Bridging Cultural Identities: Examining Newcomer’s Post-Secondary School Integration Experiences Through an Arts-Based Ethnographic Approach

Many modern emerging adults undertake the task of identity development while navigating life on a post-secondary campus, where they assimilate to new social and learning environments. Emerging adult newcomers (i.e. immigrants) must navigate additional developmental challenges as they reconcile their cultural, ethnic, and personal identity development simultaneously while facing systemic barriers to post-secondary integration. We employed an arts-based engagement ethnography to investigate the post-secondary integration experiences of 10 emerging adults from a person-first perspective. Through cultural probes, individual semi-structured interviews, and focus groups, we identified four key structures to participants’ integration experience: fitting in (through assimilation and accommodation), biculturalism, managing familial expectations, and being a newcomer in the classroom. This research clarifies the key experiences shaping young newcomer identity development and highlights the profound ways in which young newcomers negotiate and reconcile their intersecting identities while integrating into new education contexts following migration.

The Role of Perceived Familial Expectations on Depressive Symptoms and Self-Esteem in Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Analysis

Asian and Latinx emerging adults in the United States typically hold stronger values and expectations regarding their duty to support and respect their families than their White peers. Yet, research has not fully explored how meeting familial expectations is associated with psychological well-being in these populations. This study examined ethnic-racial differences in perceptions of meeting familial expectations and their relation to depressive symptoms and self-esteem (i.e., positive and negative self-image) in Latinx, Asian, and White emerging adults. Participants were 1,223 students (51% female, mean age = 19.2) recruited from a state university in southern California. Results found that meeting familial expectations regarding personal responsibility was negatively associated with depressive symptoms only for Asian youth, and with negative self-image for all groups; however, the association was stronger for Asians. Further, meeting familial academic expectations was positively associated with positive self-image and negatively associated with negative self-image for Latinx and Asian youth.

Emotional Landscapes

Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration explores how emotions in general, and love in particular, shape individual and collective experiences of migration, and the formation of mobile and transnational communities. The essays examine how varieties of love, including sentimental, sexual, and political, redefined meanings of family, community, and national belonging, altering ideas of gender and social formation. Framed by the works of scholars of emotion, gender, and migration, these articles illustrate the complicated ways that love shapes the intimate decisions to migrate, familial expectations surrounding separations, wider cultural and political perceptions of mobility, reconfiguring the meaning of love itself. The contributors investigate the changing meanings of intimacy in a world marked by urban, transnational migrations and expanding circulations of capital and goods, and the ways in which these new meanings altered gender norms. The book’s historical framework makes visible how the sentimental and material landscapes of mobility changed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the volume offers new evidence culled from archives, interviews, letters, and surveys for the study of emotion and mobility in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, and opens up new avenues for future research.

Escaping Reality by Watching Reality TV?

Chapter Two turns to reality television, exploring three theories of emotion that explain the rise of this televisual genre in the wake of 9/11. A study of the 2000-2010 programming schedule reveals the cultural anxieties with which producers and viewers of these shows (dis)engage. Although often considered superficial, lowbrow entertainment products meant primarily for escapist purposes, this essay argues that reality television programs grapple with important societal concerns: surveillance culture and privacy rights; the pressure of identity performance in the social media era; and shifting social, domestic, and familial expectations for men and women.

Autism and bilingualism: A thematic analysis of practitioners' experiences

This project aimed to understand the experiences of practitioners who work with autistic bilingual children and their families. Here we focused on factors relating to bilingual family experiences, the knowledge base of practitioners regarding autism and bilingualism, and the influence of socio-cultural factors on practice and subsequent recommendations to parents. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 12 speech and language practitioners. Three themes were identified: (1) professionals’ experiences with parents (2) cultural factors in practice (3) views on autism and bilingualism. Investigation of these themes reveal that practitioners overwhelmingly advocate for maintaining a bilingual environment for autistic children, and recognise cultural and familial expectations as some of the most important considerations when working with autistic bilingual children. However, a dearth of culturally appropriate resources and uncertainties around providing the right advice to parents were identified as barriers to best practice. This highlights the need for culturally relevant resources for use with families, and for practitioners to be provided with opportunities to receive up-to-date and accessible research findings.

When Madness Meets Madness: Insider Reflections on Doing Mental Health Research

Insider–outsider relations in qualitative research have been heavily studied. Yet there is a dearth in the literature exploring how people who have experienced madness produce knowledge and overcome trying circumstances when they do qualitative mental health research with other survivors. This article fills this gap through a critical reflection on my experiences with psychosis and involuntary hospitalization and how they shaped dialogue with my participants. Situated within a narrative framework of inquiry, I reveal how self-disclosure and critical forms of relationality during interviews with 10 psychiatric survivors produced a survivor-centered knowledge that nuances biomedical understandings of mental illness and the mental health system. Practices of self-disclosure revealed how survivors and I had to navigate familial expectations as we recovered and tried to regain a sense of identity. Doing insider research also helped me overcome the periods of embarrassment and stigma in my psychosis, as I learned through critical dialogue how traumatic events can provide unique avenues for intense self-reflection and the development of greater empathy for mental health survivors. I also discuss some of the ethical concerns and limitations of having an insider status in qualitative mental health research, and how self-disclosure may present certain epistemological challenges in the research process.