‘Us’ and ‘Them’: The role of religion in mediating and challenging the ‘model minority’ and other civic boundaries

This article examines how Korean Americans use the cultural resources of religious communities to mediate race, ethnic, and socio-economic boundaries that have consequences for civic life. Specifically, I compare involvement of Korean Americans in second-generation Korean congregations to those in multiethnic churches. I find Korean Americans who participate in second-generation Korean churches use religion to largely reproduce images of Korean Americans as model minorities, and implicitly distance themselves from those whom they perceive as less financially successful. In contrast, Korean Americans in multiethnic congregations use religion to emphasize the commonality Korean Americans have with other minorities. By using a cultural framework that allows for the agency of individuals in identity and group boundary construction, this work more generally shows the potential for new Americans to use the cultural resources of local organizations to change existing ethnic and racial boundaries in the United States.     

The reigning misperception about culture and Asian American achievement

ABSTRACT

Asian Americans graduate from college at higher rates than other groups, and evince educational outcomes that match or exceed those of their parents. They comprise about 25 per cent of the student body in Ivy League institutions, despite making up only 6 per cent of the U.S. population. While it may be tempting to reduce Asian American academic achievement to Asian culture, and Confucian values more specifically, we provide disconfirming evidence, both within the United States and beyond, to show the fallacy of this logic. Contemporary U.S. Asian immigrants are “hyper-selected”: they are more likely to have graduated from college than their non-migrant counterparts, and also more likely to be college-educated than the U.S. mean. Hyper-selectivity and its spillover effects explain the exceptional educational outcomes of Asian Americans. It is time that we laid to rest the reigning misperception that Asian American academic achievement can be reduced to Asian culture or Confucian values.     

The "Other" Story of Model Minorities: Korean American High School Dropouts in an Urban Context

This article analyzes how socioeconomic backgrounds, social capital, and school resources affect Korean American youths' educational attainment and aspirations. In the context of limited social and economic support, students delineate differences within coethnic communities along class lines and adopt an oppositional cultural frame of reference to endure and resist institutional barriers. This study demonstrates the significance of distinguishing socioeconomic differences within Korean American communities and for whom the enclaves may be more beneficial.     

The contested meanings of 'Asian American': racial dilemmas in the contemporary US

This article explores the contested meanings of the ‘Asian American’ concept in the US today. Since its emergence in the late 1960s, ‘Asian American’ has been defined by pan-Asian groups and organizations in the US as a collectivity bound by shared racial interests. Contemporary conditions have sharpened and highlighted the inherent contradictions and ambiguities of this conception of ‘Asian American’ as a racial interest group. Especially important have been the shifts in the composition of the Asian American population that followed the immigration reforms of 1965. Contestations of ‘Asian American’ also reflect larger uncertainties about the meaning of race in the US today, in particular, the nature of racial boundaries and racial disadvantage.     

A plea for the ‘de-migranticization' of research on migration and integration1

ABSTRACT

Migration and integration research has been institutionalized over the last few decades. However, an increasing number of voices has been calling for more reflexivity, criticizing the nation-state- and ethnicity-centred epistemology that often informs this discipline. Consistently with this line of reasoning, I argue that migration and integration research originates in a historically institutionalized nation-state migration apparatus and is thus entangled with a particular normalization discourse. Therefore, this field of study contributes to reproducing the categories of this particular migration apparatus. This entanglement poses some serious dilemmas for this research tradition, dilemmas that ask for further consideration and possible solutions. My main proposition is to ‘de-migranticize' migration and integration research. I outline possible ways of doing so and discuss the consequences of such a strategy for the future of migration and integration studies.     

“Sending so much more than money”: exploring social remittances and transnational mobility

Based on 324 in-depth interviews with Indian, Moroccan, Ukrainian, Bosnian and Filipino migrants based in four EU countries (Austria, Italy, Spain and the UK), our paper explores the relationship between social remittances and transnational mobility. We develop a new typology of social remittances as based on the principle of mobility. We argue that the degree to which transnational mobility is present in social remittances depends on the agency of the sender and on the nature of the receiving community. We further elaborate on such mobility-related concepts as “transnational re-scaling” (in reference to directionality of social remittances) and “translocal celebrity” (in reference to sender’s role in cultural production). Based on a large qualitative dataset, this study also contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between the local and the global.     

Introduction: Choice of spouse and mobility

Marriage comprises both individual lives and population evolution. Anthropology shows that marriage, within cultural rules, is based on parameters of different natures such as psychology or economy with implications that concern also the genetic level. The creation of a general model of marriage is quite complex as it must include factors that change in time and space between and inside societies. The marriage as a factor of social mobility is of great interest, but it can not be limited to this factor alone, because the union between two individuals and two families is also the necessary preamble to biological reproduction and population genetic pool evolution.     

Of totemism and ethnicity: Consciousness,practice and the signs of inequality*

In 1997, it was reported that a sheep had been successfully ‘cloned'at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. The sheep, named Dolly, attracted a great deal of attention and the idea of ‘cloning’ appeared to generate, in much of the western world at least, both anxiety and anticipation in equal measure. Discussion generated in the media immediately turned to the advantages and disadvantages of cloning people. I focus here on some of the responses to Dolly in the United States and in Britain. Drawing on fieldwork, pre‐Dolly, in the north of England, largue that the image of ‘the clone’ acts as a conceptual brake, as a marker of limits, to possibilities presented through new reproductive and genetic technologies. ‘Cloning’ provides an ethnographic window through which specific cultural understandings of kinship can be discerned.     

Critical comment on “Revisiting the Asian second-generation advantage”

This critical comment notes an important error of inference in Tran, Lee, and Huang (2019). Results reported in Tran, Lee, and Huang (2019) do not permit the inference that any of the second-generation Asian groups in the study—Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Koreans—face a “bamboo ceiling” disadvantage relative to native Whites in attaining managerial or professional occupations in the U.S. labor market, controlling for educational attainment, age and age squared, gender, and region.     

半翻转生物化学教学模式对学生学业成绩和自我认知的影响

“以学生为中心”的翻转课堂教学模式可以提高学生的学业成绩、改善认知和培养创新能力等,但对知识掌握的整体性、系统化和育人方面存在明显的不足;传统教学“以教师为中心”的教学理念却有着知识学习的系统化和育人方面的独特优势。我们结合了翻转课堂和传统教学各自的优点,在山东大学齐鲁医学院2020级口腔医学、药学和预防医学专业的生物化学教学中,引入了翻转课堂与传统教学相结合的半翻转课堂的教学模式,并以2019级的传统教学模式作为对照,对学生的学业成绩和自我认知情况的改善进行统计学分析。结果表明,采用半翻转课堂教学的学生成绩优于传统式教学(P<0.01);学生的自我认知能力在半翻转课堂教学实施前后有显著改善(P<0.01或P<0.05);该研究为医学院校的相关教学和研究工作提供参考。