Culture and diversity: framing the constructs

Culture and diversity: framing the constructs

The meanings ascribed to the terms culture and diversity have evolved over time and have held different connotations and significance in the social work

CONTACT Corry Azzopardi [email protected] The Hospital for Sick Children, Division of Pediatric Medicine, Department of Social Work, 555 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5G 1X8.

JOURNAL OF ETHNIC & CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN SOCIAL WORK 2016, VOL. 25, NO. 4, 282–299 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15313204.2016.1206494

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

profession at various points in history (Kohli, Huber, & Faul, 2010). Culture, from our perspective, is understood as the shared identity or identities of a group of people based on common traits, customs, values, norms, and patterns of behavior that are socially transmitted and highly influential in shaping beliefs, experiences, and worldviews. Based in anthropological and ethnographic studies and informed by a modernist perspective, the term culture was traditionally narrowly limited to the one-dimensional character- istics of race and ethnicity shared by members of a specific group.

Current conceptualizations of human diversity extend beyond outward manifestations of culture such as race, religious observances, or material arti- facts to include subjective experiences associated with the multiple social loca- tions in which individuals are immersed, including age, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, socioeconomic status, geography, and political affilia- tion, among other diversities. Through a contemporary postmodern lens, culture and diversity are viewed as individually and socially constructed phe- nomena that are ever-evolving (Dean, 2001). From this perspective, diverse groups are not homogeneous in nature despite sharing some common history, attributes, or practices. Individuals are understood to have intersecting and fluid identities, with wide variation between and within different groups.

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