abstract: Nearly 11 million immigrants in the United States, three-quarters of which are Latino, lack legal authorization to live and work in the country; nonetheless, the majority of these individuals have resided in the U.S. for a decade or more and have profound social, emotional, cultural, and economic ties to the country (Passel & Cohn, 2018). Despite being deeply embedded in their communities, the dominant policy response involves increased immigration enforcement and advancing a hostile socio-political context (Gulasekaram & Ramakishnan, 2015). This policy approach comes at a great cost to immigrant and Latino communities throughout the U.S. and is largely ineffective. Accordingly, many advocates and stakeholders, including the National Association of Social Workers (2017), argue for policies that integrate “unauthorized permanent residents” (Martínez, Slack, & Martínez- Schuldt, 2018). The primary purpose of this study was to understand strategies that can be leveraged to build support for integrationist policymaking. Among a sample of U.S.-born white college students (n=708), intensive, community, and college contact with Latino immigrants and people of color were assessed; the relationships between intergroup contact and support for integrationist policymaking were examined. To better understand the contact-policy attitudes relationship, the deprovincialization hypothesis of the intergroup contact theory (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011) and the Latino threat narrative (Chavez, 2013) were merged and tested as a serial pathway by which contact and policy attitudes may be related. Findings revealed intensive and community contact with Latino immigrants and people of color related to more support for integrationist legislation. In most cases, these effects were direct as well as indirect through the ethnocentrismthreat attitudes pathway. Ethnocentrism fully accounted for the relationships between intensive and community intergroup contact and threat attitudes. These findings have several implications for intervention. First, in the long-term struggle for immigrant integration, intergroup interaction between whites and people of color should be promoted, and the importance of casual intergroup contact should not be dismissed. Interventions that reduce social segregation are needed, as well as efforts to effectively harness the ethnic-racial diversity that presently exists. Cross-group exposure interventions that aim to overcome ethnocentric tendencies should be implemented. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Social Work 2019

The central theory guiding my research is that interstate conflict, at least as covered in mass media, leaves residual cultural attitudes that can shape the political context in which elites formulate policy. Specifically, U.S. interventionism in the Middle East has given rise to fundamental hostilities, founded on misguided biases, that shape involvement in the region today. I focus on one step within that broader theory, to test it empirically: the hypothesis that anti-Muslim stereotypes, when activated, will shape an individual’s foreign-policy preferences. I begin by considering competing accounts that link 1) ethnocentrism or 2) targeted stereotypes with support for the use of military force in the Middle East. After careful review of the group-based and social-identity theories that undergird the two accounts, I synthesize them. My more-complete theory can be summarized as: Someone will exhibit an ethnocentric response toward an out-group when negative stereotypes about the group combine with an individual’s in-group identity to result in perceived threat. Applying the logic of that hypothesis to Muslims and American foreign policy, I argue that, for American whites, Muslims are uniquely situated to be perceived as realistic and symbolic cultural threats to their core national identity because they may differ in terms of ethnicity, culture, and religion. Mass media portray Muslims as violent and encourage Americans to evaluate them in terms of such cultural dissimilarity. On the other hand, Muslims present little identity threat to blacks, whose core in-group identity typically revolves around their status as a racial minority in the United States. Even blacks who identify with the nation will not view Islam as incompatible with their national identity because that identity is typically not predicated on looking, living, or believing a certain way. I develop these ideas into testable hypotheses and investigate how anti-Muslim attitudes shape opinion about important contemporary Middle East issues. Using survey and experimental data, I find compelling evidence linking anti-Muslim attitudes – among whites – to support for using military force (rather than diplomacy) against Iran and against Islamists. Those attitudes also predict opposition to accepting Syrian refugees. Finally, I turn from this narrative of negativity to argue that the anti-Muslim stereotypes many citizens bring to bear when forming judgments of Middle East policy can be shifted. I base this optimistic expectation on media framing theories, which suggest that issue frames can shift opinion when they emphasize strong and credible arguments. After constructing frames from debate statements during the 2016 Presidential Election, and an original frame that affirms counterstereotypes of Muslims, I expect and find evidence that strong frames emphasizing the obligations of American identity and factual counterstereotype-affirming information can shift those who oppose accepting refugees to more moderate positions. Broadly, my research offers a theoretically-grounded schematic for how stereotypes and identity construction operate together cognitively to shape public opinion. My methods offer leverage to those endeavoring to explain how these idea elements shape opinion in other issue domains. I also divulge important nuances about how specific actors (i.e., whites) propagate a cycle of anti-Muslim attitudes, warfare, and terrorism. I contribute to rivalry theory in international relations by explaining how cultural biases shape an enduring rivalry of the grandest scale: the perpetual U.S.-Middle East conflict. My framing research offers both academic and practical contributions by providing evidence on behalf of existing theory and by suggesting how media and political elites – by describing issues in unbiased ways – could knock off course the perpetual cycle of American interventionism, retaliatory terrorism, and resulting anti-Muslim stereotype generalizations.

This thesis is about exploring the politics within and around research. The starting point is a European project which ran from late 1997 to the end of 2000. It was called "Self-employment activities concerning women and mi­norities: their success or failure in relation to social citizenship policies" and had as its objective to provide the EU-Commission with recommendations for improved self-employment policies. Background material was comple­mented by interviews with "experts", but the main source of information was in the form of biographical interviews with the self-employed, or for­merly self-employed, themselves. The qualitative method was used as a way of researching how individuals' background and experiences influenced their decision to become self-employed as well as their tendency to use labour market policies available for starting businesses. It was also a way to find out how those policies impacted on the individuals' lives. The conse­quent recommendations included a suggestion for broadening existing policies to comprise social aspects as well as financial allowances, and also the caution that self-employment was perhaps not the best solution to labour market and social exclusion. This latter doubt arose during project work, as did questions about methodology, the role of the researcher, and eventually about the politics that inform research. Only briefly touched upon in the project reports, these issues instead became the basis for the thesis. A reflexive rereading of the Final Report led to a critical examination of the political uses of con­cepts and categories, of how stereotypes affect research, and of the embeddedness in ethnocentric discourses of both research and researcher. The use of postcolonial and feminist theory, discourse analysis and a social constructionist perspective broadened the analytical possibilities and fur­thered understanding of the connections between politics and research. A conclusion is that a comprehensive change in the social order as well as in people's conscience is required to stem ethnic discrimination in society and the perpetuation of stereotypes and preconstructed categories in research. / digitalisering@umu

This paper investigates how Latin America and its cultures are represented in textbooks on Spanish as a foreign language. The study aims at investigating how much attention and of what type is dedicated to Latin America in the investigated material, whether the textbooks contribute to giving a varied and nuanced image of the Spanish-American cultures and how this relates to the educational goal of promoting an intercultural competence.A qualitative method of analysis has been applied in order to carry out the analysis of three textbooks for intermediate levels of language studies: Caminando 3, Alegria and De acuerdo.The results of the investigation show that the investigated textbooks mostly present a simplified, ethnocentric, homogenized and sometimes postcolonial image of the Spanish-American cultures. Texts where the culture constitutes the context and not the subject can promote a process of identification and consequently an intercultural competence.The study’s main conclusions show that Spanish-American cultures are underrepresented in the investigated material and that a non-native perspective dominates in the majority of the texts. This combined with the lack of variety and profundity, may have consequences for the promotion of an intercultural competence and for teachers’ work with textbooks and cultural content.

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The following study aims to examine how the Swedish journalism portrays the relationship between the Swedish police and the Romani people in Sweden in connection with the disclosure of the registration of thousands of Romani people during the autumn of 2013. The study proceeds from a series of articles written 2013 about what in Swedish media is known as “Registerskandalen” or “Romregistret”. The theories used in the study all originates from Postcolonial Theory and Ethnocentrism, and we used van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis for analysing the result. In the end of the study we find that the Swedish journalism portrays the Swedish police's view on the Romani people as negative in comparison to how they view the rest of the majority society in Sweden.

Prior studies have shown that the information and cultural product flow is dominantly one direction from large/wealthy markets to smaller markets. Extending this position through the underlying research, it is expected that the audiences in the United States, one of the largest cultural product exporters, may have shaped certain perceptions on the scarcity of Korean films in their domestic film market. By studying the users in an internet film discussion community, this research aims to provide useful ideas about how American audiences perceive Korean films. This qualitative case study conducted a content analysis of the actual postings by the participants on the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) as they discuss the Korean movie "OldBoy." Then, in-depth interviews with volunteered users were performed.Foreign films, such as Asian films like OldBoy, seem to especially satisfy their needs of alternatives due to these films' scarcity in U.S. market. In other words,participating in community discussion is a means of finding new foreign films, and watching new foreign films works as a way of contributing to their film viewing communities. Also, contributing the community enhances their perceived prestige as film enthusiasts. The investigator started this research from the assumption that the scarcity of Korean films made U.S. audiences ethnocentric. However, study observed that the scarcity of Korean films and the foreignness of this film is treated as one of the most attractive aspects to this subset of viewers. This study has shown that by contributing to and participating in message board discussions, the viewers built a film viewing community in the IMDb website. The discussions with others in the film viewing community helped them build and enhance their prestige as serious film-goers as they built an interpretive community. Tracking the posts and respondents' answers, the investigator could predict that they are building exchange networks in their foreign film viewing community, and this process may influence to their future foreign film viewing.

Expatriates' degree of adjustment to living and working in a foreign country is well-accepted as an important outcome variable in expatriate management research. However, measures of degree of adjustment do not capture the breadth of strategies expatriates may use to achieve such adjustment, which may be critical for understanding whether expatriates have achieved a healthy and productive orientation to life abroad. Borrowing from research on immigrant populations, this study examines the construct of expatriate acculturation strategies, which characterize expatriates' mode of adjustment along two independent dimensions reflecting maintenance of one's home culture and engagement of the host culture, respectively. One hundred U.S. expatriates were recruited and completed an index of acculturation strategies. In addition, participants completed survey and reaction-time based measures of proposed antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of varying acculturation strategies. Results suggest that expatriates largely pursue either a maintenance-focused or engagement-focused strategy and that acculturation strategies are not redundant with degree of adjustment. Relationships between acculturation strategies and relevant individual differences, characteristics of expatriate positions, and outcomes are discussed.

Abstract Globalization is forcing many American college students to re-evaluate their perspective on foreign travel. If they are offered an opportunity to improve their cultural relativity skill set by immersing themselves into a new culture, the more astute students might choose to embark on that journey especially if it would result in resume enhancement. This paper focuses upon a group of twelve community college students' cross-cultural experiences, navigation techniques, and adaptation methods as student interns teaching conversational English in Changchun, China for a period of nine to thirteen weeks in spring 2011. Several areas of interest emerged from their experiences and observations to allow for pedagogical inquiry: the global divide between Chinese and American cultural and educational initiatives; utilization of social, economic, and cultural capital by some but not all participants; successful teaching methods to deal with different learning styles; and negotiation of identities to become effective teachers and cultural ambassadors. The body of analysis, conclusions, and interpretations sections identifies the successes and failures of the twelve subjects and suggests that there is importance to this ethnographic study for sociology and education scholars. The bottom-line significance becomes apparent as more future college graduates will be seeking work both inside and outside the US in education and business fields. As employers peruse college graduates' resumes for something substantially unique, a candidate who has lived and worked in an emerging foreign country can be a huge advantage for their career aspirations.

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