — assimilation and exclusivism. Both policies have been implemented in regard to German immigrants at various times in Australia's history. The settlement policies of the post- World War II period progressed from a somewhat virulent assimila tionist approach accompanied by an active interest in the concept and practice of naturalisation, to a policy of integration/interactionism identified with a less strident approach to the naturalisation issue, arriv ing eventually at the concept or ideology of multiculturalism and citizenship as propounded in contemporary Australia. A synoptic history of German immigration into South Australia and Victoria offers evidence of a long tradition of non-assimilation; cultural and social segregation being more pronounced and visible in rural areas and in the pre-war era. Although during the last 30 years Germans in Australia have remained a culturally distinct category of people, their geographical dispersion, a low public profile, a relatively favoured posi tion in the economic structure, and a high naturalisation rate have con tributed not only to the assumption that German immigrants are assimilated but also to the creation of the naturalisation/assimilation equation.