Elisabeth Vanderheiden

Claude-Hélène Mayer

Saba Safdar

Kiyoko Sueda

Orna Braun-Lewensohn

Gila Chen

Brightness Mangolothi

Soyeon Kim

This edited volume focuses on women’s empowerment for a sustainable future. It takes cultural and transcultural and positive psychology perspectives into consideration and explores the topic of women’s empowerment from diverse stances, across social strata, cultural divides as well as economic and political divisions. It addresses the critique of the overly Western focus of positive psychology on this topic by adopting a transnational and transcultural lens, and by taking non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples into in-depth consideration. The chapters therefore focus on women from diverse socio-cultural, political, socio-economic backgrounds and discuss their ways of empowering others and being empowered. They also discuss related positive psychology constructs, such as: coping, resilience, transformation, growth, leadership, creativity, identity development, sustainable action, as well as positive socio-economic, political and eco-sustainable thought and action. The volume as a whole looks at women's leadership as a factor of empowerment. A further fundamental assumption is that women’s empowerment is needed to create a sustainable future at micro-, meso- and macro levels, which presumes safety, peace, ecological considerations, and compassionate leadership.

Transcultural and Positive Psychology Perspectives

Women's Empowerment for a Sustainable Future

This book uses a post-modern approach to explore how Japanese returnee students (kikokushijo) and former returnees who work in Japanese industry, negotiate multiple identities. Methodological triangulation is used to study inner perception of face, emotional state and the dynamics of negotiating multiple-layering of identities. The work considers the relationship between face and identities, and the function of the affective aspects of face, shame and pride in identity negotiation. Readers will discover how Japanese returnees deal with shame and pride in face-threatening or face-promoting situations that affect their identity negotiation. Many such returnees stayed abroad because of their parents’ jobs and the author explores variations among them, in terms of how they identify with their identity as a returnee. We discover how there are multiple levels of identities instead of ‘identity’ as a singular. Two phases of research, carried out across ten years and involving some participants in both phases, are explored in this work. Although the participants in the research are Japanese returnees, the findings drawn from the study have implications for others who spend an extensive period of time overseas, who migrate from one place to another or who have multiple cultural backgrounds. The book incorporates ideas from Western and Eastern literature on intercultural communication, sociology and social psychology and it blends both micro and macro analysis. This book is recommended for scholars, educators, students and practitioners who seek to understand better how people negotiate their multiple identities in this globalising world.

Shame and pride among Japanese returnees

Negotiating multiple identities

Kiyoko Sueda

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