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Public Discourse (public + discourse)
Selected AbstractsThe National Museum of Australia and Public Discourse: the role of public policies in the nation's cultural debates1MUSEUM INTERNATIONAL, Issue 4 2006Darryl McIntyre [source] Cross-border ,Traffic': Stories of dangerous victims, pure whores and HIV/AIDS in the experiences of mainland female sex workers in Hong KongASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 1 2005Kevin D. Ming Abstract:,In recent years, dramatically increasing numbers of mainland Chinese women have entered Hong Kong to engage in sexual labour. Public discourses on the threat of HIV/AIDS increasingly locate these women's bodies as sites of danger, colluding with pre-existing imaginations of mainland rural women as ignorant, desperate and deceptive in representing these women's penetration of Hong Kong's border as a primary means of infection of the Hong Kong body. Drawing on state, media and popular representations, and the narratives of female sex workers themselves, this paper examines the interwoven bio-medical, gendered, sexual and cross-border relationships that intersect in the experiences of mainland Chinese sex workers in Hong Kong. I argue that while images of disease and danger have been used to regulate these women's bodies, mainland female sex workers challenge these images by drawing on other popular stereotypes of mainland women as pure, feminine and traditional. Although images of the related but still ,other' figure of the mainland Chinese woman are powerful mechanisms for the regulation of these women's bodies, mainland female sex workers skilfully use inherent tensions in those images in resisting that control and in struggling to achieve their own personal and economic goals. [source] SPECTACLES OF SEXUALITY: Televisionary Activism in NicaraguaCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2008CYMENE HOWE ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of "televisionary" activism,a mediated form of social justice messaging that attempts to transform culture. Focusing on a locally produced and very popular television show in Nicaragua, I consider how social justice knowledge is produced through television characters' scripting and performance. The ideological underpinnings aspire to a dialogic engagement with the audience, as producers aim to both generate public discourse and benefit from audiences' suggestions and active engagement. Several levels of media advocacy interventions are considered including the production, scripting, and translation of transnational material into local registers. Televisionary activism offers challenges to several conservative social values in Nicaragua by placing topics such as abortion, domestic violence, sexual abuse, homosexuality, and lesbianism very explicitly into the public sphere. At the same time, sexual subjects on the small screen must be framed in particular ways, as, for instance, with the homosexual subjects who are carefully coiffed in normalized human dramas. Finally, many of these televisionary tactics draw from and engage with transnational tropes of identity politics, and "gay" and "lesbian" subjectivity in particular, confounding the relationship between real and idealized sexual subjects in Nicaragua. That is, these televisionary tactics "market" transnational identity politics but derive legitimacy through their very "localness." [source] Religious Claims in Public: Lutheran ResourcesDIALOG, Issue 4 2006Cynthia Moe-Lobeda Abstract:, A cacophony of religious voices seeking to influence public culture, opinion, and policy pervades the public discourse in the United States today. Some publicly-oriented religious claims are appropriate while others are not. Sorely needed are criteria for making that distinction. This essay asks: What are criteria for appropriate and valid use of religious claims, language, and symbols in deliberation about public policy? What particular gifts do Lutheran traditions bring to shaping those criteria? The essay then draws upon Lutheran theological resources to propose theologically grounded criteria for appropriate and valid use of religious language, claims, and symbols in public discourse. [source] A community development approach to deal with public drug use in Box HillDRUG AND ALCOHOL REVIEW, Issue 1 2007NEIL ROGERS Abstract The use of alcohol and other drugs in public space is one that generates much heat in the public discourse and in the media. Too often the responses called for to reduce the problems of public amenity involve punitive policing and other responses that aim to engineer (mostly) young people out of these public spaces. Often local retailers are a key stakeholder group calling loudest for punitive action. In this Harm Reduction Digest Rogers and Anderson describe a community development approach taken to address these problems in Box Hill in the City of Whitehorse, near Melbourne. This approach which aimed to develop ,bridging social capital' between community retailers and other stakeholders in the area appears to have been effective in reducing harm associated with public drug use. Moreover these changes have become institutionalised and the approach has been expanded to address other public amenity problems in the area. It is a very nice example of how drug related harm can be reduced by grass roots networks of local councils, business people, law enforcement and health and welfare service providers to address these issues. [source] How ideology shapes the evidence and the policy: what do we know about cannabis use and what should we do?ADDICTION, Issue 8 2010John Macleod ABSTRACT In the United Kingdom, as in many places, cannabis use is considered substantially within a criminal justice rather than a public health paradigm with prevention policy embodied in the Misuse of Drugs Act. In 2002 the maximum custodial sentence tariff for cannabis possession under the Act was reduced from 5 to 2 years. Vigorous and vociferous public debate followed this decision, centred principally on the question of whether cannabis use caused schizophrenia. It was suggested that new and compelling evidence supporting this hypothesis had emerged since the re-classification decision was made, meaning that the decision should be reconsidered. The re-classification decision was reversed in 2008. We consider whether the strength of evidence on the psychological harms of cannabis has changed substantially and discuss the factors that may have influenced recent public discourse and policy decisions. We also consider evidence for other harms of cannabis use and public health implications of preventing cannabis use. We conclude that the strongest evidence of a possible causal relation between cannabis use and schizophrenia emerged more than 20 years ago and that the strength of more recent evidence may have been overstated,for a number of possible reasons. We also conclude that cannabis use is almost certainly harmful, mainly because of its intimate relation to tobacco use. The most rational policy on cannabis from a public health perspective would seem to be one able to achieve the benefit of reduced use in the population while minimizing social and other costs of the policy itself. Prohibition, whatever the sentence tariff associated with it, seems unlikely to fulfil these criteria. [source] The ,New Woman' and the Politics of Love, Marriage and Divorce in Colonial KoreaGENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2005Theodore Jun Yoo This study seeks to explore the changing discursive forces that competed to define Korean women's identity and roles within the context of the new spaces created by colonialism and modernity. It argues that a small coterie of literate women seized the initiative to enhance their education, define the politics of physical aesthetics and con-tribute to the debate about the changing gender roles and expectations in Korean society all under the guise of 'Westernisation' and progress. The emergence of these 'new women' challenged traditional notions of Korean womanhood and brought the 'woman question' to the forefront of public discourse. [source] HOW CHILDREN PLACE THEMSELVES AND OTHERS IN LOCAL SPACEGEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2008Danielle Van Der Burgt ABSTRACT This study examines the ways in which children aged 11 to 15 in six adjacent neighbourhoods in a medium-sized Swedish town place themselves and others in local space. Special attention is given to how they discuss a neighbourhood stigmatized in the public discourse and how children who live in this neighbourhood react to the negative representations of the place in which they live. The study is based on group interviews and maps. The study shows that children construct representations of their own neighbourhoods as "quiet" neighbourhoods and place objects of "trouble" and "danger" somewhere else. It is argued that this is done both in relation to their personal knowledge of the neighbourhood and in relation to local and/or media representations of their own and other neighbourhoods. It is shown that the children are influenced by media representations of a stigmatized neighbourhood, but also that they are not passive reproducers of these discourses and that some of them are able to offer counter-discourses. The children living in this neighbourhood experience difficulties in defending it as the quiet place which they perceive it to be to outsiders because of the negative discourses. [source] "Singing for Our Lives": Women's Music and Democratic PoliticsHYPATIA, Issue 4 2002NANCY S. LOVE Although democratic theorists often employ musical metaphors to describe their politics, musical practices are seldom analyzed as forms of political communication. In this article, I explore how the music of social movements, what is called "movement music," supplements deliberative democrats' concept of public discourse as rational argument. Invoking energies, motions, and voices beyond established identities and institutions anticipates a different, more musical democracy. I argue that the "women's music" of Holly Near, founder of Redwood Records and Redwood Cultural Work, exemplifies this transformative power of musical sound. [source] Catching fairies and the public representation of biogeographyJOURNAL OF BIOGEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2008Richard J. Ladle Abstract Biogeography is a vibrant academic discipline that plays an important role in framing and directing debates on some of the most important environmental issues of our time, such as the impacts of climate change on biodiversity, biotic homogenization and the effectiveness of global conservation policy. Despite this, biogeography suffers from a low public profile and may consequently be poorly understood by the public. Here I review the representation of the term biogeography, and a selection of biogeographers in the public sphere (newspapers, websites, blogs) and the academic sphere (journals and reports) to understand more fully the public perception of the discipline. As anticipated, the survey suggests that the term ,biogeography' has little public currency, and that the public still largely associate the subject area with either eminent Victorians such as A.R. Wallace or modern greats such as E.O. Wilson. I conclude by discussing the potential consequences of the virtual absence of biogeography from public discourse for education and professional biogeographers. [source] Mobile discourse: political bumper stickers as a communication event in IsraelJOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Issue 2 2000L-R Bloch The use of political bumper stickers in Israel began as a spontaneous protest medium, evolving into a routinized form of public discourse, taking place throughout the year, independently of national elections. The rules of interaction of this nontraditional means of political communication are identified and the complex relationships between the messages within their social situation are investigated using an ethnographic model. This analysis reveals that the medium does indeed constitute a structured means of expression with identifiable forms, rules, and usages, affording the person in the street a way of participating in the national discourse, bypassing traditional avenues of influence. The detailed examination of a single political bumper sticker reveals a structure parallel to the overall code, further demonstrating the intricacy of the messages. The analysis shows how this political discourse reflects social norms peculiar to Israel and how its use has become an affirmation of cultural identity. Because the fundamental properties of political bumper stickers have now been exposed, it is possible to examine how the actual use of this medium changes the structure of political agency in society through the presumption that ordinary individuals have the right of access to the public debate of national political issues, a right heretofore exclusively the prerogative of institutional power holders. [source] Protecting the Nation: Nationalist rhetoric on asylum seekers and the TampaJOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 6 2008Kieran O'Doherty Abstract This paper analyses texts from the Australian print media that invoke nationalist discourse in the so-called ,Tampa crisis' of 2001, which involved the boarding by Australian military troops of a civilian Norwegian shipping vessel (the Tampa) that had rescued a group of asylum seekers. In particular, we are interested in how military action was justified in public discourse against a group of civilians through the use of arguments relying in some form or another on the notion of nationhood and national identity. We employ a critical discursive methodology to investigate how some of these descriptions worked to legitimate the Australian government's role in these events and demonstrate some of the mechanisms by which discourses of nation can operate in the marginalization of asylum seekers. We conclude that presenting issues relating to asylum seekers and the Tampa at a level of national identity was critical in justifying the Australian government's stance and actions. We also raise some concerns about the consequences that may follow from the Australian government's actions and reliance on nationalist rhetoric. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Gender and Ethnicity in Bolivian Politics: Transformation or Paternalism?JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN & CARIBBEAN ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2000Susan Paulson Throughout Latin America public discourse and political programs dealing with gender and ethnicity have focused mainly on women and indigenous people, often in paternalistic efforts to help these "marginal groups." Bolivian constitutional reforms implemented between 1993 and 1997 challenge this traditional stance by promoting balanced participation in a nation constituted by multiple identities, yet ongoing processes triggered by these reforms testify to the tradition's stubborn endurance. In this article we ask what prevents institutions working in Bolivia from applying anthropological notions of gender and ethnicity as dynamic and interlocking cultural systems, and we question the distancing and antagonism that exists between those working with ethnicity- and those working with gender. Efforts to clarify these phenomena focus on the lack of articulation between ethnographic observations, political philosophies and development policies. [source] Southern Trauma: Revisiting Caste and Class in the Mississippi DeltaAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2004JANE ADAMS ABSTRACT Two classic ethnographies, Hortense Powdermaker's After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South and John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town, contributed to a "master narrative" of the Mississippi Delta and the South that viewed class largely through the lens of race. Their work contributed to the community studies and culture and personality traditions and became part of the public discourse of race in the United States. This article examines the institutional and theoretical frameworks within which they worked. We focus on three aspects of their work: (1) their definition of class that left race as the only salient social divide; (2) their portrayal of middle- and upper-class statements as normative; and (3) their uncritical use of data from elsewhere in the South to interpret their Indianola data. We report the events at the Yale Institute of Human Relations that led Dollard to publish before Powdermaker. [source] Reconfiguring freedom: Muslim piety and the limits of secular law and public discourse in FranceAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 1 2010MAYANTHI L. FERNANDO ABSTRACT Through an analysis of the practice of veiling, I first examine how pious Muslim French women reconcile the dominant secular oppositions between personal autonomy and religious authority, and between the "true" self and religious norms, as they constitute themselves as religious subjects. I then turn to the 2004 law banning headscarves in public schools, and to the attendant public debates, exploring how this Muslim French religiosity was rendered incommensurable in secular law and unintelligible in public discourse. In so doing, I bring into focus both the underlying assumptions and exigencies of French secularity as well as some of its aporias. [source] Theorizing modernity conspiratorially: Science, scale, and the political economy of public discourse in explanations of a cholera epidemicAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2004Charles L. Briggs ABSTRACT When some five hundred people in eastern Venezuela died from cholera in 1992,93, officials responded by racializing the dead as "indigenous people" and suggesting that "their culture" was to blame. Stories that circulated in affected communities talked back to official accounts, alleging that the state, global capitalism, and international politics were complicit in a genocidal plot. It is easy to attribute such conspiracy theories to differences of culture and epistemology. I argue, rather, that how political economies position different players in the processes through which public discourses circulate, excluding some communities from access to authoritative sources of information and denying them means of transforming their narratives into public discourse, provides a more fruitful line of analysis. In this article I use,and talk back to,research on science studies, globalization, and public discourse to think about how conspiracy theories can open up new ways for anthropologists to critically engage the contemporary politics of exclusion and help us all find strategies for survival. [source] Australian Democracy and Priveleged Parliamentary SpeechPOLITICS, Issue 2 2001Lisa Hill This article responds to recent cases of parliamentary speech which reflect the ascendancy of a totalising ,mainstream' approach to public discourse and a political leadership that may, at times, be overly attentive to the majority-rule dimension of democracy. These developments spark a more general discussion of the phenomenology of privileged parliamentary speech, the role of speech freedoms in liberal democratic orders and the duties of parliamentary representatives within them. I make two general conclusions. First, the ways in which we normally argue and think about free speech will not generally apply to the speech of parliamentarians because their speech rights cannot be universalised. Secondly, even if parliamentary speech could be treated as standard speech there would be no legitimate defence (from a liberal democratic point of view) for a strictly populist approach to its use since this could undermine the deliberative function of parliament and lead to the violation of other important liberal democratic principles. [source] Science, Modernity, and the Making of China's One-Child PolicyPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 2 2003Susan Greenhalgh China's one-child-per-couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one-child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world-in-crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core,that China faced a virtual "population crisis" and that the one-child policy was "the only solution" to it,as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge-making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself. [source] George Washington, Presidential Term Limits, and the Problem of Reluctant Political LeadershipPRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2001BRUCE G. PEABODY The widespread view of the relationship between George Washington and the American custom of limited presidential service is misconceived. Conventional popular and scholarly accounts of the "two-term tradition" confuse both Washington's position on presidential term limits and the historical contours of this custom. The American convention limiting the number of terms a president could serve emerged less from Washington's views about political service than from deep-seated anxieties about centralized governing power (and specifically executive power). These concerns, along with an enduring American ambivalence about public service (reflected in Washington's retirement), continue to shape the character of both our political life and public discourse. [source] Charity, Philanthropy, Public Service, or Enterprise: What Are the Big Questions of Nonprofit Management Today?PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 3 2007Roger A. Lohmann "Nonprofit sector" issues, both in public discourse and pedagogy, are too narrowly cast as problems confronting public-serving nonprofits and grant-making foundations. Consisting also of membership organizations, educational institutions, and political pressure groups, the sector constitutes a major force in society which, in its interactive entirety, might better be termed a "social economy." This social economy both influences and is shaped by public administration, and it is now very much under public scrutiny. The author raises seminal questions that challenge the mission, management, and resources of this critical sector of society. [source] Collective representations and social praxis: local politics in the Norwegian welfare stateTHE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 4 2002David B. Kronenfeld We consider an attempt , within an economy under pressure to stay competitive in an increasingly integrated global economic system , to reconcile the contradictory pressures of democratic values versus managerial efficiency, and of the desire for an effective social welfare safety net versus the need for budgetary responsibility. We focus on a local welfare committee's experimental attempt to improve morale and productivity through a combination of added resources and greater autonomy. The better but more expensive service produced by the experiment triggered the paradoxical conclusion that what was needed was tighter administrative oversight. The experiment and its evaluation became a kind of self,fulfilling prophecy. We explore the conceptual, ideological, and economic factors that shape the government's reaction, and then offer a theory of word meaning, usage, and power in public discourse that accounts for the discussion and the actions that flow from it. [source] Abortion and Neonaticide: Ethics, Practice and Policy in Four NationsBIOETHICS, Issue 3 2002Michael L. Gross Abortion, particularly late-term abortion, and neonaticide, selective non-treatment of newborns, are feasible management strategies for fetuses or newborns diagnosed with severe abnormalities. However, policy varies considerably among developed nations. This article examines abortion and neonatal policy in four nations: Israel, the US, the UK and Denmark. In Israel, late-term abortion is permitted while non-treatment of newborns is prohibited. In the US, on the other hand, late-term abortion is severely restricted, while treatment to newborns may be withdrawn. Policy in the UK and Denmark bridges some of these gaps with liberal abortion and neonatal policy. Disparate policy within and between nations creates practical and ethical difficulties. Practice diverges from policy as many practitioners find it difficult to adhere to official policy. Ethically, it is difficult to entirely justify perinatal policy in these nations. In each nation, there are elements of ethically sound policy, while other aspects cannot be defended. Ethical policy hinges on two underlying normative issues: the question of fetal/newborn status and the morality of killing and letting die. While each issue has been the subject of extensive debate, there are firm ethical norms that should serve as the basis for coherent and consistent perinatal policy. These include 1) a grant of full moral and legal status to the newborn but only partial moral and legal status to the late-term fetus 2) a general prohibition against feticide unless to save the life of the mother or prevent the birth of a fetus facing certain death or severe pain and suffering and 3) a general endorsement of neonaticide subject to a parent's assessment of the newborn's interest broadly defined to consider physical harm as well as social, psychological and or financial harm to related third parties. Policies in each of the nations surveyed diverging from these norms should be the subject of public discourse and, where possible, legislative reform. [source] The Abortion Debate in Mexico: Realities and Stalled Policy ReformBULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 1 2007ANDRZEJ KULCZYCKI Over 500,000 clandestine abortions occur annually in Mexico, many under unfavourable health conditions. An uneasy silence about this situation has long prevailed. Since the 1970s, abortion has appeared periodically in public discourse and on the decision-making agenda, only for action to be repeatedly postponed. Mobilisation around the abortion issue grew slowly, but debate and controversy became nationwide as the country began to experience systemic change in 2000. Despite increasing political pluralism and growing awareness of the existing problems, for now in Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America, the question of abortion is not judged sufficiently pressing to merit major policy change. However, improved contraceptive use and the institution of new technologies and post-abortion care are helping to make abortions safer and rarer. [source] Reordering Society: Vigilantism and Expressions of Sovereignty in Port Elizabeth's TownshipsDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2006Lars Buur ABSTRACT Crime and vigilantism in South Africa are generally seen as a reaction to the breakdown of formal law. Both are constituted outside the state and emerge when the new social contract has been broken , that is, when the state can no longer provide security. This article argues that there is often an intimate relationship between vigilante formations and state structures. It explores this apparent paradox through public discourses on crime and the emergence of twilight institutions such as vigilante groups. It suggests that vigilantism has to be analysed as an attempt to promulgate a new legal-political order, despite being constructed outside this order. This argument is explored in the context of the Amadlozi, a vigilante group operating in the townships of Port Elizabeth. The article situates this discussion within an examination of discourses on crime, as well as the production of township residents and their protection from crime. Finally, it proffers some ideas on sovereignty and its relationship to twilight institutions. [source] Selection power and selection labor for information retrievalJOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 7 2007Julian Warner This study examines the relation between selection power and selection labor for information retrieval (IR). It is the first part of the development of a labor theoretic approach to IR. Existing models for evaluation of IR systems are reviewed and the distinction of operational from experimental systems partly dissolved. The often covert, but powerful, influence from technology on practice and theory is rendered explicit. Selection power is understood as the human ability to make informed choices between objects or representations of objects and is adopted as the primary value for IR. Selection power is conceived as a property of human consciousness, which can be assisted or frustrated by system design. The concept of selection power is further elucidated, and its value supported, by an example of the discrimination enabled by index descriptions, the discovery of analogous concepts in partly independent scholarly and wider public discourses, and its embodiment in the design and use of systems. Selection power is regarded as produced by selection labor, with the nature of that labor changing with different historical conditions and concurrent information technologies. Selection labor can itself be decomposed into description and search labor. Selection labor and its decomposition into description and search labor will be treated in a subsequent article, in a further development of a labor theoretic approach to information retrieval. [source] Theorizing modernity conspiratorially: Science, scale, and the political economy of public discourse in explanations of a cholera epidemicAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2004Charles L. Briggs ABSTRACT When some five hundred people in eastern Venezuela died from cholera in 1992,93, officials responded by racializing the dead as "indigenous people" and suggesting that "their culture" was to blame. Stories that circulated in affected communities talked back to official accounts, alleging that the state, global capitalism, and international politics were complicit in a genocidal plot. It is easy to attribute such conspiracy theories to differences of culture and epistemology. I argue, rather, that how political economies position different players in the processes through which public discourses circulate, excluding some communities from access to authoritative sources of information and denying them means of transforming their narratives into public discourse, provides a more fruitful line of analysis. In this article I use,and talk back to,research on science studies, globalization, and public discourse to think about how conspiracy theories can open up new ways for anthropologists to critically engage the contemporary politics of exclusion and help us all find strategies for survival. [source] "It's Just You and Satan, Hanging Out at a Pre-School:" Notions of Evil and the Rehabilitation of Sexual OffendersANTHROPOLOGY & HUMANISM, Issue 2 2009James B. WaldramArticle first published online: 6 NOV 200 SUMMARY Notions of "evil" are a feature of everyday discourse in civil society. Sexual offenders, individuals often labeled as "evil," are well aware of public images of themselves and their crimes. This article examines public discourses of "evil" as they pertain to sexual offenders, and the views of sexual offenders themselves on what this means to them. The ethnographic research was undertaken in a prison unit designed for the treatment of sexual offenders. As a result, the issue of rehabilitation figured centrally in their conceptualizations of evil. While admitting to being bad, and perhaps even having committed evil acts, they generally reject the label of "evil" as understood in essentialist terms. The fundamental issue of concern for my analysis here is how secular views on the nature of evil speak to the issue of rehabilitation, an inherently human, "natural" capability. To be essentially "evil," in their view, is to be almost nonhuman,a view shared by much of the public as well,and, therefore, beyond rehabilitation. [source] Asians as the model minority: Implications for US Government's policiesASIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2010Melody Manchi Chao Asian Americans are often perceived as a ,model minority', an ethnic minority that are high achieving, hardworking, self-reliant, law-abiding, as well as having few social and mental health problems. Although the impact of the model minority image on the US government's redistributive policies is a widely contested topic in public discourses, there has been little research on the association between the model minority image, people's worldviews, and attitudes towards the US government's redistributive policies. In an experiment that measured American participants' worldviews and manipulated the salience of the model minority image, we have demonstrated that those who believed in a malleable social reality were relatively unsupportive of government policies that help the Asian American (vs African American) communities. Theoretical and practical implications of this finding are discussed. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||