“It’s Only Other People Who Make Me Feel Black”: Acculturation, Identity, and Agency in a Multicultural Community

“It’s Only Other People Who Make Me Feel Black”: Acculturation, Identity, and Agency in a Multicultural Community

Political Psychology
Published online: 2013-02-18
DOI: 10.1111/pops.12020

Caroline Howarth, Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology
London School of Economics, United Kingdom

Wolfgang Wagner, Professor of Psychology
Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain

Nicola Magnusson
The Open University, United Kingdom

Gordon Sammut, Lecturer in Psychology
University of Malta

This article explores identity work and acculturation work in the lives of British mixed-heritage children and adults. Children, teenagers, and parents with mixed heritage participated in a community arts project that invited them to deliberate, construct, and reconstruct their cultural identities and cultural relations. We found that acculturation, cultural and raced identities, are constructed through a series of oppositional themes: cultural maintenance versus cultural contact; identity as inclusion versus identity as exclusion; institutionalized ideologies versus agency. The findings point towards an understanding of acculturation as a dynamic, situated, and multifaceted process: acculturation in movement. To investigate this, we argue that acculturation research needs to develop a more dynamic and situated approach to the study of identity, representation, and culture. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for political psychologists to develop methods attuned to the tensions and politics of acculturation that are capable of highlighting the possibilities for resistance and social change.

Read or purchase the article here.

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