Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968, the ...commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its relativizing, particularist, and essentializing implications. The essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally coded social spaces can be described and understood historically without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or homogeneous cultures. As we consider the issues of multiculturalism today, this volume offers new approaches to understanding multiculturalism in Central Europe freed of the effects of politically exploited concepts of social spaces.
Municipalities and multiculturalism Good, Kristin
Municipalities and multiculturalism,
c2009, 20091014, 2009, 2009-01-01, 2009-10-14, 20090101
eBook
Municipalities and Multiculturalismexplores the role of the municipality in integrating immigrants and managing the ethno-cultural relations of the city.
A history of modern European cultural pluralism, its current crisis, and its uncertain future
In 2010, the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France each declared that multiculturalism had failed in ...their countries. Over the past decade, a growing consensus in Europe has voiced similar decrees. But what do these ominous proclamations, from across the political spectrum, mean? From the influx of immigrants in the 1950s to contemporary worries about refugees and terrorism, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europeexamines the historical development of multiculturalism on the Continent. Rita Chin argues that there were few efforts to institute state-sponsored policies of multiculturalism, and those that emerged were pronounced failures virtually from their inception. She shows that today's crisis of support for cultural pluralism isn't new but actually has its roots in the 1980s.
Chin looks at the touchstones of European multiculturalism, from the urgent need for laborers after World War II to the public furor over the publication ofThe Satanic Versesand the question of French girls wearing headscarves to school. While many Muslim immigrants had lived in Europe for decades, in the 1980s they came to be defined by their religion and the public's preoccupation with gender relations. Acceptance of sexual equality became the critical gauge of Muslims' compatibility with Western values. The convergence of left and right around the defense of such personal freedoms against a putatively illiberal Islam has threatened to undermine commitment to pluralism as a core ideal. Chin contends that renouncing the principles of diversity brings social costs, particularly for the left, and she considers how Europe might construct an effective political engagement with its varied population.
Challenging the mounting opposition to a diverse society,The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europepresents a historical investigation into one continent's troubled relationship with cultural difference.
Conflicting claims about culture are a familiar refrain of political life in the contemporary world. On one side, majorities seek to fashion the state in their own image, while on the other, cultural ...minorities press for greater recognition and accommodation. Theories of liberal democracy are at odds about the merits of these competing claims. Multicultural liberals hold that particular minority rights are a requirement of justice conceived of in a broadly liberal fashion. Critics, in turn, have questioned the motivations, coherence, and normative validity of such defenses of multiculturalism. InEqual Recognition, Alan Patten reasserts the case in favor of liberal multiculturalism by developing a new ethical defense of minority rights.
Patten seeks to restate the case for liberal multiculturalism in a form that is responsive to the major concerns of critics. He describes a new, nonessentialist account of culture, and he rehabilitates and reconceptualizes the idea of liberal neutrality and uses this idea to develop a distinctive normative argument for minority rights. The book elaborates and applies its core theoretical framework by exploring several important contexts in which minority rights have been considered, including debates about language rights, secession, and immigrant integration.
Demonstrating that traditional, nonmulticultural versions of liberalism are unsatisfactory,Equal Recognitionwill engage readers interested in connections among liberal democracy, nationalism, and current multicultural issues.
Over the past 15 years, the project of advanced European integration has followed a complex secular and cosmopolitan agenda. As that agenda has evolved, however, so have various hard-line populist ...movements with goals diametrically opposed to the ideals of a harmonious European Union. Spearheaded by figures such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, the controversial leader of France's National Front party, these radical movements have become increasingly influential and, because of their philosophical affinities with fascism and national socialism--politically worrisome.
InIntegral Europe,anthropologist Douglas Holmes posits that such movements are philosophically rooted in integralism, a sensibility that, in its most benign form, enables people to maintain their ethnic identity and solidarity within the context of an increasingly pluralistic society. Taken to irrational extremes by people like Le Pen, integralism is being used to inflame people's feelings of alienation and powerlessness, the by-products of impersonal, transnational "fast-capitalism." The consequences are an invidious politics of exclusion that spawns cultural nationalism, racism, and social disorder.
The analysis moves from northern Italy to Strasbourg and Brussels, the two venues of the European Parliament, and finally to the East End of London. This multi-sited ethnography provides critical perspective on integralism as a form of intimate cultural practice and a violent idiom of estrangement. It combines a wide-ranging review of modern and historical scholarship with two years of field research that included personal interviews with right-wing activists, among them Le Pen and neo-Nazis in inner London. Fascinating, provocative, and sobering,Integral Europeoffers a rare inside look at one of modern Europe's most unsettling political trends.
By integrating two important areas of scholarly concern - the evolution and articulation of language rights in Canada, and the history of multiculturalism in the country - Haque provides powerful ...insight into ongoing asymmetries between Canada's various cultural and linguistic groups.
While the term culture wars often designates the heated arguments in the English-speaking world spiraling around race, the canon, and affirmative action, in fact these discussions have raged in ...diverse sites and languages. Race in Translation charts the transatlantic traffic of the debates within and between three zones - the U.S., France, and Brazil. Stam and Shohat trace the literal and figurative translation of these multidirectional intellectual debates, seen most recently in the emergence of postcolonial studies in France, and whiteness studies in Brazil. The authors also interrogate an ironic convergence whereby rightist politicians like Sarkozy and Cameron join hands with some leftist intellectuals like Benn Michaels, iek, and Bourdieu in condemning multiculturalism and identity politics. At once a report from various fronts in the culture wars, a mapping of the germane literatures, and an argument about methods of reading the cross-border movement of ideas, the book constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the Diasporic and the Transnational.
This article offers insight from psychological science into whether models of diversity (e.g., color blindness and multiculturalism) remedy or foster discrimination and racism. First, we focus on ...implications of a color-blind model. Here, the literature suggests that while color blindness appeals to some individuals, it can decrease individuals’ sensitivity to racism and discrimination. Furthermore, the literature suggests that, with some exceptions, color blindness has negative implications for interracial interactions, minorities’ perceptions and outcomes, and the pursuit of diversity and inclusion in organizational contexts. Second, we examine circumstances under which a multicultural approach yields positive or negative implications for interracial interactions, organizational diversity efforts, and discrimination. The research reviewed coalesces to suggest that while multiculturalism generally has more positive implications for people of color, both models have the potential to further inequality.
Trust us Hellstrom, Anders
2016., 20160101, 2016, 2016-01-15, 2015
eBook, Book
In Scandinavia, there is separation in the electorate between those who embrace diversity and those who wish for tighter bonds between people and nation. This book focuses on three nationalist ...populist parties in Scandinavia-the Sweden Democrats, the Progress Party in Norway, and the Danish People's Party. In order to affect domestic politics by addressing this conflict of diversity versus homogeneity, these parties must enter the national parliament while earning the nation's trust. Of the three, the Sweden Democrats have yet to earn the trust of the mainstream, leading to polarized and emotionally driven public debate that raises the question of national identity and what is understood as the common man.
PDF
