Comments on: Building bridges in a divided world

By: fadiyah

fadiyah — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 06:45:00 +0000

Australia is one of the desired destinations for migrants and it has a migrated population from diverse cultural backgrounds. 19% of its population speaks a language other than English, at home. However, not much recognition has been given to foreign languages in Australia as it is a very diverse plurilingual nation with limited resources. Only the languages considered to be a resource (such as German, French) or financially beneficial (Japanese, Chinese), are given due recognition. The languages of the other migrants have been neglected resulting that the second and third generation of the migrants lose their ethnicity

By: Kyungmin Lee

Kyungmin Lee — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 15:34:00 +0000

“They’re frightened by the idea of us.” This statement seems to describe the idea of discrimination quite well. Discrimination starts from judgement towards individuals who belongs to a specific group or society. As part of NESB, I could have experienced worse discrimination than I have actually experience. Nonetheless, I still think those who reported their experience might be influenced by their own prejudice by which people are sometimes over-frightened. The table of data by Markus (2016) was fairly interesting yet we need to consider the possibility of individual cognitive error and we might be able to attribute it to acquired concept of discrimination. Accordingly, this aspect should be considered as a variation for further studies.

By: Hina Ashraf

Hina Ashraf — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 21:49:00 +0000

This is a very interesting and yet disturbing report. Timothy and Mark’s story is promising. More networking and interaction would lead to more opportunities to understand each other better. Some years ago, I had conducted a study in Pakistan where students study the same National Curriculum albeit in different languages but appear to be deeply divided in terms of the worldview they share and the opportunities that they could access. Using Bourdieu lenses predominantly, I had investigated the ways the language of schooling contributes to social capital formation. And later, doing some corpus data analysis for a Migration Studies Project at Penn-State University, the findings of that study in Pakistan were corroborated by the factor that shared language and meanings plays such a vital role in creating more social capital and growth opportunities.