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Race, Ethnicity and Education in Globalised Times
This book provides a research narrative of the way an urban school community speaks about race and ethnic relationships in times of change. It analyses the history of multicultural policy and practice in Australia. Coverage also discusses the struggle to understand identity and race and cultural difference and presents a comprehensive methodological framework to explore the complex interactions that shape race and ethnic relationships.
- GenresRace
226 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
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January 3, 2016
I really enjoyed this, but at least as much because this looks at the PhD process itself and the twists and turns involved. Ruth has been a colleague of mine at work, but I wanted to read this since part of my thesis is looking at how racism works in Australia. And this book provides particularly useful insights on exactly that question.
My daughter spent some time in Japan with a group of international students a couple of years ago. A story she has told me from that time involved a night at a pub when the various nationalities were sitting about and playing the ‘let’s talk about national stereotypes’ game. Yes, always a barrel of fun and a laugh a minute. Anyway, she said she was surprised by how clear everyone was that Australians were racists. That is, that although everyone agreed that racism is a phenomenon that is everywhere, but everyone also agreed that Australians stand out even in what they admitted is a quite crowded field.
As this book points out, that isn’t how Australians see themselves. We see ourselves as one of the few successful multicultural nations. This book quotes one of our Prime Ministers as saying, “I do not believe Australians are racists”, something he said just after the Cronulla race riots a decade ago. To people like me, saying this, at such a time, seemed almost incomprehensible. But the race riot was being framed as an aberration that was fundamentally opposed to the Australian way of life, that is, a way of life that is welcoming of others and allows for cultural diversity.
Except, of course, such a view is difficult to sustain even when looking at Prime Minister Howard’s own political career. Here was a man who referred to himself as Australia’s most conservative politician ever, who sought to limit Asian immigration, who refused to offer an apology to Aboriginal Australians following a report into the stolen generations (where Aboriginal children were literally taken from their parents arms and placed in ‘care’ – often to be physically and sexually abused). The fact that the government were unable, despite the litany of abuse cases documented in the report, to offer an apology for previous government policies and actions to those still living with the consequences of those actions caused a rift in Australian politics that I don’t believe was healed even by the subsequent apology when it finally came.
Sorry, this is a topic I’m much more prone to go off on tangents about than just about any other. Nothing makes me angrier than how Australians play with racism. There has not been an election in Australia for 25 years that has not had race as a major theme. But as Ruth shows here, often this ‘theme’ is discussed more in silence than out loud. It is articulated in feelings of fear, rather than in words. That is, what is not said is intended to be understood more than the platitudes that are said and heard. A large part of Ruth’s research seeks to find a way to understand how a nation’s narratives of itself are told at various levels within a society, from national newspapers to the classroom and schoolyard. But how can you go about doing such a thing. Such a task can quickly become impossible. Actually, what Ruth is doing here is much more complicated than even this. She is interviewing parents and teachers about their experiences of race and ethnicity in a school setting with a wide variety of students from various ethnicities. And how we understand our world is essentially a task of narrative – that is, the stories that we tell so as to make sense of the world we find ourselves in. But those stories don’t exist in a vacuum, and certainly not within the vacuum of our own experience. Rather there are fields of narrative that inform and help to make sense of our experiences. Then beyond these fields of narratives – which are essentially a distilling of the common experience of people in a particular place and time – there are maps of narratives, that are the most general narrative stories that a community tells of itself. Each level in this hierarchical structure (the personal narratives, the narratives within particular fields and the overarching maps of narratives) informs the others and all are always in a process of change, of reconfiguring and redefining each other. All of them are a making sense of what it is to be a certain type of person, of possessing a certain identity.
Now, this is the bit I’ve been wanting to get to, this is the bit about identity and difference. Bauman spends a lot of time discussing this in his book Modernity And Ambivalence, particularly in relation to how prior to the second world war Jews in Germany sought to become ‘German’, but that this was impossible as they were, despite their best efforts, always defined as Other. Now, one of the fundamental ideas of Capitalism is that we are nearly blank-slates and that our identities are things we can change at will, that identity is essentially a consumable and is defined by what we purchase – that is, buy a Ford and you are a different type of person than you would have been if you’d bought a BMW, but given enough money either purchase is available to you and therefore either identity is also available to you. Except, this isn’t at all how ethnicity works. The language I’m more familiar with to describe this idea is Bourdieu’s habitus. That is, the habits and dispositions that we live by are such that we have no notion we actually have these habituses, but they constrain our ability to step in or out of identities all the same, mostly because certain ways of being simply make no sense to us, mostly because they are so far outside of our ability to even understand. And worse, since our identities are ‘embodied’, imprinted on us throughout our lives, that is, that since these identities and habits and dispositions are as much a part of us as our walking gait, our identity appears to us as utterly natural – and so the identities of Others who do not share our dispositions and habits appear unnatural to us or even willfully ignorant and inhuman. So that, even if we wanted to help those with other cultural identities to become ‘more like us’ we are unlikely to have a clue how to actually go about this.
And thus begin the paradoxes. Ought schools teach children from other cultures to assimilate into the social norms that exist around them? And if so, then to what extent are those social norms going to remain consistent over time? The Australia of today is hardly the same as the one I grew up in, when my daughters are my age they will live in quite another world. How will globalization impact local cultures and will this homogenization still leave some groups outside? Given children from Other cultures within local cultures are unlikely to ever be read as anything but Other, what does this ‘learning to assimilate’ actually mean? As Ruth points out at one stage in this, generally people from other cultures are literally used by the home culture to define the limits of ‘us’. As such, as Bauman made clear about German Jews, it is literally impossible for such people to assimilate, as ‘they’ are how we define ‘us’. So, any change in ‘them’ virtually necessitates a change in ‘us’.
If you were thinking of doing a PhD this is a particularly useful book to read for a number of reasons, not least that it provides a really helpful insight into the relationship between the idea you want to pursue in your thesis, the theory that is going to allow you to understand how that idea might be made sense of and then the methodologies that will allow you to turn that idea into a question and then into an answer – you know, the ‘what am I going to do and how’ of your thesis. This book is particularly useful, because Ruth literally maps out how she cut a path through all of these issues. Frequently, research is written up after the event in a way that makes all of this seem almost inevitable. The book will say something like, ‘here’s the question I was wanting to answer, here’s what other people said about it before I got on the scene, here’s how I thought I would frame my answer – here’s my answer.’ And while this is as it should be in the sense that the whole thing ends up being quite readable – it really doesn’t give the reader an insight into the messiness of the process. Or the way that the ‘question’ changes over the course of the research, or how that question needs to change, as the one you start out with proves to be impossible to answer. This book provides an insight into exactly that, and does so in a way that shows how various theorists found along the way help to frame and re-frame the research as well as providing the researcher with tools to work with so as to understand some of what is being found through the research. That is, this book shows that research of this kind is iterative. This is a remarkably useful thing to learn. You see, doing a PhD is quite unlike any other kind of learning. The whole point of it is that you are to add to the sum total of human knowledge – pretentious, I know, but that basically means ‘come up with something no one has come up with before’. But if that is to be the case then you need to eventually leave your supervisor behind. How do I explain this? In virtually every other learning situation your teacher is meant to be (and to remain) more knowledgeable than you about what you are learning. But with a PhD you need to become the expert – to know more than your supervisor, at least about this one thing that your thesis is about. But if that is to be the case then you really can’t be lead there – by definition there is ‘no path’. Which means that there are likely to be lots of false starts, dead ends and so on. The thing I like most about this book is that it shows all of that, and not just to show that obstacles appear, but also how they were overcome. Like I said, this is a really useful book.
My daughter spent some time in Japan with a group of international students a couple of years ago. A story she has told me from that time involved a night at a pub when the various nationalities were sitting about and playing the ‘let’s talk about national stereotypes’ game. Yes, always a barrel of fun and a laugh a minute. Anyway, she said she was surprised by how clear everyone was that Australians were racists. That is, that although everyone agreed that racism is a phenomenon that is everywhere, but everyone also agreed that Australians stand out even in what they admitted is a quite crowded field.
As this book points out, that isn’t how Australians see themselves. We see ourselves as one of the few successful multicultural nations. This book quotes one of our Prime Ministers as saying, “I do not believe Australians are racists”, something he said just after the Cronulla race riots a decade ago. To people like me, saying this, at such a time, seemed almost incomprehensible. But the race riot was being framed as an aberration that was fundamentally opposed to the Australian way of life, that is, a way of life that is welcoming of others and allows for cultural diversity.
Except, of course, such a view is difficult to sustain even when looking at Prime Minister Howard’s own political career. Here was a man who referred to himself as Australia’s most conservative politician ever, who sought to limit Asian immigration, who refused to offer an apology to Aboriginal Australians following a report into the stolen generations (where Aboriginal children were literally taken from their parents arms and placed in ‘care’ – often to be physically and sexually abused). The fact that the government were unable, despite the litany of abuse cases documented in the report, to offer an apology for previous government policies and actions to those still living with the consequences of those actions caused a rift in Australian politics that I don’t believe was healed even by the subsequent apology when it finally came.
Sorry, this is a topic I’m much more prone to go off on tangents about than just about any other. Nothing makes me angrier than how Australians play with racism. There has not been an election in Australia for 25 years that has not had race as a major theme. But as Ruth shows here, often this ‘theme’ is discussed more in silence than out loud. It is articulated in feelings of fear, rather than in words. That is, what is not said is intended to be understood more than the platitudes that are said and heard. A large part of Ruth’s research seeks to find a way to understand how a nation’s narratives of itself are told at various levels within a society, from national newspapers to the classroom and schoolyard. But how can you go about doing such a thing. Such a task can quickly become impossible. Actually, what Ruth is doing here is much more complicated than even this. She is interviewing parents and teachers about their experiences of race and ethnicity in a school setting with a wide variety of students from various ethnicities. And how we understand our world is essentially a task of narrative – that is, the stories that we tell so as to make sense of the world we find ourselves in. But those stories don’t exist in a vacuum, and certainly not within the vacuum of our own experience. Rather there are fields of narrative that inform and help to make sense of our experiences. Then beyond these fields of narratives – which are essentially a distilling of the common experience of people in a particular place and time – there are maps of narratives, that are the most general narrative stories that a community tells of itself. Each level in this hierarchical structure (the personal narratives, the narratives within particular fields and the overarching maps of narratives) informs the others and all are always in a process of change, of reconfiguring and redefining each other. All of them are a making sense of what it is to be a certain type of person, of possessing a certain identity.
Now, this is the bit I’ve been wanting to get to, this is the bit about identity and difference. Bauman spends a lot of time discussing this in his book Modernity And Ambivalence, particularly in relation to how prior to the second world war Jews in Germany sought to become ‘German’, but that this was impossible as they were, despite their best efforts, always defined as Other. Now, one of the fundamental ideas of Capitalism is that we are nearly blank-slates and that our identities are things we can change at will, that identity is essentially a consumable and is defined by what we purchase – that is, buy a Ford and you are a different type of person than you would have been if you’d bought a BMW, but given enough money either purchase is available to you and therefore either identity is also available to you. Except, this isn’t at all how ethnicity works. The language I’m more familiar with to describe this idea is Bourdieu’s habitus. That is, the habits and dispositions that we live by are such that we have no notion we actually have these habituses, but they constrain our ability to step in or out of identities all the same, mostly because certain ways of being simply make no sense to us, mostly because they are so far outside of our ability to even understand. And worse, since our identities are ‘embodied’, imprinted on us throughout our lives, that is, that since these identities and habits and dispositions are as much a part of us as our walking gait, our identity appears to us as utterly natural – and so the identities of Others who do not share our dispositions and habits appear unnatural to us or even willfully ignorant and inhuman. So that, even if we wanted to help those with other cultural identities to become ‘more like us’ we are unlikely to have a clue how to actually go about this.
And thus begin the paradoxes. Ought schools teach children from other cultures to assimilate into the social norms that exist around them? And if so, then to what extent are those social norms going to remain consistent over time? The Australia of today is hardly the same as the one I grew up in, when my daughters are my age they will live in quite another world. How will globalization impact local cultures and will this homogenization still leave some groups outside? Given children from Other cultures within local cultures are unlikely to ever be read as anything but Other, what does this ‘learning to assimilate’ actually mean? As Ruth points out at one stage in this, generally people from other cultures are literally used by the home culture to define the limits of ‘us’. As such, as Bauman made clear about German Jews, it is literally impossible for such people to assimilate, as ‘they’ are how we define ‘us’. So, any change in ‘them’ virtually necessitates a change in ‘us’.
If you were thinking of doing a PhD this is a particularly useful book to read for a number of reasons, not least that it provides a really helpful insight into the relationship between the idea you want to pursue in your thesis, the theory that is going to allow you to understand how that idea might be made sense of and then the methodologies that will allow you to turn that idea into a question and then into an answer – you know, the ‘what am I going to do and how’ of your thesis. This book is particularly useful, because Ruth literally maps out how she cut a path through all of these issues. Frequently, research is written up after the event in a way that makes all of this seem almost inevitable. The book will say something like, ‘here’s the question I was wanting to answer, here’s what other people said about it before I got on the scene, here’s how I thought I would frame my answer – here’s my answer.’ And while this is as it should be in the sense that the whole thing ends up being quite readable – it really doesn’t give the reader an insight into the messiness of the process. Or the way that the ‘question’ changes over the course of the research, or how that question needs to change, as the one you start out with proves to be impossible to answer. This book provides an insight into exactly that, and does so in a way that shows how various theorists found along the way help to frame and re-frame the research as well as providing the researcher with tools to work with so as to understand some of what is being found through the research. That is, this book shows that research of this kind is iterative. This is a remarkably useful thing to learn. You see, doing a PhD is quite unlike any other kind of learning. The whole point of it is that you are to add to the sum total of human knowledge – pretentious, I know, but that basically means ‘come up with something no one has come up with before’. But if that is to be the case then you need to eventually leave your supervisor behind. How do I explain this? In virtually every other learning situation your teacher is meant to be (and to remain) more knowledgeable than you about what you are learning. But with a PhD you need to become the expert – to know more than your supervisor, at least about this one thing that your thesis is about. But if that is to be the case then you really can’t be lead there – by definition there is ‘no path’. Which means that there are likely to be lots of false starts, dead ends and so on. The thing I like most about this book is that it shows all of that, and not just to show that obstacles appear, but also how they were overcome. Like I said, this is a really useful book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review