Suchergebnisse

Chinese adoption is often viewed as creating new possibilities for the formation of multicultural, cosmopolitan families. For white adoptive families, it is an opportunity to learn more about China and Chinese culture, as many adoptive families today try to honor what they view as their children's "birth culture." However, transnational, transracial adoption also presents challenges to families who are trying to impart in their children cultural and racial identities that they themselves do not possess, while at the same time incorporating their own racial, ethnic, and religious identities. Ma.

Very few armed forces consciously relate to the religious component of soldiers' identities. Like religions, the military system demands individuals to conform to rules and schedules. Should military and religious obligations clash, soldiers are forced to choose. When modern armed forces relate to religious elements in their members' identities, how do they do so? What are the conditions most conducive to a military relating to the religious component of its soldiers' identities? This article posits a framework for the analysis of both questions, employing the concept of mediating structures to illustrate the mechanisms whereby militaries and religions accommodate each other and Luckham's typology of boundaries (integral, permeable, fragmented) to identify the conditions that are most-and least-hospitable to mediation. This framework is illustrated by references to institutional and individual relations between religion and armed forces in Iran, Israel, Turkey, the United States, and India. Adapted from the source document.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO testified about how homeland security is vulnerable to identity fraud. Today, counterfeit identification is easily produced and used to create fraudulent identities. Tests GAO has performed over the past 3 years demonstrate that counterfeit identification documents can be used to (1) enter the United States; (2) purchase firearms; (3) gain access to government buildings and other facilities; (4) obtain genuine identification for both fictitious and stolen identities; and (5) obtain social security numbers for fictitious identities."

Citing a previously described database (see Longshore, Douglas, "School Racial Composition and Intergroup Hostility," PhD dissertation, U of California, Los Angeles, 1981; & SA 31:1/83M7512 & 31:2/83M9211), 3 school context variables are tested as predictors of white students' intergroup relations: staff racial composition, busing, & classroom resegregation. None predicts intergroup relations by itself, but each interacts with school racial composition. Implications for the concept of racial control & for future research are discussed. 2 Tables, 20 References. Modified HA.

AbstractThis paper aims to explore the interface between Benedict Anderson's (1991) imagined, conceptual communities linking people who have never met and what Vered Amit (2002) called face to face communities of groups based on social practices. Communities are imagined from above but communities also negotiate their own social and spatial boundaries, often in response to these imaginations. What is imagined can only be felt if it can be socially realised. This paper will compare findings from discourse analysis of official texts with ethnographic data collected through informal interviews with over 100 Han Chinese and Uyghurs in Urumchi, the capital city of Xinjiang. It asks how these face-to-face communities are framed by the party-state and how they understand their place within the Chinese nation themselves. Specific reference to the party's concept of ethnic unity will be used to explore the relationship between ethnicity and nationhood in China. This aims to contribute to our understanding of the variety of competing self-understandings in China and how national identities are formed and negotiated at a local face-to-face level.

Rural electoral culture and protests have often been considered as merely 'carnivalesque' products of an 'inward facing' populace. In counties such as Somerset and Dorset an obsession with regional identities, rituals and spaces has often been accused of limiting the people's political horizons. This article, conversely, will argue that rural politicians, electors and the popular crowd used regional concerns, rituals and identities to involve themselves in national protests and debates. In the decade preceding the Reform Bill a 'West Country' identity was continuously mobilised in service of national political aims. Both radical and conservative politicians used regional identities to not only secure their election but also to make national debates tangible and actionable to rural people. Equally, by seizing key local political spaces and deploying rural rituals the popular crowd were able to interject themselves into national political debates, allowing them to communicate their visions of an alternate political system.

Abstract
Given Taiwan's colonial past, modern Taiwanese theatre has never been purely aesthetic. Instead, it is largely sociopolitical, providing an alternative space that indirectly transforms local people's contestations of identity onstage, where practitioners reimagine or even reinvent Taiwan. Taking Taiwan as an intersection of transnational forces, I present an analysis of the ways in which power is negotiated in intercultural theatrical performance. In particular, I examine two 'flagship' productions of the Taiwan International Festival of Art: Orlando (2009) directed by Robert Wilson (1941–present), and La Dame aux Camélias (2011) directed by Suzuki Tadashi (1939–present). With these two productions, I explore the subtle ways in which modern Taiwanese theatre embodies both culturally universal identities and postcolonial struggles in Taiwanese contexts. By engaging with the most influential research on intercultural theatre and contextualizing these two flagship productions, I argue for moving away from an aesthetic to a more context-sensitive analysis of intercultural theatre productions that includes the perspectives and agency of practitioners and spectators. Ultimately, my analysis reveals the intense power negotiation of agency between three participating groups: foreign directors of global fame, local practitioners and spectators.

Using data on party representation for the Rules, Appropriations, and Ways and Means Committees from the 47th-103rd Congresses, I test the implications of a recently developed theory by Dixit, Grossman, and Gul. Their theory predicts that, in any particular Congress, majority and minority party representation on committees should be a function of the maximum political strength enjoyed by the majority party during the entire period for which it has held majority status up to, and including, that Congress. I refute this hypothesis and find that for any given Congress, majority party representation on committees is determined, rather, by the current political strength of the majority party. These findings speak to broad questions about our understanding of the role of the minority party in legislative organization and lawmaking in legislative politics, and in the US Congress, in particular. 3 Tables, 4 Figures, 22 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2005.]

Drawing from extensive fieldwork among graffiti writers in Sweden this article investigates gendered identity work and its consequences. It points to how potentially inclusive aspects of disembodied subcultural performances—that identities are negotiated through the material representation of the writer rather than on basis of the physical body—nevertheless work excludingly, especially so in terms of gender. This is so because identity work in graffiti revolves around a re-embodiment of identities through normative notions of the able, male and invisible body.

This paper aims at investigating how feminine identities are represented and constituted in advertising discourse (Magalhães, 1995, 2005). The analysis, which adopts the theoretical-methodological principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 2001) and Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1994), explores actions, feelings, beliefs and values expressed through this discourse, which constitutes social reality and identities.

STUDENTS OF NEW POLITICAL MOVEMENTS AND ELECTORAL SOCIOLOGY HAVE PAID LIMITED ATTENTION TO LOCAL AND REGIONAL VARIATIONS IN LEVELS OF SUPPORT. THIS REFLECTS A TENDENCY TO VIEW SOCIAL STRUCTURES AS 'NATIONAL' AND MONOLITHIC AND TO IGNORE THE HISTORICAL PROCESS THROUGH WHICH POLITICAL IDENTITIES EMERGE FROM THE CONTEXTS PROVIDED BY LOCAL TERRITORIAL-CULTURAL SETTINGS. IN THIS PAPER ELECTORAL DATA ARE USED AS THE BASIS FOR GEOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF SUPPORT FOR THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL PARTY. ALTHOUGH THIS POLITICAL PARTY CLAIMS A NATIONWIDE MANDATE IN SCOTLAND, PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS SUGGESTS A DISTINCTIVE PATTERN OF SUPPORT WITHIN THE COUNTRY THAT CAN BE EXPLAINED BY THE EVOLUTION OF PLACE-RELATED POLITICAL IDENTITIES.