Co-written by a professor and 10 students, this book explores their attempts to come to grips with fundamental issues related to writing narrative accounts purporting to represent aspects of people's lives. The fundamental project, around which their explorations in writing textual accounts turned, derived from the editor's initial ethnographic question: "Tell me about the previous] class we did together?" This proved to be a particularly rich exercise, bringing into the arena all of the problems related to choice of data, analysis of data, the structure of the account, the stance of the author, tense, and case, the adequacy of the account, and more.
As participants shared versions of their accounts and struggled to analyze the wealth of data they had accumulated in the previous classes -- the products of in-class practice of observation and interview -- they became aware of the ephemeral nature of narrative accounts. Reality, as written in textual form, cannot capture the immense depth, breadth, and complexity of an actual lived experience and can only be an incomplete representation that derives from the interpretive imagination of the author.
The final chapter results from a number of discussions during which each contributing author briefly revisited the text and -- through dialogue with others and/or the editor -- identified the elements that would provide an overall framework that represents "the big message" of the book. In this way, the contributors attempted to provide a conceptual context that would indicate ways in which their private experiences could be seen to be relevant to the broader public arenas in which education and research is engaged. In its entirety, the book presents an interpretive study of teaching and learning. It provides a multi-voiced account that reveals how problematic, turning-point experiences in a university class are perceived, organized, constructed, and given meaning by a group of interacting individuals.

Racial identity theories have been in the psychological literature for nearly thirty years. Unlike most references to racial identity, however, Thompson and Carter demonstrate the value of integrating "RACE" and "IDENTITY" as systematic components of human functioning. The editors and their contributors show how the infusion of racial identity theory with other psychological models can successfully yield more holistic considerations of client functioning and well-being. Fully respecting the mutual influence of personal and environmental factors to explanations of individual and group functioning, they apply complex theoretical notions to real-life cases in psychological practice.
These authors contend that race is a pervasive and formidable force in society that affects the development and functioning of individuals and groups. In a recursive fashion, individuals and groups influence and, indeed, nurture the notion of race and societal racism. Arguing that mental health practitioners are in key, influential positions to pierce this cycle, the authors provide evidence of how meaningful change can occur when racial identity theory is integrated into interventions that attempt to diminish the distress people experience in their lives. The interventions illustrated in this volume are applied in various contexts, including psychotherapy and counseling, supervision, family therapy, support groups, and organizational and institutional environments.
This book can serve the needs and interests of advanced-level students and professionals in all mental health fields, as well as researchers and scholars in such disciplines as organizational management and forensic psychology. It can also be of value to anyone interested in the systematic implementation of strategies to overcome problems of race.

Co-written by a professor and 10 students, this book explores their attempts to come to grips with fundamental issues related to writing narrative accounts purporting to represent aspects of people's lives. The fundamental project, around which their explorations in writing textual accounts turned, derived from the editor's initial ethnographic question: "Tell me about the [previous] class we did together?" This proved to be a particularly rich exercise, bringing into the arena all of the problems related to choice of data, analysis of data, the structure of the account, the stance of the author, tense, and case, the adequacy of the account, and more. As participants shared versions of their accounts and struggled to analyze the wealth of data they had accumulated in the previous classes -- the products of in-class practice of observation and interview -- they became aware of the ephemeral nature of narrative accounts. Reality, as written in textual form, cannot capture the immense depth, breadth, and complexity of an actual lived experience and can only be an incomplete representation that derives from the interpretive imagination of the author. The final chapter results from a number of discussions during which each contributing author briefly revisited the text and -- through dialogue with others and/or the editor -- identified the elements that would provide an overall framework that represents "the big message" of the book. In this way, the contributors attempted to provide a conceptual context that would indicate ways in which their private experiences could be seen to be relevant to the broader public arenas in which education and research is engaged. In its entirety, the book presents an interpretive study of teaching and learning. It provides a multi-voiced account that reveals how problematic, turning-point experiences in a university class are perceived, organized, constructed, and given meaning by a group of interacting individuals.

This intercultural communication text reader brings together the many dimensions of ethnic and cultural identity and shows how they are communicated in everyday life. Introducing and applying key concepts, theories, and approaches_from empirical to ethnographic_a wide variety of essays look at the experiences of African Americans, Asians, Asian Americans, Latino/as, and Native Americans, as well as many cultural groups. The authors also explore issues such as gender, race, class, spirituality, alternative lifestyles, and inter- and intra-ethnic identity. Sites of analysis range from movies and photo albums to beauty salons and Deadhead concerts.

"Thin on the Ground: Neandertal Biology, Archeology and Ecology" synthesizes the current knowledge about our sister species the Neandertals, combining data from a variety of disciplines to reach a cohesive theory behind Neandertal low population densities and relatively low rate of technological innovation. The book highlights and contrasts the differences between Neandertals and early modern humans and explores the morphological, physiological, and behavioral adaptive solutions which led to the extinction of the Neandertals and the population expansion of modern humans.

Written by a world recognized expert in physical anthropology, "Thin on the Ground: Neandertal Biology, Archaeology and Ecology" will be a must have title for anyone interested in the rise and fall of the Neandertals.

Racial Subjects heralds the next wave of writing about race and moves discussions about race forward as few other books recently have. Arguing that racism is best understood as exclusionary relations of power rather than simply as hateful expressions, David Theo Goldberg analyzes contemporary expressions of race and racism. He engages political economy, culture, and everyday material life against a background analysis of profound demographic shifts and changing class formation and relations. Issues covered in Racial Subjects include the history of changing racial categories over the last two hundred years of U.S. census taking, multiculturalism, the experience of being racially mixed, the rise of new black public intellectuals, race and the law in the wake of the O. J. Simpson verdict, relations between blacks and Jews, and affirmative action.

Building on the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and feminist philosophers of science, the essays in " Women Out of Place: the Gender of Agency and Race of Nationality" investigate the linkages between agency and race for what they reveal about constructions of masculinity and femininity and patterns of domesticity among groups seeking to resist varied forms of political and economic domination through a subnational ideology of racial and cultural redemption.
Does agency have a gender? Does nationality have a race? Does the race of nationality predetermine the gender of agency? This volume asks these questions of a variety of nationalist ideologies, some at the same point in history, others as precursors of or predecessors to an initial nationalist formation.
Contributors are: Richard G. Fox, Eva Haseby-Darvas, Paulette Pierce, Deborah Rubin, Louisa Schein, Carol A. Smith, Jacqueline True.

Before conclusions about Spanish in the United States can be drawn, individual communities must be studied in their own contexts. That is the goal of "Puerto Rican Discourse." One tendency of previous work on Spanish in the United States has been an eagerness to generalize the findings of isolated studies to all Latino communities, but the specific sociocultural contexts in which people -- and languages -- live often demand very different conclusions. The results of Torres' work indicate that the Spanish of Puerto Ricans living in Brentwood continues to survive in a restricted context. Across the population of Brentwood -- for Puerto Ricans of all ages and language proficiencies -- the Spanish language continues to assume an important practical, symbolic, and affective role.
An examination of the structural features of 60 oral narratives -- narrative components and the verbal tenses associated with each, overall Spanish verb use, and clause complexity -- reveals little evidence of the simplification and loss across generations found in other studies of Spanish in the United States. English-dominant Puerto Ricans are able Spanish language narrators demonstrating a wide variety of storytelling skills. The structure of their oral narratives is as complete and rich as the narratives of Spanish-dominant speakers.
The content of these oral narratives of personal experience is also explored. Too often in studies on U.S. Spanish, sociolinguists ignore the words of the community; the focus is usually on the grammatical aspects of language use and rarely on the message conveyed. In this study, oral narratives are analyzed as constructions of gendered and ethnically marked identities. The stories demonstrate the contradictory positions in which many Puerto Ricans find themselves in the United States. All of the speakers in this study have internalized, to a greater or lesser extent, dominant ideologies of gender, ethnicity, and language, at the same time that they struggle against such discourse. The analysis of the discourse of the community reveals how the status quo is both reproduced and resisted in the members' narratives, and how ideological forces work with other factors, such as attitudes, to influence the choices speakers make concerning language use. A special feature of this book is that transcripts are provided in both Spanish and English.
This volume combines ethnographic, quantitative, and qualitative discourse methodologies to provide a comprehensive and novel analysis of language use and attitudes of the Brentwood Puerto Rican community. Its rich linguistic and ethnographic data will be of interest to researchers and teachers in cultural communication, ethnic (Hispanic-American) studies, sociolinguistics, and TESL.

Ethnic and Racial Consciousness is a completely revised version of the highly acclaimed first edition published in 1988. At that time no one expected the former Yugoslavia would break up with the brutal slaughter of neighbour by neighbour. Few would have predicted the horrific massacres in Rwanda and Burundi which have led to accusations of genocide. The ending of the cold war has been followed by struggles in the former Soviet Union in which one group has struggled for dominance and the other for independence. Ethnic conflict is now one of the main threats to peace in the contemporary world. This new edition offers an up-to-date introduction to the many issues surrounding our definition and understanding of ethnic and racial difference, racism and discrimination in general.

In examining Asian American ethnicity and communication, William Gudykunst begins by summarizing the cultural characteristics of Asian cultures that affectAsian Americans' communication. Next, he looks at Asian American immigration patterns, ethnic institutions, and family patterns, as well as at how ethnic and cultural identities influence Asian Americans' communication. The author focuses on how communication is similar and different among Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, and Vietnamese Americans. Where applicable, similarities and differences in communication between Asian Americans and European Americans are also examined. Gudykunst concludes with a discussion of the role of communication in Asian immigrants' acculturation to the United States.

This volume is a study of the loss and reconstruction of collective and personal identities in ethnic migrant communities. Focusing on the Bosnian and Croatian communities in Western Australia, Dona Kolar-Panov documents the social and cultural changes that affected these diasporic groups on the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. She describes the migrant audience's daily emcounter with the media images of destruction and atrocities committed in Croatia and Bosnia, and charts the implications the continuous viewing of the real and excessive violence had on the awakening of their ethno-national consciousness. The author presents an insight into how migrant cultures are shaped and changed through the reception and assimilation of images seen on video and television screens. Using the combination of close and semiotic analysis of videotexts with an informed account of social, political and historical contexts, the author recalls the complex relationships between ethnicity, technology and the reconstruction of identity.

Ethnic tensions in Southeast Asia represent a clear threat to the future stability of the region. David Brown's clear and systematic study outlines the patterns of ethnic politics in:
* Burma
* Singapore
* Indonesia
* Malaysia
* Thailand
The study considers the influence of the State on the formation of ethnic groups and investigates why some countries are more successful in 'managing' their ethnic politics than others.

Building on the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and feminist philosophers of science, the essays in " Women Out of Place: the Gender of Agency and Race of Nationality" investigate the linkages between agency and race for what they reveal about constructions of masculinity and femininity and patterns of domesticity among groups seeking to resist varied forms of political and economic domination through a subnational ideology of racial and cultural redemption.
Does agency have a gender? Does nationality have a race? Does the race of nationality predetermine the gender of agency? This volume asks these questions of a variety of nationalist ideologies, some at the same point in history, others as precursors of or predecessors to an initial nationalist formation.
Contributors are: Richard G. Fox, Eva Haseby-Darvas, Paulette Pierce, Deborah Rubin, Louisa Schein, Carol A. Smith, Jacqueline True.

Seen in modern perspective, the concept of national character poses fundamental problems for social science theory and research: To what extent do conditions of life in a particular society give rise to certain patterns in the personalities of its members? What are the consequences?

Alex Inkeles surveys various definitions of national character, tracing developments through the twentieth century. His approach is to examine the regularity of specific personality patterns among individuals in a society. He argues that modal personality may be extremely important in determining which new cultural elements are accepted and which institutional forms persist in a society. Reviewing previous studies, Inkeles canvasses the attitudes and psychological states of different nations in an effort to discover a set of values in the United States. He concludes that, despite recent advances in the field, there is much to be done before we can have a clear picture of the degree of differentiation in the personality structure of modern nations.

Until now, there were few formal definitions and discussions on national character and the limits of this field of study. This book will be of great interest to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and political theorists.

The Multicultural Imagination is a challenging inquiry into the complex interrelationship between our ideas about race and color and the unconscious. Michael Vannoy Adams takes a fresh look at the contributions of psychoanalysis to a question which affects every individual who tries to establish an effective personal identity in the context of their received 'racial' identity.
Adams argues that 'race' is just as important as sex or any other content of the unconcscious, drawing on clinical case materal from contemporary patients for whom 'race' or color is a vitally significant social and political concern that impacts on them personally. He does not assume that racism or 'colorism' will simply vanish if we psychoanalyse them, but shows how a non-defensive ego and a self-image that is receptive to other-images can move us towards a more productive discourse of cultural differences.
Wide-ranging in its references and scope, this is a book that provokes the reader - analyst or not - to confront personally those unconscious attitudes which stand in the way of authentic multicultural relationships.

Related link: Free Email Alerting

Once thought of as a 'vanishing people', the Ainu are now reasserting both their culture and their claims to be the 'indigenous' people of Japan. Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan is the first major study to trace the outlines of Ainu history. It explores the ways in which competing versions of Ainu identity have been constructed and articulated, shedding light on the way modern relations between the Ainu and the Japanese have been shaped.

eBook available with sample pages: 020343546X

Racist Violence and the State is the first serious study to apply a comparative research-based approach to the study of racist violence in Britain, France and The Netherlands since 1945. Setting racist violence within a historical background of the post-imperialist legacy, the author presents an accessible, fascinating and highly original analysis of the development of public and state attitudes to racist violence over the past 50 years.

Eisenstein tracks developments such as racialized ethnic and gender conflict; the new male democracies of eastern Europe; the new Democrats of the Clinton era - exploring the `politics of hate.'

Working from the premise that the white race has been socially constructed, this volume is a call for the disruption of white conformity and the formation of a New Abolitionism to dissolve it. In a time when white supremicist thinking seems to be gaining momentum, this text brings together voices ranging from tenured university professors to skinheads and prison inmates to discuss the "white question" in America. Through popular culture, current events, history and personal life stories, the essays analyze the forces that hold the white race together - and those that promise to tear it apart. When a critical mass of people come together who, though they look white, have ceased to act white, the white race, so the text argues, will undergo fission and former whites will be able to take part in building a new human community.

eBook available with sample pages: HB:0415913926

Examines how youth is being increasingly subjected to racial stereotyping and violence in various realms of popular culture, especially childrens' culture.

Are representations of violence in youth culture racially coded? Does 'urban youth' mean 'black criminals'? What are the social and political implications of stylized, cinematic violence? Fugitive Cultures examines the racist and sexist assault on today's youth which is being played out in the realms of popular and children's culture. Carefully interrogating the aesthetic of violence in a number of public arenas - talk radio, Disney animation, and in such films as Pulp Fiction, Kids, Slackers and Juice - Giroux challenges cultural workers and other progressives to help reverse the attack on those who are most powerless in American society.

How do the Jews of Post-Holocaust, post-communist Europe-east and west-regard themselves? Do they perceive themselves as a religious minority, an ethnic group, or simply as ordinary members of the wider European cultures in which they live? How do they regard the wider non-Jewish community, and how do they relate to the Jews of other European countries? To what extent is Israel a factor in forging these relationships? The contributors to this book are authorities in their respective subjects, and all have significant international reputations. Together they cover a wide range of topics from different perspectives. Among the problems considered are: what the future holds for the Jews of Europe; what it means to be Jewish in the countries of eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, and Hungary are considered in detail by local experts); hopes and uncertainties in religious trends; and the likely development of interfaith relations, as seen by both Jews and Christians. A well-argued introduction identifies the points of convergence, the contradictions, and the myths implicit in the different analyses and teases out the main conclusions and implications. Authoritative and accessible, this book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to know about the contemporary concerns of the Jews of Europe. Published for the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. CONTRIBUTORS: Geoffrey Alderman, Max Beloff, Margaret Brearley, Julius Carlebach, Mikhail A. Chlenov, Sergio DellaPergola, Evyatar Friesel, Pier Francesco Fumagalli, Konstanty Gebert, Daniel Gutwein, Andras Kovacs, Igor Krupnik, Norman Lamm, Jonathan Magonet, Elisabeth Maxwell, Stephen H. Miller, Jonathan Sacks, Dominique Schnapper, Eliezer Schweid, David Singer, Norman Solomon, Shmuel Trigano, Jonathan Webber, Robert S. Wistrich.

The very word "England" conjures up a multitude of images: from cricket and warm beer to grey industrial towns. Whatever Englishness is, it cannot be defined purely by geography.
The first half of the twentieth century, which saw two World Wars, the decline of the British empire and worldwide economic depression, was a time when concepts about national identity were especially controversial. "Writing and Englishness: 1900-1950" is an absorbing and innovative collection of writings which explore the debates surrounding Englishness during those problematic times. Issues explored include the ideas and ideals of Englishness; versions of rural England; war and national identity; and culture and Englishness. These fascinating pieces are gathered from a wide variety of sources such as diaries, political speeches, literature and journalism.