Multicultural Encounters

Counsellors and other mental health professionals are increasingly encountering clients who differ from them in terms of race, culture, and ethnicity. Unfortunately many have not been trained to understand how powerfully culture affects our view of the world. The series on Multicultural Foundations of Counseling and Psychology is an invaluable new resource from Teachers College Press that focuses on multicultural issues in counseling and psychology. The books in this series chart the development of this evolving new field and will help educators, psychologists, counselors, social workers, and other mental health professionals learn to balance culture-universal and culture specific approaches to treat a diverse population. This volume uses fascinating therapeutic encounters to help clinicians understand and respond to the needs of their increasingly diverse clientele. Murphy-Shigematsu urges clinicians to look beyond their assumptions and stereotypes to learn their clients' cultures through eliciting key narratives. Keeping the client and therapist center stage, the author shows the complex ways in which their cultural self-narratives interact.

This book confronts the challenge of difference for rethinking everyday multiculture. It proposes both a theory and practice of a critical pedagogy of popular culture through an analysis of contemporary media and film. For students and scholars committed to a critical practice for transforming the politics of representation and otherness.

This volume gathers experienced scholars from Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa to address the challenges and tensions rising from mass migration flows, unbalanced north-south and east-west relations, and the increasing multicultural nature of society. The scope of the book's theme is global, addressing diversity and identity, intercultural encounters and conflict, and the interrogations of a new socio-political order or paradigm. It highlights some of the most poignant and challenging outcomes of cultural diversity faced by educators everywhere in today's societies.

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History explores cultural contact as an agent of change. It takes an encounters approach to world history since 1500, rather than a political one, to reveal different perspectives and experiences as well as key patterns and transformations. It studies the spaces between cultures historically to help us transcend human differences today in a rapidly globalizing world. The text focuses on first encounters that suggest long-term developments and particularly significant encounters that have changed the direction of world history. Because of the complexities of these encounters, the author takes a user-friendly approach to keep the text accessible to students with varying backgrounds in history.

Annotation

In contrast to much scholarship on cross-cultural encounters, which focuses primarily on contact between indigenous peoples and ’settlers’ or ’sojourners’, this book is concerned with migrant aspects of this phenomenon – whether migrant-migrant or migrant-host encounters – bringing together studies from a variety of perspectives on cross-cultural encounters, their past, and their resonances across the contemporary Asia-Pacific region. Organised thematically into sections focusing on ’imperial encounters’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ’identities’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and ’contemporary citizenship’ and the ways in which this is complicated by mobility and cross-cultural encounters, the volume presents studies of New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Vanuatu, Mauritius and China to highlight key themes of mobility, intimacies, ethnicity and ’race’, heritage and diaspora, through rich evidence such as photographs, census data, the arts and interviews. Demonstrating the importance of multidisciplinary ways of looking at migrant cross-cultural encounters through blending historical and social science methodologies from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers and historians with interests in migration, mobility and cross-cultural encounters.

In contrast to the economic and cultural dominance by the south and the east coast over the past several centuries, influence in China in the early Middle Ages was centered in the north and featured a significantly multicultural society. Many events that were profoundly formative for the future of East Asian civilization occurred during this period, although much of this multiculturalism has long been obscured due to the Confucian monopoly of written records. Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages endeavors to expose a number of long-hidden non-Sinitic characteristics and manifestations of heritage, some lasting to this very day. Sanping Chen investigates several foundational aspects of Chinese culture during this period, including the legendary unicorn and the fabled heroine Mulan, to determine the origin and development of the lore. His meticulous research yields surprising results. For instance, he finds that the character Mulan is not of Chinese origin and that Central Asian influences are to be found in language, religion, governance, and other fundamental characteristics of Chinese culture. As Victor Mair writes in the Foreword, "While not everyone will acquiesce in the entirety of Dr. Chen's findings, no reputable scholar can afford to ignore them with impunity." These "foreign"-origin elements were largely the legacy of the Tuoba, whose descendants in fact dominated China's political and cultural stage for nearly a millennium. Long before the Mongols, the Tuoba set a precedent for "using the civilized to rule the civilized" by attracting a large number of sedentary Central Asians to East Asia. This not only added a strong pre-Islamic Iranian layer to the contemporary Sinitic culture but also commenced China's golden age under the cosmopolitan Tang dynasty, whose nominally "Chinese" ruling house is revealed by Chen to be the biological and cultural heir of the Tuoba.