From Spirit-Murdering to Spirit-Healing: Addressing Anti-Black Aggressions and the Inhumane Discipline of Black Children

School is a hyperviolent space for Black students and in particular for Black girls. Black girls continue to be adultified, criminalized, and spirit-murdered by educators who enact racially discriminatory school disciplinary policies. Using literature from racial microaggressions and antiblackness, we introduce a model that we refer to as “antiblack aggressions” to examine the disciplinary experiences of two Black girls who were at the center of a violent assault by a White male School Resource Officer at Spring Valley High School. We provide an analysis of South Carolina's Disturbing Schools Law, and we discuss how an antiblack aggressions model can challenge traditional notions of peace, law, and justice for Black girls in school.     

Whose liberation? Iranian popular music and the fetishization of resistance

ABSTRACT

This article explores a number of issues concerning the representation of Iranian popular music outside Iran, and specifically the somewhat romanticized discourses of “resistance” and “freedom” that have tended to characterize both journalistic and scholarly writings. The article discusses a number of examples, but focuses primarily on the case of the music video “Happy in Tehran,” which was posted on YouTube in 2014 and which challenged certain local cultural and legal boundaries on behavior in public space. As a result, those responsible for the video were arrested, prompting an outcry, both within Iran and internationally; they were released soon after and eventually received suspended sentences. The article discusses the ways in which the “Happy in Tehran” incident was reported in the media outside Iran and offers alternative readings of the video and its meanings. Ultimately, the article considers how such reductionist views feed into wider regimes of orientalist representation and asks whose agenda such fetishization of resistance serves.     

The Intersectionality of Culturally Responsive Teaching and Performance Poetry: Validating Secondary Latino Youth and Their Community

In this article the authors draw from culturally responsive teaching and multicultural education to describe performance poetry as an effective strategy for validating secondary aged Latino youths’ lived experiences. Supported by teacher modeling and the incorporation of community poets, students created and shared their own powerful poems that provided authentic opportunities to engage in critical analysis of the poems and issues of equality, social justice, and equity. Performance poetry is successfully used as a tool for validation, honoring and learning from our community, and transformation. Students in this border community were validated in terms of the identities as members of multiple worlds, learned about their own neighborhood from community poets, and were transformed in their identities as community activists through performance poetry. However, in this era of standardized teaching and high-stakes testing, teaching through performance poetry is often not supported in schools.     

Profiles of Multi-cultural Identity Integration in a Conflictual Context

This study addressed the phenomenon of multiple social identities in a conflictual context. It examined the case of Palestinian-Christians living in Israel, a nation imbued with ethno-religious conflict, a complex combination of three distinct collective identities: national (Palestinian-Arab), ethno-religious (Christian), and civic (Israeli). The current study proposed a conceptual and methodological expansion of the “Bicultural Identity Integration” (BII) model (Benet-Martinez & Haritatos, 2005) as a way to assess different levels of integration between three types of identities (national, ethno-religious, and civic) in a sample of 383 Palestinian Christians with Israeli citizenship. Results revealed that the three integrations of BII (Arab-Christian, Arab-Israeli, Christian-Israeli) are positively predicted by favorable intergroup contact with Jews and Muslims and negatively by discrimination by these groups. Further, Latent Profile Analyses revealed four distinct identity profiles: two (“Pro-Arab” and “Pro-Israel”) were highly conflictual and characterized by both discrimination and negative intergroup contact, and two (“Ambivalent” and “Peaceful”) were characterized by less conflict across pairs of identities. These findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical contribution to the study of multiple social and collective identities in contexts of conflict, and their practical implications for the groups under study.     

100 Voices after 100 years: Remembering the Armenian Genocide in diaspora

ABSTRACT

Relying on Marianne Hirsch’s work on postmemory, as well as theories about new media and memory, this study explores how a group of Armenian young adults in Toronto remember the Armenian Genocide from afar, 100 years after it happened. The data come from 100 Voices: Survival, Memory, Justice. Through a thematic and visual analysis of a sample of video clips posted on YouTube, this study argues that 100 Voices is a work of postmemory that stands at the intersection of prevailing ethno-nationalist constructions of Armenian identity on the one hand, and universal discourses of human rights and historical justice, on the other. Participants are positioned as the Armenian youth, performing a particular duty of memory to remember the genocide and transmit genocide memories to future generations. At the same time, 100 Voices enables these youths to emerge as activists who express their group-based claims through universal parameters of claim-making.     

Foreign-born Chinese students learning in China: (Re)shaping intercultural identity in higher education institution

With the trend of globalization, promising development in China has attracted a growing number of descendants of Chinese immigrants who choose to return to China to pursue higher education. Furthermore, the cultural pluralism that accompanies economic globalization is increasingly changing the pattern of world civilization. However, this leads to new issues of conflict, integration, and symbiosis between different cultures among international students. To address a gap in the literature, this study explored the trajectory of how international students of Chinese origin transcend their identities and build intercultural identities during their higher education study in China. The study investigates 13 participants from different countries, focusing on the process of (re)shaping identity under multiple cultural backgrounds and how they understand this process. These findings show that for students to adapt to Chinese culture it is crucial to encourage them to mitigate language barriers, awake cultural memories, consolidate values, expand educational exchanges, and continue to improve international understanding and broad recognition from an intercultural perspective.     

“I disagreed with a lot of values”: Exploring Black immigrant agency in ethnic-racial socialization

Ethnic-racial socialization is a mechanism through which immigrant parents instill in their children a sense of pride in their culture while preparing them for negative experiences with racial and cultural out-groups. For Black immigrant parents, this can include promoting a wariness of Black Americans in their children. Through this lens, we investigated an understudied intercultural dynamic via interviews with 12 first- and second-generation African and Caribbean immigrants. Using deductive and inductive analyses, we first examined the socialization messages they received about Black Americans from their parents, finding that in addition to messages inculcating ethnic and cultural pride, the participants also heard warnings about affiliation with Black Americans. Those messages relied on personal experiences and harmful stereotypes. Second, emergent from the data were examples of the ways the participants rejected their parents’ warnings. Experiences outside of the home appeared to influence views that were alternative to their parents. This novel finding provides avenues for future research investigating Black immigrants’ paths to a sense of connection or distancing from Black Americans.     

“Styled by Their Perceptions”: Black Adolescent Girls Interpret Representations of Black Females in Popular Culture

Identity formation is a critical process shaping the lives of adolescents and can present distinct challenges for Black adolescent girls who are positioned in society to negotiate ideals of self when presented with false and incomplete images representing Black girlhood. Researchers have found distorted images of Black femininity derived from history, including the mammy, jezebel, and Sapphire, are still pervasive in contemporary media outlets that are often viewed by adolescent girls. The current qualitative interview study examined literate interpretations of current media representations depicting Black girlhood from eight adolescent girls. Findings show that participants believed that Black girlhood is portrayed as being judged by their hair; is seen as angry, loud, and violent; and is sexualized.

?Following the interview, the girls used their pens to write against each of these portrayals and also to write toward social change. The ways the girls desired to be represented were in opposition to the ways they felt society and media viewed them. Their responses and literary writings suggest that Black adolescent girls need spaces to negotiate depictions of self and identity.     

Ethnic and Urban Intersections in the Classroom: Latino Students,Hybrid Identities,and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Drawing from data collected through classroom observations and in-depth interviews, this article describes and analyzes practices identified as culturally responsive by Latinos students in an urban, multiethnic/racial context. The findings suggest that culturally responsive pedagogy must be more broadly conceptualized to address the cultural identities of students who have complex identities because of their experiences with peers of many varied identities, those whose urban roots have resulted in hybrid identities, and those who are multiethnic/multiracial. Based on these findings, the article forwards the concept of “cultural connectedness” as a framework for practicing a non-essentializing, dynamic approach to culturally responsive pedagogy that acknowledges the hybrid nature of culture and identity.     

I feel Moroccan,I feel Italian,and I feel Muslim: Second generation Moroccans and identity negotiation between religion and community belonging

Second generation immigrants in Western societies negotiate between cultural sets: the inherited and the acquired culture. For second generation Muslims the negotiation involves personal dimensions such as identity and it deals with the assimilative pressures of the society where they have grown up: a context where their ethnic and religious identities are combined and mixed. From an ecological perspective, these processes happen in the communities where everyday life and cultural transmission take place.This study examines from an ecological perspective the negotiation of identity in young adult second generation Muslim, how their ethnic, national, and religious ties are intertwined with the pressures from the community they perceive as the most important. We started from the community that the participants felt was most important for them and explored the different ways in which their religious, ethnic, and national identities were related to their most important community. Twenty young adult Moroccans settled in Italy since age 6 years were involved in semi-structured in-person interviews. The interview responses highlighted how complex these individuals find managing their ethnic and religious identities and how this process is related to their conception of religiosity and the forms it takes in everyday life (e.g., a system of values vs. a set of practices).     

Through the looking glass: Ethnic and generational patterns of immigrant identity

Traditional theories of the “looking glass self” and “social mirroring” assume that people's views of their own group reflect the societal view. Crocker and colleagues (Crocker, J., Luhtanen, R., Blaine, B., & Brodnax, S. (1994). Collective self-esteem and psychological well-being among white, black, and Asian college students. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 503–513), however, found ethnic group differences in the extent to which private and public views correspond. We report data from two studies that further examine this correspondence in (a) a sample of first- and second-generation Black immigrants and (b) samples of first- and second-generation Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, Latino, and White immigrants. Study 1 shows significant shifts for Black immigrants, from a high correlation between public and private regard in the first generation to a non-significant relationship in the second generation. Study 2 replicates the findings for the Black sample and shows different patterns of association for the other three groups. It also shows that endorsement of multiculturalism moderates the relationship between public and private regard among first generation Black and Latino immigrants. We discuss these results in terms of managing the negative value associated with one's group in society and consider immigration as a site for studying social change.     

Multicultural literature: An essay

Effective teacher education should guide preservice and practicing teachers in comprehending and facilitating educational concepts and pedagogical practices that examine and promote equity for all learners. Teachers and young learners benefit from sundry opportunities to recognize their self identities and to celebrate both individual and shared cultural characteristics while increasing their understanding and appreciation of others and society. Teachers' cultural characteristics frequently do not match the cultural characteristics reflective of their young learners, and teachers may not be cognizant that their young learners do not see and operate in the world as they do. Critical pedagogy frequently fails to occur when dissonance lies between teachers' backgrounds, beliefs, and behaviors and those characterizing their young learners. Therefore, a major responsibility of pre-K-12 school administrators and teacher educators focuses on developing cultural self-awareness in teachers concomitantly empowering them to develop cultural self-awareness in their young learners. This article addresses how to initiate and further enhance the development of cultural self-awareness in educators by viewing a short yet provocative video titled, "The Lunch Date." A synthesis of university class discussion techniques drawing on the experiences of two professors provides guiding questions and useful suggestions appropriate for pre-K-12 teachers, administrators, staff developers, and teacher educators.     

Black History,Inc! Investigating the Production of Black History Through Walmart's Corporate Web Site

Social and public sites are becoming a popular medium for intellectual consumption of Black history. Given the educational climate in which many students’ exposure to Black history may come from outside of schools, the authors examine how Walmart's Black History Month Web site produced simplistic and safe narratives about African American history.     

Pedagogies of Black Eldership: Exploring the Impact of Intergenerational Contact on Youth Research

This article examines the interactions between a collective of self-described “African American,” “multiracial,” and “African immigrant” high school youth researchers, and two African American community elders. Drawing from a year-long critical ethnographic study of the youth research collective, the author documents how pedagogies of Black eldership overlapped with youth participatory action research to open new possibilities for preparing youth as researchers. The study highlights how an out-of-school educational space afforded alternative pedagogical opportunities by specifically examining how pedagogies of Black eldership helped youth researchers historicize and politicize their research, pushing them to move from embodied knowledge to self-knowledge. Drawing from African-centered and critical theory, the study explicates aspects of the pedagogies of Black eldership. Without bounding these pedagogies, the author uses two narratives of teaching and learning to illustrate how intergenerational contact impacted the trajectory of the youth researchers. They transformed their research after meeting with the elders to be more introspective and examine how their worldviews were being constructed and influenced. The findings in this study serve as an impetus for further research examining the educational context of Black eldership and youth research.     

Discrimination and multicultural identity configurations: The mediating role of stress

The present research examines perceived discrimination as a predictor of how multicultural individuals negotiate and configure their different cultural identities within the self. We focused on three multicultural identity configurations: having one predominant identity (categorization), compartmentalizing one’s different identities, and integrating one’s identities. Since discrimination is related to intraindividual discordance and is stressful, we examined the mediating role of stress in the associations between discrimination and the identity configurations in 259 multicultural individuals. Mediation analyses revealed that greater discrimination predicted compartmentalization through greater stress, while lower discrimination predicted greater identity integration through lower stress. Categorization was not predicted by discrimination or by stress. Discrimination and stress appear to have damaging and depleting roles that hamper multiculturals’ capacity to reconcile their identities into a cohesive whole.     

“Sharenting,” parent blogging,and the boundaries of the digital self

ABSTRACT

This article asks whether “sharenting” (sharing representations of one’s parenting or children online) is a form of digital self-representation. Drawing on interviews with 17 parent bloggers, we explore how parents define the borders of their digital selves and justify what is their “story to tell.” We find that bloggers grapple with profound ethical dilemmas, as representing their identities as parents inevitably makes public aspects of their children’s lives, introducing risks that they are, paradoxically, responsible for safeguarding against. Parents thus evaluate what to share by juggling multiple obligations—to themselves, their children in the present and imagined into the future, and to their physical and virtual communities. The digital practices of representing the relational self are impeded more than eased by the individualistic notion of identity instantiated by digital platforms, thereby intensifying the ambivalence of both parents and the wider society in judging emerging genres of blogging the self.     

Sissies online: Taiwanese male queers performing sissinesses in cyberspaces 1

Abstract

The Internet has led to the creation of a variety of virtual worlds, which inspire and empower local male queers, through their virtual reality, relative safety and increased accessibility, to perform their sissy selves, which, though at different levels, might need to be suppressed in real life. The virtual ‘sissinesses’ performed by local male queers may be perceived as multiple ongoing processes of interactions as well as a variety of contested sites of power relations, through and within which the queers interact with other users and Internet technologies. Moreover, their virtual sissinesses become involved with the socio‐cultural, psychic and material conditions that incessantly intersect with one another. All these conditions and interactions thereby come to confront the reflexive agencies of the queers in order to negotiate diverse, ever‐changing sissy identities and representations in cyberspaces. More significantly, their virtual sissinesses are characterised by resisting the regimes of heterosexism, gender dimorphism, biological determinism, heterosexual masculine supremacy and compulsory gay masculinity. It is through these resisting implications that they have commenced an era of online sissy queer politics.     

Resistance Re-Examined: Gender,Fan Practices,and Science Fiction Television

Studies of gender, science fiction television, and fan culture have often asserted that female fans resist patriarchy by negotiating cultural texts through such practices as fan fiction and interactive deliberation. This analysis holds that specific motivation and context must be considered to advance such a claim, especially in light of undercurrents of misogyny contributing to such phenomena as "slash" fan fiction authored by women and dealing with romances between male heroes. This study assesses the practices of fans, relevant text, and production factors in the context of particular, gender-related issues surrounding the series Farscape and Stargate SG-1, and finds that activities often thought to be emancipatory can, in fact, reproduce hegemony, and that fans sometimes appropriate resistive rhetoric in defense of hegemonic proclivities.     

Divided Loyalties: Identity Integration and Cultural Cues Predict Ingroup Favoritism Among Biculturals

How do biculturals, or individuals who identify with more than one culture, manage their loyalties between two cultural ingroups? We argue that this process is moderated by Bicultural Identity Integration (BII), or individual differences in perceived conflict between two cultural identities. Two quasi-experiments examined biculturals’ preferences for two competing groups, each representing one of their cultural identities, in response to cultural primes. In Study 1, we found that Flemish-Belgian biculturals with low BII, or those who perceive their cultural identities as conflicting, favored the primed cultural group less than the unprimed cultural group. In Study 2, we found the same effect among Asian-American biculturals, but only when the cultural primes were positive. These findings show that low BIIs exhibit psychological reactance to cultural primes that are seen as threatening to the self, which in turn affect their loyalties to competing cultural ingroups.