Employee mistreatment and muted voices in the culturally diverse workplace

This study examines mistreatment through the perspectives of employees with different cultural backgrounds and positions in order to understand the ways in which some voices are muted and others are privileged. Mistreatment is interactional, distributive, procedural, or systemic abuse of employees taking place at both interpersonal and institutional levels on the basis of cultural diversity. Narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with employees of a large research and development organization revealed three types of muted narratives used to respond to mistreatment (muted-but-engaged, angrily disengaged, and resigned) as well as one type of privileged response. The narratives provided evidence of two processes by which voices became muted: repeated silencing over time and silencing through ambiguity of policies.     

Appropriating bodies: Organ(izing) ideology and cultural practice in medical school

The current study examines “appropriating bodies”; as a narratively performed cultural practice. A critical‐interpretive reading of medical students’ narratives concerning their training in how to perform gynecologic exams is used to understand how the professional medical ideology of excellence produces and is produced through material and symbolic activity. Medical students’ narratives reproduce, legitimate, and critique the traditional ideology of excellence through symbolic appropriation instantiated in a variety of narratives about the body, conflicts with teaching associates, and the performance of anesthetized exams during clinical situations. In particular, symbolic forms of appropriation are evidenced in temporal and spatial realms.     

From Inarticulacy to Care

This article seeks to critically re-open the closed structure of news coverage of ethnic minorities by proposing a dialogical model of representation, which evokes mutual understanding across differences through well-crafted narratives of minority experiences. Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin and Charles Taylor, it explores the notion of “dialogue” within journalistic narratives and delineates two dialogical approaches, namely the evaluative articulation of moral values and the polyphonic incorporation of different voices. The former suggests that journalists should employ nuanced languages to situate ethnic minorities’ aspirations and experiences in a common “horizon of significance”. The latter challenges the hegemonic monologue of an ostensibly objective narration and accentuates the manifold voices from ordinary people, urging the journalists to rethink their positionality as narrators. Two cases are analyzed to reveal how the dialogic representation can be realized in news reporting, calling for a transition from “ethics of inarticulacy” to ethics of care in journalism practices.     

Contextualizing musical rhetoric: A critical reading of the pixies' “Rock Music”

Rhetorical studies of popular music have privileged formalist analysis of musical score and lyrics, suggesting a need for greater inclusion of contextual factors. By explicitly attending to the rhetorical context, critics are more likely to warrant critical judgments within social and cultural discourses, reconceptualize musical texts in intertextual terms, and actively reflect on critical performance. Such a strategy is illustrated through the critical study of the Pixies’ “Rock Music,”; a song whose meaning as an anti‐anthem can be found at a nexus of rhetorical contexts, including punk taste culture, surrealist art, musical argument, post‐punk alternative rock, and anthem rock.     

Analyzing the uses and gratifications concept of audience activity with a qualitative approach: Media encounters during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake disaster

Diaries and narratives produced by 29 college students during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake served as the data for a qualitative analysis grounded in the conventional philosophy, if not the traditional methodology, of the uses and gratifications perspective. Two hundred ninety‐nine individual media episodes were interpreted. Audience activity before, during, and after media exposure was studied through the application of the Levy and Windahl Typology of Audience Activity which demonstrated the operation of the nine types of media activity proposed by its creators. Conclusions call for the redirection (rather than abandonment) of audience‐based research away from general‐trend audience consumption and towards more specific cultural interaction of people with media.     

Describing Anything That Walks

ABSTRACT

Anchored on the Vietnamese American Project (VAP), this essay presents the documentation of the Vietnamese American Experience through the voices of ethnic Vietnamese in Orange County, California, home to the largest concentration of this ethnic group outside Vietnam. Groundbreaking in its approach and method, VAP is an open forum that enables community assessment, self education, public memory preservation, and the first step toward understanding Vietnamese America and the Vietnamese diaspora. The cross-sectional narratives encompass transcontinental accounts of first and 1.5 generations of Vietnamese refugees and their children, and subsequently focus on their coming to terms with their second home in America, dwelling on how ethnic Vietnamese have negotiated with political turmoil, socioeconomic changes, and cultural identity. The paper, as the VAP, bridges cultural and linguistic barriers, connecting the native land and the adopted country. In short, the paper through its synthesis of the VAP: (1) gives a timely response to the urgent needs to understand and study the ethnic Vietnamese community in Orange County, providing much-needed primary data on the respective population for the ethnic communities and interdisciplinary scholarship; (2) serves as a healing process for members of the Vietnamese American community in Orange County and other victims of war; (3) sheds light onto intra- and inter-ethnic relations, fostering community consolidation, forging cross-cultural collaborations, and nurturing racial harmony; (4) contributes to an important period in American history with perspectives that are lacking in the extant literature; and (5) will conduce peace by bringing out the human experience in America's longest war.     

The Temple and the Bazaar: Wikipedia as a Platform for Open Authority in Museums

Museums today grapple with the reconciliation of traditional models of authority with the expectation to incorporate new voices in cultural interpretation. At the same time, society is increasingly empowered by a social Web that provides collaboration, connectivity, and openness. This paper frames the dialogue of authority and openness around parallel theories within the museum and technology communities, offering Wikipedia as a platform for facilitating new perspectives in collaborative knowledge‐sharing between museums and communities. Expanding on the metaphors of the museum as “the Temple and the Forum” and the Web as “the Cathedral and the Bazaar,” this essay argues that issues of democratization, voice, and authority in museums can be addressed through Wikipedia's community, process, and its potential as a model for a new Open Authority in museums.     

Communicating/Muting Date Rape: A Co-Cultural Theoretical Analysis of Communication Factors Related to Rape Culture on a College Campus

Previous studies suggest that college campuses foster a rape culture in which date rape (most commonly, rape of women) is an accepted part of campus activity (Buchwald, Fletcher, & Roth, 1993; Sanday, 2007). In focus groups at a Midwestern university, researchers asked students about rape as they experienced it or knew about it on campus. The study revealed attitudes and perspectives about rape communicated from cultural, social, and individual levels. Co-researchers’ comments indicated such attitudes exist in relation to and are expressed through behaviors preceding potential incidences of rape, during rape itself, and in response after rape occurs. Throughout this process, college students, especially females, were muted, potentially contributing to the creation and perpetuation of a campus rape culture.     

Sensemaking and Emotions in Organizations: Accounting for Emotions in a Rational(ized) Context

Organizations tend to be guided by a rationality/emotionality duality in which rational behavior is privileged over emotional behavior. Consequently, emotions in organizations have historically been undervalued in favor of rationality. Despite the privileging of rationality, however, organizations are emotion-laden environments. The present study uses sensemaking theory to explore how employees manage the rationality/emotionality duality in the workplace. Using a qualitative analysis of 38 emotional experiences derived from 19 interviews, it was found that participants accept the duality by orienting toward emotions that are associated with the disruption or enhancement of “rational” business practices. Further, participants tended to reinforce the dichotomy by carefully controlling their emotions in organizations through denial of emotions, reframing their experiences, by rationally reciting their emotional experiences, or by relegating emotions at work to appropriate time and place.     

Imagining a climate of equity through a critical theory of love: Using CPAR to identify guiding principles that humanize library work

Diversity is a core value of the American Library Association and diversity standards including cultural competencies have been adopted by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Nevertheless, academic libraries still have obstacles to overcome to embody these principles. Minorities continue to be underrepresented in the field and many encounter barriers within library cultures where cultural competency is lacking and micro aggressions are pervasive and invisible to many white colleagues. This study uses critical participatory action research to identify ways a library diversity and inclusion team can support library employees engaging in equity-minded work at a private, predominantly white Catholic university in the Midwest. The researchers developed a moderator guide, which they used to conduct focus groups with library faculty and staff. Library employees were asked to identify the challenges and opportunities for doing equity-minded work at the institution. What emerged from these conversations led to the development of four guiding principles. The guiding principles outlined are: a) engaging stakeholders; b) building relationships; c) modeling equity-minded practice; and d) demonstrating intercultural competence. These guiding principles are embedded in a critical theory of love as well as critical emotion and critical whiteness studies. These principles promote re-humanizing the ways in which library employees interact with each other and students while resisting the normalization of white cultural practices. Action item examples are offered to demonstrate how library employees can incorporate these principles into their practice. Finally, we offer our next steps moving forward as we plan to implement these guiding principles to support a climate of equity for library employees.     

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Museological Perspective

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival began as a four‐day event held over the Fourth of July holiday in 1967, outdoors on the Mall. The impulse for it came from Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley. The form of it came from Ralph Rinzler, field research director for the Newport Folk Festival and a documentarian who sought out authentic, grassroots American musicians. The Festival was conceived as giving voice to the less known and under‐represented, a philosophy that quickly expanded to encompass the world of what is now called intangible cultural heritage. The Festival's museology has as its core the foregrounding of the cultural exemplars and the primacy of their voices in the presentations. It has energized new possibilities for what can be done in the Smithsonian and on the National Mall, and in the lives of people, communities, and institutions well beyond.     

Access to records for people who were in out-of-home care: moving beyond ‘third dimension’ archival practice

A right to preserve one’s culture is recognised in the United Nations human rights treaty system. Individual and collective cultural identity within government and private archives can be enabled through a participatory approach which acknowledges record subjects as record co-creators. This article analyses cultural human rights instruments found in international and domestic Australian laws as warrants for a participatory archive within the Australian context, premised on the recognition of the rights of those who are subjects of the record to add their own narratives to records held in archival institutions, and to participate as co-creators in decision-making about appraisal, access and control, thus shaping and reshaping the archive from their perspective. To this end, it proposes the use of social media to enhance cultural rights and cultural identity. Adopting the principle of rights maximisation, a participatory approach lessens the impact of the right to be forgotten on cultural rights. The article concludes that Australian archival policy makers and jurisdictions which have a human rights regime, have a clear mandate to give priority to the preservation of records of distinctive cultures, in particular those of Indigenous peoples and minorities.     

Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory

Recorded music is vital to the construction of personal and collective cultural memory. My examination of the interrelation between personal and collective memories of popular music assumes both that human memory is simultaneously embodied, enabled, and embedded, and that (re)collective experiences are constructed through narratives. Analysis of an online set of narrative responses to a national radio-event, the Dutch Top 2000, shows that we need public spaces to share narratives and to create a common musical heritage.     

Discursive Constructions of the Meaning of “Family” in Online Narratives of Foster Adoptive Parents

Framed by relational dialectics theory, discursive constructions of the meaning of “family” were examined in 100 online foster adoption narratives. Parental narratives manifested struggles between biogenetic and discursive constructions of “family,” identified here as the discourse of biological normativity (DBN) and discourse of constitutive kinning (DCK). The DBN reinscribes the dominant cultural and foster care system preference for biogenetically connected families. The DCK resists the DBN, maintaining that enacted behaviors and shared affections, rather than shared genetics, constitute legitimate families. Contrapuntal analysis revealed a high degree of polemic interplay; both discourses competed to be centered rather than marginalized through the discursive practices of negating, countering, and entertaining. Implications for theorizing definitions of family and studying families in context are discussed     

Interview with Lawrence Grossberg

Cultural studies seems to have passed into the shadows of academic interests, replaced by globalization and political economy as the new millennium's privileged concerns among left academics. Yet, cultural studies' longstanding interest in the interrelationship of power, politics, and culture remains critically important. Matters of agency, consciousness, pedagogy, and rhetoric are central to any public discourse about politics, not to mention education itself. Hence, this article argues that the promise of cultural studies, especially as a fundamental aspect of higher education, resides in a larger transformative and democratic politics in which matters of pedagogy and agency play a central role.     

Hip-hop Realness and the White Performer

Hip-hop's imperatives of authenticity are tied to its representations of African-American identity, and white rap artists negotiate their place within hip-hop culture by responding to this African-American model of the authentic. This article examines the strategies used by white artists such as Vanilla Ice, Eminem, and the Beastie Boys to establish their hip-hop legitimacy and to confront rap music's representations of whites as socially privileged and therefore not credible within a music form where credibility is often negotiated through an artist's experiences of social struggle. The authenticating strategies of white artists involve cultural immersion, imitation, and inversion of the rags-to-riches success stories of black rap stars.     

Developing Local Narratives for Objects in National Collections: Lessons Learned from the “Number Please? Working with the Enfield Exchange” Project

Museums of science, technology, and engineering are developing new ways of interpreting and displaying their collections. Increasingly objects are being placed within narratives of everyday use; the human side of technology. The focus of this article is a section of one of the last UK manual telephone switchboards, which was acquired by the Science Museum, London, following its decommissioning in 1960. This artifact offers a unique insight into a communication technology that relied extensively on female telephonists, a distinct way of understanding gender roles in the twentieth century. The authors explore strategies for developing local narratives for objects from national collections and reflect on lessons learned from a cross‐institutional collaboration. This article highlights: the value of local historians, community events and oral histories to developing local narratives; how these activities informed understandings of the telephone switchboard; work life in the communications industry; the relationship between women and technology; and practical strategies that can enhance collections and museum practice through collaboration.     

Traveling South: Naples as a Site of Crossing and Migration in the Mediterranean

What sorts of images and narratives of cosmopolitanism are circulating in our cultural discourse? Stories and ideas based on experiences of migration, travel, and exile are considered in relation to the Italian city of Naples, to propose an example of “South-centric” cosmopolitanism. Two different journeys in the Mediterranean, as narrated by Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun and by Neapolitan film director Vincenzo Marra, engage with the experience of travel through stories that in opposite directions—the first from North Africa to Naples, and the second from Naples to North Africa—cross territories and lines of logic of Northern and Southern boundaries and deal with notions of belonging and homecoming.     

Textual (im)possibilities in the U.S. post‐network era: negotiating production and promotion processes on lifetime's any day now

This essay explores the struggles experienced in the creation, production, and promotion of a U.S. television series that deliberately sought to encourage cultural reflection about ethnic diversity and defied industrial norms as an original narrative program produced for a cable network. Any Day Now (1998–2002) was the first successful original series produced for the Lifetime Television network and was one of the first successful original cable series. Through an analysis of the production process, interviews with the creators and writers of the series, and examination of the series' promotion, this essay explores how the transition to a post‐network era of industrial organization and competitive practice affected the production and promotion of the series and its narratives. These findings are informative both in terms of the specific case and as they might be extrapolated as characteristic of the development of the post‐network era.