Volume 11, Issue 3 contains:

• Towards a Richer Understanding of Cultural Complexity: Examining Diversity and Cultural Identity within Tertiary Teacher Education by Carol Helene Carter.
• Using the Diversity Audit Tool to Assess the Status of Women in the Canadian Financial Services Sector: A Case Study by Wendy Cukier, Shelley Smarz and Margaret Yap.
• Work Values of Various Generations in France and the Netherlands: A Pilot Study by Sophie Hennekam.
• The Self-evaluations of Own Group Research Processes and Final Products: Comparison between University Students in Japanese-only Groups and Multi-cultural Groups by Megumi Morisue.
• The Complexities of Race and Ethnicity: Understanding Diversity in the American Context by Cheri L. Philip, Beverly Araujo Dawson and Tanisha I. Burford.
• Successful Parenting in the Eyes of Orthodox/Moderate Migrant Muslims in Australia by Aminah Mah, Marnie O’Neill and Anne Chapman.
• Multicultural Body Image in Children’s and Young Adult Publishing by Amanda Burns.

• Narrating Student Teachers’ Life Histories in Relation to Identity, Social Class and Learning Spaces through a School-based Learning Project by Micheal M Van Wyk.
• Bilingualism: A Tool for Turning Diversity to Strength between Anglophone Nigeria and her Francophone Neighbours of the West African Sub-region by Anthonia Affiong Dickson.
• Diversity in Heaven: Qur’anic Perspective Beyond Pluralism by Abdulla Galadari.
• Teachers’ Opinion Relative to Inclusion in Spain: A Comparison between Experienced and Inexperienced Teachers by María-Cristina Cardona-Moltó.
• Immigrant Adjustment: The Importance of Humor by Daniel W. Lund.
• From the Souks of Marrakech and the Wandjina Gods: How Travel Writing Transforms Our Visions of the Other by Twila Yates Papay.

Duke University Press ends its influential Series Q this month. It has been an impressive ride since the first book in the series: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark 1993 collection of essays, Tendencies. Rereading her introduction, “Queer and Now,” I am reminded of the potent sense of possibility opened up 20 years ago by the idea of queer theory. The sense of a historical moment is strong in the essay, as its title underscores. Sedgwick’s optimism was far from naïve; the same introduction disclosed her diagnosis of breast cancer, which she lived with and against until her death in 2009. Fittingly, the last volume released by Series Q is a posthumous collection of her remaining essays, The Weather in Proust.

Taken together, Sedgwick’s death, the passage of time, and the news from Duke all seem to be occasions for taking stock. Even before the press’s decision, many in the field were already in a retrospective mood. A recent book in the same series, After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, asked leading queer theorists to look back on the great ferment of the last two decades. The title of the book seems to place queer theory firmly in the past, though the editors, Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, generously shift the emphasis in their introduction: “What has queer theory become now that it has a past?”

The answer depends on how much queer theory is defined by the speculative energy that the phrase itself generated in the 1990s. The label, after all, came into circulation only after the major theoretical innovations that defined it—in the work of Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Leo Bersani, the early Sedgwick, Judith Butler, as well as many others. Those writers had already developed an analysis of sexuality that looked to relations of power rather than to individual psychology or “orientation.” And they had already shown that sex, pleasure, and the formation of sexual cultures posed deep challenges to the normative frameworks by which some kinds of sex are legitimated and institutionalized as the proper form of sexuality. As several contributors to After Sex? point out, queer theory’s intellectual concerns have given rise to newer kinds of work, and are continued under other rubrics.  More…

The commentary stimulated by our November post helps to confirm our view that pluralism is a paradigmatic halo term.  Many of the respondents clearly want to claim the term for their favored purposes; but the details concerning the term’s meaning are as yet uncertain.  Of course, most philosophical terms admit of multiple interpretations; looseness is inevitable, as often the issues are the meanings of the terms in use.  Yet we should aspire to as much precision as is possible.  Resting with multiple well-defined yet conflicting conceptions of pluralism is preferable to the current state of affairs, which is less loose than mushy.  Our aim is to suggest at a very general level what pluralism is by articulating some simple prerequisites for clarifying the term.

There are two criteria that can be employed in our task.  The first would be applicable to any proposed philosophical term.  It has two components.  First, if pluralism is the name of any view at all, it had better be possible to identify some definite philosophical claims that are distinctive of the view.  This is not to say that pluralism must be understood to name some single, monolithic position.  Pluralism can be a philosophically distinctive position, and yet be a view which admits of different varieties.

Sometimes it is helpful when characterizing a philosophical position to identify what those who adopt it are united in rejecting.  So we may state the first component of the first criterion in the following way.  Whatever pluralism is, it had better be a view that is opposed to some other identifiable philosophical position.   To put the point slightly more strongly, whatever pluralism is, it had better be a position that thoughtful people could reject.  A view that only the insane, thoughtless, deluded, and incompetent could reject is of little philosophical significance.  If pluralism is a view worth talking about, it is a view that both says something distinctive and is philosophically debatable.  More…

Photo courtesy of Derek Aylward

People who live at the bottom of the social order, especially at the bottom of more than one of its hierarchies, are frequently condemned to a life of crippling disadvantage. The existence of such mutually reinforcing power hierarchies calls the social order itself into question as a matter of justice. Political movements need to disrupt these hierarchies to overcome injustice.

In the United States, a healthy black politics is indispensable to that task. Black politics—African Americans’ ability to mobilize, in?uence policy, demand accountability from government officials, participate in American political discourse, and ultimately offer a democratic alternative to the status quo—have at times formed the leading edge of American democratic and progressive movements; black visions were some of the more robust, egalitarian, and expansive American democratic visions. This status has been lost.

The decline of progressive black politics is apparent in the Occupy actions that have swept the country to protest economic injustice. There has been black participation, and in some areas, such as Chicago, black efforts to mobilize communities have been aided by the presence of a local Occupy movement. But, for the most part, Occupy has been divorced from black politics.   More…

The latest issue of The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations includes:

• Officially Advocated, but Institutionally Undermined: Diversity Rhetoric and Subjective Realities of Junior Faculty of Color by Victoria C. Plaut, Stephanie A. Fryberg and Ernesto Javier Martínez.
• The Impact of Unemployment on Women with Physical Disabilities in Tamale, Ghana by Augustina Naami and Hank Liese.
• Revisiting the Ideal of Unity within American Public Education Informed by Multicultural Education by Shilpi Sinha.
• The Attitudes of Street Children towards Forgiving their Wartime Oppressors: Sierra Leone by Samuel Hinton.
• Responding to the Globalisation Challenge: A Project for Migrant Families to Maintain their Language and Culture by Franco Vaccarino and Ute Walker.
• “Climbing a Great Hill”: The Process of Integral Diversity Maturity Illustrated in Nelson Mandela’s Autobiography Long Walk to Freedom by Michael A. Raffanti and Toni A. Gregory.
• The Diversity of Three American White Guys: Pathways towards Racial Identity by Joe R. Busby, Tim Hatcher and Jason W. Osborne.
• Stereotype Busters: Literature Featuring Individuals with Disabilities by Poonam C. Dev and Emily M. Labenski.

Volume 11, Issue 2 contains:

• Ancient Wisdom for a New World by Delilah Ferne O’Haynes.
• Effective Strategies for Supporting Doctoral Students by Ilda Jimenez y West and Gokce Gokalp.
• The Political Socialization of African American Children through Literature from the 1970s by Laretta Henderson.
• Power and Control in an Innovative Normalization Project by Michael Wolf-Branigin.
• Rounding the Tables of Legislative Decision Making: Explanations for the Increased Presence of Women in Sub-saharan African Politics by Kimberly S. Adams.
• Beyond Introduction: The Need for Competency in Diversity Training by Lathardus Goggins II and Elisabeth Dowcett.
• NGO Narratives in the Global Public Sphere by Erin Kamler.
• Institutional Commitment to International Students and Their Needs: A Case Study at Southeastern Louisiana University by Estera Pirosca.

• Officially Advocated, but Institutionally Undermined: Diversity Rhetoric and Subjective Realities of Junior Faculty of Color by Victoria C. Plaut, Stephanie A. Fryberg and Ernesto Javier Martínez.
• The Impact of Unemployment on Women with Physical Disabilities in Tamale, Ghana by Augustina Naami and Hank Liese.
• Revisiting the Ideal of Unity within American Public Education Informed by Multicultural Education by Shilpi Sinha.
• The Attitudes of Street Children towards Forgiving their Wartime Oppressors: Sierra Leone by Samuel Hinton.
• Responding to the Globalisation Challenge: A Project for Migrant Families to Maintain their Language and Culture by Franco Vaccarino and Ute Walker.
• “Climbing a Great Hill”: The Process of Integral Diversity Maturity Illustrated in Nelson Mandela’s Autobiography Long Walk to Freedom by Michael A. Raffanti and Toni A. Gregory.
• The Diversity of Three American White Guys: Pathways towards Racial Identity by Joe R. Busby, Tim Hatcher and Jason W. Osborne.
• Stereotype Busters: Literature Featuring Individuals with Disabilities by Poonam C. Dev and Emily M. Labenski.

The latest issue of The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations includes:

• Thrice Othered: The (In)Visibility of Difference by Lindi Maritz.
• Embracing Diversity through Open Doors: Using Social Competency Processes to Build Effective Teaching and Learning Communities by Coral Cara.
• A Theorist Between Fascism and Nationalism in the First Wave of Turkish Nationalism: Nihal Atsiz by Ahmed Baran Dural.
• The Cultural and Economic Divides of Literacy Access: Addressing Barriers and Advocating Change by Tammy Oberg De La Garza.
• Discourses of Religious Diversity: A Paradox? by William Acres.
• Dialogue: The Gateway to Diversity by Keith Cunningham.
• Cultural Intelligence versus Organizational Culture: Relationship between Hungarian Students’ Cultural Intelligence and the Organizational Culture of their Prospective Workplaces by Ágnes Balogh, Lajos Szabó and Zoltán Gaál.
• Diversity and Thermal Comfort in Outdoor Places by Inji Kenawy and Hisham ElKadi.
• The Maori Boarding Schools and Maori Leadership: An Educational Tradition Viewed through the Stories of Te Aute College by James Graham.
• Perceptions of Teacher’s use of English as a Second Language Strategies and Research-based Practices with English Language Learners in Northeast Tennessee by Jasmine Renner.

From Lydia Polgreen at The New York Times…

On his barefoot trudge to school decades ago, a young Ashok Khade passed inescapable reminders of what he was: the well from which he was not allowed to drink; the temple where he was not permitted to worship. At school, he took his place on the floor in a part of the classroom built a step lower than the rest. Untouchables like him, considered to be spiritually and physically unclean, could not be permitted to pollute their upper-caste neighbors and classmates.

But on a recent afternoon, as Mr. Khade’s chauffeur guided his shimmering silver BMW sedan onto that same street in a village in the southern state of Maharashtra, village leaders rushed to greet him. He paid his respects at the temple, which he paid to rebuild. The untouchable boy had become golden, thanks to the newest god in the Indian pantheon: money.

As the founder of a successful offshore oil-rig engineering company, Mr. Khade is part of a tiny but growing class of millionaires from the Dalit population, the 200 million so-called untouchables who occupy the very lowest rung in Hinduism’s social hierarchy. More…

 

From Amy Davidson at The New Yorker, Daily Comment…

Dearborn, Michigan, is the city in America with the highest proportion of Muslims. That is not a new development. Immigrants from the Middle East began arriving in the area generations ago, when jobs building cars were still a lure—which should give a sense of the community’s vintage. Some still work in the auto industry, including Angela Jaafar, who is a marketer, and is married to Mike, a deputy chief in the sheriff’s office. The Jaafars and their children form one of five Dearborn families featured on “All-American Muslim,” a reality show, on TLC, created by some of the same team behind “Real Housewives of New York.” The show has become the target of an ugly campaign by a group called the Florida Family Association, which calls it “propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values.” That someone, somewhere, would yell at the television when presented with images of Arab-Americans getting married or ready for school or running a football practice is sad, but might not be surprising. What is more remarkable, and even alarming, is that the group’s campaign persuaded Lowe’s, the home-improvement chain, to pull its advertising from “All-American Muslim.” More…

Volume 11, Issue 1 contains:

• Embracing Diversity in Rehabilitation by David Ho.
• Practice What You Preach: The Journey of a School of Education toward Effectively Preparing Educators for Diverse K-12 Schools by Susan Warren, Maria A. Pacino and Malia Lawrence.
• Supporting Deaf Learners in Inclusive Education Settings in South Africa by Arina Kemp, Iliana Skrebneva and Deirdré Krüger.
• Different Is Not Deficit: A Philosophical View of Diversity and Identity by Myrtle Welch.
• Are the Female Entrepreneurs of Beauty Salons in India, Victims of Bad Publicity? by Roshni Narendran.
• International Careers across Cultures: A Choice or Rejection? by Neelu Rohmetra and Pallvi Arora.
• Tribal Movements in India: A Threatened Existence? by Aishwarya Padmanabhan.
• Understanding the Social-Emotional Well Being of Undocumented Latino Children in the United States by Kimberly Harrison, Cherie Blanchat and Richard Harrison.
• Diversity Management and Organizational Change: Potentialities and Limitations by Isabelle Barth and Christian Mahieu.
• A Conceptual Framework Review of Social Exclusion, and its Relation with Social Cohesion and Poverty in Europe by Safaa Shaaban.

• Thrice Othered: The (In)Visibility of Difference by Lindi Maritz.
• Embracing Diversity through Open Doors: Using Social Competency Processes to Build Effective Teaching and Learning Communities by Coral Cara.
• A Theorist Between Fascism and Nationalism in the First Wave of Turkish Nationalism: Nihal Atsiz by Ahmed Baran Dural.
• The Cultural and Economic Divides of Literacy Access: Addressing Barriers and Advocating Change by Tammy Oberg De La Garza.
• Discourses of Religious Diversity: A Paradox? by William Acres.
• Dialogue: The Gateway to Diversity by Keith Cunningham.
• Cultural Intelligence versus Organizational Culture: Relationship between Hungarian Students’ Cultural Intelligence and the Organizational Culture of their Prospective Workplaces by Ágnes Balogh, Lajos Szabó and Zoltán Gaál.
• Diversity and Thermal Comfort in Outdoor Places by Inji Kenawy and Hisham ElKadi.
• The Maori Boarding Schools and Maori Leadership: An Educational Tradition Viewed through the Stories of Te Aute College by James Graham.
• Perceptions of Teacher’s use of English as a Second Language Strategies and Research-based Practices with English Language Learners in Northeast Tennessee by Jasmine Renner.