Non-Indigenous conceptions of Indigeneity have historically focused on controlling the socialization, mobility and reproduction of Indigenous people. In the Indigenous community, we have only recently begun to demarcate our own space in which to debate the nature of Indigeneity in Australia. To date, we have successfully deployed notions of Indigeneity, via the strategic essentialism of pan-Abo...

Recent years have witnessed several examples of desecrations of copies of the Qur’an as a display of non-Muslim hostility against Muslims. The present article attempts to answer a fundamental question relating to this phenomenon: how do desecrators know what acts directed at the Qur’an are likely to offend Muslims? The suggestion put forward is that desecration is an act that can be understood ...

Our paper explores whether a combination of intersectionality and hybridity perspectives will be sufficient to develop a feminist gender psychology of immigrant women that escapes the pitfalls of gender essentialism. Analyses of interviews with Indian immigrant women and self-descriptions of Filipina mail-order brides (MOBs) suggest that intersections of identity can ironically contribute to th...

The present study analyzed the role of parents as potential sources of children's essentialist beliefs about ethnicity. We tested 76 parent-child (5-year-olds) dyads of Jewish Israeli parents from three social groups, defined by the kindergartens children attended: national religious, secular, or Jewish-Arab integrated. We assessed parents' and children's beliefs, and parents' usage of ethnic a...

Psychological essentialism is a cognitive bias that leads people to view members of a category as sharing a deep, underlying, inherent nature that causes them to be fundamentally similar to one another in non-obvious ways. Although essentialist beliefs can be beneficial, allowing people to view the social world as stable and predictable, essentialist beliefs about social categories such as race...

After becoming consistently more egalitarian for more than two decades, gender role attitudes in the General Social Survey have changed little since the mid-1990s. This plateau mirrors other gender trends, suggesting a fundamental alteration in the momentum toward gender equality. While cohort replacement can explain about half of the increasing egalitarianism between 1974 and 1994, the changes...