Monthly Archive for August, 2011

Self Study

Published on August 31, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Natalie N. Abbassi, guest-edited by Nina Berman, Guernica

In each image I’ve incorporated myself twice, once as the Iranian and once as the American.

It has always been a struggle for me to explain myself, who I truly am, and how I should or shouldn’t act in culturally diverse situations. Occasionally I feel confused, proud, and even awkward about how to deal with the differences of my two halves. Am I Iranian? Am I American? Should I be Muslim from my father or Jewish from my mother? Such thoughts and issues are what puzzle me as to which behavior would be most appropriate. I feel that maybe these photographs will answer some questions. Questions people might have, or even questions I have for myself as a person who has lived biculturally and bilingually my whole life.

In each image I’ve incorporated myself twice, once as the Iranian and once as the American. In some of my images I see conflict and in others, harmony between my two selves. This exploration is a growing one and much more work will follow.

To See the Photographs

End of History and the Last Woman

Published on August 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

As The Economist reports this week, many women in the richer parts of Asia have gone on “marriage strike”, preferring the single life to the marital yoke. That is one reason why their fertility rates have fallen. And they are not alone. In 83 countries and territories around the world, according to the United Nations, women will not have enough daughters to replace themselves, unless fertility rates rise. In Hong Kong, for example, a cohort of 1,000 women would be expected to give birth to just 547 daughters, at today’s fertility rates. (That gives Hong Kong a “net reproduction rate” of just 0.547, in the language of demographers.) If nothing changed, those 547 daughters would be succeeded by just 299 daughters of their own, and so on. At that rate, according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations by The Economist, it would take about 25 generations for Hong Kong’s female population to shrink from 3.75m to just one. Given that Hong Kong’s average age of childbearing is 31.4 years, it could expect to give birth to its last woman in the year 2798. (That is some time after its neighbour, Macau, which has a higher reproduction rate, but a much smaller population.) By the same unflinching logic, Japan, Germany, Russia, Italy and Spain will not see out the next millennium. Even China, which has a recorded history stretching back at least 3,700 years, has only about 1,500 years left—if present trends continued unbroken.

To Read More…

Call for Journal Editor

Published on August 30, 2011 in Headline, Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations seeks an editor, or team of editors, for a one-year term. This is an opportunity to make a significant contribution to what we believe is one of the leading journals in its field, the journal’s associated conference and, more broadly, the knowledge-community which the journal and conference seek to serve.

The roles of the editor are to:

  • write an introduction for the Journal volume which would be included in the first issue for the year, and possibly on the website, the newsletter and other appropriate places or for the purposes of marketing and promotion.
  • collate papers addressing a theme of the editor’s choosing into a book, to be launched at the conference at the completion of the editor’s term. The chapters may be drawn from submissions to the journal during this or recent years, and other material as considered appropriate.
  • actively solicit manuscripts for the Journal from well-known and notable members of the community—these would could be refereed if the author wished, or regarded as ‘invited papers’.
  • assist the Commissioning Editor with suggestions of supplementary peer reviewers for specific papers (and this will never be burdensome – note that the Commissioning Editor of the Journal finalizes a majority of the peer reviewer requirements based on thematic matching and ‘mutual obligation’ principles in which all author requested to review up to three other papers).
  • promote the journal throughout their network and other associated networks.
  • maintain regular communications with the community via periodical blog posts to the community website (which feeds automatically to our email newsletter, Facebook and Twitter).

The editor will be offered a complimentary electronic subscription to the Journal, free copies of the book which they edit, an electronic subscription to the book series as well as complimentary registrations to attend the conferences at the beginning and end of their term.

Qualifications

The Editor of the Journal must possess the following attributes:

  • They will have successfully obtained higher degree, and have academic teaching and scholarly research experience in an area related to the subject matter of the Journal.
  • They will have published in this or other comparable scholarly journals.

Applicants are asked to send:

  1. a cover letter outlining their interest and relevant experience, and the ways in which you would propose to enhance the profile of the journal
  2. a curriculum vitae
  3. a special theme outline: a title with paragraph explanation.

Please send applications and supporting documentation to journals@ondiversity.com.

The deadline for applications is 26 September 2011.

Affirmative Action: The U.S. Experience in Comparative Perspective

Published on August 29, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Daniel Sabbagh, BNET

Broadly defined, affirmative action encompasses any measure that allocates resources – such as admission to selective universities or professional schools, jobs, promotions, public contracts, business loans, or rights to buy, sell, or use land – through a process that takes into account individual membership in underrepresented groups. Its purpose is to increase the proportion of individuals from those groups in the labor force, entrepreneurial class, or student population from which they have been excluded as a result of state-sanctioned oppression in the past or societal discrimination in the present. According to legal scholar Sean Pager, “Unlike traditional welfare policies grounded in distributional equity, affirmative action takes its moral force from a corrective justice ideal.”1 It allocates scarce resources so as to remedy a specific type of disadvantage, one that arises from the illegitimate use of a morally irrelevant characteristic. Such measures may result from constitutional mandates, statutes, administrative regulations, court orders, or voluntary initiatives. They extend further than antidiscrimination policy strictly conceived, insofar as individuals are not required to provide evidence of discrimination to benefit from affirmative action. Their goal is to counter deeply entrenched social practices that reproduce group-structured inequality (even in the absence of intentional discrimination) by creating positive externalities beyond individual recipients.2 Such measures benefit groups “with whose position and esteem in society tne affiliated individual may be inextricably involved.

To Read More…

The Devil Still Pirouettes Among Us

Published on August 22, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Fred Zackel at 3quarksdaily.com…

Next week, on August 28, 2011, the National Mall in Washington D.C. will be unveiling the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. This day will also mark the 48th Anniversary of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

America has been unimaginably lucky. Some of our Presidents were great writers, and some were great speakers. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior’s writings, plus his speeches, stand with the best from our Presidents.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Check out his Letter from the Birmingham Jail. He wrote it on whatever paper he could find in jail. Read it aloud. Feel the rhythms on your tongue and hear his voice. See how wide-ranging his intellect was. The depth of his arguments. See how persuasive he was. And the breadth of his empathy for humanity.

To Read More…

Power and Politeness between Native and Non-native Speakers

Published on August 21, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Power and Politeness between Native and Non-native Speakers by Mustapha Taibi is available as part of the On Diversity series.

This book presents the findings of an empirical study on face and power relationships between native and non-native speakers of English. Based on twenty audio-recorded conversations, the work provides valuable insight into communication between native and non-native speakers, especially as far as politeness and interactional dominance are concerned. The underlying hypothesis was that “nativity” would constitute a source of power and that this would be reflected in conversational practices such as politeness strategies and interactional dominance. The politeness strategies covered include attending to one’s interlocutor’s self-image and needs, complimenting, supportive responses and in-group solidarity. Signs of interactional power include topic control, talkativeness, interruption and questions, among others.

Mustapha Taibi is a senior lecturer in interpreting and translation at the University of Western Sydney. In addition to translation and interpreting, he has been lecturing on semantics, pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics. From 2002 to 2006 he taught English language and linguistics as well as community translation and interpreting at the University of Alcalá (Spain). His main research interests are community translation and interpreting and discourse analysis.

Sentimentality or Honesty? On Charles Taylor

Published on August 15, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Mark Oppenheimer, The Nation

The philosopher Charles Taylor is a sadly endangered type: the philosopher-statesman. Born in Montreal in 1931, Taylor studied at McGill and Oxford, where he was a pupil of Isaiah Berlin and G.E.M. Anscombe. In 1961 he returned to his hometown to teach at McGill, and during the next decade he lost four races for the House of Commons, most notably in 1965 to future Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. By the end of the decade, Taylor was sufficiently well-known as a politico that even his writing two successive books on Hegel could not tarnish his public reputation. Taylor later taught at Oxford, then McGill again, and more recently at Northwestern. Over the years his interests have shifted from analytic philosophy to the concrete political realm; he has made major contributions to the fields of human rights, multiculturalism and communitarianism.

Taylor is particularly animated by the problem of Québécois nationalism, which concerns—and perhaps has determined—two of his chief sympathies: liberal democracy and multiculturalism, not just within societies but among them. Those sympathies conflict, of course. On the one hand, Taylor knows that liberal democracies are supposed to treat all people equally; on the other hand, he is sympathetic to his concitoyens’ desire for a French Quebec, an assertion of ethnic chauvinism that mandates legal privileges for one ethnic group and disabilities for another, such as the law prohibiting commercial signs in English.

To Read More…

Hit the Road

Published on August 11, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

“My Mother died,” said the female boss of a Japanese software company, seemingly from out of nowhere, during an interview. “I’m sorry,” I said. What else can one say?

“No, no,” she rushed to explain, sensing that I hadn’t followed her point.

I was interviewing Fujiyo Ishiguro, the founder of Netyear, an online-marketing software firm. We were discussing Japan’s software sector, her company and her decision to go to America for business school. How did her mother fit in?

“It is hard to raise a child in Japan without one’s parents,” she said. “The infrastructure for child care is not well developed.” The grandparents tend to support the mothers during child-rearing, but Ms Ishiguro’s father had also passed away years earlier, she explained.

Then I understood her point—and almost fell out of my chair. I sat there stunned. Ms Ishiguro registered my reaction. For a moment, we both simply sat staring at one another.

“You mean to tell me…you felt it was easier to leave Japan…with a two-year-old son…to do an MBA at Stanford…because you couldn’t access child care in Japan?!,” I mustered, blinking in disbelief.

We continued to stare for another second, till she broke the silence.

To Read More…

Dr. Sneja Gunew to Speak at the 2012 Diversity Conference

Published on August 10, 2011 in Conference, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Sneja Gunew (FRSC) B.A. (Melbourne), M.A. (Toronto), Ph.D. (Newcastle, NSW) has taught in England, Australia and Canada. She has published widely on multicultural, postcolonial and feminist critical theory and is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She was Director of the Centre for Research in Women’s and Gender Studies (2002-7) and North American editor of Feminist Theory (Sage) 2006-10. She was Associate Principal of the College for Interdisciplinary Studies, UBC 2008-11.

She has edited and co-edited four anthologies of Australian women’s and multicultural writings; Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct and A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (1990-91). In Australia, she compiled (with others) A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers (the first such compilation in Australia) and co-edited Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations (1992), the first collection of critical essay to deal with ethnic minority writings in the Australian context. She set up the first library collection of ethnic minority writings in Australia. Continuing her focus on cultural difference, Gunew edited (with Anna Yeatman) Feminism and the Politics of Difference (1993) and (with Fazal Rizvi) Arts for a Multicultural Australia: Issues and Strategies (1994).

Her books include Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994) and Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (2004). Her current work is in comparative multiculturalism and in diasporic literatures and their intersections with national and global cultural formations.

For more information, please visit the Diversity Conference Web-Site.

Still Lonely at the Top

Published on August 5, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

In François Ozon’s latest film, “Potiche”, Catherine Deneuve (pictured) plays a trophy wife, a potiche, who spends her days jogging in a scarlet jumpsuit, making breakfast for her cantankerous husband and writing poetry perched on a sofa. But then her husband, the boss of an umbrella factory, is taken hostage by striking workers. Ms Deneuve takes over the factory and charms the workers into returning to work. She jazzes up the products and generally proves that anything a man can do, a woman can do better.

The film was set in 1977, when the only women in a typical Western boardroom were serving the coffee. Times have changed. These days no one doubts that women can run companies: think of Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, Carol Bartz at Yahoo! or Ursula Burns at Xerox. Sheryl Sandberg, the number two at Facebook, is more widely applauded than her young male boss, Mark Zuckerberg.

To Read More…