With the new crack-down on immigration in the U.S., I am interested in exploring the concept of pragmatic tolerance, and specifically how tolerance in Amsterdam is affected by immigration. I would like to explore this topic mainly from the viewpoint of immigrants in the Netherlands.
Questions:
1. In order to assimilate into society, do immigrants feels as though they are forced to be tolerant? If so, does this involve giving up traditions/beliefs or is tolerance simply a learned behavior?
2. As people come to Amsterdam from so many areas of the world, they bring with them their customs and beliefs. Do new citizens feel as though they and their practices are tolerated?
3. Why are people inspired to move to Amsterdam? Is it what they expected?
Evidence:
So I was thinking that I could go to various immigration offices and cultural centers throughout the city in order to talk to people new to Amsterdam about their experiences thus far. Also, by going to churches/ mosques/ synagogues, etc, I would be able to talk to people from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds about how religious beliefs and practices are perceived within such a liberal society, and if the culture of tolerance forces individuals to sacrifice tradition. I have absolutely no experience with cultural research, so I'm sure that there are probably many other ways to go about this; I will likely change my plans drastically as the quarter goes on and I get a better grasp of how to go out into society and collect well rounded, unbiased data. So these are my ideas so far!
5 comments:
I think this is a super interesting idea, however like my questions it poses difficulties in really measuring the degree of assimilation or in your case, specifically forced tolerance. While without a doubt, a person’s opinion on the matter provides valid insight, but how is it measured in a study? I was thinking and the ideas I had were to make categories in a survey perhaps of several different life style aspects such as:
1. Language- is it still spoken, how much, what percentage of the day, at work, at home?
2. News and Literature- what news is watched? what book and newspapers are read? what is the ration of Dutch vs. Native political and social awareness of current event?
3. Socializing- five friends that most time is spent with, Dutch, same nationality or other?
4. Frequency/contact with country of origin- how often does one visit? how often is one in contact via phone/mail?
These are just some of the avenues to explore when measuring assimilation. It could also be done for tolerance, but one would have to do some research on certain common beliefs of the nationalities of origin vs. Dutch, and likewise pose them as questions.
Hi Jenny!
I agree with Jana--what a cool topic! It's also a huge subject to undertake. One strategy for thinking about how to undertake your research might be to identify a really specific facet you are interested in, and maybe a specific population as well.
For example, one set of questions might ask whether or not Surinamese immigrant men and women have similar language use at home to Moroccan immigrant men and women. Similarly, there may be a difference between first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants in this area... Sometimes this narrowing process makes everything fall into place about how the research will be conducted. Also, as you begin your experiences with cultural research in our seminar, I think you'll probably gravitate to particular subjects and those subjects will help lead you to methods that seem "right" for them.
Hi Jenny!
It's really awesome to see that you are also interested in immigrants. Your focus from the immigrants' perspective is very interesting. I think it would be great if we could get together and see if there are certain aspects of immigrant life or perspectives we can focus on. I think immigration and the social interactions that come with the contact between different kinds of culture is fascinating especially since both US and the Netherlands are have a significant degree of diversity so we can perhaps do a comparison between the two cities to see how much of immigrant reactions as well as native reactions perhaps are common across social settings and what are unique to the cultural settings of a particular place. That would be exciting to investigate!
Jenny,
I really do like your ideas about immigration However, it is a very difficult topic. As I'm strating to notice from some of the comments that I have been recieving, by focusing on a few specific immigrants, more information can be attained that will be easier to organize, and will most likely make things easier to ask the most helpful questions.
Of course, I have never done social research either. Your ideas about going to cultural centers is a very good one and I think that it would be very helpful in giving you general information and pointing you in the right direction.
Also with the cultural centers you could do a comparison with Seattle. Though a little more work would be involve, it would be really cool to see the results.
Jenny,
Would you be interested in forming a larger group of 5 to work together to investigate immigration, each of us taking a different component? I think your idea of exploring the concept of seeing how tolerance is affected by immigration is interesting, but I think it would also be interesting to see how immigrants are affected by Amsterdam's view on tolerance.
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