Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: This session shares the results of a qualitative study that examined how African American college age students describe their culture and why culture might be important to them. Grounded in the narrative tradition of storytelling, this study synthesizes themes from interviews and personal stories in the form of cultural self portraits. These self portraits are personal narratives of culture focused on cultural ideologies, histories, and experiences that influence the contemporary perception of culture among young African American adults. These contemporary ideas are then compared against a historical examination of African American culture beginning with enslavement in America to shed light on how culture has or has not been inherited, passed on, and kept alive in a contemporary world. Can our young people articulate their culture? Do they value it? Has race completely replaced culture? This sense of ongoing and growing cultural efficacy can be understood by considering iculture to be a flame ignited years ago in indigenous lands by our ancestors. Our acts of cultural engagement serve as elements to keep the flame going and growing [wood, charcoal, bark in the form of ritual, story, tradition]. And the fire—the culture itself—is the source that warms the chilliest of climates and energizes generations of people of color to live, survive, and thrive. The viability for cultural education programs to contribute to the needed growth in cultural efficacy among African American students offers cultural practitioners an important opportunity to gain more information and establish more intentional cultural practice.

Publication Type: Roundtable Presentation
Abstract: This literature review examined research on teacher educators’ uses of culturally marked narratives as mediational tools for preparing teacher candidates to work with students from varying language and cultural backgrounds.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper, which is basically an enquiry into the current debate within International Relations (IR) on the (ir)relevance of culture, reveals how neither the discipline nor international relations as such seem to be as ‘culture blank’ as often claimed, and how the position taken in this debate might have far-reaching implica-tions for the image of international relations. Furthermore, the paper explores how an essentially contested concept like ‘culture’ is fraught with pitfalls. Thus, two main alternative ‘cultural’ approaches seem to have replaced the usual neglect of cultural diversity, resulting in a likewise problematic exaggerated focus on this theme, so that instead of being ‘blind to culture’ like large parts of mainstream IR, these new approaches rather appear to be ‘blinded by culture’. Proponents of the so-called ‘essentialist’ approach to culture appear blinded by a conception of the absolute cultural difference of ‘the Other’, while subscribers to the so-called ‘relational approach’ seem blinded by too much awareness of their own culturally specific perspective. So, even though the recent ‘cultural turn’ within IR has brought a new and welcome awareness of culture and sensitivity to issues of cultural diversity and the representation of Otherness, it seems as if the advocates of a ‘culturalisation’ of IR have until now been better at raising important and too-long-neglected questions, than at offering attractive answers to these. At the end of the paper, I therefore outline a number of alternative and (partly intersecting) avenues to proceed at, arguing that it may be wise even to forget the concept of culture for a while, if we want to continue along the road towards a better understanding of what sensitivity to cultural diversity might mean.

Publication Type: Work in Progress
Abstract: It is hard to find anyone who does not condemn the illegal swapping of digital cultural goods in the public discourse on file sharing networks. Copying is killing the music, the music industry, it hurts national economies and the global economy and terrorist organizations are financed through piracy . But this vision of the Intellectual Property Armageddon is only one way of looking at the impact of file-sharers on the flow of cultural goods. When it comes to small and secluded linguistic cultural communities beyond the global English language universe, file-sharing might have a surprisingly significant impact on the accessibility of cultural goods.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Poised at the turn of the century, we are living in a world where the 'culture of globalization' pervades all walks of life following simultaneous communication through cinema, television, trade and tourism, compressing the political, economic and socio-cultural space in the process. Whereas the 'hyper-globalist' defines the contemporary world in terms of economic globalization and the end of nation state, the 'skeptics' view the whole debate about culture of globalization in terms of a cliché. Though it is premature to assess the impact of culture of globalization on national cultures and identities, it cannot be denied that these no longer remain robust and unsullied. In fact, the global infrastructures of culture and communication have contributed a great deal in the formation of epistemic transnational elite communities; formation of transnational political lobbies and alliances; development and entrenchment of diasporic culture and communities; increasing openness of information and cultural autonomy. Virtually all countries in the world, if not all parts of their territory, and all segments of their society, have now become part of the larger global system in a way. Interestingly, the culture of globalization has led to the emergence of new patterns of global stratification in which some states, societies and communities are enmeshed in the global order whereas others are marginalized. The 'culture of globalization' and 'globalization of culture' strives towards 'deterritorialization' and 're-territorialization' of political and economic power in the era of borderless world and global village. My paper seeks to examine the challenges of multiculturalism and hybrid culture faced by various countries worldwide. They are finding it difficult to contain the demands for group rights based on 'identity politics' within the 'liberal framework'. It is becoming very difficult for them to sustain the demands for 'group rights' based upon rationality and universality within the framework of their existing capacity, leadership, preferences, socio-cultural norms, political and economic development. The methodology adopted is analytical, conceptual and comparative.