XIII Congreso Internacional sobre la Imagen

Abstract

Global migration has led to cultural diversification in many countries. Very often, culture is defined from an ethnic lens which assumes that people from the same ethnicity are culturally homogeneous. This assumption has informed the discussion of community practice with ethnic minorities for more than three decades. From the early cultural sensitive model to the recently developed cultural humility model the scope of cross cultural practice has been expanded to reconcile and integrate with the anti-oppressive discourses such as racism, indigeneity, and post-colonialism. The newly developed practice models also recognize the diversity among people, such as gender, class, and sexual orientation, of the same ethnic group. However, they have seldom challenges that assumption of cultural homogeneity of an ethnic group. In this presentation, we introduce the concept subethnic diversity, which so far has received very limited attention in community practice. We will discuss how this concept may problematize community organization practice with ethnic groups. Findings generated from a study of Chinese community in Vancouver and Calgary, Canada, will be used to illustrate this problem. The subethnic reality among Chinese in these two cities have affected not only the internal dynamic among the Chinese. It has imposed challenges on community service practitioners in working with the Chinese community.