Messy Multiculturalism - A critical conversation about state multiculturalism and the lived everyday experiences of cultural diversity in Aotearoa New Zealand.

<p>This thesis provides an ethnographic study of multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, which investigates the tensions between government-led stories about social harmony and tolerance and the stories told by members of multicultural communities. Examining multiculturalism from an ethnographic perspective means attempting to understand this concept through the fragmented, multiform, non-systematic, evocative and constantly changing reality of social life and everyday human interactions. Essentially, this means exploring the sometimes ‘messy’ experiences of multiculturalism. The thesis is based on a narrative approach to ethnographic fieldwork, which involves the application of auto-ethnography, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis as different avenues for story collection and analysis. I position myself as an academic listener, who makes sense of stories about multiculturalism by placing them alongside other types of stories and organising them through life-story and discourse analysis approaches. Through extensive Wellington-based fieldwork with grassroots organisations, everyday diversity experts, and multicultural activists, as well as discourse analysis of various forms of government publications and materials (i.e. conference speeches, booklets, reports, guidelines and photos), I gather evidence that reveals the complexities of multicultural identities when contrasted with government discourses of multiculturalism. I assemble and analyse two sets of stories – those told by government officials and representatives and those that emerge from the messy landscape of everyday life and grassroots multicultural movements. The key aim of this thesis is to stage a conversation between these different narrative terrains and shine a light on the disjunctive moments between government narratives about cultural diversity and the experiences, needs and aspirations of people who live multicultural lives and who engage in grassroots activism. In analysing the evidence, this thesis reveals the complex ways in which people that live multicultural lives experience cultural belonging, and documents how they deploy strategic and creative techniques to navigate government-based forms of multiculturalism. My findings suggest that stories told from those who are a part of Aotearoa’s culturally diverse communities pose challenges to the official and government led image of New Zealand as a harmonious, tolerant and welcoming nation. By applying a narrative approach to the exploration of information distributed by the government, I demonstrate how this kind of information is discursively constructed and contributes to a larger storytelling project in which state information works to craft a particular image of the nation. In the conversation that is staged throughout the thesis, it is argued that the government appears to support a weak version of multiculturalism, which only allows a tokenistic inclusion of ethnic minorities. The kind of multiculturalism which is aspired to from the ground – that is, by the everyday diversity experts and grassroots activists I interviewed during fieldwork – imagines a stronger version of multiculturalism. This version includes more radical forms of inclusion such as ethnic minorities being involved in decision making processes and being fairly represented in governing/public spaces, such as government agencies, local councils, school boards, law enforcement, legal institutions, and so on. Overall, this thesis contributes site specific and narrative-informed knowledge about the meaning of multiculturalism in New Zealand. It illustrates some of the factors that the government and policy makers need to be mindful of when they approach a multicultural population and matters of governance. It also exemplifies the kind of conversation topics and issues that are important and necessary to address in a multicultural settler society, when reflecting on how we understand and express the histories of cultural diversity and aspirations for a multicultural future.</p>

Messy Multiculturalism - A critical conversation about state multiculturalism and the lived everyday experiences of cultural diversity in Aotearoa New Zealand.

<p>This thesis provides an ethnographic study of multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, which investigates the tensions between government-led stories about social harmony and tolerance and the stories told by members of multicultural communities. Examining multiculturalism from an ethnographic perspective means attempting to understand this concept through the fragmented, multiform, non-systematic, evocative and constantly changing reality of social life and everyday human interactions. Essentially, this means exploring the sometimes ‘messy’ experiences of multiculturalism. The thesis is based on a narrative approach to ethnographic fieldwork, which involves the application of auto-ethnography, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis as different avenues for story collection and analysis. I position myself as an academic listener, who makes sense of stories about multiculturalism by placing them alongside other types of stories and organising them through life-story and discourse analysis approaches. Through extensive Wellington-based fieldwork with grassroots organisations, everyday diversity experts, and multicultural activists, as well as discourse analysis of various forms of government publications and materials (i.e. conference speeches, booklets, reports, guidelines and photos), I gather evidence that reveals the complexities of multicultural identities when contrasted with government discourses of multiculturalism. I assemble and analyse two sets of stories – those told by government officials and representatives and those that emerge from the messy landscape of everyday life and grassroots multicultural movements. The key aim of this thesis is to stage a conversation between these different narrative terrains and shine a light on the disjunctive moments between government narratives about cultural diversity and the experiences, needs and aspirations of people who live multicultural lives and who engage in grassroots activism. In analysing the evidence, this thesis reveals the complex ways in which people that live multicultural lives experience cultural belonging, and documents how they deploy strategic and creative techniques to navigate government-based forms of multiculturalism. My findings suggest that stories told from those who are a part of Aotearoa’s culturally diverse communities pose challenges to the official and government led image of New Zealand as a harmonious, tolerant and welcoming nation. By applying a narrative approach to the exploration of information distributed by the government, I demonstrate how this kind of information is discursively constructed and contributes to a larger storytelling project in which state information works to craft a particular image of the nation. In the conversation that is staged throughout the thesis, it is argued that the government appears to support a weak version of multiculturalism, which only allows a tokenistic inclusion of ethnic minorities. The kind of multiculturalism which is aspired to from the ground – that is, by the everyday diversity experts and grassroots activists I interviewed during fieldwork – imagines a stronger version of multiculturalism. This version includes more radical forms of inclusion such as ethnic minorities being involved in decision making processes and being fairly represented in governing/public spaces, such as government agencies, local councils, school boards, law enforcement, legal institutions, and so on. Overall, this thesis contributes site specific and narrative-informed knowledge about the meaning of multiculturalism in New Zealand. It illustrates some of the factors that the government and policy makers need to be mindful of when they approach a multicultural population and matters of governance. It also exemplifies the kind of conversation topics and issues that are important and necessary to address in a multicultural settler society, when reflecting on how we understand and express the histories of cultural diversity and aspirations for a multicultural future.</p>

Is a non-evolutionary psychology possible?

The last thirty years has seen the emergence of a self-styled ‘evolutionary’ paradigm within psychology (henceforth, EP). EP is often presented and critiqued as a distinctive, contentious paradigm, to be contrasted with other accounts of human psychology. However, little attention has been paid to the sense in which those other accounts are not evolutionary, or at least evolutionalizable. We distinguish between a commitment to evolution, and a more specific commitment to adaptationism. We argue that all formulable accounts of human psychology are evolutionary in a real sense: non-evolutionary psychology is impossible. Not all psychologies are explicitly adaptationist, but those that are not still draw on informal notions of organismal function, and thus implicitly require at least a weak version of adaptationism. We argue that the really distinctive and contentious feature of EP is not its commitment to evolution, or even adaptationism. It is the commitment to domain-specificity and the associated multiplicity of innately specialized psychological mechanisms. This commitment entails a narrow parsing of what an adaptive problem is, and has the consequence that the science of psychology ends up consisting of many narrow proximal explanations, rather than a few broad ones. We illustrate this thesis by examining a range of paradigms that can be seen as competitors to canonical EP: social role theory; cultural evolutionary psychology and dual inheritance theory; Bayesian cognitive science; and Giddens’ social theory. Narrow versus broad functional specialization emerges as the central locus of difference between the different psychologies we review.

Weighted Envy-freeness in Indivisible Item Allocation

We introduce and analyze new envy-based fairness concepts for agents with weights that quantify their entitlements in the allocation of indivisible items. We propose two variants of weighted envy-freeness up to one item (WEF1): strong , where envy can be eliminated by removing an item from the envied agent’s bundle, and weak , where envy can be eliminated either by removing an item (as in the strong version) or by replicating an item from the envied agent’s bundle in the envying agent’s bundle. We show that for additive valuations, an allocation that is both Pareto optimal and strongly WEF1 always exists and can be computed in pseudo-polynomial time; moreover, an allocation that maximizes the weighted Nash social welfare may not be strongly WEF1, but it always satisfies the weak version of the property. Moreover, we establish that a generalization of the round-robin picking sequence algorithm produces in polynomial time a strongly WEF1 allocation for an arbitrary number of agents; for two agents, we can efficiently achieve both strong WEF1 and Pareto optimality by adapting the adjusted winner procedure. Our work highlights several aspects in which weighted fair division is richer and more challenging than its unweighted counterpart.

Task-based language teaching in a local EFL context: Chinese university teachers’ beliefs and practices

This study examines university teachers’ beliefs and practices related to task-based language teaching while teaching English as a foreign language. Task-based language teaching (TBLT) has become a prominent topic for researchers and practitioners in recent decades. It is also advocated by the Chinese Ministry of Education for college English teaching. However, few studies have investigated local EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ perceptions of and difficulties in implementing TBLT. This study aims to fill this gap. Data were collected via 12 semi-structured interviews, and the results revealed that the Chinese EFL teachers employed a weak version of the approach, i.e. the task-supported language teaching approach. They tended towards a student-centred teacher–student relationship. These findings suggest that the role of traditional Chinese values in influencing the implementation of TBLT has been overemphasized. Implications for the sustainable development of teaching pedagogy and professional learning are discussed.

Some Applications of the Poincaré–Bendixson Theorem

We consider a $${\mathcal {C}}^1$$ C 1 vector field X defined on an open subset U of the plane with compact closure. If X has no singular points and if U is simply connected, a weak version of the Poincaré–Bendixson theorem says that the limit sets of X in U are empty but that one can define non empty extended limit sets contained in the boundary of U. We give an elementary proof of this result, independent of the classical Poincaré–Bendixson theorem. A trapping triangle $${\mathcal {T}}$$ T based at p, for a $${\mathcal {C}}^1$$ C 1 vector field X defined on an open subset $${\mathcal {U}}$$ U of the plane, is a topological triangle with a corner at a point p located on the boundary $$\partial {\mathcal {U}}$$ ∂ U and a good control of the tranversality of X along the sides. The principal application of the weak Poincaré–Bendixson theorem is that a trapping triangle at p contains a separatrix converging toward the point p. This does not depend on the properties of X along $$\partial {\mathcal {U}}$$ ∂ U . For instance, X could be non differentiable at p, as in the example presented in the last section.

Rule of law and state of exception: the genesis of the problem

The purpose of this study was to clarify the correlation between the concepts of the rule of law and the state of exception in the context of the question of the nature of law and its correlation with force. The relevance of the study is explained by the need to reinterpret the idea of the rule of law and its boundaries in the context of modern challenges, in particular in the context of a pandemic. The study is of an interdisciplinary nature, which lies in combining legal, philosophical legal, and historical-philosophical perspectives using methods of philosophical legal reflection, comparison, analysis and synthesis, and historical-philosophical reconstruction. The correlation between the rule of law and the state of exception was clarified in three steps. First, the fundamental idea of the rule of law was explicated, which unites its numerous interpretations: law was considered as the antithesis of the arbitrariness of the powerful. Accordingly, the rule of law turned out to be a requirement immanent to any legal system. At the same time, the internal limitation of the rule of law associated with the statutory nature of the latter was emphasised, which inevitably necessitates striking a balance between the rule of law and justice, and the radicalisation of which brings to life the idea of a state of exception. The second part of this study contains a critical analysis of the theory of the state of exception, which, in contrast to the idea of the rule of law, identifies law and force, and ultimately denies law as such, normalising lawlessness. Finally, in the third step, three approaches to the correlation between the rule of law and the state of exception were analysed: 1) the priority of the state of exception, 2) a weak version of the priority of the rule of law, and 3) a strong version of the priority of the rule of law. It was concluded that the fundamental opposition between the rule of law and the state of exception renders their consistent combination impossible, and the corresponding attempts always turn out to be a compromise not favouring the former. However, according to the authors of this study, it is necessary to recognise the limitations of the law itself, without abandoning the discourse of the rule of law and the fundamental grounds for it

National Defense and the Value of Independence

This chapter compares Ripstein’s treatment of wars of national defense with the treatment offered by the just war theory model. Wars of national defense are surprisingly difficult to justify within the just war theory approach. Attempts by some of the most prominent philosophers working within this approach have either concluded that wars of national defense are impermissible, or that they are permissible only in an implausibly restricted number of circumstances. If they are right, and if Ripstein’s account does a better job in dealing with these cases, that would be a reason to favor his Kantian approach over the traditional just war model. Renzo argues that neither of these claims is correct. Ripstein’s view ultimately lacks the resources to justify a right to wage wars of national defense, and contemporary just war theorists are wrong in believing that their approach can at best ground a weak version of such right. This gives us some reasons to prefer the just war approach over the Kantian one championed by Ripstein.

Precautionary Principle in the Court Settlement of Civil Environmental Cases

In recent years, the precautionary principle has begun to enter legal decision-making in Indonesian civil courts. This introduction is in line with environmental cases that often involve much scientific evidence. This article aims to describe theoretical elaboration and, to a certain extent, legal developments in the application of the precautionary principle in the settlement of civil environmental cases in Indonesia. The precautionary principle provides a framework for environmental decision-making in the event of scientific uncertainty. The theoretical elaboration shows a wide dimension of influence of the precautionary principle on the system of liability and proof. In comparison, the court cases also show the application of the precautionary principle in the liability system and proof despite still in its weak version.