Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

Recently Published in the Diversity Journal

diversity_front

Recently published papers in The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations include:

We Are One

we-are-oneBy Joanna Eede, in Guernica

August 9 is International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. With an indigenous uprising last month in Brazil, Survival International’s Joanna Eede celebrates the world’s first peoples in a new book.

Each tribal society is unique. Many, however, have an ancient trust in the harmony between man and nature and the belief that for nature to endure, a long-term attitude to the caretaking of the Earth is fundamental. The Iroquois of North America always consider seven generations ahead in their decision-making—a philosophy echoed by Gana Bushman Roy Sesana, when he says, “We are not here for ourselves. We are here for our children and the children of our grandchildren.”

To read more…

Diversity Journal Submissions Open for 2011 Volume

diversity_frontWe are accepting submissions for the 2011 volume of The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations.

The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations creates a space for discussion for anyone with an interest in, and concern for, mediating cultural difference and diversity. The journal examines the realities of difference and diversity today, empirically and critically as well as optimistically and strategically, touching upon the topics of globalisation, identity and social group formation. At a time of virulent reactions to difference and globalisation (ethnonationalism, racist backlash, parochialism and protectionism), there is a pressing need to reflect critically on the shape and the possibilities of the normative agendas of diversity and globalism. The journal is a place for thinking about and discussing these pressing matters, and in ways that range from the ‘big picture’ and the theoretical, to the practical and everyday business of negotiating difference and diversity in organizations, communities and civic life.

The journal is relevant for academics, educators and research students in the fields of globalisation, nationalism, anthropology and cultural studies, tourism studies, ethnic studies, indigenous studies, gender studies, disability studies, gay and lesbian studies, diversity management; public administrators and policy-makers; private and public sector leaders: diversity management, equal employment opportunity, human resource development and workplace trainers and change agents—anyone with an interest, and concern for, mediating cultural difference.

Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.

Paper submission guidelines and timelines are available online.

Anti-mosque sentiment rages far from Ground Zero

3348278nyc-mosque-falloutsff From Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com

One of the most under-reported political stories is the increasingly vehement, nationwide movement — far from Ground Zero — to oppose new mosques and Islamic community centers.  These ugly campaigns are found across the countryin every region, and extend far beyond the warped extremists who are doing things such as sponsoring “Burn a Quran Day.” And now, fromCBS News last night, we have this:

Fire at Tenn. Mosque Building Site Ruled Arson

Federal officials are investigating a fire that started overnight at the site of a new Islamic center in a Nashville suburb.

For more…

On Caste Privilege

on-caste-privilegeFrom Namit Arora, in 3 Quarks Daily

An early goal of British imperialists in India was to create a class of local elites in their own image. They would be, wrote Macaulay, ‘interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’ An elite class did emerge, not surprisingly from the socially dominant upper-caste Hindus of urban India.

These elites, chin-deep in caste identities, saw themselves as innately superior to other Indians, mirroring the class- and race-based prejudices of the British. No wonder they got along so well. Later, when these Indians opposed the British, they used the same language of political rights and liberalism that the Europeans preached at home but didn’t practice in their colonies.

To read more…

Diversity Journal, Volume 10, Number 1 now available

diversity_front

The first issue of Volume 10 of The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations has been published.

Volume 10, Number 1 contains:

Continue reading ‘Diversity Journal, Volume 10, Number 1 now available’

Diversity Journal - Become an Associate Editor

As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations all submissions are sent for peer review, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.

In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have reviewed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.

If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations, please email journals@ondiversity.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.

Series: On Diversity

We are accepting book proposals for the imprint On Diversity.

Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.

Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.

If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.

Eleventh International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations

cape_town1Location and Date

The 2011 Diversity Conference will  be held in Capte Town, South Africa at The University of the Western Cape from 20-22 June. For more information and important conference updates, please visit www.Diversity-Conference.com

Call for Papers

If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, please click here. Once you are ready to submit your proposal, you can do so by going here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.

Registration

Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal.  Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2011 Diversity Conference, please follow this link.

Themes

This year’s special theme is Social Justice, Care, and Difference. For more information on our overall themes for the Diversity Conference, please click here.

Gaygentina

gaygentiaFrom n + 1

Two nights ago I met up with some friends here in Buenos Aires to take a look at our massed opponents, the thousands of people rallying in front of the giant Italianate Palacio de Congreso to demand that the Argentine senate reject a law, already approved by the lower house, granting full marriage rights to gay couples. The anti-gay marriage crowd on Tuesday night seemed to consist largely of families and their kids, though there were also a lot of priests in their cassocks. Seeing the sullen teenagers in the crowd—even the genuinely homophobic ones probably felt they had better things to do—it was impossible not to wonder which of them were gay, and knew it, and were standing around with their hearts in their boots.

To read more…

My Eureka Moment: Nothing to Lose but the Washing Up

femaleeunuchFrom Sally Feldman, in Times Higher Education

When I started university in the late 1960s I thought I had the world at my feet. We all did. We were the children of the post-war boom, of swinging London and psychedelia. We were the ones who were going to change the world and it really seemed as if the transformation had begun, especially for women. In our first term, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the album of the moment. We’d all pile into Lynn Barker’s room in hall to absorb the full virtuosity of the Beatles on her stereo. We also tried to squeeze into Gary Arlott’s room to squeal at Monty Python on his TV, but failed because girls weren’t allowed in men’s halls in the evenings. That outrage led to our first political sit-in. While other campuses were raging against the Vietnam war and the Kent State shootings in the US, we campaigned against the university’s paternalistic residential strictures.

To read more…

A Question of Faith

questionoffaithFrom Faisal al Yafai, in The National

A few days before the Netherlands goes to the polls, Aicha Bennani is riding through the Dappermarkt, an open-air market in east Amsterdam that sells spicy Indonesian food, Moroccan fabrics and products from all around the world. The serious faces of politicians stare down from billboards, marked with the colourful, if confusing, initials of the main parties – CDA, VVD, PvdA – and covered again with bright flyers advertising nightclubs.

“We never see the PVV here,” she says, referring to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party of the populist politician Geert Wilders. “They wouldn’t dare. We have a lot of students and artistic people here and they would just laugh. No, they go to places where there are no Muslims, where they can say what they like.” And with that, she smooths some of her hair back beneath her headscarf and rides off.

To read more…

Infidel

ayaan10a

Joel Whitney interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in Guernica

Islam’s toughest critic on her new book, the Axis of Evil, and the neoconservatives’ moral high ground.

Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969, Ayaan Hirsi Ali gained international recognition as the controversial member of Dutch Parliament who wrote a short film attacking Islam, called Submission Part 1. In the film, images of bare women’s limbs are scrawled with verses of the Qu’ran which—Ali has said—denigrate and subordinate women. As a result of the film, its director, Theo van Gogh was killed in cold blood on the streets of Amsterdam, a note jabbed into his chest threatening Ms. Ali (and the United States to boot) with a fate like van Gogh’s. Van Gogh’s last words were, “Can’t we talk about this?” After the incident, Ms. Ali spent several months virtually kidnapped by her security team.

To read more….

Arizona School Demands Black and Latino Students’ Faces on Mural Be Changed to White

Here we go again...

Here we are, again.

From Wonkette

Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly. Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.

To read more…

The French Anti-Burqa Jihad

shikhadalmiaBy Shikha Dalmia, in Forbes

Secularism does not justify eliminating women’s clothing choices.

Having grown up in a traditional Hindu family in India, I understand something about the domestic pressure for public modesty on girls. Jeans came into vogue just when I hit puberty. But for years the only way I could step out of the house in them without risking a minor nuclear explosion by my dad–a fairly urbanized doctor–was if I slipped on a blouse loose enough to smother my front and long enough to conceal my behind. A bathing suit–much less a bikini like the one that the first Muslim Miss USA wore to victory this week–was out of the question. Hence I never learned to swim.

To read more…

Grilling Grasshoppers, Communicating Non-verbally and Creating Cinematic Spaces: Colin Marshall Talks to So Yong Kim, Director of Treeless Mountain

6a00d8341c562c53ef0133edb96d33970b-800wiFrom Colin Marshall, in 3 Quarks Daily

So Yong Kim is the director of the feature films In Between Days and Treeless Mountain. The former, a portrait of the alienation of a teenage Korean girl newly relocated to Toronto, won a Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The latter, the story of a pair of very young sisters sent away from their home in Seoul to live with their remote, alcoholic Aunt and then with their grandparents in the countryside, won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, the Muhr Award at the 2008 Dubai International Film Festival and the Netpac Award at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas.

Because the film has its, to an American, foreign setting — I talk to a lot of Americans about it, and they do get caught up in the fact that it is in Seoul and Heunghae, the foreignness of certain elements of it. — how much did you want to make a story rooted in its geographic location, rooted in place, and how much did you want to make one in themes that are more universal: childhood, sisterhood?
Ideally, what I always dreamed of, making this film — I wanted to set it in my hometown, which is Heunghae, Korea. When I first started writing the story in 2003 or so, certain events were based on my memory of the location when I grew up there in the seventies. It’s quite a while back, so I wasn’t really sure how much the country had changed or how much my hometown had changed. I just started from very basic elements in the story that I wanted to focus on, which were the journey these two sisters take, and the emotional journey they go through. In that sense, that’s much more universal than the story being just a Korean story.

To read more…

Disability Ethics

disabilityethics_frontDisability Ethics: A Framework for Practitioners, Professionals and Policy Makers by Paul Jewell is now available from the On Diversity imprint.

The social arrangements with which we are familiar work fairly well for most of us most of the time. We work, we earn, we pay taxes. We engage professionals when we need their advice. We expect that there will be doctors whose expertise can be relied upon if we are ill, that there will be schools staffed with knowledgeable teachers and courts presided over by fair judges. We vote for politicians who offer policies we favour. We require government to provide us with security, protect our freedom and assist those of us who cannot help themselves.

These social arrangements rest on some shared assumptions and values. They assume that people are, by and large, free, self-determining persons who respect each other’s rights and independence, and co-operate rationally and productively with each other. Our social arrangements are challenged when this assumption does not hold. What policies should government have in place for people who are not independent, or not rational, or not co-operative, or not productive? If, by some catastrophe, through accident, disability or mental illness, you became such a person, how should you be dealt with by professionals and government services? If, on the other hand, you are a professional, how should you go about making decisions for clients who are not well placed to make decisions for themselves? Are there standards of professional ethics that can deal with this situation? Are there ethical standards that can be applied by managers of service organizations, or by policy writers, or by government officials? Are there ethical standards that concerned citizens should demand of government, of service organizations and of professionals who provide for vulnerable people?

Drawing on the stories of people with disabilities and their service providers, Paul Jewell explores ethical theories, tests their practical application, and offers strategies essential to practitioners, managers, policy-makers and professionals who provide services to people with disabilities.

American Ideal

e788ce06-4e86-11df-b48d-00144feab49a

By Katie Roiphe, in Financial Times

For a long time people have been trying to define the American woman, mostly for the purpose of mocking, dismissing or putting her in her place.

“There is no such thing as ‘the fast girl’ in America,” says one of Henry James’s Englishmen, meaning, of course, that all American girls are fast – and this is more or less the view of an ambitious new Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To read more…

Redesigned Newsletter: Launched Today

Today the International Conference on Diversity Newsletter will be relaunched - marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Diversity Community. The Diversity Newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.

It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Diversity Community.

If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to http://www.ondiversity.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.

If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at
support@ondiversity.com

Toni

judt_tony-200511032_gif_230x489_q85By Tony Judt, in NYR Blog

I never knew Toni Avegael. She was born in Antwerp in February 1926 and lived there most of her life. We were related: she was my father’s first cousin. I well remember her older sister Lily: a tall, sad lady whom my parents and I used to visit in a little house somewhere in northwest London. We have long since lost touch, which is a pity.

I am reminded of the Avegael sisters (there was a middle girl, Bella) whenever I ask myself—or am asked—what it means to be Jewish. There is no general-purpose answer to this question: it is always a matter of what it means to be Jewish for me—something quite distinct from what it means for my fellow Jews. To outsiders, such concerns are mysterious.

To read more…

Children Who Form No Racial Stereotypes Found

news2010kids

From Janelle Weaver, in Nature News

Prejudice may seem inescapable, but scientists now report the first group of people who seem not to form racial stereotypes.

Children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS) are overly friendly because they do not fear strangers. Now, a study shows that these children also do not develop negative attitudes about other ethnic groups, even though they show patterns of gender stereotyping found in other children. “This is the first evidence that different forms of stereotypes are biologically dissociable,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who led the study published today in Current Biology.

To read more…

Mexico’s Hidden Blacks

afro-mexicans2

From Alexis Okeowo, in The Economist

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

The first time I felt deeply uncomfortable being black was when I was a kid. My family had just moved to Alabama, and I was in a car with my father and my brother. A white woman with a harshly lined face and brown frizzy hair yelled out a racial slur as we drove by. Dad immediately put the car in reverse and drove over to her as she pumped gas at a filling station. “What did you say?” he demanded. She glared at him and refused to respond. Shocked into silence, my brother and I didn’t say anything for the rest of the drive home.

To read more…

Girls Gone Anti-Feminist: Is ’70s Feminisim and Impediment to Female Hapiness and Fulfillment?

phpthumb_generated_thumbnailjpgFrom Susan Douglas, in In These Times

Spring 1997.

This was the Spice Girls moment, and debate: Were these frosted cupcakes really a vehicle for feminism? And how much reversion back to the glory days of prefeminism should girls and women accept—even celebrate—given that we now allegedly had it all? Despite their Wonderbras and bare thighs, the Spice Girls advocated “girl power.” They demanded, in their colossal, intercontinental hit “Wannabe,” that boys treat them with respect or take a hike. Their boldfaced liner notes claimed that “The Future Is Female” and suggested that they and their fans were “Freedom Fighters.” They made Margaret Thatcher an honorary Spice Girl. “We’re freshening up feminism for the nineties,” they told the Guardian. “Feminism has become a dirty word. Girl Power is just a ’90s way of saying it.”

To read more…

Iceland: The World’s Most Feminist Country

icelands-prime-minister-j-001From Julie Bindel in Guardian

Iceland’s prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, was wrongly credited with being the country’s first female head of state. That honour goes to Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who served as president from 1980 to 1996.

Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.

To read more…

10th International Conference on Diversity

qub

Location and Date

The 2010 Diversity Conference will  be held in Belfast, Ireland at Queen’s University from July 19-21. For more information, please visit www.Diversity-Conference.com

Plenary Speakers



  • Uduak Archibold, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK
  • Jock Collins, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia
  • Grethe van Geffen, Seba Cultuurmanagement bv, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Souad Halila, University of Tunis Al-Manar, Tunis, Tunisia
  • Liam Kennedy, Queens University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland
  • Jack Levin, The Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, Boston, USA

Call for Papers

If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/#ppt. To submit a proposal, see: http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.

Registration

Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal.  Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Diversity Conference, see: http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/register/.

Themes

http://ondiversity.com/ideas/themes/

Accommodations

http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/accommodation/

Conference Dinner and Tours

http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/activities-and-extras/