This text offers a conceptual communication approach to defining the cultural self. It focuses upon the concept of "whiteness" and its equation with "being American" and enlarges this to encompass how European Americans and African Americans can be racially marginalized.

Negotiating Cultures and Identities examines issues, methods, and models for doing life history research with individual Americans based on interviews and participant observation. John L. Caughey helps students and other researchers explore the ways in which contemporary Americans are influenced by multiple cultural traditions, including ethnic, religious, and occupational frames of reference. Using the example of Salma, a bicultural woman of Pakistani descent who lives in the United States, and the story of Gina, a multicultural American, Caughey examines how to capture the complexity of each situation, including step-by-step methods and exercises that lead the student interviewer through the process of locating and interviewing a research participant, making sense of the material obtained, and writing a cultural portrait. Arguing that comparison between the subject’s life and one’s own is an essential part of the process, the methodology also encourages the investigator to research his or her own social and cultural orientations along the way and to contrast these with those of the subject. The book offers a practical, manageable, and engaging form of qualitative research. It prepares the student to do grounded, experiential work outside the classroom and to explore important issues in contemporary American society, including ethnicity, race, identity, disability, gender, class, occupation, religion, and spirituality as they are culturally understood and experienced in the lives of individual Americans.

How have cultural policies created new occupations and shaped professions? This book explores an often unacknowledged dimension of cultural policy analysis: the professional identity of cultural agents. It analyses the relationship between cultural policy, identity and professionalism and draws from a variety of cultural policies around the world to provide insights on the identity construction processes that are at play in cultural institutions. This book reappraises the important question of professional identities in cultural policy studies, museum studies and heritage studies. The authors address the relationship between cultural policy, work and identity by focusing on three levels of analysis. The first considers the state, the creativity of the power relationship established in cultural policies and the power which structures the symbolic order of cultural work. The second presents community in the cultural policy process, society and collective action, whether it is through the creation of institutions for arts and heritage profession or through resistance to state cultural policies. The third examines the experience of cultural policy by the professional. It illustrates how cultural policy is both a set of contingencies that shape possibilities for professionals, as much as it is a basis for identification and identity construction. The eleven authors in this unique book draw on their experience as artists and researchers from a range of countries, including France, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, and Sweden.

Immigration is even more hotly debated in Europe than in the United States. In this pivotal work of action and discourse analysis, Riva Kastoryano draws on extensive fieldwork--including interviews with politicians, immigrant leaders, and militants--to analyze interactions between states and immigrants in France and Germany. Making frequent comparisons to the United States, she delineates the role of states in constructing group identities and measures the impact of immigrant organization and mobilization on national identity. Kastoryano argues that states contribute directly and indirectly to the elaboration of immigrants' identity, in part by articulating the grounds on which their groups are granted legitimacy. Conversely, immigrant organizations demanding recognition often redefine national identity by reinforcing or modifying traditional sentiments. They use culture--national references in Germany and religion in France--to negotiate new political identities in ways that alter state composition and lead the state to negotiate its identity as well. Despite their different histories, Kastoryano finds that Germany, France, and the United States are converging in their policies toward immigration control and integration. All three have adopted similar tactics and made similar institutional adjustments in their efforts to reconcile differences while tending national integrity. The author builds her observations into a model of ''negotiations of identities'' useful to a broad cross-section of social scientists and policy specialists. She extends her analysis to consider how the European Union and transnational networks affect identities still negotiated at the national level. The result is a forward-thinking book that illuminates immigration from a new angle.

Modern-day business leaders need to manage diverse global organisations and teams that work in international contexts. This text will assist organisations of all types to manage diversity and promote inclusion in their national and international operations and markets.

"Due to significant political and social changes over the last decade in their countries and worldwide, many scholars in the Nordic nations and in Southern Africa have been researching on 'music and identity' - an area with a paucity of literature. It is our hope that this book will be beneficial to scholars interested in the field of music and identity. This volume is the result of the Swedish South African Research Network (SSARN) project, funded from 2004-2006 by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, under the theme 'Music and Identity'. SSARN was founded by Stig-Magnus Thorsén of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2002 when he invited Nordic and Southern African scholars to participate in a research group focusing broadly on the topic 'Music and Identity'"--Publisher's website.

A comparative study of immigration and ethnicity with an emphasis on the Chinese, Japanese, and Arabs who have contributed to Brazil's diverse mix.