Multicultural professional psychologists routinely assert that psychotherapeutic interventions require culturally competent delivery for ethnoracial minority clients to protect the distinctive cultural orientations of these clients. Dominant disciplinary conceptualizations of cultural competence are "kind of person" models that emphasize specialized awareness, knowledge, and skills on the part ...

Cultural appropriation is often mentioned but undertheorized in critical rhetorical and media studies. Defined as the use of a culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture, cultural appropriation can be placed into 4 categories: exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation. Although each of these types can be understood as relevant to p...

This paper reviews current research on the oppressive and dehumanizing use of language by those in political power to promote essentialist thought about oppositional groups, including during war Ukraine. Essentialism is implicit belief that categories people–those certain ethnicities or nationalities, for example–have intrinsic, immutable properties, driven some deep, unobservable, often determ...

The Western novel, practicing imperialist Africanism, has historically othered Africans as savages. Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian writer, appropriated the colonizing West’s language and narrative to present the colonial encounter from an African perspective. Interestingly enough, both African and non-African scholars believe that Achebe’s novels inadvertently reproduced the essentialism that reduce...

A traditional approach to contrastive rhetoric has emphasized cultural difference in rhetorical patterns among various languages. Despite its laudable pedagogical intentions to raise teachers’ and students’ cultural and rhetorical awareness in second language writing, traditional contrastive rhetoric has perpetuated static binaries between English and other languages and viewed students as cult...

In what follows I supplement my published reply (Strevens 2001) to Ahn et al.’s commentary (Ahn et al. 2001) on my paper concerning psychological essentialism (Strevens 2000). The supplementary comments come in three parts. First, I ask whether my alternative to psychological essentialism, which I call the minimal hypothesis, or minimalism for short, can explain certain experimental results of ...

Mereological essentialists argue that mereological summations cannot change their parts. Mereological inessentialists argue that mereological summations can change some or all of their parts. In this paper I articulate and defend a position called Moderate Mereological Inessentialism, according to which certain mereological summations can change some, but not all, of their parts. Persistent mer...