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1. Vested Accomplices: Men Embracing Cultural Humility in Personal & Institutional Transformation At a Historically Black University

   https://doi.org/10.5399/osu/ADVJRNL.5.1.3  

   Owens, Allezo; Moton, Brandon; Allen_Owens, Marcia (May 2024, ADVANCE Journal)

   Abstract This paper explores the critical role of male faculty members at a Minority Serving Institution (MSI) in promoting cultural humility and using a hermeneutical lens to achieve gender equity. Cultural humility is the awareness that no gender/discipline/race/religion is the norm and that everyone belongs at this MSI. Hermeneutics is a philosophical interpretation process that may help to understand the social identity of Black women in STEM/SBS. Examining Black women in STEM/SBS at a large MSI extends the research of intersectionality by focusing on a context where Black women students are the majority, and Black women STEM/SBS faculty are the minority. The authors provide self-reflections practicing cultural humility using a hermeneutical lens to avoid contributing to the trauma Black women in STEM/SBS face at this MSI. 

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2. The Fundamental Uncertainties of Mothering: Finding Ways to Honor Endurance, Struggle, and Contradiction

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3397177  

   Devendorf, Laura; Andersen, Kristina; Kelliher, Aisling (September 2020, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction)

   null (Ed.)

   Present day ideals of good parenting are socio-technical constructs formed at the intersection of medical best practices, cultural norms, and technical innovation. These ideals take shape in relation to the fundamental uncertainty that parents/mothers face, an uncertainty that comes from not knowing how to do what is best for one's children, families, and selves. The growing body of parent-focused smart devices and data-tracking platforms emerging from this intersection frame the responsible parent as one who evaluates, analyzes, and mitigates data-defined risks for their children and family. As these devices and platforms proliferate, whether from respected medical institutions or commercial interests, they place new demands on families and add an implicit emphasis on how humans (often mothers) can be augmented and improved by data-rich technology. This is expressed both in the actions they support (e.g., breastfeeding, monitoring food intake), as well as in the emotions they render marginal (e.g., rage, struggle, loss, and regret). In this article, we turn away from optimization and self-improvement narratives to attend to our own felt experiences as mothers and designers. Through an embodied practice of creating Design Memoirs, we speak directly to the HCI community from our position as both users and subjects of optimized parenting tools. Our goal in this work is to bring nuance to a domain that is often rendered in simplistic terms or frames mothers as figures who could endlessly do more for the sake of their families. Our Design Memoirs emphasize the conflicting and often negative emotions we experienced while navigating these tools and medical systems. They depict our feelings of being at once powerful and powerless, expressing rage and love simultaneously, and struggling between expressing pride and humility. The Design Memoirs serve us in advocating that designers should use caution when considering a problem/solution focus to the experiences of parents. We conclude by reflecting on how our shared practice of making memoirs, as well as other approaches within feminist and queer theory, suggest strategies that trouble these optimization and improvement narratives. Overall, we present a case for designing for mothers who feel like they are just making do or falling short, in order to provide relief from the anxiety of constantly seeking improvement. 

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3. Modeling Impression Formation Processes among Chinese and Americans

   Zhao, Jun (January 2021, The American Behavioral Scientist)

   null (Ed.)

   This study offers the first investigation on the normative processes through which Chinese form impressions of others in social interaction. Using affect control theory and its archived sentiment data from China, I estimate the Chinese impression formation models with a new Bayesian method. I then compare the Chinese models to the impression formation dynamics in U.S. English. Results show cross-cultural commonality in the affective processing of cultural concepts, with determinants of impression formation processes being largely universal. Findings also reveal two cultural variations that align with patterns uncovered by comparative cross-cultural research: 1) the Chinese models show less rigidity in the definition of situation; and 2) across two cultural models, the balance term has opposite effects on actor and behavior evaluation. To explore the implications of the impression models, I present a series of simulations, illustrating the predictive power of affect control theory as well as the impact of different cultural rules on social interaction. 

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4. Population structure drives cultural diversity in finite populations: A hypothesis for localized community patterns on Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile)

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250690  

   Lipo, Carl P.; DiNapoli, Robert J.; Madsen, Mark E.; Hunt, Terry L. (May 2021, PLOS ONE)

   Esteve-Altava, Borja (Ed.)

   Understanding how and why cultural diversity changes in human populations remains a central topic of debate in cultural evolutionary studies. Due to the effects of drift, small and isolated populations face evolutionary challenges in the retention of richness and diversity of cultural information. Such variation, however, can have significant fitness consequences, particularly when environmental conditions change unpredictably, such that knowledge about past environments may be key to long-term persistence. Factors that can shape the outcomes of drift within a population include the semantics of the traits as well as spatially structured social networks. Here, we use cultural transmission simulations to explore how social network structure and interaction affect the rate of trait retention and extinction. Using Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) as an example, we develop a model-based hypothesis for how the structural constraints of communities living in small, isolated populations had dramatic effects and likely led to preventing the loss of cultural information in both community patterning and technology. 

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5. Metatheme Analysis: A Qualitative Method for Cross-Cultural Research

   https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069211019907  

   Wutich, Amber; Beresford, Melissa; SturtzSreetharan, Cindi; Brewis, Alexandra; Trainer, Sarah; Hardin, Jessica (January 2021, International Journal of Qualitative Methods)

   In recent years, there has been a florescence of cross-cultural research using ethnographic and qualitative data. This cutting-edge work confronts a range of significant methodological challenges, but has not yet addressed how thematic analysis can be modified for use in cross-cultural ethnography. Thematic analysis is widely used in qualitative and mixed-methods research, yet is not currently well-adapted to cross-cultural ethnographic designs. We build on existing thematic analysis techniques to discuss a method to inductively identify metathemes (defined here as themes that occur across cultures). Identifying metathemes in cross-cultural research is important because metathemes enable researchers to use systematic comparisons to identify significant patterns in cross-cultural datasets and to describe those patterns in rich, contextually-specific ways. We demonstrate this method with data from a collaborative cross-cultural ethnographic research project (exploring weight-related stigma) that used the same sampling frame, interview protocol, and analytic process in four cross-cultural research sites in Samoa, Paraguay, Japan, and the United States. Detecting metathemes that transcend data collected in different languages, cultures, and sites, we discuss the benefits and challenges of qualitative metatheme analysis. 

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