The Turnbull government presented Australia's fifth national multicultural policy statement in March 2017. This article analyses the policy statement and argues that it represents the most ...significant change to Australian multicultural policy in four decades. Among other things, it abandons the language of government responsiveness to cultural diversity that previously defined Australian multiculturalism. The 2017 policy amounts to a new form of post-multiculturalism-different from earlier conservative, neoliberal and centre-left versions-in that it seeks to 'mainstream' multicultural policy on the grounds that Australian multiculturalism has succeeded in its intended task. While a mainstreaming strategy of this sort is, I argue, theoretically consistent with Australia's liberal nationalist approach to cultural diversity, the institutional and attitudinal conditions that it presupposes are yet to be fully realised in Australia. More multicultural work needs to be done before this kind of post-multiculturalist approach is practicable.
In recent years, European political leaders from Angela Merkel to David Cameron have discarded the term multiculturalism and now express scepticism, critique and even hostility towards multicultural ...ways of organising their societies. Yet they are unprepared to reverse the diversity existing in their states. These contradictory choices have different political consequences in the 11 European countries examined in this book: Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Sweden and Turkey. The future of European liberalism is being played out as multicultural notions of belonging, inclusion, tolerance and the national home are brought into question.
Significant debate exists regarding whether different diversity ideologies, defined as individuals' beliefs regarding the importance of demographic differences and how to navigate them, improve ...intergroup relations in organizations and the broader society. We seek to advance understanding by drawing finer-grained distinctions among diversity ideology types and intergroup relations outcomes. To this end, we use random effects meta-analysis (k = 296) to investigate the effects of 3 identity-blind ideologies-colorblindness, meritocracy, and assimilation-and 1 identity-conscious ideology-multiculturalism-on 4 indicators of high quality intergroup relations-reduced prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping and increased diversity policy support. Multiculturalism is generally associated with high quality intergroup relations (prejudice: ρ = −.32; discrimination: ρ = −.22; stereotyping: ρ = −.17; policy support: ρ = .57). In contrast, the effects of identity-blind ideologies vary considerably. Different identity-blind ideologies have divergent effects on the same outcome; for example, colorblindness is negatively related (ρ = −.19), meritocracy is unrelated (ρ = .00), and assimilation is positively related (ρ = .17) to stereotyping. Likewise, the same ideology has divergent effects on different outcomes; for example, meritocracy is negatively related to discrimination (ρ = −.48), but also negatively related to policy support (ρ = −.45) and unrelated to prejudice (ρ = −.15) and stereotyping (ρ = .00). We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, practice, and future research.
This article examines and problematises the “rights” of Indigenous communities under multiculturalism debates with reference to the San community popularly known as “Basarwa” or “Bushmen” in ...Botswana, paying particular attention to the tension between perceived government effort to accommodate this community and the concomitant violence inflicted upon its members. The article refers to the Sesana and Others v Attorney-General (2006) case as a springboard to unravel the two-thronged way in which the law becomes an instrument of violence on the one hand, and a means to correct social injustices on the other. This case deals with the forceful removal of the Basarwa from their ancestral land and the government’s abrupt termination of essential services such as drinking water and primary healthcare. The article problematises the rights of the Basarwa under multiculturalism debates and considers questions such as: If the Basarwa community are contenders under modern laws, which are alien to them in terms of the asymmetrical way in which these laws were imposed over their customary laws, what rights do they have that enable us to speak about them as citizens? In what way does the modern state accommodate them and their unique cultural and legal understanding? What resources do they have at their disposal to speak the language of the law? Is the argument that multiculturalism accommodation gives minority groups the choice of maintaining their unique cultural and legal understanding of the world sustainable? Ultimately, I proffer the application of democratic experimentalism as an effective and amicable means of solving disputes between the state and minoritised and marginalised communities such as the Basarwa.
Prior to the advent of multiculturalism, mainstream psychology mirrored the Euro-American culture. In contrast, multiculturalism acts as a prism that reveals the diversity in the human condition. ...Since most empirical research is still conducted on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic populations, we need to construct a representative map of the human psychological and behavioral phenome. To work toward this goal, multicultural psychologists go beyond personal transformation and openness to the other. They question power relations, oppose oppressive systems, address psychology's fallacy of neutrality, and engage in social justice action. Specifically, multicultural psychologists work to restore the humanity of both the oppressed and the oppressor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
This article introduces the special issue, Everyday Multiculturalism in/across Asia. It provides an overview of the international and inter-disciplinary research papers included in the special issue ...which all speak to the concept of everyday multiculturalism by critically engaging with the extent to which core aspects relate to different contexts in and across Asia. Papers in this collection encompass research undertaken in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea and which include issues of intraregional movement and labour mobility particularly regarding the experiences of migrants from Burma, China, Nepal, The Philippines and India. A key contribution of this special issue is that the papers engage with empirical, theoretical and methodological questions which consider the potential transferability of ideas related to everyday multiculturalism, especially in the context of expanding trans-Asian mobilities.
Multicultural and colourblind approaches to managing diversity are often conceptualized to be antagonistic. However, in principle, both have underlying motives for social justice, making it important ...to understand how they may be psychologically reconciled. In the present research, we examined dialectical thinking as an individual characteristic or condition under which people may endorse them in a conciliatory way. Across five studies (three pre‐registered; N = 1899), using well‐established materials that have measured and experimentally manipulated dialectical thinking, we found that individual differences in dialectical thinking were a replicable factor that moderated the relationship between colourblind and multicultural ideals. By contrast, situational priming of dialectical thinking did not reliably impact this relationship. Therefore, people with a greater propensity to view issues from multiple perspectives and to reconcile seemingly contradictory information appear more likely to take a harmonized approach to endorsing colourblind and multicultural ideals. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
The successful integration of asylum seekers into the labor market is among the most pressing issues of refugee-receiving countries. We construe co-workers' willingness to collaborate with asylum ...seekers as a crucial factor for integration and investigate its antecedents. Linking Allport's contact theory with team diversity theories, we propose that a work team's diversity affects team members' willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers. We thus investigated the effects of different facets of objective (national, migration background, age, and gender) and perceived diversity in work teams on team members' willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers. In doing so, we also tested whether asylum seekers' status in the team hierarchy (superior vs. colleague), task interdependence, and pro-diversity team norms moderate these effects. Multi-level regression analyses based on 470 participants nested in 106 teams showed that, overall, team diversity played a small role in explaining the willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers. Age diversity was negatively associated with the willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers, especially when asylum seekers were considered to take a post as a superior rather than a colleague. In teams with high task interdependence, migration background diversity and willingness to collaborate with asylum seekers were positively associated. Pro-diversity norms did not moderate team diversity effects. Overall, our findings demonstrate that team diversity can have beneficial, harmful, and no substantial consequences for the willingness to work with asylum seekers, depending on the considered type of diversity and boundary conditions.
Seventeen years ago Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) published the landmark article "Toward aTheory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy," giving a coherent theoretical statement for resource pedagogies that ...had been building throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I, like countless teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means to make teaching and learning relevant and responsive to the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (inequality. Recently, however, I have begun to question if the terms "relevant" and "responsive" are really descriptive of much of the teaching and research founded upon them and, more importantly, if they go far enough in their orientation to the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society. In this essay, I offer the term and stance of culturally sustaining pedagogy as an alternative that, I believe, embodies some of the best research and practice in the resource pedagogy tradition and as a term that supports the value of our multiethnic and multilingual present and future. Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling. In the face of current policies and practices that have the explicit goal of creating a monocultural and monolingual society, research and practice need equally explicit resistances that embrace cultural pluralism and cultural equality.
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