Press "one" for English Schildkraut, Deborah J
2005., 20131024, 2013, 2005, 2007-01-01, 20050101
eBook
Press "ONE" for Englishexamines how Americans form opinions on language policy issues such as declaring English the official language, printing documents in multiple languages, and bilingual ...education. Deborah Schildkraut shows that people's conceptions of American national identity play an integral role in shaping their views. Using insights from American political thought and intellectual history, she highlights several components of that identity and shows how they are brought to bear on debates about language. Her analysis expands the range of factors typically thought to explain attitudes in such policy areas, emphasizing in particular the role that civic republicanism's call for active and responsible citizenship plays in shaping opinion on language issues.
Using focus groups and survey data, Schildkraut develops a model of public conceptions of what it means to be American and demonstrates the complex ways in which people draw on these conceptions when forming and explaining their views. In so doing she illustrates how focus group methodology can help yield vital new insights into opinion formation.
With the rise in the use of ballot initiatives to implement language policies, understanding opinion formation in this policy area has become imperative. This book enhances our understanding of this increasingly pressing concern, and points the way toward humane, effective, and broadly popular language policies that address the realities of American demographics in the twenty-first century while staying true to the nation's most revered values.
We compare two jury selection procedures meant to safeguard against the inclusion of biased jurors but are perceived as causing minorities to be underrepresented. The strike-and-replace procedure ...presents potential jurors one by one to the parties, while the struck procedure presents all potential jurors to the parties before they exercise their challenges. The struck procedure more effectively excludes extreme jurors but leads to a worse representation of minorities. The advantage of the struck procedure in terms of excluding extremes is sizable in a wide range of cases. In contrast, the strike-and-replace procedure better represents minorities only if the minority and majority are polarized. Results are robust to assuming that the parties statistically discriminate against jurors on the basis of group identity.
Nationality is the most important legal mechanism sorting and classifying the world's population today. An individual's place of birth or naturalization determines where he or she can and cannot be ...and what he or she can and cannot do. Although this system may appear universal, even natural, Will Hanley shows that it arose just a century ago. In Identifying with Nationality, he uses the Mediterranean city of Alexandria to develop a genealogy of the nation and the formation of the modern national subject.Alexandria in 1880 was an immigrant boomtown ruled by dozens of overlapping regimes. On its streets and in its police stations and courtrooms, people were identified by name, occupation, place of origin, sect, physical description, and other attributes. Yet by 1914, before nationalist calls for independence and decolonization had become widespread, nationality had become the defining category of identification, and nationality laws came to govern Alexandria's population.Identifying with Nationalitytraces the advent of modern citizenship to multinational, transimperial settings such as turn-of-the-century colonial Alexandria, where ordinary people abandoned old identifiers and grasped nationality as the best means to access the protections promised by expanding states. The result was a system that continues to define and divide people through status, mobility, and residency.
Democracies assume accurate knowledge by the populace, but the human attraction to fake and untrustworthy news poses a serious problem for healthy democratic functioning. We articulate why and how ...identification with political parties – known as partisanship – can bias information processing in the human brain. There is extensive evidence that people engage in motivated political reasoning, but recent research suggests that partisanship can alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments. We propose an identity-based model of belief for understanding the influence of partisanship on these cognitive processes. This framework helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth. Finally, we discuss strategies for de-biasing information processing to help to create a shared reality across partisan divides.
Over 2 billion people use social media every day, and many use it to read and discuss politics. Social media also facilitate the spread of fake news and hyper-partisan content.
Online discussions of politicized topics, including political events and issues (e.g., same-sex marriage, climate change, gun control), resemble an echo chamber. That is, posts on these topics are shared primarily by people with similar ideological preferences.
Political polarization is most likely when users employ moral/emotional language. This may reflect ideological differences between people on the left versus right or partisanship.
Online partisan criticism that derogates political opponents increases political polarization.
Liberals are somewhat more likely to share cross-ideological content on social media (i.e., information posted by people with different ideological beliefs).
With more than half its population under twenty years old, Iran is one of the world's most youthful nations. The Iranian state characterizes its youth population in two ways: as a homogeneous mass, ..."an army of twenty millions" devoted to the Revolution, and as alienated, inauthentic, Westernized consumers who constitute a threat to the society. Much of the focus of the Islamic regime has been on ways to protect Iranian young people from moral hazards and to prevent them from providing a gateway for cultural invasion from the West. Iranian authorities express their anxieties through campaigns that target the young generation and its lifestyle and have led to the criminalization of many of the behaviors that make up youth culture. In this ethnography of contemporary youth culture in Iran's capital, Shahram Khosravi examines how young Tehranis struggle for identity in the battle over the right to self-expression. Khosravi looks closely at the strictures confronting Iranian youth and the ways transnational cultural influences penetrate and flourish. Focusing on gathering places such as shopping centers and coffee shops, Khosravi examines the practices of everyday life through which young Tehranis demonstrate defiance against the official culture and parental dominance. In addition to being sites of opposition, Khosravi argues, these alternative spaces serve as creative centers for expression and, above all, imagination. His analysis reveals the transformative power these spaces have and how they enable young Iranians to develop their own culture as well as individual and generational identities. The text is enriched by examples from literature and cinema and by livid reports from the author's fieldwork.
For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization ...to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors' places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.
The European puzzle Demossier, Marion
2007., 20070815, 2007, 2007-08-15, 20070101
eBook
The twin concepts of “Culture” and “Identity” are inescapable in any discussion of European Integration and yet over the last ten years their meaning has become increasingly contested. By combining ...an anthropological and political perspective, the authors challenge the traditional boundaries within the issue of the construction of Europe. In the first part, historians and anthropologists from various national traditions discuss the process of the construction of Europe and its implications for cultural identities. The second section examines a number of topics at the core of the process of Europeanization and presents up-to-date information on each of these issues: political parties, regions, football, cities, the Euro, ethnicity, heritage and European cinema. Emphasis is be placed on the political structuring of cultural identities by contrasting top-down and bottom-up processes that define the tensions between the unity and diversity of the European Community.
Abandon Ship or Stay on Board? Mallinas, Stephanie R; Plant, E Ashby; Maner, Jon K
Social psychology (Göttingen, Germany),
09/2021, Letnik:
52, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
How do people respond when their group's power is threatened? Four studies suggest that threats to group power lead people to adhere to and invest in their group. When a personally important group's ...power was threatened, people psychologically adhered to the group (Studies 1a and 1b). This adherence occurred among people who were high (but not low) in group identification (Study 2). Adherence to the group was associated with behaviors aimed at promoting benefits to the group (Study 3). Findings suggest that people invest themselves in personally important groups when the group's power is threatened. This occurs largely among people strongly identified with a group, suggesting that clinging to the group occurs especially when costs to leaving are high.
Walking served as an occasion for the display of power and status in ancient Rome, where great men paraded with their entourages through city streets and elite villa owners strolled with friends in ...private colonnades and gardens. In this book-length treatment of the culture of walking in ancient Rome, Timothy O'Sullivan explores the careful attention which Romans paid to the way they moved through their society. He employs a wide range of literary, artistic and architectural evidence to reveal the crucial role that walking played in the performance of social status, the discourse of the body and the representation of space. By examining how Roman authors depict walking, this book sheds new light on the Romans themselves - not only how they perceived themselves and their experience of the world, but also how they drew distinctions between work and play, mind and body, and Republic and Empire.
Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book ...advances a novel answer: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. The book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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