The witholding of equal public recognition of national, cultural and language identity often causes severe anguish to sub-state peoples and sometimes leads to war. For this reason, political philosophy has an important responsibility to think through the moral grounds and the appropriate means of recognition. This chapter draws a moral map of the recognitional debate, outlining three normative camps: nonrecognition, monorecognition, and recognitional pluralism. I argue for recognitional pluralism, in two steps. The first step establishes, contra nonrecognition, that nations, cultures and languages are recognition-worthy, and that this is so for two reasons: they give people access to cultural life-worlds, and they are sources of dignity. The second step builds the case for a pluralistic means of according public recognition. To do so, I argue, against monorecognition, that egalitarian recognition of life-world access and dignity is to be the driving principle. Within the pluralist camp, I argue for the principle of equal services, which implies that the state accords comparable cultural services to the cultural groups that share a state or territory. Examples of this can be found in equal language rights regimes, egalitarian public holiday systems, as well as in multinational federalism.

This chapter discusses multicultural humanistic psychology, which is a theoretical foundation that seeks to engage the culturally relative self-actualization processes of the individual and community through the diverse spectrum of multicultural facets, so that wellbeing and social and emotional intelligences flourish. This paradigm synthesizes the strengths of both humanistic psychology and multicultural paradigms to support clinicians and educators in engaging with phenomena in the rapidly changing world. Multicultural humanistic psychology is not about validating Western cultural paradigms so that a new theory can be prepackaged and distributed globally. Rather, it is a way to awaken the potential of consilience, to recognize and transcend limitations, and acknowledge that together the fields are more relevant to global challenges. This paradigm guides the further discussions on social and emotional intelligences.

This chapter is a unique contribution to the social and emotional intelligences discourse. Culturally relative self-actualization is defined as the transcendence of basic physiological, psychological, and self or group-fulfillment needs that are meaningful and defined by a person’s cultural paradigm. Within a cultural paradigm, the person’s specific living contexts must be taken into account, as many do not have the privilege or ease of satisfying needs as readily as others. This chapter demonstrates how social and emotional intelligences support culturally relative self-actualization.

Self-awareness brings the person to deeper levels and within new realms of understanding social and emotional intelligences because the perception is focused on the contexts and meanings in which feelings or emotions arise. This chapter offers readers a multicultural perspective on what awareness means and how it can help to explore the social and emotional phenomena of a person’s world. Taoist and Buddhist perspectives open up the perspective on what awareness entails. This chapter explores how self-awareness is more than a cognitive endeavor, and is a phenomenal feature of the social and emotional intelligences.

Module 4 discusses dynamics of societies when several cultures interact over sustained time periods. Multiculturalism describes a political strategy first instituted in Canada under which cultures were intended to coexist, though inequity, discrimination, and prejudice do persist around the world. Hawaiʻi and Aotearoa (New Zealand) serve as additional examples of interaction between multiple cultures. Sojourners cross cultures for work or education, expected to return home eventually, and study of their experiences has yielded concepts such as cultural intelligence to describe factors favorably influencing outcomes. Contact theory proposes that equal status interaction eventually reduces intercultural tensions, possibly benefiting diverse workforces in healthcare settings.

Chapter 4 depicts a US elementary school that a second-generation Chinese immigrant child attends. It explores the school’s multicultural ideology and monolingual ethos from the child’s kindergarten teacher’s viewpoint. It further explores how this child’s family language ideology and policy are shaped by his first-generation immigrant parents’ own language limitations in the U.S. and their comparative views on Chinese versus American communicative styles. Through observation and narrated stories, this chapter brings the reader to the child’s elementary-school classroom, his school’s field day and international day, and his parents’ workplaces. It presents a case where not only do the parents fully support the English-only policy and practice at school, but they also are ready and willing to deliberately shift to greater use of English at home, based on their careful cost–benefit assessment of the consequences of the language shift for their family.

This chapter traces Ottoman responses to the challenge of Europe’s rise and global hegemony – responses that engendered two emergent properties: religious disenchantment and growing resentment at the loss of Muslim primacy. These properties informed new political programs in the buildup to and during critical junctures. Milestones included the Tanzimat (1839) and subsequent, Young Ottoman reforms led by bureaucrats and intellectuals. The result was a framework for multicultural citizenship – an Islamo-liberal project. It bore fruit in the first Ottoman constitution (1878), but was soon suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1908/9) who instead developed (pan-)Islamism as a political program. His authoritarian rule, in turn, spurred a coalition of liberal and proto-nationalist Young Turks to revolt (1908), launching the “second constitutional period.” The revolution was then captured by an illiberal Triumvirate espousing a more unitary, proto-nationalist project. No linear or teleological process, the chapter reveals that contests were driven by the complex interplay of ideas, actors, and contextual pressures. These forces informed a new menu of programs for managing religion and diversity that would outlive the empire itself: Islamo-liberalism, liberalism, Islamism, and Turkism.

In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

This chapter explores the work of Hanif Kureishi and, in particular, his 1995 novel The Black Album. Set in London in 1989, the novel engages with the fall of the Berlin Wall, with terrorism, and, most prominently, with the Rushdie Affair. It stages debates around religion, free speech, and cultural identity. Kureishi conceives of multiculturalism as premised on a vibrant exchange of ideas, and in The Black Album he portrays Islamism – and, by extension, fundamentalism of any kind – as a pseudo-idea which can only constitute a threat to, and never a part of, an effective multiculturalism. However, this chapter identifies a key paradox in The Black Album: it implores readers to treat ideas seriously, and yet there is very little serious treatment of particular ideas in the novel itself. As such, Kureishi’s novel is far more invested in the idea of ideas than in any particular body of them.

Chapter 6 addresses the common strategy to appear unprejudiced: racial colorblindness. Are individuals in a color-salient society able to not see color? The chapter begins with empirical research on the question of whether people are able to ignore the race and ethnicity of others. As it turns out, people who attempt to ignore race cannot, and tend to have awkward interactions with people of color. Instead of colorblindness being a good strategy to avoid discrimination, colorblindness facilitates the ignoring of discrimination. The pros and cons of a multicultural perspective as an alternative to racial colorblindness is discussed. Implications of the cultural emphasis on colorblindness is interrogated, such as the implicit belief that white people are true Americans, whereas people of color are only provisionally American. Strategies for prejudice reduction end the chapter and include creating more complex social identities and coalition work – organizing across difference.

This chapter provides an overview of folk and multicultural festivals in Australia, especially as to how these events have been important to the creation and celebration of community identity since the 1950s. It begins with a brief outline and critique of the policies that have shaped modern Australia as a culturally diverse nation and the role of festivals as a vehicle for representing ethnic identity, inclusivity and tolerance. This discussion also considers the contentious positioning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures as part of a broader notion of diversity, as well as debates raised by a focus on the performance of ethnic identity that emphasises authentic practice and devalues cross-cultural collaboration. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of an Australian folk culture in British folk music traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the revivalist folk movement of the 1960s. The final section outlines the development of national folk festivals as events representing an authentic Australian folklore and culture that, like multicultural festivals, offer insight into the problematic relationships between place, community, belonging and the national space.

The chapter illuminates diverse musical encounters or engagements between ‘minority’ cultures and what was, until recently, an Anglo-Australian majority over four periods of social, cultural and political foment between the pre-Federation colonial era and the present. It first examines the pre-WWI musical contributions of German-speaking residents and visitors, and Italian and Jewish influence on musical entertainment in the inter-war and post-war era. It then considers how, from the 1980s, the twin forces of local multiculturalism and ‘world music’ intersected in Australia to foster a wealth of musical diversity, including creative musical interventions and experimentations. We also consider the many multi-faceted present-day music ‘scenes’ associated with diasporic communities by honing into the local world of Indonesia-related music-making in Australia. Music of minority cultures tends to become articulated through uneven power relationships with the majority culture and its institutions, but the chapter provides a more nuanced view of this relationship. It demonstrates, for example, how ‘minority’ musicians have strategically deployed the ‘power’, or value, of ‘difference’ for professional or other advantage, exploiting opportunities provided by the mainstream, which can simultaneously shape and even redefine minority music.

African musical practices in Australia are highly diverse and multifaceted. This chapter examines the work of a Senegalese Australian artist across contexts ranging from a new multimedia arts initiative, music festivals, community events and schools. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic research as well as performer and educator experiences, it shows that music provides an important space through which to explore the complexities of diasporic experience in Australia and to engage in self-representation countering dominant negative portrayals of Africans in Australian media and political discourse. Through music, African Australian artists negotiate ideas about cultural specificity and universality, maintaining connections to African cultural practices while forging new connections and forms of creativity in contemporary Australia.

This chapter seeks to explain one element of inequality in Western Europe by focusing on the treatment of immigrant communities. It focuses on how attitudes to immigrants – and conceptions of them within a broader framework of social justice – evolved. One of the ways that the ‘long 1968’ challenged European complacency was to present the cause of immigrants as a cause of social justice. By contrast, today immigrants are often depicted as antithetical to social justice. Many commentators have argued that a fundamental tension exists between ethnic diversity and social equality, and depict mass migration as undermining social justice. But where did such ‘welfare chauvinism’ originate from, and how did these ideas entrench themselves within public discourse? In other words, how did we get from social justice for immigrants to immigrants as the antithesis of social justice? A conventional answer to this question might focus on the loss of confidence of left-wing political projects towards the end of the twentieth century, and the concomitant rise of the radical right. This chapter, however, interrogates tensions within social-justice discourses of the left and centre-left, paying attention to emancipatory and exclusionary aspects, and drawing links between the ‘guest worker’ era and the present day.

This chapter examines the ways in which the sovereign, monocultural, and monist state that was dominant in Latin America starting in the nineteenth century has mutated over the last thirty-six years. It begins by offering a description of the initially dominant model and then introduces the multicultural liberal and radical intercultural models that replaced it by politically and legally recognizing the cultural diversity that characterizes Latin American societies. The chapter then explores the discursive and practical challenges generated by illegal normative systems (such as those managed by guerilla or paramilitary groups, or criminal organizations), and by extralegal normative system (such as the regulation of private property in peripheral urban neighborhoods) which compete with the sovereignty of states and official law. The constitutional bloc, the Inter-American Human Rights System, and bilateral or multilateral treaties signed by Latin American states further pluralize legal creation and weaken the concept of absolute state sovereignty. This chapter characterizes these developments as instances of either weak or strong legal pluralism.