Culture in the Blender

This morning when I switched on the BBC, the first thing I saw was an Al-Arabiya interview of Obama. The words coming out of his mouth – that he’s there to listen first, and that the United States all too often commands – were words I never thought I would hear in a hundred years [...]

In addition to getting my PhD in materials science and engineering and doing various academic-type things, I work part-time for the largest student-run consulting organization in the US.
Once a business brat, perhaps always a business brat – I feel very alive in business casual clothes giving presentations to clients or cracking a problem with my [...]

Latoya Peterson at Racialicious has written a post about American hip-hop politics. The post and the comments revolve around weighing the poor quality of music on American radio channels in general (there are few non-commercial channels that focus on bringing quality or novelty to American radio, meaning that radio channels mostly cater to mass markets [...]

Pollock and van Reken mention in their groundbreaking book that one of the unique properties of third culture kids is that we experience the world as three-dimensional, meaning that we can easily imagine that we are on the scene of a news report and understand the consequences, suffering or difficulty reported on.For me, the 四川 (Sìchuān) earthquake is [...]

In my free time, I’ve been looking for more papers relating to the TCK experience. One of them, Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition, is arguing for a paradigm shift in how culture is viewed.
The effort to identify the knowledge that varies between but not within large cultural groups had led [...]

This semester, I’ve arranged to audit a very exciting-sounding class: Cultural Psychology. The course description is
Centers on cross-cultural study of substantive areas such as personality, motivation, socialization, interpersonal behavior, psychological environments, cognition and cognitive development, ethnocentrism and stereotypes, and visual perception; emphasis on methodological limitations and contributions of cross-cultural study; and discussion of current problems [...]

Studying French in America is pointing out to me, bit by bit, how much more blurred cultural boundaries are in Europe than probably anywhere else, at the very least as compared to the United States and China. It certainly doesn’t seem that way when you’re there, because there are plently of things to mark the [...]

I am realizing that I am switching more and more to considering myself primarily a TCK, simply because it’s easier. I can point to concerns in my life and say “Oh, it comes up from time to time for most TCKs” or “It’s common for TCKs to feel that way”. I can’t say that very [...]

Still reading What’s the Matter with Kansas? and I am again simultaneously enlightened and confused. Enlightened, as to what has happened in the US on the grassroots level domestically. Confused, as to how I can understand so little of the emotions and perceptions that have given rise to this backlash and as to how I [...]

Inspired by smittenbyu’s courage to reveal herself, I decided to take a little leap of my own. I posted a question asking if others had been thrown out of or rejected by a home… and I got almost an immediate response. I am not alone at all. The part of me that I have always [...]