Toward Multiculturalism

As the first country in the world to enact a formal policy of multiculturalism, Canada has made impressive strides toward promoting civic inclusion for all; however, the education system remains less than forthcoming about the injustices that shape our democracy and create conditions that teach young people to see difference as deficiency. Ratna Ghosh and Mariusz Galczynski seek to persuade educators to incorporate the ideology of multiculturalism into their classroom pedagogy and professional practice. In this third edition, Redefining Multicultural Education mobilizes an expanded definition of multiculturalism that encompasses gender identity, sexual orientation, religious expression, and (dis)ability. New features include material on environmental awareness, cyberbullying, multilingual learners, digital technologies, youth radicalization, and recent events in Quebec and First Nations communities. Integrating vignettes, discussion questions, and sample activities with techniques for applying a multicultural lens to any subject area or level of study, this lively and accessible guide is essential for those interested in preparing students for a global economy in which innovation relies, before all else, on diversity.

With over 20 percent of the population foreign-born, and with more than 250 ethnic origins, Canada is one of the world's most multicultural societies. Canada's ethnic and religious diversity continues to grow alongside immigration. Yet how well is Canada's model of multiculturalism and citizenship working, and how well are Canadians, whatever their ethnic or religious origin, doing? Will Canada's relative success compared to other countries continue, or are there emerging fault lines in Canadian society? Canadian Multiculturalism: Evidence and Anecdote undertakes an extensive review of the available data from Statistics Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada operational statistics, employment equity and other sources to answer these questions and provide an integrated view covering economic outcomes, social indicators, and political and public service participation. Over 200 charts and tables are used to engage readers and substantiate the changing nature of Canadian diversity.

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends Paul Gottfried’s examination of Western managerial government’s growth in the last third of the twentieth century. Linking multiculturalism to a distinctive political and religious context, the book argues that welfare-state democracy, unlike bourgeois liberalism, has rejected the once conventional distinction between government and civil society. Gottfried argues that the West’s relentless celebrations of diversity have resulted in the downgrading of the once dominant Western culture. The moral rationale of government has become the consciousness-raising of a presumed majority population. While welfare states continue to provide entitlements and fulfill the other material programs of older welfare regimes, they have ceased to make qualitative leaps in the direction of social democracy. For the new political elite, nationalization and income redistributions have become less significant than controlling the speech and thought of democratic citizens. An escalating hostility toward the bourgeois Christian past, explicit or at least implicit in the policies undertaken by the West and urged by the media, is characteristic of what Gottfried labels an emerging “therapeutic” state. For Gottfried, acceptance of an intrusive political correctness has transformed the religious consciousness of Western, particularly Protestant, society. The casting of “true” Christianity as a religion of sensitivity only toward victims has created a precondition for extensive social engineering. Gottfried examines late-twentieth-century liberal Christianity as the promoter of the politics of guilt. Metaphysical guilt has been transformed into self-abasement in relation to the “suffering just” identified with racial, cultural, and lifestyle minorities. Unlike earlier proponents of religious liberalism, the therapeutic statists oppose anything, including empirical knowledge, that impedes the expression of social and cultural guilt in an effort to raise the self-esteem of designated victims. Equally troubling to Gottfried is the growth of an American empire that is influencing European values and fashions. Europeans have begun, he says, to embrace the multicultural movement that originated with American liberal Protestantism’s emphasis on diversity as essential for democracy. He sees Europeans bringing authoritarian zeal to enforcing ideas and behavior imported from the United States. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends the arguments of the author’s earlier After Liberalism. Whether one challenges or supports Gottfried’s conclusions, all will profit from a careful reading of this latest diagnosis of the American condition.

Heightened interest in multicultural issues in psychology and an understanding of culture as a critical aspect of human behavior has moved the topic of multiculturalism into the forefront of research and to required coursework in the helping professions. However, this is not without the backlash of resistance. Resistance to Multiculturalism: Issues and Interventions examines the subtle forms of racism and resistance to the multicultural movement in psychology and society. The authors use their vast experience in the arena of multiculturalism, both from the perspective of teaching and administration, to detail accounts, experiences, and challenges of resistance. Therapy and research is interwoven throughout this text that begins by placing multiculturalism at the heart of the best traditions of scholarship as proposed by the highly regarded Ernest Boyer of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In a conversational style and through chapters addressing what includes modern resistance, the classroom, stereotypes, resistance at the administrative level, and groups, this book offers techniques and interventions to overcoming resistance. Readers who teach multiculturalism, students, researchers, and those advocating for multiculturalism on on the broader community level will find Resistance to Multiculturalism an informative guide to combating the challenges of resistance.

Multicultural societies are a phenomenon that can be increasingly observed worldwide. This book focuses on the question of how individuals living within a multicultural society experience the meeting of cultures. Murdock combines both a thorough review of the theoretical body of research concerning multiculturalism and related concepts such as globalization, acculturation and biculturalism with specific empirical research evidence, providing new insights into factors which shape our openness towards a plurally composed society. Multiculturalism, Identity and Difference contains original research conducted within the ‘natural laboratory’ that multilingual, multicultural Luxembourg provides. This is a country where the foreign population makes up nearly half of the total population. In the era of globalization, culture contact is a daily occurrence and this book makes a contribution to the questions of if and how culture contact can be experienced as an opportunity rather than a threat by individuals.

Canadian Multiculturalism @50 offers a critically-informed overview of Canada’s official multiculturalism against a half-century of successes and failures, benefits and costs, contradictions and consensus, and criticism and praise. Admittedly, not a perfect governance model, but one demonstrably better than other models.