Globalisation and multifaith societies

We are living in increasingly mobile, multifaith, and secular societies, which has led to new opportunities and challenges. We live in religiously diverse cities and neighbourhoods offering a rich array of cultural, artistic, architectural, and culinary experiences that are widely appreciated. At the same time, Western societies are grappling with the reality that they can no longer be defined as Christian nations, and this has impacted national identity, values, and education. This increased diversity is viewed and felt differently in different places. Some have embraced it and viewed it as a strength and advantage while others are resisting what they perceive as a threat to their way of life. This article examines the development of religious diversity, focusing on the UK and Australia as examples of 'Old' and 'New' World societies but also including broader contexts. It then discusses the growth of multifaith awareness lo¬cally and globally, including the role of the multifaith movement in promoting interreligious understanding. Finally, we consider the social and political aspects of living in a multifaith society and theoretical frameworks pertaining to religion and governance. This article aims to inform and assist scholars, religious and non-religious organisations and state actors to better respond to the changing religious landscape in order to maximise social inclusion and minimise tensions within and between diverse groups and societies.

Migrant youth and social policy in multicultural Australia: exploring cross-cultural networking

This chapter explores the extent to which the direction of Australia’s official multicultural and civic integration policies, reflects the social attitudes and networking practices of migrant youth. The chapter pays particular attention to the Federal Government’s “Anti-Racism Strategy” announced in 2012 as part of its Multicultural Policy. On a theoretical level, direct efforts to mitigate racism have the potential to augment strategies that reaffirm pluralism and address disadvantage often associated with the migrant experience. On an empirical level, it is important to explore the extent to which such top-level discourses have actual founding in the social lives of migrant youth. Therefore this chapter presents the empirical findings of an empirical longitudinal on “Social Networks, Belonging and Active Citizenship among Migrant Youth” (Australian Research Council Linkage project 2009–2013). Migrant youth in this study pointed to a number of instances of racism, which act as significant barriers to cross-cultural networking. Analysis of the data shows, among other things, that there is a persistent tendency among migrant youth to point to their social distance from the metaphorical “Aussie Aussie” people of Anglo origins who are perceived as symbolising Australia’s mainstream. Such manifestations of racial discrimination preclude the emergence of a genuinely inclusive society that supports and nurtures cultural diversity as a significant part of the Australian national identity, as well as the stated objectives of its social policy repertoire.

Book review: The Unknown Nation : Australia After Empire

The Unknown Nation is an illuminating history of Australia's putative 'search' for national identity. The task of remodelling the national image touched every aspect of Australian life where identifiably British ideas, habits and symbols—from foreign relations to the national anthem—had grown obsolete. How to celebrate Australia's past achievements and present aspirations became a source of public controversy as community leaders struggled to find the appropriate language and rhetoric to invoke a new era.

At home/out of place: young people’s multicultural belongings

What does it mean to come of age in an era of anti-multiculturalism? How does such an environment shape the ways young people of diverse backgrounds come to feel “at home”-in the nation, in the city, in their neighbourhoods, and in their national identity? Discussing findings from a study of youth in the multicultural suburbs of five Australian cities, this chapter explores how the politics of belonging is lived through the spatial practices of everyday civic life for those who have grown up during the multiculturalism backlash of the 1990s and 2000s. It examines the contradictory picture that emerges of a new generation claiming a right to multicultural citizenship and forging productive diversity within the urban multiculture, and yet simultaneously positioned as “out of place” within civic life.

Students' understandings of religious identities and relations: issues of social cohesion and citizenship

The focus in this article is on issues of social cohesion and citizenship as they relate to students' understandings of religion and religious identity. The article draws on data gathered from a study conducted at a highly diverse English comprehensive school and is set amid broader anxieties about religion, community disharmony and national identity in the United Kingdom. The high levels of religious diversity at the school were seen as supporting social cohesion - enabled in this context through students' understandings of religion and religious identities as socially contingent and supportive of a sense of agency. These understandings are aligned with a sophisticated and inclusive citizenship - one that is productive of democratic alliances and political agency and necessary in disrupting the narrow and problematic understandings of religion that can lead to social disharmony and conflict.

Australian multicultural policy: social cohesion through a political conception of autonomy

This article provides an account of the governance discourses informing Australia’s multicultural policy history. The article problematises the liberal ideologies informing these discourses – as essentialising the cultural identity of minority groups within exclusionary values about what constitutes the common good. Highlighting the ongoing imperative of questioning current frames for understanding and approaching multiculturalism, the article strengthens existing research that calls for alternative models that support a political conception of autonomy. The key argument is that social cohesion, unity and solidarity can be engendered through this conception where a situationally defined, rather than essentialised, view of culture enables recognition and legitimising of a proliferation of voices and versions of national identity and the common good.

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia occupies the mainland area east of India and south of China, as well as the archipelago between the mainland and Australia, west of the Pacific Ocean. The region is self-identified by its geographic proximity, although cultural commonalities across the region occur mostly at the level of consensus gentium rather than as an overarching mode of regional distinction. Its peoples derive from a broad East Asian racial grouping, dividing primarily along linguistic lines into four families of languages. These linguistic families thereafter quickly devolve into hundreds of ethnic groups, many of which have been bound together in postcolonial states that, to various degrees, comply or otherwise with precolonial polities. While some states have a strong sense of coherent national identity, others have had to consciously construct such an identity, with varying degrees of success and not a little resistance.

National and cultural identity in diaspora

The thesis examines the 'preservation' of Lithuanian national and cultural identity among migrant groups in Australia, comparing postwar migrants with people who have arrived since 1970. It argues that cultural identity is a flexible, evolving concept, negotiated in relation to the social, economic and political circumstances of the migrant.

Ontology of building in war and reconstruction

Post-war cities epitomise both a disjuncture and resonance between the end of the nation-state, on the one hand, and a preoccupation with reinventing the city through building, on the other. Programs of 'reconstruction' and 'remaking a city' are preceded by destruction: a destructive force has altered the face of the city, buildings have been destroyed and damaged, their ordered and ordering materiality is eroded, and the city is no longer an image of an idealized symbol of unity and identity. Belying the mythical power of architecture as a material and symbolic force, is also its fragility. Architecture can be monumentally erected and can have a presence and persistence that inspires awe and wonder, but it can also, just as easily be de-erected, demolished, destroyed. It can be de-constructed in a way that the literal sense of the term signals its symbolic frailty. Perceiving the symbolic as intrinsically tied to the physical articulation and presence of the architectural edifice, both reveals and conceals that the symbolic is also tied to fantasy, memory and fiction. Drawings that precede construction are projections of an idealized image of something that does not yet exist, and photographs that remain after a building is demolished are representations of a past realist that is now fictional.

Cosmopolitanism, identity and recognition

An application of the social theory of Axel Honneth to global justice, arguing that development goals must include provision for the intersubjective recognition required for identity formation. In the disciplines of Political Philosophy and International Relations cosmopolitanism is often defined as the view that all people, no matter their national, ethnic or religious backgrounds and no matter what their gender, have an equal moral status. The most telling enunciation of this view is the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the focus that is given to rights and a global form of legal equality by this document and by such theorists as John Rawls is not rich enough to capture all of the ethical demands that global society places upon well-to-do Westerners and developed nations. This paper makes use of a thesis by Axel Honneth to the effect that political thinking needs “a basic conceptual shift to the normative premises of a theory of recognition that locates the core of all experiences of injustice in the withdrawal of social recognition, in the phenomena of humiliation and disrespect.” Honneth identifies three spheres of recognition in modern societies: love, law, and achievement. I offer some exposition of his theory and then argue that global justice must be understood to embrace the substantive ethical values that arise in these three spheres as well as the procedural standards of moral rightness that belongs to the second of them. Such an expanded conception of global justice will yield an enriched conception of cosmopolitanism.

Reconstruction of in vivo time-evolving neuroendocrine dose - response properties unveils admixed deterministic and stochastic elements

Homeostasis in the intact organism is achieved implicitly by repeated incremental feedback (inhibitory) and feedforward (stimulatory) adjustments enforced via intermittent signal exchange. In separated systems, neurohormone signals act deterministically on target cells via quantifiable effector-response functions. On the other hand, in vivo interglandular signaling dynamics have not been estimable to date. Indeed, experimentally isolating components of an interactive network definitionally disrupts time-sensitive linkages. We implement and validate analytical reconstruction of endogenous effector-response properties via a composite model comprising (i) a deterministic basic feedback and feedforward ensemble structure; (ii) judicious statistical allowance for possible stochastic variability in individual biologically interpretable dose–response properties; and (iii) the sole data requirement of serially observed concentrations of a paired signal (input) and response (output). Application of this analytical strategy to a prototypical neuroendocrine axis in the conscious uninjected horse, sheep, and human (i) illustrates probabilistic estimation of endogenous effector dose–response properties; and (ii) unmasks statistically vivid (2- to 5-fold) random fluctuations in inferred target-gland responsivity within any given pulse train. In conclusion, balanced mathematical formalism allows one to (i) reconstruct deterministic properties of interglandular signaling in the intact mammal and (ii) quantify apparent signal-response variability over short time scales in vivo. The present proof-of-principle experiments introduce a previously undescribed means to estimate time-evolving signal-response relationships without isotope infusion or pathway disruption.

Reconstructing Aboriginal identity : a social-political case-study in curriculum change

This paper locates the development of Aboriginal Studies curricula within the context of Aboriginal political activism and 20th century reconstruction of Aboriginal identity in Australia. It is suggested that the incorporation of the reconstructed Aboriginal identity in Aboriginal Studies curricula institutionalised a radical conceptual change. Using the senior secondary Aboriginal Studies curriculum as an example, it is argued that unresolved tensions exist in the syllabus, the conceptualisation of community and the social process of identity formation inherent in recent reconstructions of Aboriginal identity. The question posed is whether these tensions will ultimately act as a form of oppression for Aboriginal people in the cross-cultural environment of contemporary Australia.