Digital Commons Network^™

Can Asians Be Creative?, Chua, Roy Y. J., Jerry Zremski

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A crotchety American named Henry Ford invented a modern, fast and efficient way to manufacture automobiles and a Japanese man named Eiji Toyoda refined and perfected it. A series of innovators across the western world developed the television - and the tech specialists at Sony, Toshiba and a host of other Asian companies found ways to make TVs better, cheaper, faster. And an idiosyncratic Californian named Steve Jobs invented a company that made a smart phone for the masses - and then outsourced the manufacturing to China. If you detect a pattern here, you are not alone. Asia may be …

The Position Of African Women Within The Realm Of Culture, Patriarchy And The Law: A Case Of Kenya, Liz Guantai

Young African Leaders Journal of Development

The world is on a quest to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG5), which seeks to promote gender equality and empowerment of women and girls. Women have been oppressed overtime in most societies. Statistics continue to project increasing rates of various acts of gender based violence such as domestic violence, sexual violence, cultural and economic abuse and so on. These acts of abuse are accelerated by several factors pertinent to our social systems such as culture, patriarchy and the Law. Using Kenya as a case study, this paper examines how these three factors contribute to differential gender treatment. …

Critical Pedagogy And Language Acquisition: Benefiting From A Country’S Crisis To Improve Second Language Instruction, Jamile Forcelini

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

Education has the power to influence learners to either accept reality or critically deliberate and change it. Critical thinking is vital to empower learners and society as a whole to move from a practice of inertia to Freire’s practice of freedom as well as humanization. Change, however is only attainable if pursued with one of the most powerful social tools: Language; the most perceptible manifestation of culture and culture is our connection to the world, what unites us in society, identifies us communally, and serves us as guidance for civic conduct (Larson and Smalley, 1972). The present article aims to …

Cultural Variability In The Link Between Environmental Concern And Support For Environmental Action, Kimin Eom, Heejung S. Kim, David K. Sherman, Keiko Ishii

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Research on sustainability behaviors has been based on the assumption that increasing personal concerns about the environment will increase proenvironmental action. We tested whether this assumption is more applicable to individualistic cultures than to collectivistic cultures. In Study 1, we compared 47 countries (N = 57,268) and found that they varied considerably in the degree to which environmental concern predicted support for proenvironmental action. National-level individualism explained the between-nation variability above and beyond the effects of other cultural values and independently of person-level individualism. In Study 2, we compared individualistic and collectivistic nations (United States vs. Japan; N = 251) …

Investigating The Construct Of Psychopathy In Lebanese And American Adults, Marie-Anne Issa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychopathy has been primarily investigated in forensic and psychiatric populations in North America. Cross-cultural studies, mainly conducted in Europe, have shown disparities in psychopathy scores and the measures’ psychometric properties, which raise the issue of cultural factors, such as individualism-collectivism, values, and different ways of emotional expression, and the impact of these cultural factors on the construct and its manifestation. Psychopathy has been rarely explored in Arab populations. This dissertation examines the construct of psychopathy among Lebanese adults, to assess its meaning, relevance, and utility among this population and compares the responses of Lebanese to American adults. The design of …

War Of The Worlds: Music And Cosmological Battles In The Balinese Cremation Procession, Michael B. Bakan

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Abstract

This article explores processional action as a form of cosmological intervention in Hindu-Balinese cremation processions, focusing on the multiple and intersecting functions of a particular type of Balinese instrumental music ensemble: the gamelan beleganjur. It explores the alternately “enlivening and protective aspects” (DeVale 1990, 62) that underlie the use of beleganjur music in the ngaben, or cremation ritual, showing how beleganjur’s sonic power and rhythmic drive serve to combat malevolent spirit beings, strengthen and inspire processional participants in their efforts to meet challenging ritual obligations, and grant courage to the souls of deceased individuals embarking on their …

T Bone Burnett, The American South, And The Ethic Of A Contemporary Cultural Renaissance, Heath J. Carpenter

Student Theses and Dissertations

With the success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, T Bone Burnett spent his cultural capital on repurposing traditional American music in subsequently successful soundtracks and artistic productions, providing a spark for a 21st century cultural movement that moves beyond music. This study aims to position Burnett has a cultural catalyst by grounding his work, and those abiding by a similar ethic, in the American South. In the process, I examine what Burnett’s soundtracks and select artistic productions communicate about contemporary Southern cultures and identities, while negotiating the ever-enigmatic generational issues of identity and authenticity. By extending the …

Reconsidering Attachment In Context Of Culture: Review Of Attachment Studies In Japan, Kazuko Y. Behrens

Online Readings in Psychology and Culture

This paper revisits the attachment controversies, reexamining the debates regarding attachment phenomenon being universal or culture-specific, and reconsiders whether it is possible to conduct culturally sensitive attachment research in non-Western societies while incorporating systematic empirical designs to enable replications across cultures. The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding about the clash between the fields and achieve consensus regarding the value of attachment research while acknowledging the limitations of attachment research in certain cultural contexts. The cultural debate will focus on one non-Western culture – Japan – where the controversy began. Finally, this review proposes the way in …

Searching Cézanne’S Provence, Robert M. Girvan

The Goose

This personal essay describes the author's visit to Provence to see the sites where Cézanne painted a number of well-known landscape paintings. He compares the paintings with the landscape as it existed when the paintings were painted, and as exist today, to trace the connections between landscape, and art, and in particular, Cézanne's artistic techniques. Finally, the author suggests that Cézanne's close observation of the natural world, and commitment to studying the old masters still has something important to teach us today in our digital age.

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

The Goose

Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

An Environmental History Of Medieval Europe By Richard C. Hoffman, Geneviève Pigeon Dr

The Goose

Review of Richard C. Hoffman's An Environmental History of Medieval Europe.

D-Place: A Global Database Of Cultural, Linguistic And Environmental Diversity, Kathryn R. Kirby, Russell D. Gray, Simon J. Greenhill, Fiona M. Jordan, Stephanie Gomes-Ng, Hans-Jörg Bibiko, Damián E. Blasi, Carlos A. Botero, Claire Bowern, Carol R. Ember, Dan Leehr, Bobbi S. Low, Joe Mccarter, William Divale, Michael C. Gavin

Biology Faculty Research

From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access repositories. In this paper we introduce D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. This expandable and open-access database (accessible at https://d-place.org) brings together a dispersed corpus of …

The City From Above, Guadalupe Astorga Contreras

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

The city of Tijuana, Mexico has become a second home to many LMU students through programs like De Colores, which introduce students to issues of immigration, poverty, and education. The city varies from L.A.-style skyscrapers and paved roads to shacks along dirt paths. This image shows some of the diversity and growth of the city as it continues to develop, and provides a different perspective on the crowded communities that make up Tijuana.

Tourist To My Own Culture, Guadalupe Astorga Contreras

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

After nine years of living in the U.S. and staying away from her cultural homeland of Mexico, photographer Astorga returned to some of the places she remembered visiting as a child in her native country. Throughout the trip, the unthinkable change from intimacy to unfamiliarity was clear. These pictures show that progression and invite the viewer to become a tourist alongside Astorga as she visits a place she once considered home.

(Re)Positioning Black: Negotiating Racial Subjectivities In White Discursively Constructed Spaces, Elisa Davidson

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis is both a personal and social inquiry of the experience of Black students at a predominantly white university. Within this inquiry, I extend Nakayama and Krizek's (1995) concept of whiteness as having "no true essence" to conceptualizations of blackness to assert that blackness is “a pattern of negotiation that takes place in conditions generated by specific discursive formations and social relations” (McLaren, 1999, pg. 40) rather than a fixed, essential category. Viewing blackness as encounter means that it is emergent through specific social and discursive conditions that are constantly constructed and negotiated through interactions with whiteness. I approach …

Challenging Freedom: Neoliberalism And The Erosion Of Democratic Education, Robert Karaba

Democracy & Education

Goodlad, et al. (2002) rightly point out that a culture can either resist or support change. Schein’s (2010) model of culture indicates observable behaviors of a culture can be explained by exposing underlying shared values and basic assumptions that give meaning to the performance. Yet culture is many-faceted and complex. So Schein advised a clinical approach to cultural analysis that calls for identifying a problem in order to focus the analysis on relevant values and assumptions.

This project starts with two assumptions: (1) The erosion of democratic education is a visible overt behavior of the current U.S. macro-culture, and (2) …

Cross-Cultural Understanding, Sajjad Haider

Student Research Symposium

This case-study is about the cross-cultural management and how it affects the employee relations and ultimately impacts their performance, if not handled properly. The case delves into different situations where understanding of the other cultural values, norms, work practices and human behavior is critical for foreign managers to succeed.

The case entails how a foreign FMCG company faced with the difficult and challenging situation in China. In order to fix the problems, the corporate headquarter sent three of their bright personnel; Janet, Peter and William to China. They were tasked to improve the HR, marketing & sales and distributions channels. …

Movements, Music, And Meaning: A Comparative Analysis Of Cultural Narratives In Vietnam Era And Post-9/11 Anti-War Music, Jonathan Nathaniel Redman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the presence of widely circulating cultural narratives in the lyrics of approximately eighty anti-war songs from the Vietnam and post-9/11 eras. Unlike prior movements and music research, this thesis privileges culture over movements and views movements as cultural antennae both picking up on trends and cultural narratives, and broadcasting their own altered cultural meanings back into the “cultural airways.” It sees music as a cultural medium which acquires cultural meanings from its surroundings, alters those meanings, synthesizes new ones, and perpetuates old ones. Drawing on comparative and narrative analysis approaches informed by grounded theory techniques, this thesis …

Towards The Enhancement Of A Critical Cultural Paradigm In Health Communication: An Examination Of The Impact Of Paradigmatic Structures, Laura Elizabeth Arneson

Theses and Dissertations

In the field of Communication there are a wide variety of ways in which scholars can utilize theories to serve as epistemological frameworks in order to examine sociological structures. In this thesis, the subfield of Health Communication will be examined through a positivistic and critical cultural studies paradigm. This work will then examine underlying assumptions related to theoretical approaches in health communication.

With the primary argument of this work being that the dominant approaches in Healthcare Communication have been primarily rooted in positivism, this research study will attempt to show how this assumption continues to extend even into new digital …

Uncovering America’S Horror Story: A Content And Critical Analysis Of American Horror Story., Jessica Maio

Honors Projects in Communication

The popular television series American Horror Story has captivated millions of Americans with its shocking and twisted plotlines that never fail to surprise. Perhaps one of the reasons that the show has become so popular is that it uses the horror genre as a way to explore controversial topics. The purpose of this project is to examine the controversial topics that are presented in American Horror Society and compare them with the current views of mainstream society to determine whether the show primarily reflects the views of the larger society or challenges them. In other words, how does American Horror …

Towards A Cultural Approach Of Transatlantic Integration, Jorge Arturo Smith Carbajal

Open Access Dissertations

The increasingly complex challenges faced by the Western world since the beginning of the twenty-first century have fostered scholarship on culture and values as important explanatory factors of international relations. Such theoretical shift offers the opportunity to develop new avenues of research. Transatlantic relations are one of them. On the one hand, great emphasis has been placed on security issues in the wake of World War II through NATO and on economic issues in the wake of the world financial crisis through TTIP. On the other hand, although the Euro-American relationship has been characterized by strong differences, it nevertheless shares …

How Do We Adopt Multiple Cultural Identities? A Multidimensional Operationalization Of The Sources Of Culture, Badri Zolfaghari, Guido Mollering, Timothy Adrian Robert Clark, Graham Dietz

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Given the shortcomings of unidimensional accounts of culture that are based on nationality, this paper builds on and steps beyond current multidimensional conceptualizations of culture in order to provide first empirical evidence for a multidimensional operationalization of culture. It shows the multiple and simultaneous sources of cultural values (i.e., Family, Nationality, Urban/Rural Background, etc.) that individuals draw from in order to behave in accordance with their social setting. This contributes to our understanding of how and when individuals adopt multiple cultural identities. As the first attempt to operationalize the 'mosaic' framework of culture proposed by Chao and Moon (2005), this …

Reflections On The Arts, Environment, And Culture After Ten Years Of The Goose, Pamela Banting, Theresa Beer, Sarah Van Borek, Rob Boschman, Nicholas Bradley, Nancy Holmes, Franke James, Jenny Kerber, Sonnet L'Abbé, Larissa Lai, Daphne Marlatt, Stephanie Posthumus, Catriona Sandilands, John Terpstra, Harry Thurston, Rita Wong

The Goose

To mark the tenth anniversary of The Goose, we asked prominent ecologically-minded scholars, writers, artists, and educators from across Canada to reflect on the relationship between the arts, culture, and the environment. Their comments illuminate a wide range of triumphs and tensions, from the politics and practices of environmentalist writing and art, to the connections between the environment and matters of diversity and justice, to the past and future of ALECC (Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada), to the world of a single poem.

Development Paradoxes: Feminist Solidarity, Alternative Imaginaries And New Spaces, Elora Halim Chowdhury

Journal of International Women's Studies

In his seminal work Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995), post-development scholar Arturo Escobar likens development to a chimera. My work builds on a sophisticated body of post-development and transnational feminist theory drawing on conceptions of the relationship of representations of development in the Third World to the interconnected webs of various transnational patriarchal and economic dominations that affect, and are affected by, the realities of marginalized communities in the Global South. In particular, I am concerned with how development discourses interlock with global systemic hierarchies of race, gender, class as well as structural oppressions, …

Through The Linguistic Looking Glass: An Examination Of A Newspaper As Negotiator Of Hybrid Cultural And Linguistic Spaces, Anthony Spencer

Speaker & Gavel

I contend English-language media outlets could and should be viewed as minority-language media outlets as they are cultural negotiators for tourists, sojourners and other transnational migrants. To better understand the cultural and linguistic forces these English-language media outlets exert upon the host cultures and nations in which they exist, I performed three months of ethnographic observations at a newspaper in Costa Rica and conducted in-depth interviews with staffers. I particularly focus on the hybrid identities of the staffers as they in turn instruct their readers how to navigate this hybrid community. I identify and explain the themes, which emerged in …

Change In Higher Education: Reflecting On Culture And Identities In Dit, Ann Conway

System and Institutional Design and Transformation

The case study is based on review of government policies and institutional strategy documents looking towards the future and determining how they are affecting the current situation in the Institution. The primary aim of the research was to identify drivers of change and mergers in higher education. This was conducted via analysis of interviews and observations at meetings and classes, and via use of discourse analysis of some policy and strategy documents. It was then reflected on how changes and mergers impact on cultures and professional academic identities. The interviewees were asked about their views on which factors bring about …

Negotiating Gender And Sexuality In Contemporary Turkey, Jaspal Kaur Singh, Mary Lou O'Neil

Books

Turkey is often visualized as a modern nation-state having a perfect balance of Eastern and Western cultural mores and traditions within dominant ideological constructions and representations, but on closer inspection, one can detect conflicts and contradictions within various texts—particularly in regards to depictions of gender and sexual identity. Upon its foundation as a nation, Turkey embarked on a state-centered, elite-driven path toward modernization and Westernization while also seeking to produce a monolithic culture. At the time, it was widely believed that Turkey could not rank among modern,

Western countries without the emancipation of women. As a result of the founding …

Playing With Knives: The Socialization Of Self-Initiated Learners, David F. Lancy

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Since Margaret Mead’s field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a range of societies. One improbable commonality has been the tolerance, even encouragement, of toddler behavior that is patently risky, such as playing with or attempting to use a sharp-edged tool. This laissez faire approach to socialization follows from a reliance on children as …

“He Asked If I Knew Anything About The Universe. And I Told Him No”: Alien Abductions In American Literature, Stephen James Fleming

Theses & ETDs

Stories about aliens saturate American culture, but few critics explore them as figures that span decades and genres and that reveal a great deal about the people who are drawn to alien imagery. This thesis examines aliens in two ways: as very real extraterrestrial beings sexually assaulting abductees and assimilating into humanity; and as fictional responses to our fears of the racial Other. I speak to cultural studies scholars, since the abduction masterplot takes on the issues of social anxieties, conspiracy, politics, and entertainment history, also found in canonical literature. The first chapter traces the evolution of nonfiction abduction narratives, …

Cross–Cultural Generalizability Of The Alternative Five–Factor Model Using The Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire, Jérôme Rossier, Anton Aluja, Angel Blanch, Barry Oumar, Adam W. Stivers

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Several personality models are known for being replicable across cultures, such as the Five–Factor Model (FFM) or Eysenck's Psychoticism–Extraversion–Neuroticism (PEN) model, and are for this reason considered universal. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the cross–cultural replicability of the recently revised Alternative FFM (AFFM). A total of 15 048 participants from 23 cultures completed the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire (ZKA–PQ) aimed at assessing personality according to this revised AFFM. Internal consistencies, gender differences and correlations with age were similar across cultures for all five factors and facet scales. The AFFM structure was very similar across samples and can …