University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee – Assistant Professor  Intercultural Communication

Location: Wisconsin, United States
Institution Type: College/University
Position Type: Assistant Professor
Submitted: Monday, August 25th, 2008
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Main Category: Communication/Mass Communication
Secondary Categories:   None

The Department of Communication seeks to hire a tenure-track assistant professor specializing in Intercultural Communication/Global Studies or closely related field. The successful candidate will be a strong teacher and scholar grounded in social science. Ph.D. or ABD (degree completion by January 2010) in Communication specializing in Intercultural / Global Studies or closely related field required. Regional expertise in Africa, ASIA or Latin America desired. Applicants must submit their vitas, letter of application and writing sample online at https://www.jobs.uwm.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=50715 Send teaching credentials and three letters of recommendation, one addressing applicant’s classroom experience / teaching expertise to: Prof. Nancy Burrell, Chair, Department of Communication, UW-Milwaukee, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201. Review of Credentials begins October 15, 2008 and continues until the position is filled. UWM is an AA/EEO employer.

Contact Info:
Please apply online at:
https://www.jobs.uwm.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=50715
Website: https://www.jobs.uwm.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=50715

Does the institutionalized usage of hyphenated-nationalities help, hurt, or distract a country from more pertinent issues?

America is a country of immigrants.

One side of the American street prides itself on not seeing the person as a combination of ancestral ethnicities but, instead, each individual becomes a culmination of their life experiences.

The other side of the American street takes pride in the achievements of their ancestors and believe their ancestor’s struggles, sacrifices and oppressions are intrinsic to who they are and how America treats/sees them.

This boulevard of contrasting views pervades most aspects of American social laws and policies. Almost every social issue faced by our judicial and/or legislative bodies, on national, state and local levels, have an ethnic/racial purpose or impact and we spend inordinate amounts of time debating, protesting, defending, and balancing these facets.

There is the beginnings of a new movement within our country to re-think the use of ethnic qualifiers to the American nationality. African-American, Hispanic-American, or
your-ethnicity-goes-here-DASH-American is of questionable benefit to the nation’s social fabric and, debatably of course, does more harm to national unity than good.  This same debate was part of the nation’s conversation at the turn of the 20th century when it was the German-Americans, Irish-Americans, and Polish-Americans that qualified their nationality.

In many aspects, where America goes, so goes the world.  Before any other country steps into this pit of social identities, there are some questions the people of that country should ponder:

1. Are institutionalized hyphenated-nationalities  good for a country’s unity and socio-mentality or is it an institutionalized contradiction to the term “nationality”?
2. Can you belong to more than one country and, if so, what happens when the two countries have conflicting policies?
3. Can you maintain the cultures and customs of your ancestral homelands while still assimilating fully into your birth country?
4. Does the use of hyphenated-nationalities proclaim an aversion to the idea of assimilation?
5. Is the use of the hyphenated qualification a two edged sword that cuts both ways?  In other words, can you expect your country to treat you different because of your hyphenation but treat you the same despite your hyphenation?

What are the ideas of migration researchers in these points? What influence does the use of hyphenated labels by migration researchers have?

William Myrick Thomas
dolarbil@gmail.com
www.dropthedash.com/fusion/html/links.html

What do you think? Is the author addressing an important point? Check out the website and see what you think. (Note: I don’t necessarily agree with him myself…)

• personality clashes (he says that he has noticed that Koreans are “sometimes more intense and aggressive” in their style of expression than Taiwanese)
• “a kind of insecurity complex” on the part of the Taiwanese when they compare themselves to the more internationally visible South Korea.

Muninn continues,

When it comes to Taiwanese sentiments towards Korea, if my very limited exchanges are at all suggestive of anything, the Korean brand power, food culture, and drama fandom seen here are not incompatible with a degree of emotional disdain.

This is all very new to me because I never noticed any kind of anti-Korean sentiment in Taiwan before. In fact, there was a Korean student in my Freshman English class last year who seemed well-liked by his classmates, as far as I could tell.

So what do my readers (or maybe there’s only one reader anymore!) think? Do you think Taiwanese have personality conflicts with Koreans any more than they do with, say, Japanese or Chinese from the PRC (maybe they’ll have more of the latter now that we’re letting PRC tourists in!)? Let me know…

He also discusses a critique of Deborah Tannen’s work (which we read and discussed before) by Deborah Cameron, who points out

that much of the literature on miscommunication between men and women lets men off the hook for their inability to understand women’s speech, even though the actual linguistic evidence implies that men use the same linguistic strategies (such as indirect requests) when it is convenient to do so. The point being that such miscommunication is treated as a cultural problem when it is really a problem of unequal power relations. The same woman who fetches her husband’s ketchup when he asks “Is there any ketchup?” will treat a similar question from her daughter as a factual query, replying: “Yes, dear, its in the cupboard.” Cameron argues that treating such communication problems as a matter of intercultural miscommunication (as Deborah Tannen does), obscures the real problems.

This adds an interesting and needed angle to intercultural communication studies that I hope I can discuss in class whenever I teach ICC again.

A grad student from Kanagawa University may have cracked the great riddle of Asian cuisine: the origin of the Fortune Cookie! As the NY Times reports, the original fortune cookies may have been produced by Kyoto-area confectioners in the late 1800s.¹ The practice — and the distinctive iron grills used to make the sembei crackers, which are part of the historical puzzle — spread to Japanese-owned Chop Suey houses in San Francisco.² From there, Chinese-owned restaurants began to offer them, and Chinese-owned bakeries supplied them.

(If you don’t know what a fortune cookie is, it’s a kind of cookie that Chinese restaurants in the U.S. give to patrons at the end of a meal. Inside the cookie is a piece of paper with a “fortune” written on it, like “You have a potential urge and the ability for accomplishment” or (my favorite) “Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else’s water lily.” There’s some discussion and some pictures of fortune cookies at Wikipedia.)

1) Faced with a Caucasian (or, I assume, any other not-Asian-looking individual), the Korean or Japanese person in question will have complete a meltdown, and do their utmost to complete the entire transaction (at the post office, store, restaurant, etc.) without making any eye contact or speaking a single word. In extreme cases they can completely crap-out and request help from the manager or other co-worker before even beginning the transaction or confirming that their customers does not, indeed, speak Korean/Japanese.
2) If the NALI (not Asian looking individual) is in the company of anyone who looks even remotely Asian, they will completely ignore the existence of the NALI and speak/recognize only the Asian looking person. This will continue even if a) the NALI continues to respond to questions and speak passably well in the native language of the Japanese/Korean person in question and/or b) if the Asian looking person in question in fact does not at all know how to speak Japanese/Korean.
3) Faced with a NALI, the Korean or Japanese person in question will panic and try to communicate in a non-grammatical mix of their native language, really bad English, and hand signals. This can happen even if you speak passably well in the native language of the person and have not yet shown any inability to understand their regular Korean/Japanese.

It’s an interesting read–check it out!

Nevertheless, not even all European American New Yorkers use this variety. Upper-middle class European American New Yorkers and suburban residents from educated backgrounds often speak with less conspicuous accents; in particular, many, though hardly all, use rhotic pronunciations instead of the less prestigious non-rhotic pronunciations while maintaining some less stigmatized features such as the low back chain shift and the short a split ….

Similarly, the children of professional white migrants from other parts of the US frequently do not have many New York dialect features, and as these two populations come to dominate the southern half of Manhattan and neighboring parts of Brooklyn, the dialect is retreating from their neighborhoods. Many teens attending expensive private prep schools are barely linguistically recognizable as New Yorkers. Nevertheless, many New Yorkers, particularly those of Southern and Eastern European descent from the middle- and working-class, retain varying degrees of what has been coined New Yorkese or Brooklynese within their daily speech.

There’s also a link to the homepage of the alt.usage.english newsgroup, which contains an audio archive of people with different accents reading texts. There are samples of a New Yorker reading “Arthur the Rat” and “I teach Ferdinand the calm cat to fetch cold cups of coffee. Who knows more about tasting things? He’s used the book.“

(I should add that the discussion page on the Wikipedia article is pretty interesting, too…)

The article “Taiwanese localization movement” is divided into four sections: effect, history, suppose and dispute. At the very beginning, the article explains that in order not to be regarded as a part of China, the movement highlights the distinguishing characteristics of Taiwanese culture. It should be glad to see that Taiwanese government has put their effort to advance the local culture, whereas it is sad to know the movement has become a political trick which is played to win their elections in recent years.

Except, the article points out that the movement is mainly developed in three ways: rewriting textbooks to emphasize the history of Taiwan and tried not to put too much issues about the national identity problem between china and Taiwan, promoting the language and culture of aboriginal and Hakka through media, changing the names of some companies and organizations from “China” into “Taiwan.” However, it fails to contain the controversial part that each elementary school student is required to be taught Taiwanese which is a spoken language and the writing system had lost, thus causes many complains from schools and students. Yet, in my opinion, it is not wise to practice “the Campaign for the Correction of Names”. Because most of Taiwanese cultures and arts are developed from China, it means nothing even though the word “China” has been taken off from the title.

The article illustrates that the local identity of Taiwan had kept ignored by the Imperial Japanese government and the Kuomintang, but now the localization movement is highly valued after the governing of President Lee Teng-hui.

Moreover, according to the article, the movement earns the support from the two major political parties and PRC. However, there are some arguments between “three main political groups”, the article mentions, about whether Taiwan should create its own identity in order to separate from Mainland China or not. However, the process has been played as a dangerous movement; for some politicians are intend to lead people to think that we should drive anything related to China out of Taiwan, including those who came from China but stay in Taiwan now. It becomes a line which is hard to across between Taiwanese and Chinese. Besides, for instance, how do you define a literature, which is written by a Taiwanese yet is accomplished under the governing of Japanese government, as Japanese literature or Taiwanese literature? This article can add more information about what the movement influence Taiwan.

On the discussion part, one guy mentioned that the issue of localization movement “ is not a divisive issue on Taiwan”, and it also the support from major political parties. I agree with that. Since Taiwanese already has a strong conscious of nation identity, there is no political party want to lose their supporter for against the movement. Others say that “The Taiwanese localization movement really has nothing to do with the political status of Taiwan (now, it did in the 1970′s). It’s more of a question of local cultural identity”. In some part, people have more interested to find out what the root of Taiwanese art, literature, culture is. Yet, in other part, the movement is still effected by politic. They try to put the label on culture, art, and people about what is from Taiwan and what is not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_localization_movement