Language,multiple authenticities and social media: The online language practices of university students in Mongolia

This paper seeks to contribute to the current discussion of the sociolinguistics of globalization by revealing youth linguistic diversity from the perspective of the online mixed language practices of university students in contemporary post‐socialist Mongolia. Drawing on sets of Facebook data, the paper firstly argues that the online mixed youth language practices should be understood as ‘translingual’ not only due to their varied recombination of linguistic and cultural resources, genres, modes, styles and repertories, but also due to their direct subtextual connections with wider socio‐cultural, historical and ideological meanings. Secondly, online users metalinguistically claim authenticity in terms of their own translingual practices as opposed to other colliding language ideologies such as linguistic dystopia. How they relocalize the notion of authenticity, however, differs profoundly depending on their own often‐diverse criteria, identities, beliefs and ideas. This shows that, with mixing and recombining at its very core, the translingual practices of modern young speakers provide us with a significant insight into the co‐existence of multiple authenticities and origins of authenticity in an increasingly interconnected world.     

Encountering and dealing with difference: second life and intercultural competence

With increasing cultural diversity as a result of globalization, intercultural competence (IC) to interact and co-exist in multicultural environments is recognized as being very important. Research indicates that cultural knowledge alone, or even being immersed in a different cultural environment does not necessarily lead to the development of IC necessary to deal with differences in behaviour, communication styles, and values and beliefs. Rather, it requires intentional development particularly of critical awareness of an individual’s cultural identity, and the values and beliefs that underpin one’s attitude and behaviour. Providing effective learning and teaching approaches to facilitate development of these affective and behavioural dimensions, challenges traditional pedagogical practices. Second life (SL), a multi-user virtual environment, potentially provides effective intercultural experiential learning opportunities to develop the desired IC by challenging personal beliefs and assumptions underpinning cultural frameworks and identity. This paper evaluates SL as one of the approaches used to develop IC in a first year IC module in a New Zealand university. Based on data from two case studies, it presents and discusses significant findings in terms of using SL and the development of students’ IC.     

Saving the Savior

This article begins with an autobiographical reflection about what sociology has meant to me as an Iranian intellectual. Sociology has enabled me to think critically about my country's politics and culture, appreciating its strengths without overlooking its unjust and injurious aspects. That experience shapes my answer to the question “Saving Sociology?” If there is anything in sociology that I would like to save–in both senses “to keep” and “to rescue”—it is sociology as a critical, reflective discipline, a discipline that not only studies society but also contributes to its change. As the contemporary world moves toward a “global” society, we are increasingly facing the dilemmas of multiculturalism. Sociologists often investigate other societies or (like myself) look back at their own from a spatial and cultural distance. This situation has created a dilemma for many scholars: Should we criticize problems stemming from “indigenous” beliefs and practices of other societies? Cultural relativism argues that different cultures provide indigenous answers to their social problems that should be judged in their own context. While this approach correctly encourages us to avoid ethnocentrism, it has led to inaction towards the suffering of oppressed groups. Reflecting on the relativist approach to sexual dominance, I question some cultural relativist assumptions. Discussing how “indigenous” responses to male domination in many cases disguise and protect that domination, I will challenge the “localist” approach of relativism and argue for a universalist approach.     

The Sublime and Contemporary Popular Culture: The Radical Text in a Post‐Political Era

This paper attempts to re‐examine the question of to what extent is it possible in the contemporary cultural situation for popular media texts such as music videos, mainstream films or television programmes, for example, to embody notions of the radical. Many, now conventional, variants of postmodern theory would seem to suggest the very notion of “the radical” has become an anachronism in a media landscape where the sphere of popular culture has become little other than a generally uncritical, depoliticised and hyper‐commodified terrain, and within which attempts to radicalise this sphere in ways suggested in previous periods are doomed to failure. Drawing upon the ideas of commentators such as Lyotard, Jameson and ?i?ek, the paper revisits the notion of the sublime in an attempt to argue for a critical postmodernism, rather than a more conventional and conservative interpretation of the term, as a means to begin to conceive of new, radical media production.     

Ideology,Context, and Obligations to Assist Older Persons

Are older adults responsible for meeting their own needs, is it their children's obligation to care for them, or is there a collective responsibility to see that older adults have their needs met? The purpose of this study was to examine the normative obligations of individuals, family members, and the government to provide for the needs of older adults. The authors examined how ideological beliefs and contextual circumstances are related to beliefs about obligations to older persons. Data were collected from phone interviews of a sample of 270 adults who were over 40 years old. The results indicate that ideological beliefs were better predictors of normative obligations than were contextual variables. Future research should reflect the complex relationships among ideological beliefs, contextual circumstances, and normative obligation beliefs.     

Generations Linked: A Case Example of Māori Grandparents

This article offers an analysis of the significance of intergenerational living patterns and relationships as the mechanisms by which Pacific grandparents preserve and transmit indigenous cultural values, beliefs, and practices. A case example from a study conducted among Māori grandparents in Aotearoa, New Zealand, serves as the core focus of discussion. Seventeen grandparents were interviewed about their lived experiences in their multiple generation homes. Findings indicate that intergenerational life is a means for linking generations and transmission of indigenous culture to the next generation. Participants discussed their intergenerational relationship with much affection and love for their grandchildren and family. Discussion and implications for future research and practice are provided.     

Shifting repertoires: understanding cultural plurality in policing

The police is one of the most prominent organizations in the frontline of public administration. In order to deal with high external expectations, the organization has been said to develop and nurture multiple police cultures. Applying Grid Group Cultural Theory, or GGCT, we address the following questions: what sets of values, beliefs and practices has the police organization developed to deal with high expectations stemming from their publics? How do cultural tensions play out in real-life practices of policing “under pressure”? We find that cultural patterns described in the general literature on policing can be plotted on the GGCT map. Zooming in on the case of policing in the Netherlands, cultural plurality appears to be not only prominent in the police organization as such, but can also be found in the form of continuous cultural “tap-dancing” – swift, flexible and improvisational shifting – at various levels of active policing.     

Migrant Workers Home and its practices on shaping the culture and community of ‘New Working Class’: a criticism on cultural-political activism in contemporary China

ABSTRACT

New Workers Home (Beijing, China) has been the most important site of activism and organizing of New Workers culture in Mainland China over the past 15 years. Beyond today’s intellectual atmosphere of liberal and ‘left-phobia’ in China, exploring the formation of a New Working Class can give us a new sense of class discourse and imagination of socialist China in the dimensions of both knowledge and activism. Based on my half-year fieldwork in New Workers Home and participant observation in knowledge and activism of New Workers culture, this paper aims at providing an in-depth analysis of the implications and tensions in the Migrant Workers Home’s imagination of New Workers culture and the organization’s energy and internal turbulence in their imagination of the community of the New Working Class, through reviewing their cultural actions focusing on the ‘cultural battlefield’ and community culture of Pi Cun (an urban fringe village in Beijing), their wider actions in social enterprise, ecological agriculture, organizational works among New Workers and their own organization’s internal situation. The outline of the problematics in this paper can be drawn by putting forward the following questions. How is the New Workers culture shaped by Migrant Workers Home? According to the situation of New Workers in contemporary China, what is its imagination of this forming class? How does it intervene the forming of a New Working Class with its cultural activism? By establishing a museum, college, social enterprises and ecological farms, how do these practices show its imagination of labours’ culture and politics? Located in Beijing and facing special political conditions, how does it arrange the guidelines and strategies of movements? What are the dilemmas of these practices, strategies and real politics?     

Kitchen Stories: Patterns of Recognition in Contemporary High Cuisine

How are patterns of cultural production informed by the nature of the field? In particular, I am concerned with how the mode of cultural production mediates relations among creators and, in turn, how these relations affect cultural production. I also inquire into how these two sets of relations are influenced by the connection between the field of cultural production and the larger social world. I rest my inquiry in the field of culinary arts. Drawing on ethnographic research with elite chefs in mid‐ to high‐status restaurants in New York City and San Francisco, where I have conducted 45 in‐depth interviews and observation in their restaurant kitchens, I analyze how actors subjectively manage the institutional conditions of authorship and differentiation through their discursive practices on the mode of cultural production and on their relations with other creators. By analyzing how chefs manage these issues, we will also observe how they subjectively deal with their objective position in the field.     

Contingent Hybridity: The Cultural Politics of Tepoztl‡n's Anti-Golf Movement

In order to maintain some level of local control over both ideological and material resources, local social activists construct hybrid cultures that reflect their simultaneous insertion into local, national, and global cultural discourses. Theirs is a contingent hybridity in that it reflects the specificities of their experience as well as the conscious attempts to resist the homogenizing tendencies of global discourses while not isolating themselves from those discourses. This article analyzes the conflict in the town of Tepoztl?n, Morelos, Mexico, over the construction of a golf course and the ensuing movement against the project. While emphasizing local practices and making use of local communicative networks, movement leaders were also quite adept at moving between the cultural realities of Tepoztl?n and their own experiences outside of the town in order to forge alliances with transnational organizations. As a result, many Tepoztecos now make use of such labels as "environmentalist," but do so within the embedded social and cultural structures of their community.     

Predictors of White Adoptive Parents’ Cultural and Racial Socialization Behaviors With Their Asian Adopted Children

This study investigated the role of White racial identity statuses, cultural and racial socialization beliefs, cultural socialization self-efficacy, and racial socialization self-efficacy in predicting White adoptive parents’ (N = 200) cultural and racial socialization behaviors with their Asian adopted children. Only cultural and racial socialization beliefs contributed to the prediction of socialization practices. In addition, we examined whether cultural and racial socialization self-efficacy would moderate the relationship between parents’ cultural socialization and racial socialization beliefs and behaviors; there was no support for cultural or racial socialization self-efficacy as moderators in the beliefs–behaviors relationships. Finally, findings revealed that parents were more involved in cultural socialization than racial socialization behaviors, although they did not engage frequently in either type of socialization behavior, particularly racial socialization.     

Learning to be seen: the depiction of encounters between Israeli and newcomer children in children’s literature

Books written for and about children may serve to convey central cultural tenets to new members of society. This paper looks at the depiction of encounters between newcomer and locally born children in contemporary Hebrew literature aimed at teenage readers and presents the major resources and practices by means of which the newcomer protagonists are portrayed as coming to find their place in the new society. The paper suggests that, rather than introducing Israeli‐born readers to newcomer cultures, as might be expected in the current ideological climate of cultural pluralism, these books serve as a means of conveying to children and young people socially sanctioned modes of coming to belong to Israeli society.     

The love bug and the melancholic drag queen or a reflection on the cultural/political “grounds” of subjects as sexual

The notion of the subject and its formation has long been at the centre of discussion in critical theory. Identity discourse constructed a passive subject made up of qualities such us gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and age. Poststructuralist thought on the other hand invested its critical mind in producing a mobile subject, one that is both the product and the producer of practices, power and processes. While identity discourse put qualities such as “sex” at the centre of its analysis of subject formation and produced a sexual subject, poststructuralist thought emphasised “bodies and pleasure” and produced the subject as sexual. This article addresses the formation of the subject as sexual through an everyday practice that forms a dominant part of our contemporary computerised era, namely that of the opening of an e‐mail. It reads the effects of the “Love Bug”, the e‐mail that infected millions of computer systems on the 4th of May 2000, so as to assess the extent it produces a different subject sexual than the one already promoted in poststructuralist thought. Butler’s notion of “gender performativity” (a dominant concept in relation to the subject as sexual) and her allegory of the melancholic drag queen are evaluated through ?i?ek’s critique and the example of the “Love Bug” e‐mail. This produces a different reading of the subject as sexual: one that understands sexual pleasure as being at the foundations of subject formation.     

Cultural Bodies in Bolivia's Gendered Environment

This paper approaches the cultural body as a dynamic nexus of interaction between biophysical factors and diverse social environments in Bolivia. The discussion develops insights from four recent studies that explore the beliefs, practices, and relations that give shape and meaning to sexuality and reproductive health in Bolivia. Visions and voices of women and men with varying sexualities and identities shed critical light on a number of common theoretical assumptions about gender.     

Asian students’ perceptions of group work and group assignments in a New Zealand tertiary institution

This study, conducted in 2005 in a New Zealand tertiary institution, examines Asian students’ perceptions of the much‐promulgated cooperative learning concepts in the form of group work and group assignments. Twenty‐two Asian students participated in one‐hour individual face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews. The study found that Asian students valued highly the significance of classroom group discussions where they could interact with students from other cultures and backgrounds, improve their English‐language skills, enhance their cultural understanding and provide them with opportunities to make friends. However, they held intensely negative views about group assignments that required students to complete a project as a group with shared marks determined by the performance of the group. Contributing factors affecting group dynamics included members’ attitudes and willingness to cooperate and contribute as a team, the composition of the group, students’ competing demands on students’ time and attention, heterogeneity from the natural abilities of students, and the varying cultural values and beliefs held by group members. Most Asian students felt disheartened and helpless at having to complete mandatory group assignments. The study suggests that cooperative learning has its strengths and weaknesses. Students’ needs, interests, cultural values, and teaching effectiveness should be considered as a priority in teaching in tertiary institutions.     

In the shadow of the coal breaker: cultural extraction and participatory communication in the Anthracite Mining Region

What stories do ruins tell? What is the legacy of the extractive coal industry? When is extraction complete in a single-industry area? Tied to global capital, fuelling the Industrial Revolution on the labour immigrants, the legacy of extraction in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region in Northeastern Pennsylvania extends into local notions of heritage, memory, community welfare, and place. Tracking (de)industrial life scenes in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region, this ethnographic work follows traces of the past as they emerge and the day-to-day practices that sustained them noting intensities and flashpoints as they arise in daily life. As a particular flashpoint, Coal Region residents processed the demolition of the ruins of Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker, the last anthracite coal breaker built before 1960 and once the largest coal breaker in the world. Residents rapidly produced and shared digital media of the Breaker with and through a large public digital humanities collaboratory that I created and maintain through an active Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AnthraciteCoalRegion) of more than 8000 members and a corresponding website (http://anthracitecoalregion.com). Engaging in community dialogue, participatory communication, and offering critical interpretations, residents wrote accounts about the demolition of the Breaker including its historical and mnemonic relevance, the cultural politics surrounding it, and the ethical dimensions of its extraction from the landscape by a mining company engaged in strip-mining on the surrounding land. These connections and dislocations between situated pasts show affective intensities arising suddenly even though dominant or more official narratives may have overwhelmed them. The sanitizing of the landscape of Saint Nicholas Breaker tries to empty the physical place of the material cultural traces of mining people/mined people to re-extract more coal through strip-mining operations, thereby rendering superfluous the underground miners’ labour by removing the last sign of it - the Breaker - from the landscape.     

The Contribution of Social Behavior to Diabetes and Obesity: Do Health Behaviors Matter in the African‐American Community?

The obstacles experienced by those who are overweight and suffering from associated ailments are immense. This literature review evaluates the health behaviors and the socio‐structural barriers among African‐Americans that contribute to the high prevalence of obesity and diabetes. These include behaviors of African‐Americans that contribute to diabetes such as diet behavior, social behaviors, as well as behaviors that manifest in socioeconomic status. This assessment will be used to provide insights as they pertain to African‐Americans, cultural beliefs and practices, and their impact on the development of diabetes. This review illustrates that many of the aforementioned behaviors are embedded within and are shaped by broader social structures. This literature offers policy recommendations to assist in the elimination of health disparities specifically within the African‐American community.     

Health beliefs of college students born in the United States,China, and India

The authors surveyed 243 urban public university students who were born in the United States, China, and India to compare the health beliefs of the China-born, India-born, and US-born students. Although the China- and India-born students shared beliefs in many preventive and therapeutic practices of Western medicine with the US-born students, they retained some of their traditional health beliefs. This suggests that student health service clinicians should assess students' cultural beliefs and individualize healthcare for students from different countries.     

White Racism,Social Class,and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action

Among scholars in sociology and history, the backlash against affirmative action has been blamed on White working‐class Americans. What has received far less attention is the individual and collective institutional role(s) played by the White middle and upper middle‐class in backlash politics. Given that individuals in these social classes have far greater institutional power than White working‐class Americans, their beliefs and practices deserve sustained critical attention, and, as the few existing research studies demonstrate, White middle‐class and upper middle‐class Americans have played an influential role in backlash politics. Part of the reason for this gap in the literature is that these groups are more difficult to access as research subjects. Gaining access to this population may require working through many levels of a bureaucratic organization designed to protect their time and privacy. Moreover, when interviewed, these Americans are more likely than their working‐class counterparts to mask racist sentiments through the polite language of “color blindness.” Research methods that complement surveys and in‐depth interviews are recommended as strategies for probing White middle and upper middle‐class Americans' deeply hidden beliefs.