Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity: Critical Cases engages the paradox of cultural difference and social solidarity within contemporary contexts. Several of the essays in this book focus on individuals negotiating with perceptions of their personal, social, and political identity. Other contributions frame the political perceptions of the individuals and the cultural communities those perceptions construct. In this collection are essays concerning immigrants and the negotiation of sacred, political, and cultural spaces in the United Arab Emirates, the UK, Germany, and Australia as well as analyses of internal cultural differences and solidarity in Quebec, Canada and Turkey. Selections include an analysis of language accommodation asymmetry in the Gulf States; ethnopluralism and right wing extremism in Germany; the search of renewed Alevi identity in Australia; and the difference between post-war and post-EU ascension Polish immigrants in the UK. In addition, two essays concern challenges and analysis of Canadian and Quebecois multi-culturalism. Finally, three contributions focus on Turkey through an analysis of perceptions of the dead in Turkey's Kurdish conflict; transformation of urban identities in the Turkish city of Mersin; and how plurality is incorporated into symbolic representations of religious difference in Antakya, Turkey. Each essay in this book describes processes of differences and solidarities within specific contexts, challenging implicitly or explicitly the paradoxical entanglement of the two. Through this collection, the editors intend to begin to demonstrate the possibility of a broader acceptance of solidarities through difference.
About the Author: Scott H. Boyd teaches literature and humanities at Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus Campus. He received his PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts from Ohio University, conducting research on art and identity in German 20th century art and film. He primarily writes and conducts research in cultural theory; incorporating systems theory and adapting biological models, such as autopoiesis, to culture and paradigms of culture. He is also the co-founder of the Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity Network. Mary Ann Walter received her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently Assistant Professor of Teaching English as a Foreign Language at the Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus Campus. Her research focuses on experimental phonology and sociolinguistics of the Middle East. Her current research project concerns language choice and ideology in the Arab Gulf states.