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The purpose of this study was to explore the identity development of mixed race individuals in a Western Canadian context. The case study methodology was used to guide the overall procedure and participant selection. A thematic analysis was used to analyze patterns in the data. Four individuals of mixed race parentage were interviewed and five themes emerged: (a) the influence of family, (b) the influence of childhood experiences, (c) the influence of physical appearance, (d) the influence of racism, and (e) the influence of adult experiences. The detailed explorations of the participants experiences add to the Canadian literature on mixed race identity development, which provides several counselling implications and directions for future research. / Psychological Studies in Education

Blank space in western Art History and visual culture is something that has tended to be either explained away, or ignored. Pictures that do not depict challenge the visual basis of the ego and its others, confronting what I call the 'Phallic reader' (who sees according to the logic and rules of the Phallogocentric system he inhabits) and potentially disturbing his sense of the visible. The Phallic reader, the visible and the seeing ego's sense of how to see, meet in what I call the 'psychic surface'. Deploying this notion of a 'psychic surface' allows for readings which move on from the potentially confining logic of the Phallus. Paradoxically, the psychic structure of monochrome's liminal blankness is homologous to the indeterminate Mixed Race subject, whose body transgresses not only the foundational historical binarism of 'Black/White', but also Lacanian psychoanalysis. This thesis aims to concentrate on exploring blank spaces, with particular reference to the monochrome within western Art History. Building on the considerable work since at least the 1960s that critiques the binary logocentrism of Eurocentric, Hegelian-originated Art History, this thesis aims to explore the specific ways monochrome evades, undermines and tricks commonly accepted 'groundrules' of Art History. The Phallic reader is severely restricted in understanding that which falls outside of the signifying logic of a particular system of Art History that follows a binary, teleological and Phallogocentric course. Both monochrome and the Mixed Race subject fall outside of this logic, as both contain the structure of the trick. In each case, the trick is activated in the tension between the prychica nd the opticals urfaces. I suggestt hat monochrome's psychic space is pre-Phallic, a space of eternal deferral of meaning, a space that playfully makes a nonsense of binary structures. Psychoanalysis is largely used here as an analytic tool, but also appears as an object of critique. Art History provides an anchor for the optical surfaces under discussion. Theories of 'radical superficiality' both contradict and complement these ways of theorising the psychic surface. The trick/ster is a significant/signifiant means of deploying interdisciplinary methodologies to negotiate this difficult terrain between Black, White and monochrome. An interdisciplinary approach also enacts the psychic structure of indeterminacy of my objects of study. I hope that by proposing a potential transgressive power for those indeterminate things that continue to confound the binary systems that aim to contextualise and confine them, I will contribute to the areas of Visual Culture and 'Race' Theory.

This research is a qualitative, heuristic study involving in-depth interviews with eight white, professional heterosexual women in interracial relationships. The women were found through an opportunistic or snowball approach. The participant women were in the age range 25-60. Six were married and two were in long term relationships. All women had children, seven having mixed-race children between 18 months and 23 years of age. Four women had partners of African-Caribbean heritage, three had partners of African heritage and one had a partner of Nepalese heritage. The women shared their reflections on having to confront the realities of racism, coming to terms with their own ambiguous racial position, facing the notion of whiteness and considering their social position as white women. The research was conducted using a heuristic methodology to explore white women's experiences, using creative images and personal reflective and reflexive narratives integrated throughout the text. The research offers insight into how the social experiences of being in an interracial relationship impacts on white women; as individuals, partners and in their role of mother. Implications for themselves as mothers and parenting their children in a racist context are explored and discussed. The findings suggest the women can feel caught between the known (whiteness) and the unknown (blackness). Having crossed a 'socially unaccepted racialised boundary' and challenging explicit dominant social, gendered and racialised beliefs, the women stepped into the unknown involving experiences of changes in status, challenges to assumptions of their maternal competence and living in a world which involved a continuous process of deconstruction and reconstruction of a new, unforeseen racialised identity. The white women moved from being an 'insider' within their own dominant social experiences, to becoming an 'outsider' within another cultural context, sometimes experiencing uncertainty about where they belonged. The white women experienced a shift of reference group orientation, with a new experience of continuous external scrutiny unfolding. These newly encountered social and personal events challenged the white women to review how they previously saw themselves, with this all impacting on their previously taken for granted social status. These experiences impacted at emotional and cognitive levels. As a consequence, the white women often found themselves occupying a liminal or unknown space where a process occurs of attempting to come to terms with the new experiences, new learning and adopting alternative strategies to deal with these different experiences. Implications for counsellors working with white women in interracial relationships are considered and suggestions for therapeutic engagement are made.

This thesis explores hybridity and ethnicity in Nickerie, Western Suriname. It undertakes this exploration from the perspective of doglas, Surinamese people with mixed African and Asian parentage. In Suriname’s postcolonial process of nation-building, ethnicity has been essentialized, with doglas representing a category of anomaly, but also of uncertainty. What I have termed ‘dogla discourse’ refers to the opinions, experiences and negotiations among and about doglas in Nickerie that both shored up and destabilized Suriname’s ethnic essentialism. Dogla discourse fuses and confuses ethnic categories and boundaries in its insistent hybridity. The thesis shows that being dogla does not simply align with common tropes of ‘mixed-race’. I argue that in embracing conflicting paradigms of ethnicity, doglas in Nickerie both emphasized and undermined ethnic essentialism. This was expressed in idioms of kinship and sexual relations, in notions of the pure/impure dogla body, and in the relevance and irrelevance of ‘cultural spirituality’. Furthermore, dogla discourse problematized the role of ethnicity in the enduring struggles of how to define ‘the national’ in postcolonial states. Thus, the thesis presents an ethnographic contribution to studies of ‘mixed-race’ in contexts of postcolonial nation-building, and theoretically expands conceptualizations of ‘the hybrid’.

Historians have debated to what extent the free people of color in New Orleans were members of a wealthy privileged elite or part of a middle or working class in the South's largest antebellum city. This study steps outside the debate to suggest that analysis of the censuses of 1850 and 1860 shows correlations between neighborhoods, household structures, and occupations that reveal a heterogeneous population that eludes simple definitions. In particular this study focuses on mixed-race households to shed light on this segment of the free colored population that is mostly unstudied and generally misrepresented. This study also finds that immediately prior to the Civil War, mixed-race families, for no easily understood reason, tended to cluster in certain neighborhoods. Mostly this study points out that by the Civil War, the free people of color in New Orleans had evolved into a diverse mostly working class population.

Thesis advisor: Janet E. Helms / Multiracial people often experience challenges to developing positive racial identities and psychological well being in the racially stratified U.S. society. Research and theory suggest that contextual variables are important for the facilitation of positive adjustment for Multiracial individuals. However, despite the importance of social context, the majority of research has been limited by the use of small, non-generalizable samples, the lack of quantitative studies, a lack of consistent ways to measure these constructs, and researchers’ tendencies to examine well-being or racial identity in isolation. In addition, Multiracial identity typically has been assessed as a single racial identification categorization, rather than as the fluid racial identity process suggested by Helms’s (1995) People of Color (POC) racial identity theory. The present study proposed and examined a model that incorporated social context, racial identity, and well-being to better understand how Multiracial people develop racially and psychologically in a racially contentious society. Multiracial (Black/White and Asian/White) adults (N = 172) completed a demographic questionnaire, Multiracial Scales (Family Influence, Reflected Appraisals, Acceptance/Exclusion) created for this study, the Multiracial Challenges and Resilience Scale (Salahuddin & O’Brien, 2011), the People of Color Racial Identity Attitudes Scale (Helms, 2005), the Brief Symptom Inventory 18 (Derogatis, 2001), and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larson, & Griffin, 1985). Multivariate multiple regression analyses (MMRAs) were conducted to examine relationships among social context (challenging and supportive) and psychological well-being, racial identity and well-being, and social context and racial identity. Results of the MMRAs favored supportive social contexts ( i.e., Acceptance by the White and Multiracial groups) as being related to better psychological well-being and challenging social contexts (i.e., Exclusion from the White racial group) as detracting from well-being. Conversely, challenging social contexts were more predictive of racial identity than supportive social contexts. Racial identity was also significantly related to psychological well-being. Results revealed differences between racial groups in the relationships among racial identity and well-being, such that Asian/White participants experienced greater life satisfaction and Multiracial pride than Black/White participants. Overall, the results of the analyses indicated support for the proposed model’s inclusion of social context, racial identity, and well-being in a single study. As anticipated, social context and racial identity were predictive of psychological well-being, and social context was predictive of racial identity. Results also provided preliminary evidence for the use of Helms’s (1995) POC theory with a Multiracial population. Methodological limitations and implications for future theory, research, and practice are discussed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

Dans les années 1990, l’Australie met en place une politique de réconciliation s’étalant sur dix ans et visant à développer une meilleure relation entre Australiens aborigènes et non-aborigènes. Cette politique est fondée sur la reconnaissance de l’existence continue de tensions entre les deux communautés, et ce malgré une plus grande reconnaissance de la place des Aborigènes en Australie depuis les années 1970. La relation complexe entre Australiens aborigènes et non-aborigènes – en particulier "blancs" et dont les origines sont anglo-celtes – est le résultat du processus de colonisation, des politiques ultérieures conçues pour contrôler la population aborigène, et de la domination des Aborigènes par l’Australie "blanche" au cours de l’histoire. Du fait des politiques discriminatoires, de nombreuses familles aborigènes décidèrent de cacher leurs origines et de se faire passer pour blanches. De nombreux enfants métisses à la peau claire furent enlevés à leurs familles et perdirent leurs liens avec leurs familles aborigènes. Aujourd’hui, un nombre grandissant d’Australiens choisissent de revendiquer leur identité Aborigène et de reprendre possession d’un héritage dont ils ont été privés. Mais si avoir des origines aborigènes n’est plus source de honte, en revanche, le chemin à parcourir pour retrouver son identité aborigène peut être difficile. Cette étude analyse les parcours identitaires de onze Australiens élevés dans une culture "blanche" anglo-celte et qui ont des origines aborigènes. L’analyse de leurs perceptions de l’identité aborigène révèle la prédominance des discours "blancs" sur les Aborigènes en Australie aujourd’hui, mais aussi la présence de discours essentialistes restreignant la définition de l’identité aborigène, et maintenant utilisés par la communauté aborigène afin de contrôler cette définition. L’analyse de la relation d’opposition entre Aborigènes et Australiens "blancs" dans l’Australie contemporaine révèle la difficulté à revendiquer à la fois des origines "blanches" et "noires", ainsi que des identités multiples. / In the 1990s, Australia set up a ten-year policy of reconciliation aiming at developing a better relationship between Indigenous people and the wider Australian community. This policy was based on the recognition of the enduring dichotomy between both communities despite an increasing acknowledgement of the place of Indigenous people in Australia since the 1970s. The complex relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians – and especially ‘white’ Anglo-Celtic Australians – is the result of the process of colonisation, of the subsequent policies designed to control Indigenous people, and of the historical domination of ‘white’ Australia over Indigenous people. As a result of discriminatory policies, many Indigenous families decided to hide their heritage and ‘passed’ into ‘white’ society. Many mixed-race and fair-skinned children were taken from their families and lost their connection with their Indigenous relatives. Today, an increasing number of Australians choose to identify as Indigenous and to reclaim a heritage they were deprived of. But although having Indigenous heritage is no longer regarded as shameful, the road back to Indigeneity can be a difficult one. This study is the analysis of the identity journeys of eleven Australians who were raised in a ‘white’, Anglo-Celtic Australian culture and who have Indigenous heritage. Their perceptions of Indigeneity are analysed to reveal the dominance of ‘white’ discourses about Indigeneity in today’s Australia, but also the presence of restricting essentialist discourses now used by the Indigenous community to keep control over the definition of Indigenous identity. The analysis of the oppositional relationship between Indigenous and ‘white’ Australians in contemporary Australia reveals the difficulty of embracing both ‘white’ and ‘black’ heritages and of claiming multiple identities.

This is an exploratory study to examine a population which has not been widely researched, mixed-race or "culturally-complex" individuals and identification. In the interest of this study, "culturally-complex" refers to individuals who report parents being from two or more different races/ethnicities; i.e. Black, White, Latino/Hispanic, Asian, Native-American, etc. Current literature reveals through quantitative methods that mixed-race adolescents often report more stress and are at greater health risks than most mono-racial adolescents. However, past studies have not thoroughly investigated why and how this stress exists and at times is inconsistent, which points to the need for qualitative inquiry. Although most of the previous literature focuses on mixed-race adolescents, this study focused on an adult population. Study participants were recruited through snowball sampling for in-depth, open-ended interviews. The data was analyzed by searching for common themes that illustrate the possible causes for stress in culturally-complex individuals. Though this study cannot be representational of all culturally-complex individuals it did provide for noteworthy findings. Race and ethnicity, and particularly being culturally-complex are topics that are often not spoken about in the family or between siblings. In general, culturally-complex individuals are not provided with space for dialogue and so thus, having a place to voice ideas, experiences, and opinions was appreciated by all participants. In all interviews, frustration and confusion was expressed towards box-checking. Though stress and invalidation was inconsistent in past literature surrounding mixed-race and culturally-complex individuals, only some participants in this study reported stress and invalidation, while other participants did not report having ever experienced stress or invalidation. While literature had posed that often culturally-complex individuals would identify with the ethnicity of the father, in this study most of those who identified as one culture over another had identified as the ethnicity of the mother. Participants additionally had ―hierarchies of identities‖ where being culturally-complex was not always their most important role. Future research should examine populations from different socioeconomic groups and other demographics.