1,720,957 research outputs found
Adolescents' perspectives on multiculturalism in the context of Singapore's National Education programme
No full textMulticulturalism plays an important part in how people think about and organise society, interact with and experience cultural diversity. Increasing diversification brought about by greater and easier movement of people across national boundaries and growing use of social media has amplified the multicultural characteristic of contemporary societies, shaping multiculturalism narratives differently in every society. Hence, governments are constantly seeking policy response to the challenges of increasing diversities in contemporary societies—one of which is through education. As one such major policy response, the National Education programme launched in 1997 focuses on nation building and given that Singapore is a self-described multiracial/multicultural society and that multiracialism is written into the Constitution at Singapore’s founding in 1965, serving as the core rationale for many policies, the importance of multiculturalism and its place in the National Education programme is thus not unexpected.This study is an attempt at examining and understanding adolescents’ perspectives on multiculturalism, which have been largely overlooked, in the context of Singapore’s National Education programme. Building on the theoretical work of Hartmann and Gerteis’ Two-dimensional Framework for Visions of Difference, this study reframed and expanded the framework, informed by literature on multiculturalism, into a Two-dimensional Framework for Multiculturalism Forms. The updated framework follows the two sociological dimensions of social cohesion and social integration. Using a qualitative interview approach, data collected from ten adolescent participants surfaced a total of 13 Multiculturalism Perspective Themes. Adolescent participants were chosen because they are the beneficiaries of multicultural education policies which prepare their entry into an increasingly multicultural society.These findings show that adolescents’ multiculturalism perspectives indicate an individual-based interactive pluralist multiculturalism that is inclined towards intercultural interaction and deeper cultural understanding. A key finding is that social integration, and the consequent social harmony, is understood by the participating adolescents as a primarily individual responsibility, albeit disciplined and shaped by laws and norms. Multicultural issues are framed as the fault of the individual racist and/or culturally ignorant person. There is thus a certain blindness or ignorance of existing racial inequalities or injustice. The participants generally have a positive view of the state of multiculturalism in Singapore and expressed a preference to maintain the status quo of the Singaporean multiculturalism on a rationale of keeping the existing social harmony intact. There is an uncritical acceptance of the racial balance and unproblematic understanding of the ethnic Chinese demographic majority advantage. Furthermore, social cohesion is mainly understood by the participants as national cohesion in terms of the Singaporean identity comprising of the officially recognised CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) multiracial model.While schools and the National Education programme are credited for providing youth with experiential learning of other cultures and functioning as a safe platform for discussing multicultural issues, the National Education programme is still mainly seen as surface multicultural education. This suggests that adolescents felt that they are not adequately engaged in deeper and more frank conversations and discussions about multiculturalism in Singapore, hence their lack of relevant vocabulary and criticality of thought in addressing multicultural issues
Systemic racialisation: Singaporean multiculturalism and its discontents
No full textAn often overlooked or underemphasised perspective in discourses on race, racialisation and racism is that of a systemic racialisation of people into “races”. While structures of racism are well studied and developed under the theory of systemic racism, structures and institutions of racialisation receive much lesser attention. However, systemic racialisation can provide conducive avenues for racialised groups to be socially and politically hierarchised, leading to racism despite systemic racism being not necessarily prevalent. Examining Singapore’s well-regulated and efficient state-espoused multiculturalism, this paper describes and deconstructs the postcolonial society’s systemic racialisation in its multiracial model of multiracialism and seemingly successful racial harmony to surface two main discontents, namely that of 1) ethnoracialisation, and 2) conflict avoidance and disempowered dialogue. The paper further illustrates how these two key problems in the Singaporean multiculturalism contributes to normalising racism
The continued relevance of multiculturalism: Dissecting interculturalism and transculturalism
No full textAs contemporary societies experience increasing diversification, the relevance of multiculturalism is increasingly questioned. Growing criticisms of multiculturalism have led to the claim of a post-multicultural era, bringing about the rise of interculturalism and transculturalism as two alternative approaches to the fact of cultural diversity. However, the declaration of a post-multicultural era may have been premature. This paper seeks to provide a conceptual clarification of multiculturalism by refuting two key and related criticisms of multiculturalism: Cultural essentialism and imposed cultural homogeneity. The notion of family resemblance in multiculturalism is explicated to demonstrate the flexibility and viability in its understanding of culture and ethnicity. The key tenants of interculturalism and transculturalism are also examined in the argument for the relevance of multiculturalism.Accepted versio
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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