Rortyan therapists,pragmatist engineers,and white nationalist egotists: A response to Huckerby,Huetter-Almerigi,and Showler

This essay is a reply to commentaries by Elin Danielsen Huckerby, Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi, and Paul Showler on Tracy Llanera's Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism (2020).     

Redefining Cultural Diplomacy: Cultural Security and Foreign Policy in Canada

A content analysis of material generated by the 1994–1995 foreign policy review process in Canada was conducted in an effort to understand how culture came to be officially constituted as the third pillar of Canadian foreign policy. The analysis showed significant differences among actors in terms of modes of legitimization of cultural diplomacy. State agents, by refusing to consider culture as a referent object in a broadened notion of security and by assimilating it into a system of civic values, resisted pressures from academics and groups that favored introducing societal conceptions of culture as relevant for the making of foreign policy. The result is nevertheless a new, albeit defensive and still ambiguous, form of implication of foreign policy in the cultural mission of the state in Canada.     

A Posture of Reciprocity: A Practical Approach to Collaboration Between Professionals and Parents of Culturally Diverse Backgrounds

The current emphasis on developing culturally responsive services for families of children with disabilities from culturally diverse backgrounds informs the need for professional self-awareness whereby professionals learn to recognize not only the cultural specificity of personal values and beliefs but also of their professional practice. We describe an approach, the posture of reciprocity, that enables professionals to acquire this level of cultural awareness. Examples to illustrate applications of the posture are provided.     

Debating drunk driving: The construction of causal explanations in television discussion programmes

The mass media are an important source of social understandings and representations. The growing genre of audience discussion programmes functions as a public forum for airing opinions on issues of social concern. The genre is structured so as to involve viewers, to validate ordinary experiences and to express opinion. Four programmes on drunk driving were analysed for the causal explanations they offer viewers. The causes, effects and causal interconnections used within each programme were analysed, and networks of the overall representations of drunk driving were constructed. These showed a broad consensus of causes and effects across programmes, but different explanations in terms of locus, stability and controllability. Programmes typically offered lists of important factors, rather than structured arguments, despite the debating framework. There was an emphasis on external, stable, controllable causes in the programmes.     

Cultural context and substance abuse in Hispanic adolescents

Much emphasis has been placed on the significant substance abuse problem being faced by Hispanic as well as other minority youth in the United States. However, little research has focused on the relative importance of culturally determined factors in the development of substance abuse in Hispanic youths. In this study, we propose an approach to measuring cultural factors through the activity orientations that youths endorse. We studied over 4000 Mexican-American and Mexican youths living along the U.S.-Mexico border with respect to their recent drug use, problem drug use, depressive symptomatology, and their activity orientation. While culturally related activity orientation does significantly increase risk for substance abuse, we found that symptoms of distress/depression and sociodemographic factors exerted a stronger effect on these youths.     

Activity settings as the unit of analysis: A theoretical basis for community intervention and development

Theory, methods, and action develop within context, one of which is the intellectual climate of an era. Community psychology is directly and indirectly interactive with many intellectual currents, such as postmodernism, semiotics, hermeneutics, and dialogism. These ideas are discussed as they impact on community psychology, with an emphasis on the reemergence of meaning as a central condition of psychology and community. Meaning is of key importance to the unifying concept in the transactional theoretical model which is presented. How this model might serve as a conceptual framework for an asset approach to community intervention and development is discussed. Increasingly, it is recognized that the development of theory to guide community research and action is necessary to advance intervention and to realize the potential of community psychology. It is argued that community psychology is positioned by concepts and practice squarely at the point of emerging thought, and can make fuondational contributions to general social science. The next article in this special section illustrates concepts of this model in an early education program and the remaining article illustrates the influence of ecocultural factors.     

Group Psychotherapy in the Context of Cultural Diversity

The authors review the salient issues involved in therapy with culturally diverse populations. They present a framework where group therapy addresses those issues. Clinical vignettes from each of the authors serve to illustrate the power of group therapy with ethnocultural populations.     

The synergy of memory, affects and metaphor

Recently, the concept of metaphor has been revitalized as a result of the convergence of interest in this subject from a variety of disciplines including neurobiology, linguistics and cognitive science. Metaphor is now viewed as an emergent property of mind. Metaphor is rooted in the body in two senses: metaphor is used to organize bodily sensation cognitively, especially affects, and secondly, metaphor is rooted in the body as it rests on the border between mind and brain. Metaphor is therefore viewed as a developmentally early, primitive mental function related to synesthesia. There is a significant distinction between frozen or foreclosed metaphors and open and generative metaphors. The foreclosed metaphor will dominate the perception of others in cases of trauma and can be understood as an explanation of transference repetition. Clinical examples of foreclosed metaphors are illustrated by vignettes of patients who have suffered traumas. Examples taken from two artists are used to illustrate instances in which the artist's own unassimilated experiences appear as generative metaphors.     

Cuban Mothers' Schemas of ADHD: Development, Characteristics, and Help Seeking Behavior

Parents play a crucial role in the diagnosis and treatment of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), one of the most prevalent developmental disorders of young children We report the findings of a qualitative study of Cuban-American mothers of 7 to 10 year old children with ADHD. Results suggest that mothers lacked a cultural model for ADHD and held a cultural model of normal child development which hampered their development of a schema of ADHD. Development of ADHD schemas were motivated by perplexity at their children's behavior and by the high value mothers ascribed to academic achievement. Although the schemas developed by the mothers were labeled as ADHD, their behavioral characterizations of their children, their attributions for the condition and for its causes, and their management strategies were not always in agreement with those of the biomedical model for the condition. However, once mothers classified their children's behavior as atypical, they actively sought assistance from the professional sector.     

Intrinsic Value as a Reason for the Preservation of Minority Cultures

In the Netherlands, the policy of supporting the efforts of ethnic-cultural minorities to express and preserve their cultural distinctiveness, is nowadays considered as problematic because it might interfere with their integration into the wider society. The primary aim is now to reduce these groups' unemployment rate and to stimulate their participation in the wider society. In this article I consider how the notion of the intrinsic value of cultures, if sensible, might affect the policy regarding ethnic-cultural minorities. I develop a theory of intrinsic value of culture, as an analogy of the theory of intrinsic value of non-human natural entities. My conclusion is that the dominant cultural group in the Netherlands should preserve clearly deviant minority cultures which have considerable intrinsic value.