“If Only I Did Not Have That Label Attached to Me”: Foregrounding Self-Positioning and Intersectionality in the Experiences of Immigrant and Refugee Youth

In order to bring forth the specific intricacies of the migration experience among comparatively understudied immigrant and refugee youth, this article bridges an intersectionality framework with multicultural education scholars’ calls to flexibility and fluidity in conceptualizing culture and identity. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the analysis is anchored by two pervasive themes: (a) the dynamic nature of identity positions whose intersections make the adaption of youth irreducibly nuanced and (b) the need for self-definition in the process of adaptation. Racial and ethnic positioning, national origin, class, legal status, and religion intersected in the participants’ lives in important ways, but they did not fulfill the same role across the cases. Attention to how these social locations intersect offers insight into the importance of context-based examinations of immigrant youth positioning, in addition to the centrality of structural analyses. Taking on an intersectionality lens, educators can engage both with the need to examine newcomer youth's situations structurally, while also tuning in to their interpretations, local contexts, and how various structural positions are foregrounded or obscured in their immigrant and refugee students’ paths.     

“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.     

Sick bunnies and pocket dumps: “Not-selfies” and the genre of self-representation

ABSTRACT

This article develops and troubles existing approaches to visual self-representation in social media, questioning the naturalized roles of faces and bodies in mediated self-representation. We argue that self-representation in digital communication should not be treated as synonymous with selfies, and that selfies themselves should not be reductively equated with performances of embodiment. We do this through discussing “not-selfies”: visual self-representation consisting of images that do not feature the likenesses of the people who share them, but instead show objects, animals, fictional characters, or other things, as in the practices of #EDC (“everyday carry”) and #GPOY (“gratuitous picture of yourself”) on platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and reddit. We present an account of self-representation as an emergent, recognizable, intertextual genre, and show that #EDC and #GPOY practices are best conceptualized as instances of self-representation.     

Narrating the pasts and selves: in dialogue with Ashis Nandy's “Memory Work”

Abstract

Through taking Ashis Nandy's “Memory Work” as the entry point to his psychological-political thoughts toward colonialization, de-colonialization and the empathetic critique of ultra-nationalism in India/South Asia, this paper aims to emphasize Nandy's essential argument to see how ideologies of modern colonialism work on molding the narrative of pasts and vivisecting the multiplicity of subjecthood – which Nandy termed as “multiple selves.” In this regard, this paper considers “Memory Work” as a revitalization of the perspective to look into how the selves and the narrative of pasts inter-configure each other under colonialism and nationalism. The paper also further looks for alternative accountability of pasts and selves within communities and their cultural traditions.     

Religion and politics in Malaysian nation-building: a “double-movement” of hegemonic and plural Islam

This article looks at links and fractures in the development of Political Islam in Malaysia. It looks at the various bases of divides in Malay political mobilization. In the early colonial period, Malay–Islamic political elites were divided along the lines of language and schooling, while the postcolonial era saw the divisions taking on a more ideological basis, marking the deepening of intra-Islamic contestation. The double-movement in Political Islam’s expansion can be seen as moving in two opposite directions. While, on the one hand, the incorporation of Islamic governance in the state had taken on a centralized and hegemonic character, the splintering and pluralization of Political Islam had also occurred in an equally extensive manner.     

“Good” organisational reasons for “ineffectual” research: Evaluating summative evaluation of museums and galleries

New displays, galleries and exhibitions in museums and galleries are increasingly subject to summative evaluations, wide-ranging investigations that examine how visitors respond to and engage with particular initiatives. These evaluations provide insights into the behaviour and attitudes of visitors and the ways in which particular exhibitions, exhibits and information resources facilitate engagement, participation and learning. Unfortunately, however, summative evaluation has relatively little impact either on the particular initiative or more generally in contributing to our knowledge of visitor behaviour and understanding of best practice. In this paper, we suggest that the relative lack of impact of summative evaluation is not primarily due to any methodological shortcomings or the idiosyncrasies of some of the approaches that are used. Rather, the organisational and institutional context in which summative evaluation is commissioned, undertaken and received can impose contradictory demands and undermine the opportunity of learning from and applying the findings of evaluation.     

Three “centuries”: the context and development of rural construction in China

If the shoe doesn’t fit, it is a mistake to change the foot, but in essence this is what occurred in 20th-century China, in the context of rural construction. Motivated by self-preservation, nationalist forces in China resisted the hasty, indiscriminate and harmful importation (indeed, imposition) of western influences, but these external influences ultimately predominated over traditional domestic practices. Radical ideologies evolved, destroying traditional construction methods while promoting ill-conceived, but ostensibly “modern” counterparts, or chaotic syntheses of old and new. Rural economies were devastated, to the despair of peasants. The internal response to external stimulus had become far more damaging, the cure its own fatal disease. Amid ongoing efforts at reconstruction, local committees were formed that varied in efficiency, and successive waves of rural construction featured a wide array of approaches, far more than merely “top down” or “bottom up (grassroots).” And yet, while conditions have improved, the symptoms of radical response persist. The proper cure should be context-dependent reform.     

Chen Yingzhen and Taiwan's “sixties”: self-realization of the postwar generation in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Chen Yingzhen has been regarded as Taiwan's utmost representative leftist intellectual. This article tries to reconstruct Chen's historical significance in Taiwan's “sixties” in a broader perspective. The 1960s in Taiwan was a peculiar period. While there was a global youth rebellion, Taiwan's postwar baby boom generation, who had just been re-educated as Chinese, were going through a cultural “renaissance”. They started to put into practice what they had learned and to realize their creativities in all aspects—taken as a whole, these efforts could be understood as this generation's attempt to achieve self-realization. Chen Yingzhen and his works served as a significant initiating and guiding force during this time. The fact that there were no dominating ideologies during this period allowed room for this wave of creativity to flourish.     

Using systemic functional linguistics as method in identifying semogenic strategies in intercultural communication: A study of the collocation of “time” and “different” by Swedish managers with international management experiences

Theoretical foundations to intercultural communication (ICC) are integrative and interdisciplinary but few have studied ICC from a systemic linguistics perspective. Viewing communication as a dialogic process, this study takes a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) view of language as a social semiotic where semogenesis (meaning making) is both construed and construed by context of situation which in turn is construed by culture. Using interview data collected from Swedish managers who have extensive international management experiences, this study aims to illustrate how SFL can be used as an adaptive theory and framework of discourse analysis in uncovering semogenic strategies in ICC processes.     

“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.     

Nations in shame and art’s shame: towards a radical politics of image and affect around “Okinawa”

ABSTRACT

This article first examines the resurgence of popular, semi-academic nationalist discourses that solidify the figures of “Japan” and “Okinawa” within post-1945 U.S.-led formation of nation-states across the Asia-Pacific. It critiques two discourses that are symptomatic of such a return to the figure of the nation: developmental economist Matsushima Yasukatsu’s thesis of “Ryukyu’s independence” and philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya’s call to relocate the U.S. military bases from Okinawa to mainland Japan. These symptomatic instances of the mutually transferential nationalisms in Okinawa and mainland Japan rely upon crudely culturalist assumptions about the self and the others and are thus surprisingly oblivious to how the very nation-forms have been instituted as part of imperial modernity. Their implicit figurations of the exemplary national subjects partake in the biopolitical assumptions as to whose lives must be “made to live” and “made to die” within and outside the border of the national. Ultimately, such nationalist discourses about Japan and Okinawa engage in a zero-sum exchange of imperial shame and colonial shame, a process that further stabilizes the co-operative placement of local nation-forms within the U.S.-led inter-state regime of warfare and biopolitics. But insofar as these discourses require the images of the nations that they seek to represent, their (re)production of what Naoki Sakai calls “a schema of co-figurative” nationalities needs to be critiqued through an exploration of a radical aesthetics and affect that pertain to image production.

The second part of the article presents my interpretation of artist Nema Satoko’s recent book of photography titled Paradigm, a work in which both bodies and objects explore their potential transformations in the midst of their precarious exposure to one another. I argue that Nema’s images of fragile bodies and objects in the present landscape of Okinawa are poised on the cusp between the past that invokes a sense of shame and this past’s potential future that necessitates an ethical posture of humility. In the vicinity of Adorno’s notion of “art’s shame,” Nema’s photographic images illuminate an amorphous realm of fragile beings, whose linkage and exposure to one another opens a space of viability that is obscured by the biopolitical imaginaries of nation-forms.     

Accounting for quality: arts evaluation,public value and the case of “Culture counts”

Arts policy has a longstanding relationship with the concept of “quality” and the ways in which organisations measure, evaluate and account for it. Culture Counts, an evaluation system and digital platform, compiles data from standardised evaluation surveys of different stakeholder groups – organisations, audiences, critics, funders and peers – and provides the means to compare and triangulate data in an accessible format. As a result, it claims to provide a more effective, democratic tool for quality measurement of art, which demonstrates the public value of funding [Department of Culture and the Arts, & Knell, J. (2014). Public value measurement framework: Measuring the quality of the arts. Perth: Department of Culture and the Arts.]. Through qualitative research with two consortia of organisations involved in Culture Counts pilot projects in Manchester, England and Victoria, Australia, we explore these claims, comparing the reception and promotion of the system in both countries and considering its potential incorporation into policy assessment frameworks and adoption within arts organisations’ existing evaluation capacities.     

The Big,Bad Wolf: Resisting Corporate Evil in “Damages” and State of Play

Popular culture requires readily identifiable villains. Subcultural groups often serve this role, creating controversies. Controversies based on religion are especially bitter. As a rule, religion in the movies is inoffensively sentimental, but The Da Vinci Code is both popular and provocative, treading on the dangerous ground of Jesus's mortality. An Inconvenient Truth, another unexpectedly popular recent movie, is not as amusing, but it concerns issues Jesus cared more about.