Back in January we blogged about a competition for documentaries focusing on the multicultural city.  Right now the same organisation is calling for papers for a second festival.  One film I recently came across would certainly fit this framework.  Called, “Hear Every voice: NYC and the National Park Service”, this film is a collaborative effort between filmmaker Stephen Ogumah, the National Parks Service, and sociologists Professors Jerry Krase and Jennifer Adams of Brooklyn College, along with a number of their students.  The central question the film asks is how New York’s national parks can contribute to the experience of urban living, especially for the city’s highly diverse migrant population.

The film brings together the themes migration, multiculturalism, and the uses of urban space, particularly common space.  For example, it considers how shared spaces may be implicated in generating interactions in an ethnically diverse population through practices such as shared gardening, festivals such as carnivals, or even cricket.  Social research methodologies are also featured, as Brooklyn College students work as interns with the National Parks association to research knowledge of, and attitudes towards national parks in NYC.  Overall I found this interesting to watch, mainly because it brought together a themes that I wouldn’t normally associate with each other, namely the possible relationship(s) between migration and national parks.  It’s well worth a watch, and could possibly be a good resource in teaching courses on urban anthropology and/or migration.

more about “Hear Every Voice: NYC and the Nationa…“, posted with vodpod

Posted in Education, Film, Media, Migration, Multiculturalism, Urban Anthropology Tagged: National parks, New York City ]]> http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/nyc-national-parks-migration-and-visual-sociology/feed/ 0 Jovan http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/anthropology-ma-thesis-makes-tabloid-headline-in-holland/ http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/anthropology-ma-thesis-makes-tabloid-headline-in-holland/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:00:25 +0000 Third Tone Devil http://culturematters.wordpress.com/?p=928 ]]>

I blogged earlier about the visibility of anthropologists in the Dutch public. Well, get this: a just-graduated masters student in my department at the VU made the front-page of the free (!) tabloid Spits (described by my colleagues as “right-wing”) today. The article, entitled “Chinese feels [sic] discriminated” describes “research by anthropologist Lilly Witte (23)” about Dutch-raised ethnic Chinese, which concludes that they feel that mainstream Dutch society does not quite accept them as Dutch, on account of their look.

Although some of my colleagues feel that there might be some trick here (this newspaper is seen as having a generally anti-immigrant slant, so this might be a way of compensating?), and the usual laments about simplification apply, it is fantastic to see anthropology masters students’ research influencing the widest possible arena of public debate. Congratulations, Lilly.

Next month the University of Western Sydney will be launching a new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies.  Here are the details of the Centre and the launch:

Launch of the new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies

The University of Western Sydney is its new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies on the 16th of July, 2009 (Sydney, Bankstown Campus, Lecture Theatre 4, Building 23)

Prof. Jim Beckford (Warwick University, UK), Prof. Riaz Hassan (Flinders University), Prof. Fethi Mansouri (Deakin University), A/Prof. Gabriele Marranci (UWS), and Prof. Bryan Turner (UWS) will be
speaking on the day.

A copy of the program for the launch can be downloaded at

http://tinyurl.com/mqkwrj and the invitation can be found at the following URL http://tinyurl.com/nceisinvite

For more information or to RSVP, please contact Judy Crabb, Executive Officer, College of Arts: j.crabb@uws.edu.au, or (02) 9772 6765.

Attendees are welcome to attend the dinner but bookings for this are essential.

The development of this Centre has been assisted by a Federal Government grant of $8m which established the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies and brings together the University of
Melbourne, Griffith University, and the University of Western Sydney. Collaboration between these institutions has already established a new undergraduate program in Islamic studies.

The Director of the Research Centre is Professor Bryan Turner,Professor of Social and Political Thought in the School of Humanities and Languages in the College of Arts.

The Research Centre is essentially concerned with the contemporary world and will seek to foster comparative studies of Muslim communities both within and outside Australia.

While I am in announcement mode, here are the details of an upcoming symposium that may be of interest to some CM readers.

SYMPOSIUM:    Sunday 19th of July

CONFERENCE:   Mon-Tue 20-21 July

Under the broad theme of ?Challenging Islamophobia: towards social
justice & inclusion?, National Social Cohesion Conference will explore
the following themes in six plenary sessions.

Muslim experiences, settling in Australia

Media and its Role in Public Hysteria

On the Borderline of Vilification and Freedom of Speech

Politics of Diversity and the Politics of Marginalisation

Muslim Women: Narrated experiences from the margins

Anti-racism: Learning from the past, new strategies

Attached are full conference details and registration form. Please
email filled registration form to info@affinity.org.au, alternatively
you can register online at www.affinity.org.au.

For any other enquiries please email info@affinity.org.au.

We look forward to your attendance and participation in discussions.

Antropologi.info has a review of Werner Schiffauers (sorry, both German links) book  Parallelgesellschaften - Parallel Societies. Do we need a common set of values?

Schiffauer, a well-known German anthropologist, who has been studying Turkish migrant communities in Germany (and other European countries) for a long time, challenges in his latest book the (in Europa and Germany) wide-spread belief that social integration depends on a shared set of values. Instead he postulates – and demonstrates with reference to a number of case-studies – that countries with highly diverse cultural beliefs can function very well – if … if there is a climate which values cultural exchange and sees „culture“ not as a monolithic entity.

An important prerequisite for successful cultural and social integration is the recognition, on the part of policy makers, the media and the education system, that people have multiple identities and life-styles, with fluid, overlapping and changing boundaries between them. In contrast are those policies of difference, often (mistakenly) appearing under the label of „multiculturalism“, which make us belief that people (migrants or mainstream) adhere to one exclusive and well-defined set of values.

Here I am reminded of Amartya Sens eloquent critique of this view, which he calls “plural monoculturalism.” Sen notes that, for example, multiculturalism in Britain has come to stand for the view that “distinct cultures must somehow remain in secluded boxes.”

If a young girl in a conservative immigrant family wants to go out on a date with an English boy, that would certainly be a multicultural initiative. In contrast, the attempt by her guardians to stop her from doing this … is hardly a multicultural move, since it seeks to keep the cultures separate. And yet it is the parents’ prohibition … that seems to garner the loudest and most vocal defense from alleged multiculturalists on the grounds of the importance of honouring traditional cultures, as if the cultural freedom of the young woman were of no relevance whatever.

The presentation of migrant communities living in some kind of „parallel societies“ – a view propagated by a number of German media – is a dangerous one, as it misrepresents the reality of most migrants in Germany by placing them in the prison of culture, thus alienating many and turning all to often into a self-fullfilling prophesy.

Observing people in Sydney made me quite clear that the dominant focus of cross-cultural academics and practitioners on national cultures is problematic. People from so-many cultural background study and work in closely cooperation at universities and public and private organisations. Looking at your Indian, English, Dutch, Japanese or German colleague as representatives of fixed national cultures will not help you very much in your collaboration. The so-called essentialistic perspective has become very popular in contemporary management literature and consultancy and is highlighted by European authors, such as Hofstede (1990) and Trompenaars (1993). The work of Hofstede and Trompenaars, who have developed ‘cultural maps of the world’ in which each country can be situated based on their score on different indexes, fitted perfectly in the assumption that culture is a (more or less) stable entity that can be ‘engineered’, and managed. However, recent evaluations of these essentialistic cultural programs are not positive in regard to organizational costs and sustainability. The programs use a dramatic oversimplification of the culture concept and make no difference between espoused values and actual behaviour. Consultants of large cross-cultural consultancy firms themselves don’t believe in the value of multi value models. Instead they do use their international sensitiveness and experience to train managers and employees. In our research on the number one consultancy on cross cultural business in the Netherlands showed that a larger part of the consultants were using anthropological tools and methods rather than the corporate developed multi value models. None of them however, were anthropologists.

And this is surprising as international management and the training of managers in cross-cultural affairs should be of the core competences of anthropologists. However, anthropologists are not very good at selling their knowledge and skills to corporations. They are outnumbered by all other kind of professions that have taken up cross cultural consultancy. Only recently I have seen a growth of (small) anthropological consultancy firms, but there could be many more of them. The message that everything is more complex than what our cultural “competitors” bring is of course not a very good argument for selling your services. That could be done better by, for example, showing in a business case the costs of failures and awkward collaboration.

To support managers and organisations operating in a international context, we have explored new directions in cross-cultural management by making managers aware of practices of (cross-cultural) collaboration. The interest is not so much in gaining knowledge of other (national) cultures but rather on spaces and boundary objects in which cross cultural collaboration in daily organizational life takes place. Two weeks ago I was working with a large project management firm that had asked help to manage their large diversity of workforce. The company had employees of more than 35 different national cultures working in complex projects. Instead of training the management on all these cultures we studied collaboration practices at the workfloor from a socio-material perspective which includes spatial settings, materiality and social behaviour. The French anthropologist Latour called this symmetric anthropology. We found that engineers and project employees of both the company and the client gathered around so-called “rollerboards”. These are tables that can roll and have large paper drawings of installations on them. Around the rollerboard 6 different professionals stand, hang and are bending over the drawings. In debating which objects had to be left out, changed or added, each of the 6 professionals got time to explain their view, experience, perspective. If agreed upon, different colours were used to materialize the debate and colour the drawings on spots were the debate was on. The manager was surprised as he wanted to replace the rollerboard by a computer system, which would have ruined this efficient cross-cultural collaborative practice. In this way anthropologists can deliver knowledge and advice that are not given by traditional cross-cultural consultancy firms.

Today’s New York Times reports that “Arts Leaders Urge Role for Culture in Economic Recovery”. “Culture” here means the arts, and what the “leaders” urge is state funding for public art projects, ranging from more fine art commissions built into public construction and transportation projects to a European-style government-level secretary of culture.

Because in the past there has been much less of this in the US, discussions of “culture” have centred less on the arts and more on education and the media, which — along with museums — is where the “culture wars” largely played out (of course, they did in the National Endowment for the Arts as well, but that wasn’t so significant and visible to a broad public). If the wishes reported in the article materialise, then the American state will be confronted with the question of how to shape public representations of culture in the arts more strongly than before, and similarly to the way that, say, Britain’s Arts Council has. Considering the dominance of the “heritage format” (in Andrew Shryock’s term) in the (self-)representations of American society, there is a risk that ethnically labelled “cultures” will proliferate in this imagery.  This was, for a while, the case in Britain, where, say, certain artists tended to be selected qua British-Chinese or British-Caribbean artists, and expected to represent their “constituencies.” On the other hand, the fact that Obama’s own person, to an extent, defies the “heritage format” raises hope that this will not be the case.

Just quickly.  The Sydney Morning Herald currently has a nice little multimedia presentation entitled “20 Little Australians”.  A condensed version of a longer story that will appear in the weekend paper, obviously designed to coincide with Australia Day on the 26th.  The presentation features 20 children who have migrated to Australia and provides snippets of their experiences and impressions in and of Australia.  Overall the presentation has a glossy, feel-good feel but the Herald folk avoid presenting Australia as the promised land for all comers.  There are some negative impressions, mentions of racism and so on, but most appealing and interesting to me were the unexpected comments, like the Russian boy who noted that people don’t speak as much to each other as they do in Russia, or the Pakistani boy who was amazed that he was allowed to call his neighbour by his first name.

Besides containing these little gems, the presentation is well worth the watch just to get a two minute overview of the astounding variety of migration to Australia and a couple of hints at what we do well and not so well for those who have chosen to settle here.

[Link.]

The Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative (SEED) at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa has just put out a call for video and photo presentations on the theme of the ‘multicultural city’.  Sounds like an exciting venture.  Here are the details:

Diversity in Place: Making Documentaries on the Multicultural City April 24th, 2009
http://diversityinplace.wordpress.com/

More than half of the population in the world now lives in cities, and the urban share of the globe will continue to increase dramatically to reach 70 percent by 2050. Migration, both from within and among societies, is a major source of urbanization, with multicultural cities on the rise everywhere.

Call for Documentary Film/Video Entries

In an innovative way toward mutual learning, we invite the submission of video and photo documentaries whose emphasis is on exploring multicultural cities and processes of place-making. Scholars, teachers, students and practitioners alike are searching for alternative methods to conventional data analysis and academic writing to be able to capture ethnic diversity and multicultural interactions in real world settings. The use of documentaries to show the daily practices of multiculturalism in the city can make several key contributions to research, teaching and action.

Videos not in excess of 15 minutes are requested for submission to screenings which will be held at the conference venue at the University of Hawai’i Manoa Campus on April 24th, 2009. Selections of videos to be included in the seminar will be made by a committee of students and faculty who are organizing the event. Artists, video- and filmmakers, researchers, writers and others interested in the relation between people and places and the making of multicultural cities are invited to join the project, participate to the seminar to discuss their ideas and work.

Questions, themes, topics and issues to be addressed in the documentaries can include, but are not limited to:

* How documentaries by recoding the presence of people of different origins over time can reveal ‘invisible’ minority cultures in a way that no other media can.
* The efforts at historic preservation of elements of the city that might otherwise have been overlooked but are of high cultural value to members of a community.
* How multiculturalism can work well in practice and thus contribute to a more positive attitude about and pride in the multicultural city, and thereby assist in fostering mutual accommodation and tolerance.
* In an age of global migration in which significant segments of multicultural cities do not have citizenship or are otherwise marginalized in the city, how documentaries can help identify issues of social justice.
* How multiculturalism inscribes itself into the city by everyday uses of urban space and lead us to a greater appreciation of the many different identities that make up the multicultural Cosmopolis of contemporary times.

By combining the reflections and findings emerging around the objectives of the conference, and understanding the inevitability of increasing diversity in urban places, this conference aims at drawing lessons and recommendations as to what makes the creation of ethnic spaces possible, and further what helps to form and shape livable cities with healthy intercultural relations, namely, cities as multicultural places where migrants’ place-making is understood and acknowledged as an inherent human right to the city.

This conference is sponsored by the Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative (SEED), University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Submission Deadline and Guidelines

The purpose of the call is a selection of a maximum of eight documentaries to be screened in a one-day conference on April 24th, 2009 at the University of Hawai’i.

Submission deadline: March 1st, 2009

Guidelines

Videos should be short — no longer than 15.00 minutes. International and Domestic submissions are encouraged.
The formats accepted are: DVD
Please include: Synopsis, Bio, CV and Contact Information. All submissions will be added to the Diversity in Place Video Library for possible inclusion in future projects. If included in other projects, artists will be contacted for permission.

Send submissions to:

Vera Zambonelli, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Saunders Hall, 2424 Maile Way, 96822 Honolulu HI

Travel and lodging aid:
Pending application, the Project will cover part of travel expenses and lodging in a Youth Hostel for participants residing outside of Honolulu. If traveling to Honolulu is not an option, we will arrange videoconferencing through skype.

For more information: diversityinplace@gmail.com
http://diversityinplace.wordpress.com/

Yesterday’s Herald reported on a case in France in which a requested marriage annulment made by a Muslim man after he discovered that his wife was not a virgin was overturned.  The article states that:

Public outrage at April’s annulment ruling forced the Government to order the case be reviewed, against the wishes of both spouses.

The groom, a Muslim engineer in his 30s whose name was not made public, sought the annulment after realising his bride was not a virgin on the night of their marriage in a civil ceremony in July 2006.

His wife, who admitted to him she had had premarital sex, said she accepted the annulment.

The case is extraordinary both because the annulment was reversed due to public pressure and because it was done against the wishes of both spouses.  Reading the article, I asked myself why a case like this would generate so much outrage while other cases involving a breach of trust between newlyweds would not register a blip on the public’s radar.  I can only assume that the case fitted neatly into stereotypes about “Islamic oppression of women”, the public focusing mainly on the question of the bride’s virginity rather than on the issue of trust. Ironically, the French public may likely be more fixated on the issue of virginity than the groom himself.

The fact that in all the outrage about this case the views of the bride were ignored also speaks volumes.  I am reminded of discussions of “the veil” in which the opinions of veil-wearing Muslim women themselves tend to be excluded because it is assumed that these women have been so brainwashed by their socialisation that they do not realise they are being oppressed.

The case would seem to suggest that Muslims in France are subjected to a higher level of public scrutiny of their private dealings than most people would expect.  It would also seem to suggest that gender relations within the Muslim community form a privileged site of critique by the non-Muslim population, an area in which people feel authorised to be outraged, and to express that outrage actively and publicly.