Gay men's digital cultures beyond Gaydar and Grindr: LINE use in the gay Chinese diaspora of Australia

ABSTRACT

Recent research on gay men's digital cultures has focused predominantly on Western, English-language-based sites and populations. In the case of Australia, a country with an official multiculturalism framework in place and against a backdrop of significant levels of Asian immigration over the past several decades, a more pluralistic approach is needed to critically interrogate the dialectic between platforms, users and wider sociocultural complexities. To this end, the current paper presents research in progress on the social chat application LINE and its use amongst the Chinese diaspora of gay men in Australia. Drawing on data from participant observation carried out over several months during late 2015 and early 2016 in an Australian-based LINE group for local Chinese gay men, we highlight here how LINE functions as an important intermediary for many Chinese men engaging with gay men's digital cultures in this context. In particular, we show how LINE plays a crucial role in Chinese gay men's engagements with gay men's digital culture in Australia by (1) mediating this group's navigations of new social and cultural environments and (2) remediating their experiences within other platforms central to the broader GLBT community.     

Creating Culturally Responsive Family Therapy Models and Research: Introducing the Use of Responsive Evaluation as a Method

Models of marriage and family therapy (MFT) typically reflect Western values and norms, and although cultural adaptations are made, many models/frameworks continue to be inappropriate or inadequate for use with non‐Western cultures. Worldwide, therapists are examining ways of using MFT models in a culturally sensitive manner, especially when working with clients who are seen as having minority status or perceived as “other” by the dominant group. This essay suggests the use of responsive evaluation as a theoretically consistent methodology for creating and evaluating culturally responsive therapies. This approach rigorously evaluates each unique client/therapist context, culture, power, needs, and beliefs. We describe responsive evaluation and discuss how each component addresses the research needs of examining culturally responsive family therapies. A case illustration is offered delineating the process of conducting culturally responsive therapy with a Cambodian sample using solution‐focused and narrative therapy.     

Bonding and attachment of Australian Aboriginal children

In New South Wales, Australia, there is an increasing emphasis in the children's court on bonding and attachment assessments to determine whether or not a child remains with their carers. Aboriginal children and young people are over nine times more likely than other children and young people to be in out‐of‐home care. There is a paucity of information on culturally appropriate assessments of Aboriginal children in relation to bonding and attachment. Most assessments on the Australian indigenous families are based on the dominant Australian community's perception of what constitutes competent parenting. The question arises as to whether we are making psychologically and ethically sound decisions about whether or not a child remains with their Aboriginal carers based on evidence that is culturally appropriate for Western families but culturally inappropriate for the indigenous families. It is argued that the core hypotheses of attachment theory such as caregiver sensitivity, competence and secure base have to be based on the Australian Aboriginal people's cultural values. The aims of this paper are to explore the current practice on the bonding and attachment assessment of Aboriginal children using a dynamic eco‐systemic approach in the assessment of bonding and attachment of the indigenous people, with an emphasis on the historical, cultural and spiritual contexts. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Culturally responsive teaching in China: instructional strategy and teachers’ attitudes

The aim of this study was to investigate the manner in which teachers facilitate the pedagogical process within a culturally diverse student population. The study focused on two primary schools in China; one located in a more fully developed city in eastern China (Case A), while the other was in a less developed city in rural western China (Case B). This allowed the researchers to compare and analyse the different instructional practices by means of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The findings indicate that: the teachers in Case A demonstrated overall affirmative attitudes towards ethnic minority cultures, as well as towards the students belonging to those cultures. However, the teachers also chose not to mention the specific ethnic identities and cultural differences of the students during the course of their instruction in order to ensure equal treatment for everyone. This leads to a kind of ‘cultural blindness’ in the classroom. In Case B, opinions regarding minority cultures were more varied. Compared with the teachers in Case A, more teachers in Case B found minority cultures to be inferior to the dominant Han culture. Some teachers also, counter intuitively, were of the opinion that the minority cultures were even superior. At the instructional level, school leadership developed courses on local culture and ethnicity for the teaching staff. This was done for a variety of reasons. The strongest evidence to support culturally responsive teaching in Case A does not stem from teaching and learning demands but from the necessity to pursue characteristics that make them distinctive from other schools at the same time, Case B’s practice of culturally responsive teaching was strongly supported by the government and UNICEF. Teachers in both schools indicated that they had integrated their knowledge of ethnic minority groups into the subject matter when it was necessary.     

The sexual in Chinese sociology: homosexuality studies in contemporary China

Through a meta‐literature review, this paper examines the changing contours of Chinese sociology of homosexuality in contemporary China. It unfolds the different theoretical orientations and methodologies that construct the modern male homosexual subject under major socio‐economic and political changes. Chinese sociology of homosexuality started in the reform era and has been dominated by Western knowledge production and the political ideology of the communist party‐state. Fused with the bio‐medical model and the state's modernization project in the 1980s–1990s, the sociological study adopted a functionalist and positivistic approach with survey‐based methodology in the main which focused on the etiology of homosexuality. A new transnational knowledge production of sociology of homosexuality has formed since the 2000s which has shifted towards a constructivist/ post‐structuralist approach and reflexive qualitative methodology. The new sociological study examines the rise of male (as well as female) homosexual identity in China, questions the hetero/homosexual binary and discusses how an individual makes sense of homosexual identity to form same‐sex intimate relationships. By tracing the epistemology of homosexuality in contemporary China, this paper rethinks the dominance of the Western construction and the role of the state in shaping the knowledge of homosexuality and proposes alternative spaces for theorizing Chinese sexual identities, desires and practices.     

Assessing Tradition in Chinese Elders Living in a Changing Social Environment

SUMMARY

Social workers are increasingly challenged to provide culturally sensitive services to older immigrants from diverse backgrounds. Assessment tools developed in the elder's own cultural context can maximize appropriate assessment and planning. This article describes the development of a tool for measuring adherence to tradition in Chinese elders. In Chinese tradition, an elder's purpose, meaning, and self-worth are derived, in large part, from their contribution to family, relatives, and the community. Existing measures of filial piety and acculturation do not capture this dimension. Filial piety involves being on the receiving end of care, honor, and obedience from younger generations. Acculturation is the opposite of adherence to tradition. One thousand five-hundred and two Chinese elders in China were asked questions on mutual aid and intergenerational exchange. Factor analysis extracted nine items loading into two factors reflective of traditional exchange. This measure could prove useful in understanding the effect of traditional beliefs upon various psychosocial outcomes.     

TOO-BLUE: COLOUR-PATCH FOR AN EXPANDED EMPIRICISM

This essay is in part a response to the rhetoric of the ‘two cultures’ revived by the ‘science wars’ conducted in recent years through the mass media against humanities disciplines, especially ‘post-modern’ art, cultural studies, and non-analytic philosophy. The essay focuses in greatest detail on the relation between science and philosophy, arguing that they are in fact complementary activities effectively partaking of the same reality. Although knowledge practices in the humanities draw from their partaking radically different orders of result from those of science (and from each other), they have claim to an effective connection to a shared reality. Humanities disciplines, and even ‘informal’ or ‘traditional’ knowledge practices, can be argued to be realist, empirical enterprises generating modes of validity specific to their manner of result – provided that the definition of empirical reality is generously broadened. An ‘expanded’ empiricism is a ‘radical’ empiricism in William James's sense of taking relations to be as real and as fundamentally given to experience as discrete objects or sense-data. Recognizing the reality of relation nudges empiricism in the direction of process philosophy. The essay reviews concepts of cause and discovery, nature and culture, affect and virtuality, truth and constructedness, taking the experience of colour as a prime example. It combines elements of James's radical empiricism with Whitehead's process philosophy with the poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari with chaos and complexity theory. The resulting perspective converges with Isabelle Stengers' vision of a non-judgemental political ecology of knowledge. An expansive ethics of relationality, of mutual differential belonging, is the natural correlate of an expanded culture of empiricism.     

How Creative Contributions Emerge Over the Lifespan

The starting point for this article is, What are the hegemonic models of man and woman that educational practices are orientated toward in gypsy communities (models that are often in conflict with mainstream schooling institution's models of socialization)? We do not find the collectivism/individualism approach for explaining socialization in minority cultures helpful, for it can lead us to misunderstand the continuous process of change through which communities challenge existing power relations and thereby change society. The alternative proposed here is the analysis of the role of multivoicedness in the process of cultural change, hybridation, and resistance. A set of conversations with members of a Spanish gypsy community give us a “text” where multiple voices contribute, showing a mixed culture where “traditional” voices are in a constant dialogue with “modern” voices. Minority culture cannot be interpreted as a “traditional” culture, for minority culture includes voices of the hegemonic culture in various different forms and provokes hybridation as differentiation, creating a complex framework for children's socialization.     

Meeting immigrant health challenges: An integrated model in New York City

New York City has traditionally been the portal to America for millions of foreign‐born immigrants. Current immigration echoes this past. Each year, tens of thousands of immigrants and migrants enter New York City. These individuals and families come from diverse cultures and health care systems which continue to impact on their health care needs. How can New York's health care system provide culturally sensitive and epidemiologically informed health services to these immigrants? In 1990, with a grant from the Aaron Diamond Foundation, an interdisciplinary group of professionals established the New York Task Force on Immigrant Health. This paper will describe the work of this unique multi‐disciplinary organisation as it seeks to address issues of health status and service delivery to immigrant populations. The paper will discuss specific issues and strategies with respect to a) the development of data bases, b) ethnographic investigations, c) cross‐cultural and structural barriers to care, d) the creation and analysis of models to integrate traditional and Western bio‐technical health care, and e) the informing and transforming of public policy and programs to result in more linguistically appropriate, culturally sensitive and effective health and social services. The successes of the New York Task Force on Immigrant Health, in a relatively brief period of time, provide both a model and a stimulus for other localities and nation‐states interested in preventing illness and improving the health status of their diverse populations.     

Recruiting Arab Fathers in a Center for Children at Risk in Israel

Arab society in Israel is positioned between the traditional, collective values of Arab culture and the more prevalent Western individualistic values of the Israeli society at large. This poses a challenge for the welfare services in Israel, especially in the case of Arab clients, who tend to receive and interpret the social workers' messages as contradictory to their cultural norms. Therefore, recruiting Arab fathers for treatment is a particularly difficult task. The article focuses on creating a culturally sensitive process for recruiting Arab fathers for treatment in a center dealing with Arab families at risk in Israel.     

"Active" and "Passive" Resettlement: The Influence of Support Services and Refugees' own Resources on Resettlement Style

This paper explores the process of resettlement among recent refugees in Perth, Western Australia. We propose four refugee resettlement styles created through the interaction of a number of factors. These factors can be clustered as: (1) the social features of refugees (their human, social, and cultural capital), and (2) the host society's responses to refugee settlers (Australia's resettlement policy and services and the broader influence of the host society's responses to refugees). We propose that refugees approach their resettlement in predominantly active (“achievers” and “consumers”) or passive (“endurers” and “victims”) ways and that these are differentially successful strategies. Medicalization of the refugee experience in Australia is a factor that may influence refugees to adopt a passive “victim role”, so we propose that a greater emphasis during early resettlement should be placed on refugees' own culturally defined priorities such as employment and stable housing. The argument developed in this paper is supported by data from two qualitative research projects conducted in Western Australia. The fieldwork consisted of interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, and targeted refugees from the former Yugoslavia and the Horn of Africa who arrived in Australia during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as resettlement service providers.     

Research perspectives on culturally sensitive science education

Issues of culture and world view, and their impact on students' learning of science, have become increasingly important to science teachers. This paper provides a review of the development of science education research perspectives on culture and multiculturalism within the science classroom. The review draws on cross-disciplinary sources for its understanding and examines the work of Western and non-Western science education researchers. Reflections on the literature provide an insight into the Australian cross-cultural situation as the author considers the effect of culture on her own practices as a science educator and in a multicultural classroom.     

A GASOLINE SCENTED SINDBAD: THE TRUCK DRIVER AS A POPULAR HERO IN SOCIALIST HUNGARY

The author reconstructs the figure of the trucker as an interesting figure in socialist Hungary's ‘history of mentality’. The study outlines how the figure of the trucker and the popular meanings people associated with them, has constituted a post-Turnerian ‘liminoid construction’ that secured them the (ill-)fame of transgression of any kind of border, subversion against any kind of interest different from theirs, or simply just the fame of agents of change of Hungary's post-1956 everyday life culture. Their liminal character's representation had three major fields: Firstly, in books and movies truckers are usually at the threshold between everyday life of socialist Hungary,and life worlds of another countries, cultures, fields of knowledge and pleasures, between the feared and wanted, the unknown and the quotidian well-known. Secondly,their self-representation unveiled a strenuous way of life and continuous pressures represented by conflicting expectations of self-interest, the family, the profession, colleagues, the company, and social norms. Thirdly, an analysis of their usual life situations (on the road, at the border, at home, etc.), highlighted how these culturally constructed environments served as contrasting ‘cultural landscapes’ to the truckers' liminoid figure. An analysis of the role of motors and women in the representation of truckers gave an explanation of the popular appeal associated with truckers. The last section on truckers' contribution to the emerging Hungarian consumer culture in the 1970-1980s revealed major trucker missions such as supplying objects of desire and (perhaps more importantly) images of another cultures; the conveyance of ‘at-hand’ knowledge and skills about other cultures; travel itself; and performance at trendsetting ‘habitual show’ of doing petty business, and more generally, everyday risk-taking and decision making. Probably truckers' most important role was their contribution to the knowledge, attitudes and skills people employed in making up a Hungarian consumer society.     

ETHNIC IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL CAPITAL: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF CHINESE OPERA IN SINGAPORE

This article weaves the trajectory of Chinese opera in Singapore with the country's political development. Starting in 1965, the year of Singapore's independence, it attempts to debunk the myth that national culture is resistant to global culture by describing the state's systematic erosion of local culture. From the late 1970s onward, with economic progress, state fears of “Westernisation” led to a centring of Chinese culture in national culture; this was followed by a mini-revival of Chinese opera that coincided with the emergence of Confucian ethics as national discourse and as a culturalist explanation for the “Asian miracle” of the 1980s. This article shows that globalisation's effect on local cultures is not a straightforward process. Instead, it is a complex relationship where the flourishing of a local culture depends on the changing recognition and valuation of cultural identities, ethnicity, and language as cultural capital. This in turn implicates the structural features of national policies and globalisation processes that determine the recognition and valuation of this cultural capital. The use of “cultural capital” as a conceptual tool to isolate the cultural and social components of Chinese opera demonstrates that a local culture flourishes or withers according to the effects of globalisation and national policies on such cultural and social factors.     

弘扬传统文化 创新德育途径——在高职院校开展中国优秀传统文化教育的思考

中华民族历经数千年,孕育了内容丰富的优秀传统文化。中国优秀传统文化素来重视道德教育,关注个体身心修养,这一特性使中国优秀传统文化具备了强大的德育功能。作为我国当代高等教育的新形式,高等职业技术教育发展的时间还很短,在很多方面还处在不断摸索的阶段。针对高职院校的具体特点,积极探索新的德育工作思路,对高职学生的全面发展会大有裨益。本文对在高职院校中开展中国优秀传统文化教育进行了初步的研究探索,根据高职德育工作的要求以及高职学生的德育需求,将高职德育工作目标归纳为七个重点。针对这七个重点内容,就如何应用中国优秀传统文化更有效地开展德育工作分别进行了论述。在高职院校开展中国优秀传统文化教育还要注意对优秀传统文化的甄别,在教育方法上要注意与时俱进,将优秀的传统文化与现代科技方法结合起来,以取得更好的教育效果。     

Transcultural Differentiation: A Model For Therapy With Ethno‐culturally Diverse Families

This article evolved out of the writer's experience of being an immigrant, a systemic thinker, and a therapist involved in working with individuals and families from many different cultures. It proposes a model of ‘transcultural differentiation’, drawing on Western notions of separation‐individuation (Mahler) and differentiation of self (Bowen), but arguing that these concepts may have equivalents within non‐Western philosophies (e.g. Indian cultural beliefs). The model suggests that families co‐existing with both a culture of origin and an adoptive culture must inevitably change, and that in this process, they necessarily evolve into entities which transcend both culture of origin and adoptive culture. Implications for therapy are explored; in particular, it is argued that the therapist's awareness of, and sensitivity to, the transcultural experience may be more crucial than whether or not she/he shares the client's culture of origin.     

A Burkean analysis of China Is Not Happy: a rhetoric of nationalism

As a sequel to China Can Say No, China Is Not Happy is the bestseller of 2009 in China. The book praises China's post-80s generation for their act of patriotism, condemns the West, in general, and the United States, in particular, for exploiting the Chinese and for causing a global economic crisis. It also criticizes the Chinese liberal elite and overseas returnees for being Western-influenced mental slaves and traitors. The authors of the book call for an abandonment of “literary tone”, advocate a tough stand against Western countries, and envision China as the leader of the world through its economic and military power. This paper examines the major themes and belligerent rhetoric employed in the book through an application of Kenneth Burke's rhetorical concepts of identification, terministic screens, and representative anecdotes. The author of this paper contends that such use of rhetoric demonstrates the language habit of China's political discourse in its modern history, escalates blind nationalism, and widens the gap in intercultural understanding between China and the US.     

Habla Mi Idioma? An Exploratory Review of Working Systemically with People from Diverse Cultures: An Australian Perspective

This paper presents a review of the literature informed by both grounded theory and phenomenology, which explores how culture is addressed in the family therapy field with particular emphasis on Australia. The primary aim of the study is to identify the issues and relevant publications that can inform and guide Australian family therapists in working with clients from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The secondary aim is to provide recommendations that may inform research directions and clinical practice. The results indicate that this challenge is not unique to Australia; indeed the issue is ubiquitous across the Western world. This paper attempts to provide an impetus for future dialogue and to precipitate discussion around the development of a culturally sensitive approach in the Australian family therapy field.     

The Price of 'Free' Trade: NAFTA and the Economies of Border Crossing in George Rabasa's The Floating Kingdom and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Abstract

Under contemporary US immigration policy, the US-Mexico border has become a new 'American Frontier', a 'Tortilla Curtain' that marks the edges of nation and of national knowledge. As a result of such US policies and the increased cultural and political tensions in the area that result from them, the border region has more clearly emerged imaginatively and culturally as, in Gloria Anzaldúa's terms, a 'third country'. This paper analyses that 'third country' and its relationship to an arbitrarily imposed and emphatically enforced political and cultural border in the work of the Chicano writer George Rabasa and the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Both Rabasa and Silko actively map a wide variety of ethnicities and cultures into the physical border region itself, engaging with the complex relationships between culture and nature, community and place. Both also emphasise an increasingly transgressive and transnational perspective. In this context, both writers highlight and expose the indeterminacy, fragility and permeability of borders of all kinds.     

THE INFLUENCE OF HOLISTIC AND ANALYTIC COGNITIVE STYLES ON ONLINE INFORMATION DESIGN: Toward a communication theory of cultural cognitive design

Although studies have linked culture to online user preferences and performance, few communication researchers have recognized the impact of culture on online information design and usability. It is important to ask if people are better able to use and prefer Web sites created by designers from their own culture. We propose that to improve computer-mediated communication, Web site design should accommodate culturally diverse user groups. First, a body of research is presented that aligns East Asian cultures with more holistic cognitive styles and Western cultures with more analytical cognitive styles. Building on this contrast, a theory of cultural cognitive design is proposed as a means of understanding how cognitive styles that develop under the influence of culture lead to different ways of designing and organizing information for the Web.