Throughout its history as a nation, Canada has had a culturally diverse population. For much of this time education has been one of the principal means through which the state and society have addressed the concerns associated with cultural diversity. From the early 1900s onward local and provincial educational authorities have developed and implemented a variety of policies and programs designed to address these concerns. In the 1940s, as the federal government started to develop its first policy and programs to address cultural diversity, it also found itself involved in the field of cultural diversity and education. This study examines how the federal government became interested in cultural diversity and education and how it continued to work in this field despite the fact that education is an area of provincial jurisdiction. In 1940 federal authorities began to lay the groundwork for a cultural diversity policy designed to foster support for the Canadian war effort among members of non-British, non-French ethnic groups. Education was initially to have been one of the strategies through which federal authorities implemented their cultural diversity policy but cultural diversity and education became an area of federal policy separate from yet related to the cultural diversity policy. Throughout most of its history, the two main objectives of the cultural diversity and education policy were education of immigrants for assimilation and education to promote effective intergroup relations. By the late 1960s tentative steps were being taken in the direction of education for cultural retention. Over the period from 1940 to 1971 a policy community of individuals and agencies with interests in cultural diversity and education evolved. Members of this community influenced the development of the federal policy by working on specific initiatives with the federal agency responsible for cultural diversity and education. Each of those initiatives became a site for negotiation on the direction of the policy. Thus the policy developed in an unplanned and ad hoc manner and grew to incorporate contradictory objectives. In addition, some of the work in cultural diversity and education also undermined the goals of the federal cultural diversity policy.

Canada’s Multiculturalism Act insists that Canada embraces its ethnic and racial diversity. At the same time, the broader discourse of multiculturalism tends to figure Canada as a tolerant but essentially white nation that accommodates minority cultures. In an attempt to expand established arguments about the ways in which the ideology and practice of official multiculturalism elides our history of racism and violence and perpetuates racist myths and stereotypes, this dissertation examines the depiction of a civil, multicultural nation in women’s fiction produced during Canada’s multicultural period of the 1980s and 1990s. With an eye to understanding the particular challenges that women who have been subject to racially-motivated violence and discrimination face in relating their experience, it considers the innovative ways in which fiction by Joy Kogawa, Anne Michaels, Eden Robinson, Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Rau Badami, and Catherine Bush grapples with the effects of systemic racism. While these writers explore the gendered trauma of women who have been subjected to racism, they do not depict their protagonists primarily as victims. Instead, they show these women forging innovative strategies to overcome trauma and victimization, and their silencing and debilitating effects. In exploring the merits of those strategies to understand how they might help us to grapple with the legacy of systemic racism and of the multicultural discourse that has sometimes masked racism in this country, I argue that literature can foster empathy in its readers, while demanding that we acknowledge our complicity with a social and political system that has frequently been racist, exclusionary, and even violent. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the strategies for overcoming the traumatic effects of racism employed by these authors not only challenge conceptions of Canada as a civil, nonracist society, but also offer ways of extending our understanding of Canadian civility and diversity. In doing so, I suggest that Canadian literature can offer its readers the opportunity to accept responsibility for the abuses of our collective past and conceive of a more accepting, equal society.

This thesis engages in a critique of the concept of Australian native title law as a 'recognition space'. It doing so, it treats native title law as a form of identity politics, the courts a forum in which claims for the recognition of identity are made. An overview of multicultural theories of recognition exposes what is signified by the use of recognition discourse and situates this rhetoric in political and theoretical context. A critique of native title recognition discourse is then developed by reference to the insights of sociolegal scholarship, critical theory, critical anthropology and legal pluralism. These critiques suggest that legal recognition is affective and effective. This thesis highlights native title law's false assumptions as to cultural coherence and subject stasis by exploring law's demands and indigenous claimant engagement with these demands. In this analysis, law's constitutive effect is emphasized. However, a radical constructivist approach is eschewed, subject engagement explored and agency located in the limits of law's constitutive power. The effects of legal recognition discourse, its productive and enabling aspects, are considered best understood by reference to Butler's notion of provisional 'performativity'. Ultimately, claimant 'victories' of resistance and subversion are considered not insignificant, but are defined as temporary and symbolic by virtue of the structural context in which they occur.

No description available.

This study addresses the significance of residential integration for racial groups. It questions the meaning of multiculturalism and further the meaning of residential integration as a term used by scholars in association to multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities. There are various viewpoints and assumptions among scholars that racial segregation is a social problem and therefore it can be solved through residential integration of racial minorities. This study will argue that there are disconnections of the assumed link between racial segregation and poverty. It also argues that residential integration, as a tool to provide equality and socio-economic resources for racial minorities is not a solution to the complexities of past racial discrimination. This study concludes, that residential integration fails to address the assumed goals of intermixing different racial groups because social, political and economic advantages cannot be accomplished merely through physical integration. / Department of Urban Planning

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed Mar. 27, 2008). PDF text: viii, 233 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 1 Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3284718. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis (D.Min.)--South Florida Center for Theological Studies, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1994. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-67). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-105). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.