Cultural Diversity

Individualising difference, negotiating culture: Intersections of culture and care

“…And importantly, we sought to move backward and forward from culture-as-categorisation – as neatly bounded or fixed (cf. Isar, 2006) – to the complexities (and intersectionality) of biographies and personhood in everyday life. This was set against the backdrop of on-going efforts across many health service environments to further incorporate diversity as a meaningful aspect of their models of care.…”

“…As Vertovec (2012: 54) notes, ‘what [and who] is diversity – that loose set of discourses, policies and practices – actually for?’ (see also Ahmed (2007); Bell and Hartmann (2007)). ‘Culture’ is also neither a fixed nor a benign or neutral concept; rather, it is fluid and ever-changing, imbued with political, ethical, legislative and power relations (Dorazio-Migliore et al, 2005; Isar, 2006). Thus, in turn, questions around culture include: what constitutes cultural ‘difference’ and from whose perspective?…”

Globalization, Culture, and Development

“…As mentioned already, although the main focus of the 2005 Convention is clearly on the diversity of cultural expressions in the cultural and creative industry format, in the "Preamble", as well as in the language of its "Objectives and Guiding Principles", the Convention embraces all the differing diversities imaginable. These rhetorical segments of the text are in fact based on the language of UNESCO's earlier Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001), which was designed to cover all the possible facets of cultural diversity, and thereby not only transform the notion from an observed human reality into a normative metanarrative, but also and above all validate "cultural exception" thinking (Isar, 2006). The broad scope of the 2001 Universal Declaration provided solid ground for taking the next step, the real purpose, which was to draft an international treaty pertaining to the rights and responsibilities of national governments as regards the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods and services.…”

“…Cultural differences among human societies were valued by the framers of its constitution as a given of the human condition that needed to be nurtured and celebrated -rather than hatefully denigrated as they had been by the racist doctrines of the political regimes defeated during the Second World War. Only later did cultural diversity become a keyword in various culturalist affirmations within UNESCO, by which countries consciously mobilized their cultural distinctiveness (Appadurai, 1996;Isar, 2004Isar, , 2006Isar, , 2008. In this guise, the term became a metonym for resistances to Western cultural hegemony (driven by the decolonization that considerably enlarged UNESCO's membership in the 1960s) and/or for the cultural claims of discriminated groups everywhere.…”

Cultural diversity, democracy and the prospects of cosmopolitanism: a theory of cultural encounters

“…Given the emphasis in recent times on cultural diversity in relation to political community, greater clarity needs to be established on what constitutes culture and cultural diversity beyond the recognition of its differentiated nature. The notion of cultural diversity can mean many things (Bennett 2001; Isar 2006). It frequently is a synonym for identity: one's identity is constituted by the ability to distinguish oneself from another; it can signal a strong sense of otherness through ‘othering’ mechanisms by which the Other is marginalized, exoticized, or persecuted.…”