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Multiculturalism is a controversial concept and a debated topic. To develop scientific analysis and inform political discussions, it is important to study how lay people evaluate it. Previous research has mostly regarded attitudes towards multiculturalism as unidimensional. This research often relies on the operationalisation offered by the Multicultural Ideology Scale (MIS), in which minorities' cultural maintenance and acceptance of cultural diversity are central. In this multimethod study, we take a critical perspective on such operationalisation and examine majority of Finns' responses to MIS in a survey and in focus group discussions. By approaching evaluation processes as social interaction, we challenge the unidimensionality assumption of attitudes towards multiculturalism. We show how cultural essentialism and nationalism are used in arguing for and against multiculturalism, and in negotiating its boundaries so that the majority can keep its dominant position. This conflicts with recognition and equality that are widely considered as cornerstones of multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent critics have often downplayed the significance of Joyce's attack on the Gaelic Revival in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel actually enacts nothing less than a systematic repudiation of nationalist tropes from the position of liberal cosmopolitanism. As a detailed comparison of Joyce's text with the turn-of-the-century revivalist discourse shows, A Portrait undermines each of the key revivalist preoccupations (including both linguistic nationalism and ethnic essentialism), finally deconstructing the project of nation building in toto . This radical critique of nationalism suggests that, after twenty years in which Joyce studies have been dominated by attempts to displace the once-prevalent vision of Joyce as an apolitical and internationalist aesthete with a version of Joyce as, above all, a colonial Irish intellectual, it is time to once again take his commitment to aestheticism and cosmopolitanism seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent trends in ethnomusicology have included a growing concern with indigeneity. A conceptual alternative to the discipline’s long-standing preoccupations with diaspora, indigeneity is frequently characterised through a narrative in which ‘native’ groups assert their identity in opposition to an invading—historical or contemporary—oppressor. The recent explosion of interest in the expression of an English identity within contemporary, multicultural Britain offers a very different narrative. Amid wider public celebrations of Englishness, and popular concerns about immigration, UK devolution, EU federalisation and US-led globalisation, a resurgence has taken place in the profile of specifically English folk music and dance since around 2000. The last 10 years have seen an emerging movement to reclaim Englishness by the political left, yet the folk arts pose specific problems for such a project—namely, the reification of nostalgia for a rurality that is necessarily pre-multicultural. Through examining some case studies of the current English folk resurgence, this article will discuss how contemporary English folk artists (the majority of whom share left-of-centre politics) attempt to negotiate Englishness in relation to their multicultural and multinational British context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we position the contributions to our special issue in relation to existing scholarship on racism and stereotypes. We pay close attention to conceptual strands in the literature that emphasize two cognitive-discursive characteristics of stereotypes: their essentialist reductions and projections and their metonymical qualities. We then extend our conceptual and thematic map further to include recent discussions of the relationships between national and European identifications, particularly in crisis contexts, and the role of memory politics in them. We conclude with a brief mention of the scope and potential dangers of historical analogies in moments of crisis and fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational social spaces are multidimensional in terms of the socio-spatial categories - that is, local, global, and national - and different actors and institutions involved. Recent developments in transnational methodology argue for a thorough reflection on the challenges of methodological nationalism, essentialism, and researchers' positionality. Therefore, in designing and conducting transnational research, reflections on methodological challenges become a crucial step. Yet, as these challenges often remain to be discussed on a methodological level, their implementation still needs to be set out clearly to be useful for empirical research in transnational social spaces such as on social protection. For that reason, we discuss transnational research designs as well as different methods of data collection and analysis. We argue for a multisited and mixed-method research design, which includes the emigration and the immigration countries, as well as the involvement of research teams located across borders. Thereby, a combination of perspectives between emigration and immigration countries in transnational social spaces can be achieved. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research examined the proposition that particularly perceptions of essentialist (compared to narrativist) group continuity enhance group identification, because essentialist group continuity is more likely to satisfy the individual need for self-continuity. This prediction was tested in three studies, using the context of national identity. Study 1 confirmed that only essentialist (and not narrativist) group continuity increased group identification when experimentally induced. Studies 2 (survey) and 3 (experiment) explored the mediating role of collective self-continuity. As expected, it was found that people are more likely to identify with groups that are seen to possess essentialist continuity (compared to narrativist continuity), because these groups most strongly provide them with a feeling of self-continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]