Multiculturalism in Turbulent Times


Book Description

This book interrogates politics and practices of multiculturalism and multicultural education in contexts where liberal and critical multiculturalism is under pressure. It examines and interrogates perspectives on multiculturalism and the political and social to diversity in societies in Asia and Europe. It is set against a background of increasing right wing radicalism and pervasive authoritarianism in different parts of the world. These ideologies not only undermine multiculturalism but the potential of democracy itself. The book includes chapters from leading scholars on multiculturalism, interculturalism and diversity around the world. It examines the challenges to multicultural diversity in the Global North, and makes a distinctive contribution by addressing this issue in the Global South societies of Asia, including Myanmar, China, and Pakistan. As such, this book opens up international debate about multiculturalism by providing exchanges rarely heard across borders.




The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Discourse Studies


Book Description

In response to the cultural challenges in society and scholarship, this handbook presents the conceptions, assumptions, principles, methods, topics and issues in the studies of cultural forms of human communication—cultural discourses—by experts from around the world. A culturalist programme in communication studies (CS), cultural discourse studies (CDS), as represented in this handbook, is a new current of thought in human and social science and a form of academic activism, but above all, it is a fresh paradigm of research committed to enhancing cultural harmony and prosperity on the one hand and facilitating intellectual plurality and innovation on the other hand. This handbook is the first of its kind; it is concerned with the identities of, and interactions between, the world’s diverse cultural communities through locally-grounded and globally-minded, culturally conscious and critical approaches to their communicative practice. Contributors apply such insights, precepts and techniques, not merely to discover and describe past and present communication, but also to design and guide future communication. This handbook is ideal for scholars and students interested in cultural aspects and issues of communication/discourse, as well as researchers of other fields looking to apply cultural discourse methods to their own projects.




The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture


Book Description

The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture examines the gothic mode deployed in a variety of texts that touch upon inherently US American themes, demonstrating its versatility and ubiquity across genres and popular media. The volume is divided into four main thematic sections, spanning representations related to ethnic minorities, bodily monstrosity, environmental anxieties, and haunted technology. The chapters explore both overtly gothic texts and pop culture artifacts that, despite not being widely considered strictly so, rely on gothic strategies and narrative devices.




Turbulent Times


Book Description

Compelling discussion of transformations within British Jewry in recent times.




The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen


Book Description

As a linguistic carrier of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization, the Yiddish language is closely tied to immigrant pasts and sites of Holocaust memory. In The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen, Rebecca Margolis investigates how translated and subtitled Yiddish dialogue reimagines Jewish lore and tells new stories where the supernatural looms over the narrative. The book traces the transformation of the figure of the dybbuk—a soul of the dead possessing the living—from folklore to 1930s Polish Yiddish cinema and on to global contemporary media. Margolis examines the association of spoken Yiddish with spectral elements adapted from Jewish legends within the horror genre. She explores how all-Yiddish prologues to comedy film and television depict magic located in an immigrant or pre-immigrant past that informs the present. Framing spoken Yiddish on screen as an ancestral language associated with trauma and dispossession, Margolis shows how it reconstructs haunted and mystical elements of the Jewish experience.




Anxieties of Migration and Integration in Turbulent Times


Book Description

How do migration and integration change when ‘crisis becomes normalcy’? This open access book investigates this question in the present context of turbulent times when, instead of dealing with one crisis, migrants, governments and whole societies have to cope within a complex web of multiple unsettling events that create anxieties about migration. Emphasising a plurality of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, as well as a variety of geographical settings in Europe and beyond, the chapters bring new insights into migrations produced by global political events, national political shifts, economic downturns and the Covid-19 pandemic. Special attention is given to both migrants’ experiences and policy outcomes. The result is an impressive rethinking of the concepts and terminology applied to migration and integration, of interest to students, social scientists, and policy-makers.




Convivial Cultures in Multicultural Cities


Book Description

The large-scale migration brought about by the expansion of the EU over a decade ago led to migration from less ethnically diverse countries to multicultural and super-diverse societies. This book examines the complex encounters between Polish migrant women and local populations in Manchester and Barcelona, with attention to the ways in which difference is negotiated and managed through everyday practices of conviviality, which help to overcome hierarchies and create elements of sameness. Illustrating how cultural differences may become important resources for interaction that facilitates positive relationships, Convivial Cultures in Multicultural Cities draws on the narratives of Polish migrant women to shed new light on everyday social relations between migrant women and local populations, including settled ethnic minorities and other migrants. In doing so, it contributes to our understanding of the positional nature of racial identification and complicates our ideas of whiteness and privilege.




Contested Belonging


Book Description

Contributions address the sites, practices, and narratives in which belonging is imagined, enacted and constrained, negotiated and contested. Focussing on three particular dimensions of belonging: belonging as space (neighbourhood, workplace, home), as practice (virtual, physical, cultural), and as biography (life stories, group narratives).







Language Learners as Ethnographers


Book Description

This book looks at the role of cultural studies and intercultural communication in language learning. The book argues that learners who have an opportunity to stay in the target language country can be trained to do an ethnographic project while abroad. Borrowing from anthropologists' the idea of cultural fieldwork and 'writing culture', language learners develop their linguistic and cultural competence through the study of a local group. This book combines a theoretical overview of language and cultural practices with a description of ethnographic approaches and materials specifically designed for language learners.