Identity, Hybridity and Cultural Home
- Friday 16 October
- Room 208, Joyce Ackroyd (#37)
- 1pm - 2pm
Where is a cultural home for people who live in between cultures? This question is explored in the book, Identity, Hybridity and Cultural Home: Chinese Migrants and Diaspora in Multicultural Societies (2015; Rowman and Littlefield International, London; ISBN 9781783481255). Historically, immigration was conceptualized as restricted cross-border movements of people and emphasized permanent relocation and settlement. Modern day immigrants, however, forge and sustain multi-stranded social and cultural ties that link together their countries of origin and countries of settlement. With increasing border-crossing movements and multicultural exposure, there comes the need to take a new look of identity and belonging. This presentation focuses on the identity negotiation experiences of Chinese migrants in Australia and their search for a sense of belonging. Identity negotiation entails more than simply speaking different languages to meet situational requirements, it involves the search for a cultural home where people feel that, as a cultural being, they are loved, valued, accepted, respected and protected. The question is how Chinese migrants locate a cultural home when “home” is not in one place.
Dr Shuang Liu is a senior lecturer in School of Communication and Arts at UQ. She researches at the interface of intercultural communication and cross-cultural psychology, with a particular focus on acculturation, identity negotiation, and intercultural relations. Shuang is interested in understanding how we define who we are as cultural beings, how individuals come to be aligned with different groups, and how we negotiate identities when discrepancies occur between the self-claimed identity and the identity ascribed by others. Shuang currently serves as the Associate Editor for two leading journals in her field: International Journal of Intercultural Relations and Journal of Communication.