Multicultural Nature Research Articles

The Teaching of Quebec in Canadian Studies: Crisis or Opportunity?

Paradigms and frameworks for “doing” Canadian studies inherited from 1970s and 1980s Canada continue to resonate, but they also reveal serious limitations. Competing cultural and political frameworks for talking about regionalism, nationalism, diversity, language, North America, and globalization remind us of differences in Canadian and québécois foundational discourses. Indigenous studies significantly call into question the idea of Canada as a bilingual and multicultural nation, addressing the persistence of neo-colonialism. In this article, I use personal reflection on teaching a Quebec course in a Canadian Studies university department, one that uses Canadian and Quebec literatures to revisit these dilemmas. I conclude with a few thoughts, also based on personal experience, about the challenges and opportunities posed by shifting intellectual and fiscal points of reference both at home and abroad.

Mansions in Maroubra

Jews of South African origin make up approximately one out of every seven or eight Jews in Australia. In studies of migrant communities in Australia, South African Jews are seen as uncontroversial and unproblematic, and therefore, somehow unworthy of further analysis. This article argues that it is precisely the uncontroversial nature of South African Jewish migration to Australia that is interesting. How are South African Jews able to make themselves at home in Australia? In this article, I draw on interviews with South African Jews who have come to Australia since 2000, and who have settled in Sydney. This is a qualitative study of their migration experience. How do they understand their migration? What constitutes home for them? What is it about Australian society that allows South African Jews to make home here with such apparent ease? Their experience offers broader insights into the nature of Australian multiculturalism in the early twenty-first century.This article has been peer-reviewed.

Entrenching Euro-Settlerism: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Nationalism in Québec

I'M TALKING LANGUAGE (BUT NOT RACE) In my admittedly open reading of Eve Haque's remarkable study, she casts a light on the many frayed threads hanging from the bilingualism/multiculturalism discourse in Canada; threads that beg unraveling since their apparent coherence masks a reformulation of national belonging that codifies the racialization and exclusion of people of colour and indigenous peoples. Pulling at these threads is a vital intellectual project, particularly at this juncture when colour-blindness (Bonilla-Silva 2010) and/or racial liberalism (Mills 2008), which define anti-racist analyses as themselves racist or more insidiously, as reverse racism, gain ascendance in society and the academy. Through her research and analysis, Haque points to the shift from race to culture, from ethnicity to language, and we now know, to the official multicultural logic that makes considerations of the persistent racial inequities in Canada nearly impossible to hear against the din of self-congratulatory cheer. We are, after all, multicultural or in the case of Quebec, intercultural--open signifiers that have come to mean anti-racist, in the sense of never openly discussing, let alone tackling racism. For those working to challenge the stranglehold that such fantasies have on our national imaginations, Haque's study offers an invaluable historical and political outline of the construction of state-based racialized logics. Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework begins with Jacques Parizeau's remarks about money and the after the defeat of the Yes side in the 1995 referendum in Quebec. Haque moves us beyond the now-infamous declaration, however, to Parizeau's explanation of it in the 2003 documentary, Public Enemy Number One: The vote--the words might not have been well chosen - but the fact is that is what happened ... the non-francophone vote ... I'm talking language ... I'm not talking ... origin or whatever ... it was a language issue (4). Instead of relying primarily on ethnicity to explain the defeat of the referendum, Parizeau enters the presumably safer political register of language. Haque uses this high-profile example effectively to situate her study: More than a semantic slip, Parizeau's shift onto the terrain of language to clarify and support his comments was illustrative of the convenient alibi for racial ordering that can be provided by a multicultural nation established on the foundation of a putatively open linguistic duality (4). She begins with this example not to hold Quebec up as uniquely xenophobic--as is often the case in English Canada--but to direct the reader to her examination of the language-race-culture nexus. She asks the reader later in her introductory remarks: How, in Canada, did language come to be the site for articulating exclusions which can no longer be stated in terms of race and ethnicity? (4) As a scholar of Quebec, I was pleased to see Haque introduce the question animating her study with the language qua race problematic. In what follows, I discuss Quebecs counterpoint to Canadian multiculturalism: Interculturalism. Turning to its development allows me to develop further Haque's arguments about the shifting relationship among culture, race, and language in the 1960s and 1970s. QUEBEC AND THE LIMITS OF MULTICULTURALISM Haque expertly leads us through the formal opposition among a variety of ethnic organizations to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism's (B and B Commission) limited terms of reference and conclusions regarding Canadian society--opposition that Haque (53-71; 75-9; 149-50) convincingly connects to the eventual development and adoption of the Multiculturalism Policy. Yet, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's vision of multiculturalism also energized fierce disagreement in Quebec given the already tense political atmosphere following the previous fall's October crisis. …

Safe sex practices of Indian immigrant men living in Australia: an exploratory research.

There is a paucity of scientific information about safe sex practices of Indians immigrants living in popular multicultural nations such as Australia. An online survey of adult Indian men living in Australia was conducted to measure the frequency of use of safe sex practices using the Safe Sex Behavior Questionnaire (SSBQ). Among the respondents of the SSBQ (n = 184), 16.8% (n = 31) reported that never insist on condom use, when having sexual intercourse. One in two men surveyed, agreed that it is difficult for them to discuss safe sex issues with their sexual partners. One in two men said that they used alcoholic beverages prior to or during sexual intercourse. There were no significant differences in SSBQ data among Indian men based on their relationship status. The current study has assessed a range of safe sex practices by involving a community sample of Indian men, and provides baseline data for further evaluation and comparison.

Audience Reception Analysis of Moroccan Public Service Broadcasting

Television is one of the most important sources of information and entertainment for the majority of Moroccans. Since 2002, the Moroccan government has put forth policies to regulate the use of television as an important outside source for promoting its development programs. This audience reception study aims to assess the opinions of Moroccan television viewers on the quality of programming provided by the two public service TV stations, Al Oula and 2M. The study applies Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory to examine the interactions of the Moroccan audience with the content of the two public service television stations. This study focuses mainly on television viewers of lower educational backgrounds and those with lower incomes because they could benefit most from the developmental role of public service television. The study examines the extent to which TV programming addresses the viewers’ lifestyles and concerns and the expectations viewers may have of their public service stations. The study uses focus groups as a stand-alone data-gathering strategy because of the multicultural nature of Moroccan society, which is characterized by different ethnic, linguistic and geographic attributes. Focus groups enable researchers to collect rich data in participants’ own words; they are particularly useful when the survey group is illiterate or semiliterate. The application of Stuart Hall’s theory in the Moroccan context reveals some of the model’s strengths as well some of its limitations. While the model provides rich analytical tools that help us understand the relationship between how television producers encode messages and how audiences decode them, this study illustrates the limits of Hall’s theory application to non-western audiences. Hall’s model is founded on the assumption that audiences are capable of decoding the television content and that the variations in the decoding process are the outcome of the audiences’ reactions to the hegemonic message. The study found that this was not applicable to Moroccan audiences and that additional theoretical tools needed to be in place for an audience reception analysis to be complete and substantial.

Transgressing Theological Shibboleths

Building on the proposals of Jennings, Bantum, and Carter toward constructing alternative theological articulations that move away from racialized framings, this paper proposes a reinterpretation of the cultural dimension as locus of divine activity. This methodological shift requires that the historically-culturally specific event of Jesus be reinterpreted as opening the door for the celebration of other ethnocultural traditions, which, when coupled with the event of Pentecost, provides enough grounds for discerning the Spirit at work at the level of culture. The two events of Jesus and Pentecost challenge us to reconceive the particular culturally bound ways in which the Spirit is involved in the process of divine disclosure, leading us toward the recognition of the contextual, plurivocal, and multicultural nature of theological reflection.

The challenge of working with the embodied mind in the context of a university-based Dance Movement Therapy training

Developing the necessary skills for a dance movement therapist, such as working with emotional conscience, accessing the knowledge of the body and enhancing the intelligence of feeling, are only some of the objectives of a Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) training. Experiential groups included in psychotherapy training seek to provide opportunities for reflection on interactions and other important learning for future therapists. In this article the experience of conducting such experiential groups at the Autonomous University of Barcelona is shared through vignettes, portraying some of the emotional aspects that are being activated in both, movement and verbal groups.Special attention is given to the challenge of working with the lived, embodied, experience and the embodied mind in an academic context which commonly emphasizes purely intellectual concepts and evaluation criteria that may at times over-determine free expression of feelings. The multidisciplinary approach adopted by the training is taken into consideration (the Marian Chace approach as well as Authentic Movement elements within the DMT field, along with Group Analytic Psychotherapy and a general intersubjective psychological orientation), as is the multicultural nature of the groups, composed of students coming from nearly twenty different countries.

Маґребінський кабінет фігур: національні образи в романі Ґреґора фон Реццорі “Горностай з Чернополя”

“Maghrebian” novel “An Ermine in Czernopol” by G. von Rezzori is considered to be the first multicultural novel in the postwar German literature. Its multicultural nature is linked to the Bukovyna origin of the author, who was born in a region that is rich in different ethnic groups, languages and religions, where the author could collect his childhood experiences and later transform them into artistic images. The author lightly encrypts topographic concepts of Czernopol and Teskovyna, by which real historical topoi of Chernivtsi and Bukovyna shound be understood. In his novel the author describes real “maghrebian cabinet of figures” marked by unique originality. Here we see Germans and Jews, Romanians and Ukrainians, Russians and Poles, and representatives of the other nationalities, ethnic origin of which is undefined. In the images of the protagonist of the novel major Tilda, such original characters as Pashkano or prefect of Teskovyna Tarangolian, national identity of which is rather blurred, the Romanians Nastaze or Aleksyanu, the Germans professor Foyera and editor Adamovsky, the Jewish children Blanche Schlesinger and Sally Brilya, the Jewish entrepreneurs Ushera Brilya, Ephraim Perko and Wolf von Leybish Merores, Ukrainian prostitute Mititka Pyovarchuk, we see the colorful national gallery of types that, despite the author’s tendency to operate by the stale cliches appear to be eventually strong individuals. The report also touches the problem of Rezzori’s “anti-Semitism” and the satirical methods of depicting “maghrebian” reality.

From whiteness to diversity: crossing the racial threshold in bicentennial Argentina

This article examines recent transformations on the discourses of race and nation in bicentennial Argentina, which have shifted from the notion of a fundamentally white nation to an assertion of its racial and cultural diversity. I examine the production of race in contemporary institutional and non-institutional practices that challenge the discourses of modernity according to which Argentina is a white, homogenous and Europeanized nation. The article focuses on a set of cultural manifestations involving Japanese Argentines that – as non-traditional actors in the racial and national stages and as ‘desirable’ immigrants – reveal some inherent fissures in the current official narrative that ostensibly progresses from homogeneity to diversity, and from exclusion to inclusion. By observing the performativity of race and a non-constructivist understanding of race embedded within these cultural manifestations, I argue that the newly multicultural nation continues to inherit its mechanisms of racial production from the modern nation.

Is There an Own-Race Preference in Attractiveness?

Even in multicultural nations interracial relationships and marriages are quite rare, one reflection of assortative mating. A relatively unexplored factor that could explain part of this effect is that people may find members of their own racial group more attractive than members of other groups. We tested whether there is an own-race preference in attractiveness judgments, and also examined the effect of familiarity by comparing the attractiveness ratings given by participants of different ancestral and geographic origins to faces of European, East Asian and African origin. We did not find a strong own-race bias in attractiveness judgments, but neither were the data consistent with familiarity, suggesting an important role for other factors determining the patterns of assortative mating observed.

Prognosis Critical: Resilience and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australia

Prognosis Critical: Resilience and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australia

Addressing the Needs of the Gifted in Singapore

The tiny, multicultural nation of Singapore has a long history of provisions for gifted students. Beliefs about ability and talent development are strongly influenced by traditional Confucian perspectives that view environmental factors as dominant in the development of talent. Early identification is not stressed and working hard is emphasized at home and school. Like many other countries, Singapore has been broadening its conceptions of giftedness and diversifying its talent development efforts in recent years. The government has recently announced its vision to achieve global recognition and leadership for outstanding accomplishment in the arts and sports and continues its unwavering pursuit of global leadership in science and technology. Here we describe the various ways this broadening and diversification is reflected in programming, instruction, and research in gifted education.

Traditional Celebes textiles of Indonesia

It`s been a common knowledge that Indonesia has a multicultural nature which produces a rich civilization, traditional textiles is one of the examples. Indonesian textile is one of the earlier/oldest artefacts being studied. The wide range of its selections also a proof that Indonesia already had an advanced culture. In Indonesia, textile isn`t just a mere cloth; it also used to refer your social statuses, a ritual complements aspect, and many other symbolic purposes. Celebes textiles just a small example how rich this country culture is. The purpose of this study was to convince people that Indonesian traditional textile has a potential to stand in same ground with any modern textile produced around the world.

¿Puede la etnicidad reemplazar lo racial? Afrocolombianos, indigenidad y el Estado multicultural en Colombia

Several Latin American countries have declared themselves —including Colombia— as multicultural nations. In the process they have restructured legal rights along lines of cultural distinction that have provided special rights to ethnic groups under new political constitutions. A crucial dimension of this legal change has been the sacralization of a particular conceptualization of indigeneity. In this article I focus on the processes that enable and limit ethnic belonging in Colombia, in order to understand the concept of indigeneity on which these ideas of ethnicity are based. I analyze the use of specific ideas of indigeneity in a territorial conflict in the Andes between Indigenous and Black communities, and also a Supreme Court ruling (Sentencia T-422/96) that discusses the rights of Afro-Colombians. https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X73

Invited colloquium: Foreign languages in an age of globalization

With the advent of globalization and the increasingly multilingual and multicultural nature of nations, institutions and classrooms, the fundamental nature of foreign language instruction is changing. Such traditional notions as: ‘native speaker’, ‘target culture’, ‘standard L2’ are becoming problematic with the influx of immigrants to industrialized nation-states, the diversification of accents, and the stratification of language varieties. Foreign language classrooms, too, are becoming less and less homogenous: lacking common points of reference in a common L1, students have to learn the L2 without any common prior cultural or historical context. Caught between the need to impart a skill that will be ‘usable’ in a variety of global settings and the desire to develop an L2 academic literacy that is specific to a given national culture, foreign language study is challenged to reconcile the local and the global, its national premise and its transnational entailments. This colloquium explored the changing nature of the challenges facing the teaching and learning of foreign languages in an age of global information technologies, global job market, and global migrations. In particular it focused on the notion of the ‘foreign’ in foreign language education and how globalization has affected this foreignness.

Spatializing Religious Freedom

This article addresses the complex legal endeavour to shape the frontiers between two of the most fundamental liberal rights in multicultural nation states: the right to cultural difference and the right to religious freedom in Colombia. I follow one dispute, between members of the indigenous Arhuaco group who are Evangelical Christians and their indigenous local authorities. This example illuminates longstanding debates surrounding the relationship between religion and politics within legally plural states. I put together different scales of analysis for understanding: (i) the legal definition of the right to religious freedom and the right to ethnic cultural difference as private or public and individual or collective; (ii) the debate about the political meaning of religious practice by studying, for example, how it relates to claims over inequality and land access; and (iii) the importance of understanding the meaning of conversion for addressing the legal difficulty of creating a sustainable boundary between these two rights.

Race moves: following global manifestations of new racisms in intimate space

This article makes tentative links between abstract global forces and the affective and material reworking of race in intimate spaces of culture and community. Using postcolonial and psychoanalytic resources the article follows enduring manifestations of race as racism surfaces and is mobilized through global shifts of people, ideas and capital. The article argues that as national borders become destabilized under globalization, existing significations of race and racism give way to reattach to migrating, vulnerable and displaced bodies. The article argues that teachers and educators in multicultural nations can begin to follow and intervene in race moves by collectively thinking through narrative histories of migration that structure national belonging and non-belonging and our relationships to each other at home and in the world.

Ensuring cultural sensitivity for Muslim patients in the Australian ICU: Considerations for care

Australia is a diverse and multicultural nation, made up of a population with a predominant Christian faith. Islam, the second largest religion in the world, has demonstrated significant growth in Australia in the last decade. Coming from various countries of origin and cultural backgrounds, Muslim beliefs can range from what is considered ‘traditional’ to very ‘liberal’.It is neither possible nor practical for every intensive care clinician to have an intimate understanding of Islam and Muslim practices, and cultural variations amongst Muslims will mean that not all beliefs/practices will be applicable to all Muslims. However, being open and flexible in the way that care is provided and respectful of the needs of Muslim patients and their families is essential to providing culturally sensitive care.This discussion paper aims to describe the Islamic faith in terms of Islamic teachings, beliefs and common practices, considering how this impacts upon the perception of illness, the family unit and how it functions, decision-making and care preferences, particularly at the end of life in the intensive care unit.

National Multiculturalism, Transnational Identities

This paper looks at the tension between official multiculturalism, understood as a nation-building project that seeks to incorporate migrants into a unified national community even while recognising and fostering their difference, and the extra-national identifications, connections and practices that characterise really existing or everyday multiculturalism in Australia. This tension will be explored by way of the experiences of Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Turkish and Burmese Mon communities in Sydney and Canberra. It argues that the ‘new’ multicultural subjects dwell between assimilation and transnationalism in a way that challenges our ability to theorise them, and the multicultural nation-state's capacity to recognise and engage them. In future research on migration in Australia, we will need to continue to take cognisance of the established nature of migrants' claims to national belonging and the reality of their local cultural becomings and hybridities; and at the same time take account of the lithe and multi-scalar nature of their identifications beyond the boundaries of proximate community, locality and nation.

The athlete as model minority subject: Jose Bautista and Canadian multiculturalism

The discourse of multiculturalism disguises complicated racial dynamics in nations such as Canada. Although white privilege persists, it tends to be mediated through non-white figures who can engender consent from other minority members. These figures have been called model minorities, a role that is well-tailored to celebrated athletes. Athletes who fill the role of model minority represent the ideal immigrant citizen: English-speaking, middle class/bourgeois, disciplined, and hard-working. As such, they serve a disciplinary function for other immigrants by demonstrating how it is they should act and producing a standard against which they are evaluated. The model minority has become a crucial representational figure for multicultural nations like Canada because the political economy of these states requires cheap labour that can be hyper-exploited through the dehumanization of racialization. Drawing on articles in Toronto's most prominent newspapers, I argue that Toronto Blue Jays baseball star Jose Bautista has recently assumed the status of a model minority. I elaborate the functions of the model minority through a reading of Bautista's representation.