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In this article, Walter Parker brings structure and agency to the foreground of the current tumult of public schooling in the United States. He focuses on three structures that are serving as rules and resources for creative agency. These are a discourse of derision about failing schools, a broad mobilization of multiculturalism, and an enduring nationalism. Drawing on Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, Parker examines how these discourses figure in redefining school reform, redefining school curricula, and requiring schools once again to serve nationalistic purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relations between gender and nationalism in Latin America. It looks at the history of the gendering of nationalism around masculine figures in the region. The association between the region's global integration and the relations between gender and nationalism is discussed. In addition, the article highlights sex tourism as an example of how globalization complicates the notion of a singular other in constructions of national identity. The presence of multiculturalism in the transformative process in Latin American gender and nationalism is also explained.

In this article, I examine the possibility of a productive dialogue between diaspora studies and the anthropology of immigrant education in the United States. Arguing that their respective views on the nation-state is a key source for their different orientations toward migrant social and cultural worlds, I nevertheless argue that an engagement between these two fields of study will yield more critical understandings of nationalism, the category of the "immigrant," and multiculturalism within both these areas of scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although researchers have deconstructed the myth of stark social differences between the various North American sub-societies, an assimilating American melting pot and an ethnically oppressive monocultural Québec are still popular representations within Canadian majority discourses, such as the English-language mainstream media and parts of academia. In this paper, I argue that images of ‘America’ and ‘Québec’ play important roles for the multicultural reconstruction of Canadian nationhood. Examining selected op-ed articles from two Toronto-based mainstream newspapers during the 1990s, I develop and exemplify a theoretical understanding of how national identities are constituted and transformed within inter- and intra-national relations of power and alterity. I pay special attention to the particularisation of Canada through the confrontation with American nationhood, the ambiguities of recognising the distinctiveness of Québec inside Canada, and the consequences of projecting Québec's supposedly ‘ethnic’ nationalism outside the boundaries of Canadianness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the city of Los Angeles, which has been dubbed the "capital of the Third World". Multicultural paradise of Los Angeles; Eighty-one languages spoken in the elementary school system; Problems brought on by a faltering American economy; Thoughts on the beating of Rodney King; Three powder kegs of nationalism, racism and religious fundamentalism.