Browsing by Subject "multiculturalism"

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    Finding a Box for the Multicultural: The Power of Language and the Overcoming Strengths of the Multicultural
    (2013-04-24) Llamas, Jewel
    With each Census in the United States, the number of citizens who identify with multiple racial or cultural categories has slowly elevated. Nevertheless, this nation still lacks a language with which to identify such persons. This thesis project focuses on the power of accepted categories and labels on a group that has been denied them: the multicultural. This research delves into the lives of fourteen Duke Undergraduates who classify as multicultural, having parents from different cultural backgrounds. The ethnographic approach revealed that despite lacking their own of language on a national level and being pressured to think and behave in a pre-categorized fashion based on race and culture, the students I interviewed showed strength and cultural understanding in the face of their slow-to-change environment. The pressures they faced validate the need to rethink the implications that current categories of race and culture impose on the population of the United States, particularly its minority groups. Establishing nationally-recognized language for the multicultural would grant recognition and power to its growing population. However, this thesis does not argue for the creation of a multicultural “box” in which the culturally diverse can be placed. Labels and their characteristics created challenges for the multicultural. Thus, the interviews show that the multicultural may have wanted a label, but only because accepted categories suggest normalcy and their absence leaves one as “other.” On the other hand, not having their own classification exposed the drawback of conventional boxes for humanity: restriction and loss of individuality. The multicultural reveal the solution: the recognition of the limitations of established categories and the acceptance of the complexity of the human population. Being multicultural allows such individuals to realize this solution, granting them the ability to see the individual rather than the group, unlike so many of the people who appeared in their lives. Through the bridging of their social capital across cultural divides, the multicultural recognize that no one truly “fits” a label, relinquishing their need to have an established language for identification of their own.
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    Isaiah Berlin's Liberal Humanism
    (2023) Spisiak, Brian Daniel

    In this dissertation I trace Isaiah Berlin’s efforts to find a “less internally contradictory” and “less pervertible” concept of liberty. I argue that Berlin’s political philosophy is grounded in a resolve to treat persons as individuals and as capable of choice, a position I call liberal humanism. These two commitments, liberalism and humanism, are ontological: liberalism posits that choice is both desirable and possible for human beings; humanism affirms that the individual person is the fundamental unit of politics, or the entity to which one might ascribe choice, agency, and freedom, and that attempts to divide individuals into sub-personal entities or to aggregate them into super-personal ones are dangerous paths towards dehumanization. Each of the four chapters of this dissertation traces a transformation of the choosing self that leads to equivocation and contradiction, producing situations in which persons are metaphorically “free” while literally unfree. Ultimately, I portray Berlin as a deeply anti-metaphysical thinker, a skeptical anti-idealist who, in the spirit of his hero, the Russian writer Alexander Herzen, sought to avoid the sacrifice of human beings on the altars of abstraction.

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    Multicultural Cold War: Liberal Anti-Totalitarianism and National Identity in the United States and Canada, 1935-1971
    (2007-05-03T18:53:45Z) Smolynec, Gregory
    In Cold War North America, liberal intellectuals constructed the Canadian and American national identities in contrast to totalitarianism. Theorists of totalitarianism described Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as monolithic societies marked by absolutism and intolerance toward societal differences. In response, many intellectuals imagined Canada and the United States as pluralistic nations that valued diversity. The ways in which Canadians and Americans imagined their respective national identities also varied with epistemological trends that were based on the ideas of totalitarianism and its correlate, anti-totalitarianism. These trends emphasized particularity and diversity. Using archival sources, interviews with policy-makers, and analysis of key texts, Multicultural Cold War outlines the history of theories of totalitarianism, related trends in epistemology, the genealogy of the social sciences, and the works of Canadian and American proponents of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism. It centers attention on Canada and the United States where the unreflective ideology of anti-totalitarianism was widespread and the postwar enthusiasm for ethnicity and cultural pluralism became especially pronounced. In the U.S.A. this enthusiasm found expression among public intellectuals who defined cultural pluralism in their scholarship and social criticism. In Canada, discourses of multiculturalism originated in the hearings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and the political thought of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. This dissertation shows that enthusiasm for sub-national group particularity, pluralism, and diversity was a transnational North American trend.
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    Regulating Migrant Integration: Examination of Multiculturalism and Assimilation
    (2019-03) Nguyen, Van
    In recent years, increased migration and humanitarian refugee flows have heightened fears that migrants could fail to integrate into their host countries – therefore becoming burdens on generous welfare states or turn towards extremist ideals. This research thus sought to measure the implications that certain immigrant integration policies could pose on opportunities for immigrants living in developed countries like France, Germany, Australia, and Canada. To assess assimilationist and multiculturalist policies, the attainment of migrant opportunities was measured with the OECD and European Union’s data source, Indicators of Immigrant Integration (2015). While several indicators across the integration issue areas (economic, social, and political) demonstrate that countries with multiculturalist policies had smaller gaps of difference between native and nonnative populations, many are less significant after considering migrant education- and skill- level distribution. However, other conclusions in regard to future steps towards improved integration policies were found as well. The contributions from this study compounds on existing migration research and should move governing bodies closer to systematic policies that enable them to reap collective benefits of migration. In addition, civil society and intergovernmental organizations should use these insights in the development of realistic and effectual models of integration for future implementation.