Booth’s Miseducation and “Fake News”

Posted on March 27, 2018 by Sana Fatima

I am very fascinated by how knowledge and information are produced, spread, and believed, and I am particularly interested in how this process manifests itself in the 2016 US Presidential Elections (or any political movement and momentum in general). Firstly, I would like to highlight the concept of miseducation discussed by Booth. Upon reading Booth’s work “Media Rhetrickery”, I learned that there are two types of media rhetrickery: unconscious, undeliberate miseducation and conscious, deliberate miseducation. While I was aware of these ideas prior to this reading, Booth helped me clearly categorize the ideas while taking the distinctions into regard.

In an attempt to better understand the application of Booth’s ideas, I would like to highlight is Trump’s idea of “fake news”. Fake news in itself is not an invalid concept – it brings to light the issue of unconscious media miseducation, which Booth discusses. For instance, news outlets frame events in ways that further a particular point of view and cater to their target audience. Discomfort is a phenomenon that arises if we disagree or are unable to understand, and media outlets do not want to risk this discomfort causing their audiences to change the channel. And so, the constant cycle of producing streamlined information, mindlessly consuming it as long as it aligns with our biases, and reproducing it in order to spread its reach is something that takes place regardless of our position on the political spectrum.

Furthermore, I would like to assert that outside of unconscious, undeliberate miseducation, the media ascribes to conscious, deliberate miseducation as well. Because media news outlets are still companies competing for capital, they are understandably driven by profit, and this profit often results from high viewer ratings. This means that the outlets must produce information that can be easily consumed by its viewers. As Booth outlines it, they follow some or all of the four motives that cause conscious miseducation: money, political support and personal safety, celebrity, dogmatic commitment. I would personally assume that money (profit), political support and personal safety (for network executives), celebrity (reputation as a news source0 and dogmatic commitment (especially with regard to the promotion of certain religious, moral, social and political ideals) all play a role in media outlets’ decisions to produce conscious, deliberate miseducation.

And so, we arrive back at Trump’s idea of fake news. Understandably so, this term can be described as creating both unconscious and conscious miseducation. However, it describes miseducation nonetheless, and is arguably miseducation itself, as it frames specific news outlets as being proponents of fake news and reproduces ideas that are spread to and often supported by Trump administration supporters and non-supporters alike.

 

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Last Unit Reflection

Posted on March 27, 2018 by piers fleming

I thoroughly enjoyed the mock election that we have been working on in class. We tried to be a “Orsinian Fascist” party, after realizing the implications of labelling ourselves as neo-fascists (haha). We called ourselves the “Orsinia Forward” party to symbolize our progressive platform. I got the idea for this from French president Macron’s self-founded party “La Republique en Marche” (The Republic Onward or On the Move) which evoked a strong sense of pride in the country and inclusiveness. I found creating the platform and writing the speech to be pretty interesting, especially in analyzing just how convincing you can make ideas sound that aren’t necessarily logical.

This got me thinking of Orwell and his Politics of the English Language, and wondering if there were actually languages out there that were less fluffy by nature, and did not have the ability to be so deceiving. Furthermore, I don’t really understand what point Orwell is trying to make with his argument. I understand that he shares the opinion that the English language is in decline, but changing it would mean to make a conscious decision for the greater good of something as abstract as a language. Didn’t he understand that people who were being deceitful or insincere were doing it for gain? I don’t understand why someone who would profit from deceitful language would make an effort to make it more transparent. I think it is up to populations to simply be able to analyze language more carefully, or even less realistically, have a very straight forward thinking society that doesn’t tolerate fluffy language. Regardless, while Orwell’s points are interesting, and I can see why these he would ideally want to implement these rules, the situation is simply that – ideal. It is unrealistic to think that this would happen form the person doing the action, rather than solving the problem by making the deceit evoked in the speech ineffective against the target population. As mentioned earlier, this could be done from better education, strong er ability to detect bias etc., which are ironically similar points that people make about today’s media and not believing everything you hear in the news.

Coming back to our speech, it was clear that we were definitely using appeal to emotion and other forms of rhetoric in order to convince the audience (mostly just Daniel) of the legitimacy of our goals and how realistic they were. (Daniel if you are reading this, we are still clearly the superior party and put forth much more realistic ideas, compared to the lofty idealized ambitions of the opposite, sub-par party). We tried to create a bond with the Orsinians, based on our past history and love for our female founder, yet also incorporate views that are more present. This was done to maximize popularity and is reflected in many political parties today.

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Changing Powers by Rhetoric

Posted on March 27, 2018 by Alexandria Avant-Herbst

I suppose this doesn’t quite as much pertain to the topic of “Media and Politics” as it does to a few comments that stuck out to me during today’s mock election. I’m talking about our brief mention of “elected monarchy” and “dictatorship.”

As a philosophy student with a good deal of interest in politics, surprise surprise, I’ve studied a good bit of political philosophy. As such, I tend to know just how a lot of governments are structured and the way power shifts and operates within those governments. I often forget that not everyone has this background. The apparent contradiction in an “elected monarch” stems from a very simple misunderstanding of the terms used, but I think that there are a lot of these misunderstandings of the inner workings of political structures. For instance, to take something from Frum, many people think that the US system is somehow automatically operating under a system of checks and balances. It’s easy to trust in the operation of these without even realizing that they are failing, and require the cooperation and generally the honor of those involved. There are even people who have no idea what the president actually does, or who believe that he can write laws.

You may see where I am going. There are all of these confusions surrounding political structures, despite their being crucial to the inner workings of government. But the fact is, a lot of the times political structures are as much about the faith the people have in the system as they are about the genuine structures. Take the supreme court of the US, for example. While the supreme court can make decisions about laws and policy, they have no actual ability to enforce these repeals or policy changes. Nor can they truly enforce the precedent which forms the common law. However, because the people and the president hold respect for the courts, because there is belief in their power, and in the importance of legal precedent, the courts do have power. If the president chose not to act on one of their decisions, there would be public backlash, but the courts couldn’t do anything. If the public lost faith in the courts, then this backlash would go away, and the Supreme Court would fall.

Similarly, our ideas about government can shift the structure thereof, and once imagined powers can come to be. The way this occurs is through rhetoric and the sharing of public knowledge and ideas. Thinking back to Booth, our ideas about government and political power seems like a reality which is in large part shaped by rhetoric. While there is nothing technically contradictory about the idea of an “elected monarch” the typical idea of monarchy implies one which is hereditary, and as this has been ingrained in our language, the term “monarch” has come to mean “hereditary monarch.” Similarly, the idea of a dictatorship, which while it is technically only an autocratic state operating to preserve its own power, reads as very pejorative. In fact, we specifically point out “benevolent dictatorships” as being contrary to this idea. This is somewhat similar to the way people sometimes append qualifiers for certain jobs as a way of signaling out that quality as being typically dissociated from that job, the way some people say “Black president” or “female doctor” or even “male nurse.” I am sure there are better examples, and I could probably write a lot on just this topic, but I digress.

Regardless, I simply found it interesting to consider the way in which our rhetoric shapes the way political power is consolidated.

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Elections, elections, elections.

Posted on March 27, 2018 by daniel lam

What an interesting few weeks it has been for me.  Not only were we doing a mock election in class, but it was also elections season at UBC.  Throughout the past few weeks, I kept on thinking about how the media has played a huge factor in influencing peoples’ perception of society.  Notably, I thought about how this related with the “Russian trolls and bots” that helped to influence Trump’s election, by causing massive distrust in the current political system at the time, and how certain media outlets such as Breitbart, Rebel Media, and The Blaze also helped to fuel that distrust.

Recently, student elections just happened at UBC.  As with many student elections that have happened in my time at UBC, there has always been some form of controversy that has sparked up.  This year, there were several instances that had happened.  In the AMS Elections, it was the controversy surrounding comments that were made by the Interfraternity Council executive toward a candidate who happened to be a sexual assault survivor.  Using the power of social media, people began to talk about this issue, and a large part of a candidate’s success in their election would turn out to be about whether or not they accepted the Interfraternity Council’s endorsement.  Endorsements from other campus groups ended up going against those who had accepted their endorsement from the Council.

Another way the media had influenced politics recently was with constituency elections at UBC, notably with the drama that had ensued within the SUS and the AUS.  Starting with SUS, a letter that was posted by a former SUS President garnered traction online, and there were calls for widespread changes in SUS in order to allow for people from outside the organization to be more active in the society.  In comes Deepinder Dhot, an outsider candidate for SUS VP Student Life.  He put on a very well run campaign and with the anti-SUS sentiment lingering amongst Science students, I personally believe a large part of his victory came from Reddit and social media.  This media also brought about huge discussion as to what needed to change in the SUS in order to be more receptive to the student body.  In the AUS, allegations of bullying of a candidate sparked up, and the media’s influence worked in voting out a student candidate who was seen as “petty” and “a child”.

Going back to the mock election, I observed the ways that rhetoric helped me sway my choice during the mock election.  There was one team that was able to convey their message in a way that made me want to support them if this were a real election.  While there might not be any “social media” in New Orsinia, it is still the people’s sentiments of a certain party that will likely be the key factor in influencing this decision if it were a real election.  With different issues that were described as being present in N.O., I think the ways the parties talk about different issues, and how they are represented in the media, will be what will sway voters, similar to the way Donald Trump was able to sway voters from coal mining communities to vote for him, by using the right-wing media that was shown in largely Republican communities and also some Democratic communities as well.  Media has a huge role in working to influence elections, and it has had a huge role in swaying voters toward a certain position.

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The (Queens’) Speech

Posted on March 27, 2018 by Melissa Teo

Last week we had some time to think about a mock election and the components of rhetoric that are employed in the media. Our group decided to take a “green matriarchy” position in terms of political stance (with the tag line, “Happy Greens, Happy Queens”), and I found that crafting a speech to be something that has taught me a lot about the way in which language functions as a vessel for conveying information.

Our group took a really systematic approach by first coming up with things someone of our particular political stance would be for and against (i.e. anti-oil, pro-environment, pro-women), and then choosing which of those should be featured in our speech. In choosing the cream of the crop, we had to think about our opponents (the Neo-Fascists) and what they might be for and against. This is a train of thought and reasoning that stems from Aristotle in that good rhetors can and should be able to anticipate a response to a rhetorical/political situation before even having a prompt to do so.

Crafting the speech was another task unto itself because we then had to think about how to sell our ideas and make them seem very reasonable and morally upright (if they weren’t already). Our proposals are quite utopian and mirror a feminist Marxist ideal, but we also wanted to implement an all-powerful ruler, so trying to craft a ‘communist’ Eden required us to think about how to “sell” the idea of an all-powerful leader without mentioning a ‘dictatorship’.

As someone who’s studied rhetoric, it was easy enough for me to say, “Okay, in our speech, we’re going to evoke bad character of our opponents, make emotional appeals, and drop a metaphorical comparison in our speech to make it moving and win our audience over”, but what I noticed was that we ended up using a lot of rhetorical devices that we (I!) haven’t formally studied when we had the goal of wanting to persuade our audience. I referenced this site: http://phrontistery.info/rhetoric.html

Which leads me to consider George Orwell’s piece (“Politics of the English Language”) more carefully: is it the case that political language, when flowery and dusted with these rhetorical tactics, is always a tool of corruption? I had to take a step back and think about our speech, the goal we were trying to attain, the message we were trying to convey, and the agenda we had in mind in order to realize that these tactics could very well be the same tactics used by the other party (who happened to take on a Neo-Fascist stance, which is a stance that is extremely scrutinized contemporarily, for obvious reasons). It also got me to think about how a person could advocate for a dictatorial power in the name of efficiency and the like.

I don’t necessarily agree with Orwell’s stance, but I do grant him the validity of his concerns over this kind of language – one could argue that Orwell and Burke (who wrote “Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle”) were talking about the same kind of ‘rhetrickery’ that Booth also warns us about in his chapter on “Media Rhetrickery”.

In a sense, having learned about and studied rhetoric has made me very aware of these devices and the way they are employed in speeches, which goes to show (at least myself) that Booth’s remedy for curing bad, deliberate rhetrickery through education is at least plausible. However, I still think it’s optimistic of him to think that this education will be used the same way that he (or I) uses it. Surely, as I have mentioned before, formally studying such devices will allow those with ulterior motives to use them in a not-so-nice way (i.e. to manipulate and to skew information). But nevertheless, I think he’s still onto something when he says more people will be able to at least recognize this deliberate rhetrickery, which may steer more people away from believing “alternative facts”.

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The Impeachment Of Trump and the 25th amendment

Posted on March 20, 2018 by rylan levine

Daniel’s delivered a really interesting talk on the impeachment of Trump last week. It explored the possibility of Trump being taken out of office and all the different ways in which previous presidents were removed.

There are lots of laws surrounding the area of impeachment but one of the main ones focused on was the 25th amendment. It talked about the possibility of a board of medical professionals being able to remove Trump from office if he was seen mentally unstable to run a country.  Now there were some issues with the law and the way it was worded, as it seemed very vague. Knowing basic political science, this is most likely done to allow for a bit of leeway when considering this law, as open interpretations allow for the unpredictable behavior of humans, and is in itself more all-encompassing. However, laws that aren’t strict have their downsides too, the main one being that it is harder to convict someone on a charge so general that we are unsure if the suspect has done anything wrong at all.

This led me to also think about corruption. Corruption within politics is a big issue, and one that can be easily exploited with such power. Hence laws are made to prevent such things. Looking at this law, if a team of medical staff were to come together, who gets to choose the medical staff? Surely with any president there is the ability to corrupt and dissuade professional and medical opinion

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Unit Reflection for Week 11 (Boothe/Orwell/et all)

Posted on March 19, 2018 by aja moore

Like all of Boothe’s texts so far, I found this one really informative and pretty comprehensible. I appreciated that he is really upfront about his limitations (he states very clearly that he is only qualified to speak with (some) authority on MR within the context of North America) and the lengths that he goes to to demonstrate how any person with any political leaning/motivation can employ these dishonest methods (they are not themselves inherently connected to any ideology/power structure.)

I think he does a good job of showing not only how/why people might distort information, but also connecting those reasons to each other to show us just how fraught with ill-intentions, silence, confusion, dishonesty, money, etc is involved in the dissemination of, and consumption of, information.

I just started reading a new book by Jackie Wang called Carceral Capitalism. It’s a semiotexte (I would be interested in hearing and Linguist or Rhetorician’s opinion on semiotexte, honestly) by a poet I really love about (many things, including) mass incarceration, for profit punitive models, capitalism, the nexus of these things, and prison abolition.

I’m not very far along in the book (because it’s this time in the semester and I’m working almost every day) but recently I was reading about the introduction of technology, to prisons generally, and in Florida, more specifically. Wang writes that for a long time prisons integrated almost no technology into their infrastructure. Prisoners could pay money to send e-mails but were generally unaware of the technological developments going on “outside.”

Then she writes about how this changed, and technology became more readily available to prisoners. At first this seems really positive, and in a sense, it is. Prisoners have a much easier time communicating with loved ones, for example. I felt like this was a prime example of information that I have difficulty accessing, and fact-checking. Given how much information is out there, how sensitive the information can be, and how badly I can imagine powerful people do not want their practices revealed. I began to feel that if only I had taken it upon myself to learn about the specific and plentiful restrictions on inmates, and if only many others had to, then things would be vastly different and communication between inmates and their friends/peers/partners would be even further than it is now.

But Wang goes onto explain how technology drastically changes things very quickly. Soon, a skype like technology begins to replace certain visits. Here, she discusses her mother’s use of the service to speak with her brother, who’s incarcerated. She writes that her mother enjoys the service because it allows her to show her son her home. So while Wang concedes that the electronic option has benefits, she writes that she is concerned that if these types of services grow to supplant all in person visits prisons will cease to exist, experientially, for all those who do not either work, or serve sentences in them. For Wang, public access to prisons is crucial to the understanding of, and ending of, their brutality.

This made me think about Orwell and his concern about Dying Metaphors. I’ll admit I’m not his biggest fan but I did enjoy when he wrote “The idea that art is apolitical is itself a political stance.” (or something to that extent.) I suspect that Orwell would consider “the cage” a tired af metaphor. That can be found in almost any medium, in almost any era, emblematic of almost any thing.

[THIS IS MY PERSONAL FAVORITE https://bombmagazine.org/articles/skull-bones/]

And I started to think that some metaphors are dying, and that is precisely the reason to keep using them? If we know that prisons and carceral practices are intentionally (oftentimes for immense financial and personal gain) obscured from the public, and that the we are also being thoroughly discouraged from actually accessing these spaces, then perhaps we should not hesitate to invoke the metaphor (if it is called for, and not merely for dramatic effect…I think the link I shared actually does a great job of addressing this difference.) While, of course, pursuing more phenomenological research as well, so that the reality of prisons is, at the very least, on the public’s periphery, as often as possible.

 

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The looking glass self and the US

Posted on February 14, 2018 by piers fleming

This week was primarily focused on the dynamic between the self and the other. Most famous for this is Hegel, who coined his theory of us identifying ourselves, by comparing us to the people around us. A sociologist named Charles H. Cooley further explored this, and developed his theory of the “looking-glass” the idea of developing oneself through the analysis of the differences we have with the people around us.

Now, I’ll be honest, I didn’t really understand what this theory was entirely when I first heard about it in class. However, I did watch a great video and I will try and synthesize it.

1.     Think about a teacher and a student

2.     The student receives a bad mark on his latest assignment

3.     The reason for this was that the teacher wanted to incentivize the student to try harder, as the teacher thought the student had great potential, but wasn’t applying himself. So the teacher graded him more harshly

4.     The student, having received the harsh grade, might became disinterested in the class, thinking he wasn’t as smart as his classmates. This could also cause him to think

a.     The teacher thinks he isn’t intelligent

b.     He isn’t good at the subject that the assignment pertained to  

5.     The plan has thus backfired as the student has misread what the teacher wanted to convey

I am sure we can all draw parallels to society in the States. Prejudices arise from a misunderstanding (sometimes arrogance) of different parties. Essentially, the potential problems with the looking glass self is the lack of communication between multiple parties. These misunderstandings only further reinforce existing animosities between groups.

But Cooley offers more. What if the teacher and the student are able to communicate? What if the teacher explains why they acted in this way and thus allowing the student to understand why he was graded more harshly than others. This could spark a change in the student to put more effort in because of the expectation of fulfilling his potential.

 How can this last step be brought into US communities to help alleviate tensions between them? It is extremely difficult, as it is impossible for everyone to be all-knowing and foresee a lack of communication between two groups. If this was possible, some of the problems that arise from the looking glass self wouldn’t exist. However, there is potential in creating discussion and dialogue for groups to connect.

 The hardest part of the looking glass self is that it creates an environment where the minority, or common victim of racism/prejudice, takes on the responsibility of monitoring their looking glass. As in à an African-American knowing that some ignorant white person may grow weary of their proximity, or cross the street as they grow nearer. This hurts the targeted minority, as they feel helpless in being able to alleviate this expectation that is placed on them. Rather, it should be on the majority community to acknowledge such an prejudgment and work on alleviating it.

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UR #3: Recognizing the Other and Defining the Self

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Sana Fatima

These past few weeks, we have been exploring the concept of the self and the other, and using US race relations as an arena for the application of these ideas. While looking at historical race relations, power structures, and their translation to contemporary racial projects in the United States, I found myself drawing upon Hegel’s work the most. It is very difficult for me to conceptualize the self without having an “other” to compare myself to, and I find this need replicated in racial identity as well. In order to build upon this point, I will focus primarily on Winant’s ideas surrounding white identity as a social construct (read: “invented whiteness”), and relate it back to Charles H. Cooley’s theory called the Looking-Glass Self.

In Winant’s essays on contemporary racial politics, he asserts that white identity is based on “negating other races” and identifying what is “not white” about others in order to determine what is “white” about white people’s concept of self. Winant claims that whiteness is an invention that ironically depends on non-whites in order to exist. This fascinating assertion ties in with Hegel’s concept of using “the other” to define “the self”, as Winant describes white people using external representations of other groups to determine how they want to understand and present themselves. At this point, I would find it useful to determine how much of this perception of the other is rooted within the self, as our own experiences and interactions undeniably define how we view others. Is this process a cycle, and can we really say that the other defines the self in that case?

I relate this idea of using the other to define the self to a symbolic interactionist theory called “The Looking-Glass Self”, a concept proposed by a sociologist named Charles H. Cooley. According to Cooley, the self develops as it perceives and interprets itself through others and the interactions it has with others. In other words, people serve as a “looking glass” for us to see ourselves, and this defines our sense of self and identity. Due to its social psychological nature, the theory is largely focused on the way that the mind develops meanings that it then associates with social symbols. I connect this to the manner in which we, as people with different cultural and racial experiences, develop meanings for certain symbols and how this defines our identity.

For instance, when it comes to police presence, white people attach very different meanings to it than do minority groups, and this defines how we interact with the police, the role that we think state-sanctioned violence should play, and the kinds of policies that we support. When it comes to tokens of culture and identity, such as food or clothing, again we have different meanings and values, and we establish where we stand in relation to these tokens. This social location depends greatly on a) the interactions we have with others, b) the meanings we are taught and/or learn over time and c) our perception of self, in no particular order. This winds back to Hegel’s idea that we rely greatly on the other to define ourselves, an idea that I definitely agree with. When it comes to white identity especially, it makes sense that they define themselves in relation to the other ethnic groups that they are surrounded by, as it appears to be a natural process to me. Unfortunately, when these definitions seek to homogenize a diverse other, proceed to separate the other, and then disadvantage them in order to maintain a sense of identity, that is when I must disagree with this identity formation and reproduction process.

This also leads me to wonder how people that do not have a clear-cut racial “other” define themselves. For example, if I were to ask my cousin (a young Pakistani woman who was born and raised in Pakistan, and still resides there) about identity, how would she define herself? Would it instead be in relation to gender or religious sect, or would race and culture still be a major factor in defining who she is as a person or a social actor? Do we use the other in a way to develop the parts that we are most unsure about? Do we draw upon the most obvious or visible differences to establish ourselves? Although I understand that the application of the self vs. other is not exclusive to race, I find that in the Western context, culture and climate, it plays an extremely important role. In fact, with reference to the Trump administration’s constant practices of racial othering in order to promote white American identity (i.e. “bad hombres”, the Muslim Ban, etc.), I cannot help but feel that unfortunately, even in a supposedly “post-racial climate”, race in America will be eternally relevant.

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The Hyphen

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Melissa Teo

These past two weeks, we’ve obviously covered several broad and differing topics: the notion of the Self/Other, and race relations. In discussing these, I think of my own relationship with my consciousness of being, and in thinking about defining (from our last unit) and the international spectrum (our upcoming unit), these factors of my being (spatially, temporally, existentially, etc.) affect how I see myself, how others see me, and my idea of who I should/shouldn’t/can/couldn’t/would/wouldn’t be. Race (especially) has given me a lot to think about the the last few weeks.

These thoughts manifest in something known as the hyphen, an abstract concept built upon the symbol joining two words with the assumption that in combination, they hold one meaning. In transcultural rhetoric and discourse, the hyphen is literally the symbol between, for example, Chinese and Canadian in the term Chinese-Canadian. However, it is also a figurative space, or threshold, that separates one’s identity from one’s body. I’ve done some thinking previously about this idea, and I will try my best to summarize. Though based on my own experience, I believe this form of “being” can be applied to many people living in the West.

I suppose it might be easy to think that this is a mind/body split, but I feel like it yields a more dysphoric end between body, identity, and environment. Only within the self-other recognition does the hyphen exist because it acknowledges the blend of two “others” into one “self”, and this recognition – this struggle – is what characterizes the hyphenated individual. The hyphenated individual must balance their unbalanced, tri-partite selves in which all parts are just as important as, but not equal to, the whole.

The importance of the recognition of others in relation to the self is the reason why the hyphenated individual cannot be the self Kierkegaard formulates (as the self is only in relation to its own self). Kierkegaard would probably argue that it is the self, not the other, that we must pay attention to, but we cannot ignore that our transcultural identity is comprised of multiple parts informed by things outside of us.

Furthermore, we utilize language to place constraints on people, on identity, and on experience and existence (as I have argued in my last blog post). I have neither been wholly Chinese nor wholly Canadian. I’m too Canadian to be Chinese – too engulfed by the myth of the west, too concerned with individuality, sexuality, and so on – but I’m also too Chinese to be truly Canadian despite being born here. Moreover, my body and my actions are further categorized into either feminine or not feminine enough. The state of hyphenation, of being Chinese-Canadian, is a state of constantly being informed by either side of the hyphen. This limbo state – this in-between state – is something that is both foreign and familiar, and not knowing how to navigate it causes havoc and misery.

How, then, can the hyphenated individual be an individual if it is so important to recognize the other in their attempt to recognize themselves? One must understand what it means, socially, to be Chinese, Canadian, and Chinese-Canadian, as our language has structured them. Chinese-Canadian does not merely mean the sum of what it means to be Chinese and Canadian, separately. In the term ‘Chinese-Canadian’, both the words ‘Chinese’ and ‘Canadian’ split away from their socially constructed meanings and converge to form an entirely new understanding – a new form of being. And because there is no “real” way to be Chinese or Canadian, there is thus no “real” way to be Chinese-Canadian, even if to be Chinese-Canadian is to be constantly informed by two sides. Canadian is Canadian, Chinese-Canadian is Chinese-Canadian: Chinese-Canadian is neither Chinese nor Canadian; it entails neither Chinese-ness nor Canadian-ness – it entails otherness, in-between-ness.

The hyphenated individual is both themselves within the understanding of the other AND other to themselves, and the contradictory nature of this allows the individual to find a messy, chaotic sense of self within the clash between understanding and acceptance – it is a unique, lived experience. The hyphenated individual is informed by others, and because of this, they have the most room to recognize the space the hyphen creates through self-reflection, and therefore themselves as an agglomeration of that manifested space. This is constant and ever-changing, as the two sides of the individual are always informing and reacting to the hyphen, and the hyphen is always informing and reacting to the two sides, but are neither resolved nor resigned to any ‘part’ of the self.

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