Browsing by Subject "Multiculturalism"
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Item Designing visitor engagement for online museum exhibitions(2012-08) Briggs, Brian; Cho, Hyojung; White, Scott; Dean, David K.For many museum professionals, particularly those who work in American history museums, designing exhibitions that engage a broad audience can be a difficult, but necessary, matter. As these professionals try to compete in new markets, broad engagement becomes more important. Even when they compete to tell familiar stories, such as those of the American Indian Wars, this type of design can still prove challenging. For over 20 years museums have continued to seek means for broad audience engagement in physical exhibitions, but little critical inquiry has occurred regarding neither online exhibitions nor the American Indian Wars. To fill this niche, this study offers a new method of designing, critiquing, and re-designing the narratives used currently in online museum exhibitions of the American Indian Wars. By advocating a means of argument built in communication theory that is capable of providing analytical tools for developmental work of online exhibitions, this study seeks to expand the disciplinary capacity of Museum Science. By applying Altman’s Theory of Narrative to three specifically chosen case studies this study produced two results. One that the current works of exhibition designed online by history museums seems to offer limited character constructions to the audience thereby limiting user choice and ultimately audience engagement. Secondly, that the narratives currently produced also limit engagement potential by returning a singular message from the museum as an authority figure. These results demonstrate how the tool advocated here, a combination of two aspects of communication theory can better inform the design of online museum exhibitions and by extension the exhibitions of the American Indian Wars as they occur online. The recognition that narratives are currently formed in ways that limit the engagement of a digital audience produces the ability to begin to break down these forms and re-design them focusing on expanded characters and narratives built to foster discussion and inquiry by the audience.Item Drumming Asian America : performing race, gender, and sexuality in North American taiko(2011-05) Ahlgren, Angela Kristine; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Dolan, Jill, 1957-; Paredez, Deborah; Jones, Joni L.; Wong, DeborahTaiko is a highly physical and theatrical form of ensemble drumming that was popularized in 1950s Japan and has been widely practiced in Japanese American and other Asian American communities since the late 1960s. Taiko’s visual and sonic largesse—outstretched limbs and thundering drums—contrasted with pervasive stereotypes of Asians as silent and passive. This dissertation uses ethnographic participant-observation, archival research, and performance analysis to examine how North American taiko performance produces and is produced by the shifting contours of racial, gender, and sexual identity and community. Taiko groups create, re-shape, and challenge familiar notions of Asia, America, and Asian America through their public performances and in their rehearsal processes. While sometimes implicated in Orientalist performance contexts, taiko players use performance strategically to commemorate Asian American history, to convey feelings of empowerment, and to invite feminist, anti-racist, and queer forms of spectatorship. This dissertation explores taiko’s roots in the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, its implications for 1990s multiculturalism, as well as its intersections with contemporary queer communities. My analysis focuses on three case study groups whose origins, philosophies, and geographic locations offer a diverse view of North American taiko and the Asian American/Canadian communities with which they are associated. Chapter One considers how San Jose Taiko’s early articulation of their identity as an Asian American taiko group continues to influence its practices and performances, particularly their taiko-dance piece, “Ei Ja Nai Ka?” and their national tours. Chapter Two examines how Minneapolis-based Mu Daiko negotiates its members’ diverse racial, ethnic, and gender identities within a Midwestern context that values multiculturalism. Chapter Three considers how the all-women’s group Jodaiko conveys Asian American lesbian identity and invites queer spectatorship through theatrical performance choices and its members’ everyday gender performances. My analysis extends from my ethnographic participant-observation, which includes personal interviews, attendance at workshops and performances, and spending time with performers; archival research in formal collections, groups’ internal documents, and my personal archive of taiko programs, posters, photographs, DVDs, and other ephemera; and performance analysis that is informed by my twelve years of experience as a taiko performer.Item Entre pueblo mágico y ciudad multicultural : ciudadanías diversas en la Periferia Urbana de San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas = Between enchanted town and multicultural city : citizenship formations among the Mayas in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico(2014-05) Canas Cuevas, Sandra; Speed, Shannon, 1964-This dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of state led multiculturalism and its impacts on indigenous people in the former colonial city of San Cristobal de Las Casas in Southern Mexico. Based on an eighteen-month period of fieldwork, it examines how the colonial order is being redeployed in the urban space through multicultural programs that seek to govern indigenous people. In particular, it discusses how indigenous people are transformed into multicultural citizens and their lands into natural reserves. In showing how indigenous people are being produced as citizens and governed through particular citizenship regimes, it also emphasizes on how they produce themselves as political subjects. Drawing upon indigenous people experiences at the urban periphery, this dissertation discusses the complexities and contradictions they face in the process of building a community of their own. It investigates how multiple citizenships, religious and gender regimes coexist in the urban periphery, and how indigenous people navigate them in the process of building new forms of belonging. This dissertation complicates the civil society vs. State opposition by focusing on how citizenship among indigenous people is built on a daily basis through contradictory and problematic articulations. Through their articulations with peasant organizations, the State, political parties, NGOs and religious discourses, indigenous people become agents of their own government. They do so by directing each other actions and decisions, shaping their leaders practices and holding them accountable, and monitoring gender relations and religious practice to secure women’s participation in both politics and religion. Finally, this dissertation argues that indigenous people in the urban periphery of San Cristóbal de Las Casas refuse to become multicultural citizens. Instead they struggle to build horizontal and inclusive communities through land occupation and conversion to Islam, and in the process they are calling into question the limits and contradictions of state led multiculturalism, and expanding liberal notions of citizenship.Item Evaluating liberal multiculturalism : what could political theory offer in accommodating diversity?(2010-08) Alptekin, Huseyin; Gregg, Benjamin Greenwood, 1954-; Hooker, JulietLiberal multiculturalism, at least in the lines of some of its advocates, is vulnerable to serious critiques. This paper lists all major critiques directed to liberal multiculturalism without necessarily agreeing with all. Yet, this is not a sufficient reason to drop it from the intellectual agenda. In contrast, it still stands as the most promising theory to solve the problems stemming from cultural diversity. The position taken in this report sees liberal multiculturalism insufficient in accommodating all the interests of all the parties involved (e.g., different minority groups, political positions, theoretical approaches). Yet, a flexible and contextual formulation of liberal multiculturalism is able to accommodate the broadest range of demands involved in the debate without any serious damage to the core liberal premises such as respecting freedom of choice and basic human rights. What is achieved with such a formulation is not an entirely consistent philosophical truth project, but a relatively flexible guide to solve public policy issues in the face of cultural diversity.Item Insurgent historiographies of planning in marginalized communities : competing Holly Street Power Plant narratives and implications for participatory planning in Austin, Texas(2011-05) Wirsching, Andrea Christina; Sletto, Bjørn; Paterson, Robert G.I am interested in investigating community perceptions of planning processes in marginalized communities. More specifically, through this project I will draw on the concept of insurgent historiography (Sandercock, 1998) to examine community members’ perceptions of planning processes, in particular for environmental justice mitigation in diverse communities. I will explore this topic through the case of the Holly Street Neighborhood and Holly Street Plant Redevelopment in Austin, Texas. Constructed in the 1950’s, the Holly Street Power Plant has served as a symbol of the trials and tribulations of marginalized communities in East Austin: institutionalized segregation, industrialization, and their disproportionate effects on minority communities in Austin. During its time in operation, the plant was reported to have had numerous spills and other detrimental events. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry lists 17 reported events related to the facility (2009). However, a Public Health Assessment conducted by the Texas Department of Health concluded that there was “no apparent public health hazard” associated with the site (Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry, 2009). After years of protest, civil lawsuits and investigations, Austin City Council voted to close the Holly Plant in 1995. It was finally taken completely offline in 2007 after approval from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, shifting the community discourse to that of justice and healing: site remediation, decommission and demolition, and redevelopment. By utilizing ethnography and other qualitative research methods, I will document subjugated types of knowledge and memories of this planning process, and, drawing on concepts of insurgent historiography and difference, construct an alternative, insurgent historiography of the Holly redevelopment. I will conclude by discussing the implications of revealing insurgent historiographies for planning in diverse, marginalized communities, and how unlocking such narratives have the potential to improve community participatory planning.Item Liberal multiculturalism and the challenge of religious diversity(2010-12) De Luca, Roberto Joseph; Hooker, Juliet; Pangle, Thomas L.; Tulis, Jeffrey K.; Stauffer, Devin; Forbes, Hugh DonaldThis dissertation evaluates the recent academic consensus on liberal multiculturalism. I argue that this apparent consensus, by subsuming religious experience under the general category of culture, has rested upon undefended and contestable conceptions of modern religious life. In the liberal multicultural literature, cultures are primarily identified as sharing certain ethnic, linguistic, or geographic attributes, which is to say morally arbitrary particulars that can be defended without raising the possibility of conflict over metaphysical beliefs. In such theories, the possibility of conflict due to diverse religious principles or claims to the transcendent is either steadfastly ignored or, more typically, explained away as the expression of perverted religious faith. I argue that this conception of the relation between culture and religion fails to provide an account of liberal multiculturalism that is persuasive to religious believers on their own terms. To illustrate this failing, I begin with an examination of the Canadian policy of official multiculturalism and the constitutional design of Pierre Trudeau. I argue that the resistance of Québécois nationalists to liberal multiculturalism, as well as the conflict between the Québécois and minority religious groups within Quebec, has been animated by religious and quasi-religious claims to the transcendent. I maintain that to truly confront this basic problem of religious difference, one must articulate and defend the substantive visions of religious life that are implicit in liberal multicultural theory. To this end, I contrast the portrait of religious life and secularization that is implicit in Will Kymlicka’s liberal theory of minority rights with the recent account of modern religious life presented by Charles Taylor. I conclude by suggesting that Kymlicka’s and Taylor’s contrasting conceptions of religious difference—which are fundamentally at odds regarding the relation of the right to the good, and the diversity and nature of genuine religious belief—underline the extent to which liberal multicultural theory has reached an academic consensus only by ignoring the reality of religious diversity.Item Lights and shadows of the education reform process in Bolivia and Guatemala(2014-05) Xum Palacios, Brenda Estela; Hale, Charles R., 1957-Bolivia and Guatemala experienced a process of education reform in late 90's. Even though both countries had great international support to eliminate inequalities, especially among indigenous peoples, the domestic political contexts determined to what extent such changes were possible to make. In Bolivia the process started in 1994 with the signing of the Reform Law of Education, and in Guatemala in 1996 with the signing of the Peace Agreements. After more than two decades Bolivia and Guatemala present very different outcomes derived from their respective education reforms. This study is a comparison of them, an attempt to unveil the reasons why Bolivia has moved forward in terms of diversity, indigenous languages, and inclusion while Guatemala has apparently nullified the education reform process and remains in authoritarianism.Item Making diversity an institutional value : a look at five similar institutions of higher education In Texas(2011-05) Lowery, LaTanya Denell; Vincent, Gregory J.; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Sharpe, Ed; Bumphus, Walter; Garrard, Doug; Gonzales, StevenPrior research reveals that today’s students must develop a respect for diversity to function effectively in a global environment; otherwise they will be unlikely to succeed in the 21st century (Bikson & Law, 1994; University of Michigan Fortune 500 Amicus Brief, 1999; Abraham Lincoln Commission on Study Abroad, 2005). Unfortunately, many see diversity as having a mandatory acceptance policy attached to it. This view places the concept of diversity into a negative category. To help shift that negative slant a strategic effort is required to assist with redefining what diversity means and why acceptance of diversity adds value to an institution of higher education. Universities and colleges are comprised of staff, faculty, and students from differing backgrounds. Therefore it is important to maintain an environment that is conducive of respect, openness, and inclusion for all constituents served. By advancing that vision an institution can remain competitive and viable in today’s economy. As a commitment to promoting awareness of and appreciation for different types of diversity, many post-secondary Boards of Trustees and senior administrators are incorporating campus-wide diversity initiatives into every aspect of the campus framework (Ward, 2009). Specifically, senior-level positions referred to as Chief Diversity Officers are being created to oversee that diversity is incorporated as a core institutional value. The purpose of this study is to look at five similar public universities in Texas to see how the current demographic changes and projections are impacting both strategic plans and policies relating to diversity initiatives. Four research questions will guide this study: (1) What institutional and societal factors contributed to the establishment of the chief diversity office and the position of the chief diversity officer? (2) What is the difference between the role of the Chief Diversity Office and the role of a Multicultural Affairs Student Services Office? (3) How is diversity being made into a core value at an institution of higher education? and (4) How does the chief diversity officer assess that diversity is an institutional value? To gain insight into the research topic a qualitative methodology was used to collect and analyze the data. More specifically, the questionnaire and interview questions used in this study are a replication of David’s (1998) study of The Roles and Functions of Diversity Affairs Centers’ Chief Personnel Officers at Public Universities in Texas. The survey instruments were originally developed in 1992 by Ruth Moyer at Kent State University. The findings will be used to ascertain the extent to which institutions are making diversity a value.Item Multiculturalism and the museum : three case studies.(2012-08-08) Fiegel, Natalie.; Hafertepe, Kenneth, 1955-; Museum Studies.; Baylor University. Dept. of Museum Studies.With the rise of social history over the past several decades, educational institutions have increasingly been called upon to represent and showcase different cultural and minority groups within their walls. This has forced museums to reevaluate their exhibit spaces in order to create more inclusive, diverse interpretations. Basic museum practices have been challenged and the role of the museum has been called into question. Case studies of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, the Oklahoma History Center, and the New Mexico History Museum showcase the different approaches museums today are taking within their exhibits to create as authentic and unbiased portrayals of different cultures past and present as possible.Item Negotiating multiculturalism : identities, organizations, and bureaucracy in higher education(2015-05) Soni, Jaya Kristin; Rodriguez, Néstor; Angel, Ronald; Carrington, Ben; Padilla, Yolanda; Young, MichaelThrough a case study conducted at a large public University this dissertation explores how educational institutions and bureaucracy shape student organizing around issues of race, gender and sexuality. This project utilizes in-depth interviews with 30 University students and staff members affiliated to a Queer Student of Color (QSOC) agency to understand how organizations emerge to join formal bureaucracies and what the consequences are for organizational operations, relationship building and internal membership. This dissertation demonstrates that entry into a formal bureaucracy required strategic communication and disrupted existing structures, causing resistance from progressively centered organizations. Once formally associated to a University Multicultural Activity Center (MAC), Queer Students Of Color and Allies (QSOCA) faced pressure to adhere to institutional guidelines that shifted organizational focus and programming. While such membership provided institutional space, material resources and coalition building opportunities, the bureaucratic structure was unable to manage conflict and challenges in shared decision making processes. Furthermore, bureaucratically employed resources resulted in pressure for QSOCA to distinguish members, leaders, and advisors causing the organization to reconsider meanings and responsibilities of Allies.Item The perceptions and experiences of white special education teachers certified through an ACP program at a HBCU(2010-05) Budd, Eric Eugene; Sorrells, Audrey McCray; Garcia, Shernaz; Schaller, James; O'Reilly, Mark; Moore, AliciaThis research study explored and analyzed the perception and attitudes of first year White special education teachers’ experiences as they successfully matriculated through an alternative teacher certification program with a concentration in Special Education. The certifying entity for this teacher preparation program was a historically Black university (HBCU). It was the intent of this study to gather data on how White first year special education teachers view multiculturalism and diversity. This studied explored the rationale for why White pre-service teachers would select a HBCU to prepare them to enter the teaching field. This was a qualitative study using a naturalistic inquiry approach to learn about the perception of the participants. There were five participants selected to participant in this study. A set of guiding questions were used in order to maintain a focus, provide structure and give consistency to the interview process. The participants all were teaching in special education classrooms in large urban school districts. The classrooms they taught in were culturally and linguistically diverse. The data collection methods used included interviews, small group discussions and surveys. These interactions were audio taped then transcribed. The transcriptions were then reviewed by the participants to incorporate a member checking mechanism for the study. All five of the participants believed they benefitted from receiving their teaching certification from the HBCU. Their goal was to work in an urban setting and they agreed the certification program they attended helped them to become aware of the importance of celebrating diversity in their classes. All of the participants described an awakening to the challenges faced by students from low socio-economic, culturally and linguistically diverse students. Along with this epiphany the participants discussed the need to close the cultural gap between themselves and the students they teach. They all realized the importance of closing the gap in order to build mutual trust in their classrooms. The implications for future research include a broader study of the strategies used by White teachers to connect with culturally and linguistically diverse students in their classrooms.Item Singing beyond boundaries : indigeneity, hybridity and voices of aborigines in contemporary Taiwan(2014-12) Hsu, Chia-Hao; Slawek, StephenWhile Taiwanese Aboriginal culture has become essential for Taiwanese to construct a new national identity, this report examines the uses, makings, and transmissions of Taiwanese Aboriginal music in contemporary society, illuminating power dynamics of how Aboriginal music has been presented and perceived among different groups. The shifting Taiwanese identity within the contemporary political context opens up the discourses of indigeneity that have interpreted the Aboriginal culture as a site either for forming the new Taiwanese identity or claiming indigenous rights and subjectivity. Through the analysis of these discourses, I deconstruct how Taiwanese Aboriginal music has been exoticized and folklorized as Other by the Han-centric perspective. Further, by examining Aboriginal song-and-dance at intra-village rituals, at a Pan-Aboriginal festival, and at international cultural performances, I seek to argue that Aborigines are neither simply implementing the “otherness” imposed by the Han majority nor are they completely in conflict with it. By using Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third space that resists the binary of the dominant ideology and counter-hegemonic discourses of a minority, I particularly consider the Aboriginal vocable singing as a site within which Aborigines strategically adopt different identities depending upon the performative context. Through this theoretical perspective, I argue that the multiplicity of identity and the interconnectedness of Aboriginal musical practices across different groups and regions challenge the rhetoric of multiculturalism and diversity of cultures in the sense of neo-liberal ideology.Item The Eighth Wife's Daughter(2011-08-08) Clarke, Shavonne W.This thesis explores, through fictional storytelling, the cultural duality of individuals inhabiting Singapore prior to World War II. The primary locale in many of these stories-an actual residence known as Eu Villa-interconnects each narrative and helps to uncover the hybridization of a Chinese family (and servants) living in a British colony. Many of the stories are imparted from different perspectives: wives, children and amahs, each of them pieced together to bridge the space between Chinese heritage overlaid and intermixed with British culture. In this way, the stories of this thesis reflect on the history that preceded the distinct multiculturalism of contemporary Singapore.Item The inauspicious monster inside the sacred fortress : colonial multiculturalism and indigenous politics in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta(2014-05) Ward, Ricardo Tane; Speed, Shannon, 1964-; Hale, Charles R; Gordon, Edmund T; Sturm, Circe; Padilla-Rubiano, GuillermoThis dissertation is about development and multiculturalism in Colombia. My ethnographic work focuses on the Iku, an indigenous pueblo in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in Northern Colombia (SNSM), as they work to resist development projects and wrestle with political changes brought on by multiculturalism. The Iku have traditionally resisted the state, capitalism and development. The multicultural paradigm for addressing development in indigenous territory in Colombia has been adapted from international frameworks for “special indigenous rights”. Colombia has served as a model multicultural nation, because of its progressive constitution and its practice of implementing Free, Prior and Informed Consultations about development projects for indigenous people. These changes have had profound effects on the governance of indigenous peoples, and have garnered internal cultural responses from the Iku. The reaction to development and multicultural politics has been dissonant from the state at an ontological level – that is at the basic level of understanding reality. Multiculturalism is tied to liberal state governance and industrial capitalist economies, rooted ontologically in colonial-modernity. The Iku have a relational ontology tied to their culture-territory. This dissertation does not elaborate a discursive Iku critique of capitalism or mystify readers with a re-telling of their cultural mythology. Instead, I explore ontological politics as both colonizing, in the form of extractive industries’ disregard for the natural world, and resistant, in the Iku practices of reproducing their culture-territory. This dissertation explores this political space with an eye towards building decolonial politics that respond to the challenges faced by the Iku and the multicultural state.Item Totonac ‘usos y costumbres’ : racial sensibilities and uneven entitlements in neoliberal Mexico(2012-12) Maldonado Goti, Korinta; Speed, Shannon, 1964-; Hale, Charles R.; Costa Vargas, João H.; Cárcamo-Huechante, Luis E.; Sierra Camacho, María Teresa; Padilla, GuillermoThis dissertation investigates the pernicious effects of neoliberalism in postcolonial, ostensibly post-racial Mexico. I analyze and thickly describe the daily negotiations of race in neoliberal Mexico, as they play out between indigenous Totonacs and Mestizos, or dominant, non-indigenous, non-Black identity, in a small town in central Mexico. I focus specifically on the discursive and material life of indigenous “traditions and customs,” or usos y costumbres that reverberate within and around an Indigenous Court in Huehuetla, Puebla. Usos y costumbres is the core concept around which indigenous rights revolve and the legal justification of the indigenous courts. As such it becomes the arena of struggle and a key site to investigate power relations and social transformations. First, I analyze and chart how Mestizo authorities, Indigenous Court officials, and Totonac community members struggle to fix, define, and redefine the meaning of usos y costumbres, and consequently shift local racial sensibilities and perceptions of self and others. Second, I analyze how the success of indigenous mobilizations, crystallized in this case in the courthouse, incites potent decolonial imaginaries, knowledge productions, and practices that in previous moments were likely unimaginable. The central aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the multicultural logics of governance and related languages of rights and cultural difference are lived through, incorporated in, and complexly contested in Huehuetlan social life. I will argue that the formative effects of state-sponsored multiculturalism in Huehuetla repositioned the Totonacs as subjects with power, crystallized in the institutionalization of “cultural knowledge” as jurisprudence in the Indigenous Court, that reverberates in daily confrontations with the legacy of hegemonic Mestizaje.Item Towards a psychology of recognition : a critical analysis of contemporary multicultural counseling competency models(2011-08) Beaulieu, Gregory René; Sherry, Alissa René; Adams, Mark; Aguilar, Jemel; Cokley, Kevin; Richardson, Frank; Rude, StephanieSince the 1970s multiculturalism has emerged as an important area of scholarship within both academic and applied psychology. Scholars have offered a range of theories to assist psychologists in understanding the ways cultural context impacts psychological development and well-being with the aim of moving the field towards an affirming position on psychological differences that depart from the Eurocentric mainstream. One prominent example is the Multiple Dimensions of Counseling Competency (MDCC) by D. W. Sue (2001) which enjoins psychologists and counselors to acquire knowledge, awareness, and skills (KA&S) for five different racial and ethnic groups to promote culturally affirming work in a variety of professional and societal contexts. KA&S approaches like the MDCC remain the primary mode for conceptualizing multicultural competence today. This dissertation begins with a critical analysis of the extant multicultural competency literature which yields three important areas of concern. First, theorists face a dilemma regarding the definition of culture itself. Race and ethnicity receive stronger emphasis in the multicultural discourse which marginalizes other oppressed voices and perpetuates the invisibility of their unique struggles. In turn, attempts to expand the definition of culture to a non-hierarchical approach to all social identities and contexts draws attention away from race, an area already too easily avoided. Currently, no solution has balanced these two poles in the treatment of the word culture. Second, current models draw no limits to cultural relativism leaving questions of intragroup oppression unanswered. Third, models inadequately conceptualize the multiple social and cultural identities within the same person and offer insufficient guidance to professionals when intrapersonal identities conflict. Each of these three concerns is addressed by drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship in anthropology, political philosophy, and social psychology. These answers yield a new model for work with diverse social identities, Recognition Competency Theory (RCT). This new approach to competency with diverse populations has implications for the ways the psychology of oppression is conceptualized, taught, and treated as a focus of professional policy. Strengths of this new model, its relationship to the MDCC, its limitations, and implications for future research are discussed.Item Visualizing race : neoliberal multiculturalism and the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary South Korean television(2013-08) Ahn, Ji-Hyun; Kumar, Shanti"Visualizing Race: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Struggle for Koreanness in Contemporary South Korean Television" investigates visual representations of multicultural subjects in both celebrity culture and the reality television genre to examine the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary Korean television. My aim is to explain the transformation from a modern monoracial Korea to a multicultural, global Korea as a national project of what I call "neoliberal multiculturalism" and to problematize the implicit tie between the two words, "neoliberal" and "multiculturalism." Using the category of mixed-race as an analytical window onto this cultural shift, I attempt to link the recent explosion of multiculturalism discourse in Korea to the much larger cultural, institutional, and ideological implications of racial globalization. To illustrate this shift, the dissertation analyzes both black and white mixed-race celebrities as well as ordinary multicultural subjects appearing on Korean reality programs. I examine historical archives, popular press sources, policy documents, and television programs in order to analyze them as an inter-textual network that is actively negotiating national identity. Utilizing the concept of neoliberal multiculturalism as an overarching framework, the dissertation explicates how concepts such as nationality, race, gender, class, and the television genre are intricately articulated; it also critically deconstructs the hegemonic notion of a multicultural, global Korea presented by the Korean media. I argue that Korean television deploys racial representations as a way to suture national anxiety over an increasing number of racial others and projects a multicultural fantasy towards Koreans. This interdisciplinary project contributes to several fields of study by explicating the changed cultural meaning of mixed-race in the age of globalization, defining the organic relation between the medium of television and racial representation, broadening our understanding of Asian multiculturalism and the racial politics in the region, and examining the particulars of ethnic nationalism appearing in the Korean media and popular culture.