Digital Commons Network^™

Strengths And Challenges In Chinese Immigrant Families, Xiaolin Xie, Yan Xia, Zhi Zhou

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

This qualitative study involved interviewing 40 Chinese Americans residing in Lincoln and Omaha, NE, and Naperville, IL, on their perceptions of family strengths and acculturative stress. Themes related to family strengths include family support leading to achieving a renewed sense of family, contextual support from friends and community, communication among family members, spiritual well-being, and balancing host and heritage cultures. Themes pertaining to acculturative stress are language barriers, loneliness, and loss of social status and identity at the early stage of immigration. New dimensions are being added to the current family strengths model. Implications for health professionals are provided.

Mexico As Seen Through American Eyes: The Evolution Of U.S. News Media Coverage, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Sociology Faculty Publication Series

The traditional Mexican view of the U.S. news media's treatment of Mexico and Mexicans is that those media have been mired in prejudice, owing to what Octavia Paz has called "the twin sisters ignorance and arrogance." Mexicans of all social levels have held to this view for many decades, denouncing the obsession of American journalists with drug trafficking, illegal migration, and governmental corruption, and for forming or reinforcing in generations of Americans a vague, exotic, touristy, sometimes downright surreal vision of Mexico.

This view, however, began to shift very markedly during the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). Especially …

Islam And Democracy: An Empirical Examiniation Of Muslims' Political Culture, Moataz Bellah Mohamed Abdel Fattah

Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the following empirical puzzle: do the attitudes of ordinary educated Muslims stand as an obstacle toward the adoption of democracy? This research question calls for empirical/behavioral methodological tools that bring into focus contemporary Muslims' attitudes rather than ancient jurists' contributions. In other words, the dissertation shifts attention from ancient Islamic texts to contemporary Muslims' mindsets through written and web-bases surveys in 32 Muslim societies.

At the aggregate level, Muslim societies perplex with two types of sub-cultures: the culture of "dictator, but..." and the culture of "democracy-as-a-must." The former is the sub-couture of two groups of Muslims: …

Review Of Native Voices: American Indian Identity And Resistance Edited By Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, And David E. Wilkins, Beth R. Ritter

Great Plains Quarterly

From our current vantage point, the true legacy of Vine Deloria Jr.'s scholarship and activism can neither be fully measured nor overstated. We know with certainty, however, that the landscape of Native American scholarship has been permanently altered-for the best. Native Voices honors Deloria's contributions through the presentation of original Native scholarship inspired by his model. As its editors observe, "Deloria has influenced a whole generation of younger Indian scholars to be self-consciously indigenous thinkers-to reclaim an American Indian intellectual tradition, along with a political activism rooted in the oral traditions of our peoples and the wisdom of our elders …

Book Review: Unsettling The Literary West: Authenticity And Authorship, J. David Stevens

Great Plains Quarterly

Its promise to revolutionize western studies aside, Nathaniel Lewis's Unsettling the Literary West offers several smart readings of western texts along with a unique analytical approach to the field. Lewis's central claim is that as early as the 1830s writers of western literature felt an undue obligation to capture the "true West," to produce books that stressed accurate renditions of landscape, and, however exaggerated, to claim real-world credentials to substantiate their observations. Though most of these writers understood absolute realism to be impossible, they were performing for eastern audiences whose interest lay not in artistic perception but in the "genuine" …