Lecture 1 Flashcards
What is diversity?
Cultural diversity: about matters in which individuals visibly (appearance, clothing) and invisibly (norms, values, beliefs) differ from each other. Differences are noticeable in attitude, language, values, behaviors, experience, background and education. Cultural diversity is defined by differences in regional, religious or ethnic background being present. The definition is broadened by adding differences in age, gender, sexual preference and ableness.
Commonly used in organizational studies.
Four approaches encountered in diversity (Ponzoni et al)
Deficit or deficiency: focusses on minorities lack of qualifications
Difference: recognition of cultural diversity, causes conflict and enrichment
Discrimination: focusses on structural sources of migrants’ exclusion
Diversity approach: diversity incorporated as core value (in an organization) as added value.
Belonging: a sense of belonging
- as a political concept, is multi-dimensional and multi-layered. Includes citizenship but goes beyond.
- a personal, intimate, private sentiment of place attachment ( ‘sense of belonging’) and grows out of everyday practices. An affective bond.
‘Being at home’ as an official, public-oriented formal structure of membership, as for instance manifested in citizenship.
–> Articulated through language of right and responsibilities.
These two different forms of belonging interact with each other accorded an importance in difference spheres.
Not belonging and political protest
Colin Kaepernick: Political protest regarding perceived injustices to the African American and minority communities. Represented those without a voice.
Polity and citizenry. Juxtaposes membership belonging and a sense of belonging in different ways. May see herself deeply bonded to the political institutions but sees no sense in association with fellow citizens beyond the specific community.
Not-belonging: belonging is only lip service with little effect on their lived reality. A weapon to address discriminating institutionalized practices.
A sense of belonging can be something withheld from us, it is an attribute of a social identity. This sense can be of belong being PERCEIVED by others as not belonging here. It can be reinforced by wider social structures and routine practices in a society (discrimination), all of which can communicate powerful exclusionary messages.
Unbelonging
Those who have “lost” political belonging
What is taken for granted belonging is disconnected,
- -> Place of exile and danger, of homelessness and rootlessness, leaves them adrift, homeless.
- (Forced) migration: creating a sense of belonging elsewhere (Navigating the space of ‘inbetweeness’ of ‘elsewhereness’)
Presently political belonging is increasingly conditional and open to retraction
Anthias (2013) belonging
- In the process there are two entities that lurk at the centre: society (conflated with community), on the one hand, and culture (elided with identity/belonging) on the other.
- Belonging has experiential, practical and affective dimensions. It relates to how we feel about our location in the social world which is in turn related to formal and informal experiences of belonging. In addition it is also about practices: we articulate our belonging through our practices and our practices give rise to our sense of belonging.
Anthias (2013) Diversity and integration:
- Diversity: the maintenance of ‘good difference’, on the one hand, and the pursuit of a harmonious society with core values on the other hand.
The term diversity should not be referring to the ‘other’ (which is the way in which it makes its entry in the political and theoretical debates usually). Diversity is not just something between us but also within us.
- Integration as assimilation is a preferred model of ethno-cultural accommodation in the current climate. Assimilation approaches tend to see migrants as essentially adapting to the society of reception and achieving full embeddedness and social mobility within it.
A distinction: structural and cultural assimilation. Seen as structural assimilation into the labour market and polity, is here counter-posed to assimilation at the cultural level. A distinction between the structural and the cultural also often underpins the notion of integration. However, this assumes that the domain of the so-called cultural is not involved in the public space of integration.
Anthias (2013) Intersectionality
- has been: enormously effective in challenging the singularity, separateness, and wholeness of a wide range of social categories.
- the complexity of social identities means also that social divisions are irreducible and dialogical. irreducible: they cannot be explained through a process of reduction to other categories. However, this does not mean that they operate as stand-alone categories in the realm of social practice but rather that they operate dialogically: producing fissures at times as well as amplifications of inequality. The emphasis on irreducibility and the dialectical nature of combinatory or complex articulations is able to recognize contradictory articulations of difference and identity.
In relation to issues of diversity and integration, interrogate the ways in which positions and locations which crosscut ethnic markers function either to destabilize or provide avenues towards dialogue and negotiation around meanings, values and practices in a modern multidimensional global world. This can aid in providing processes and mechanisms which facilitate the resolution of potential conflicts, conflicts that are neither derived solely or cohere solidly around issues of cultural difference, but in which cultural difference and ethnicity often act as vehicles for projects of exclusion/legitimation and usurpation/resistance that are underpinned by power inequalities of different kinds in our globalizing world.
(Healy, 2020) Belonging internal problem
- to be perceived by others as belonging is very different in kind to perceiving oneself as belonging. Discovering that how we perceive ourselves in this dialogue is not how others perceive us can be painful.
Healy (2020) Not belonging interpretation
- person may see herself as deeply bonded to the polity, may recognise and value the institutions of that polity, but see no sense in associating with fellow citizens beyond their specific community. Similarly, a person may see herself as deeply bonded to her fellow nationals, develop contact across a variety of other cultural or interest groups, yet remain suspicious and lack trust in the polity itself
- individuals who believe that their belonging is only a matter of words with little effect on their lived reality. In other words, the group may see her as belonging but she does not feel this matches her lived experience.
- neither party may be completely committed to seeing the other as belonging: it is always qualified or open to revision. This sense of being perceived by others as not belonging here can be re-enforced by wider social structures and routine practices in a society, all of which can communicate powerful exclusionary messages.
The main point is that a self is not a simple construct that comes into being entirely of itself, but is constituted reflexively in relation to others and dependent on their actions.
