1,721,017 research outputs found
More Bennetton than barricades? : the politics of diversity in Europe
No full textDiversity, apparently, also claims its victims. In the Financial Times in September 2006, one of them took a stand, using the opportunity of an ‘answers to problems’ column to stubbornly declare, as the headline reads, “I’m not racist, but I had to speak out”. His testimony is as follows: I am a white, British, male MBA student at a US business school. When we had our class picture taken for the school’s brochure all the women and the ethnic minorities
were arranged at the front, and the white males were barely visible. Soon afterwards we had a class on diversity, and I mentioned that the photograph was not representative and was immediately attacked by everyone. I am a meritocrat but now I have acquired the undeserved reputation of a racist and sexist. Should I have kept quiet? What are we to make of this complaint, and the urgent imperative to speak out? Beyond illustrating the pronounced tendency of the privileged to seek forms of compensatory victimhood – in defence of their privileges – this snapshot captures ambiguities and tensions in the increasingly prevalent idea of ‘diversity’. In turn, it is the prevalence of this idea, and the implications of these ambiguities and tensions for radical and progressive social politics in Europe, that is the subject of this introduction
Accidental cosmopolitanism: connectivity, insistence and cultural experience
Get PDFProcesses of globalisation are often associated with a burgeoning consciousness of interconnectedness and interdependence between people in the majority and minority worlds. Areas of everyday life, such as consumption and travel, are held to be increasingly informed by the realisation that micro-practices implicate the person in relation to global Others. It is argued that rhetorical ideas of global awareness - as well as the theoretical assumptions that underpin them - depend heavily on rationalist notions of an unfurling consciousness, and inadequately consider the ambivalences engendered by informational overload, non-linear processes and the unintended consequences of globally significant actions. Thus prevalent ideas of acting ethically in globalised societies are not based on considerations of how people may construct the ‘globe’ as a shifting, imagined and incoherent context.
The thesis proposes a new understanding of the idea of imaginative geography to conceptualise the ways in which living in interdependence involves a constant tension between implication and understanding. This is exemplified by the ways in which contemporary tourism - for political, cultural and environmental reasons - has become an experience of accidental cosmopolitanism for many; the experience of becoming unavoidably aware of one’s interconnections in a context where leisure normally guarantees insulation from them. As a case study the thesis analyses the construction of the Caribbean as a particular type of touristic space embedded in western images of the non-modem paradise. Field work in St Lucia reveals a fine-grained picture of the ambiguous ways in which touristic images are mediated, re-accented or contested, and how fantasy spaces can never be insulated from wider socio-political dynamics. It concludes by examining the import of these theoretical innovations and the fieldwork observation for discussions of globalisation and non-formal education
The Practice of Intercultural Communication:reflections for professionals in cultural encounters
No full textInterculturalism and multiculturalism in lreland: textual strategies at work in the media landscape
Get PDFThis essay is based on qualitative research undertaken by the Working Group on Media and Interculturalism, based at Dublin City University. The working group is a series of ongoing research projects exploring recent initiatives in the Irish media that have introduced and activated discourses on multiculturalism, interculturalism, anti-racism, diversity and citizenship. The purpose of this project was to explore how the Irish media is contributing to structuring (and normalising) the discourses in which, and through which, public understandings of and responses to socio-cultural changes are being formed
The Whiteness of Innocence::Charlie Hebdo and the Metaphysics of Antiterrorism in Europe
No full textGlobal Theory and Touristic Encounters
Get PDFAccording to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the tourist industry is providing
one in nine jobs and eighty per cent of travellers come from just twenty countries. In
other words, in a changing global economy, tourism is a matter of economic imperative
for the Majority World, and privileged mobility for the Minority.
The economic dependency of the Eastern Caribbean on tourism has been well-
documented (Ferguson 1997, Lea 1998, Patullo 1996). A large element of its
attractiveness depends on its connotations of paradise in the Minority World, and
therefore it is an economic necessity that paradise is continually simulatable. The
widespread development of all-inclusive resorts, or what Bauman has termed
‘reservation-style experiences’ (1998: 58), organises social space as a simulacra of widely
circulated images, and it is a structuration which approaches culture as a factor of risk
and uncertainty. Furthermore, not only does a large amount of tourist/host contact take
place within this confinement, but it is increasingly the normative setting for
representations of the Caribbean in media texts.
In this paper I do not wish to re-examine arguments concerning the social
unsustainability of this form of tourism, as I think that can be taken as read. My focus
will be the way in which this kind of tourism provides a framework for imagining and
gazing upon the Caribbean, and the problems this presents for island identities. Central
to this is the question of identity and globalisation, that nebulous process which drives
the increase in the type of tourism which is under discussion. An influential current in
global theory is to analyse the way in which processes engendered in the economic
sphere result in cultural phenomenon which are delinked from any simplistic notion of
economic causality. While this is generally sustainable, I wish to argue that the precise
form of tourism which defines the Caribbean’s entry into this global market has a
structuring influence on the cultural, precisely because it is the cultural which has been
fundamentally commodifie
Racism and media, in a moment of crisis and opportunity
Get PDFThis article provides the author's reply to the four book responses by Dreher, Georgiou, James and Saha. The discussion focuses on how their analytical engagement with the book's treatment of the ambivalences of digital media culture raise pertinent questions for focusing on anti-racism in media work and practices. It does so while reflecting on the extraordinary conditions of antiracist protest and revolt during which it was written in June 2020
Backlash! Just in Case: ‘Political Correctness’, Immigration and the Rise of Preactionary Discourse in Irish Public Debate
Get PDFIn the shadow of the gulag
Someone had to speak out. On September 27th and 28th 2006, the Irish
Times prominently advertised the publication of an article by William
Reville on the 28th entitled 'How the culture of political correctness is
damaging academic freedom'. After an undisclosed period of no doubt
admirable restraint, Reville was motivated - through personal academic
embarrassment and in defence of science - to take a stand against the intolerant
orthodoxies and illiberal rigidities that have calcified universities
everywhere. Political correctness, or PC as he terms it, is an 'intolerant and
deeply dodgy' ideology characterised by 'very tolerant attitudes on issues
such as gender, race, sexuality and the environment', and based on an 'ethical
theory' of relativism. Relativism, he explains, holds that there is no such
thing as superior knowledge or 'higher standards in human choices', thus
' ... if a pre-modern jungle tribe believes that the moon is a luminous
lantern suspended by the gods above the tree-tops, relativism proposes that
this knowledge is just as valid as the scientific understanding that the moon
is a satellite of the earth that revolves around our planet'
Media transnationalism in Ireland: an examination of Polish media practices
Get PDFA divergent range of Polish-language and Polish-oriented media has developed in
Ireland since May 2004. These media, and the practices that produce and engage with
them, cannot adequately be analysed within conventional categories such as ‘ethnic
minority media’. Drawing on qualitative work conducted with Polish journalists and
media workers, this article examines Polish media as an emerging transnational field,
shaped by a reflexive awareness of the extent of transnational media flows within
Polish social networks. It suggests that this field can be approached, and further
research based, on concepts of immanent transnationalism, multi-modal address and
multicultural reflexivity. Given the incipient condition of transnational media research
in Ireland, the article draws on current debates in diasporic and transnational media
research to argue that future research should transcend the reductive tendencies of
‘methodological multiculturalism’, and attend to the ways in which transnational
practices negotiate situated political discourses concerning migration
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