This text is designed especially for clinicians and students working with Asian immigrant populations. Drawing on the international literature, it discusses the therapeutic process in psychotherapy and counselling with these clients, exploring both key psychodynamic constructs and social systemic factors.

Many first and second generation Asian immigrants experience acculturation challenges to varying extents. These challenges, such as language barriers, racial discrimination, underemployment, the loss of support networks and changes in family role and structure, may exacerbate a myriad of mental health issues. In addition, their help-seeking behaviour, as shaped by a general adherence to a collectivistic worldview and indirect communication style, often creates challenges for the practitioners who are trained under a Western practice modality. Drawing on literature from English-speaking countries with sizeable Asian immigrant populations such as the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom, this text is designed especially for clinicians and students working with Asian immigrant populations. It discusses the therapeutic process in psychotherapy and counselling with these clients, exploring both key psychodynamic constructs and social systemic factors. Building on contemporary relational theory, which emphasizes the centrality of the helping relationship and sensitivity to the client’s subjective realities, the book demonstrates how western-based concepts and skills can be broadened and applied in an Asiacentric context, and can be therapeutic even in social service and case management service settings. There are chapters on issues such as domestic violence, intergenerational conflicts, depression amongst elders, and suicide, discussing the prevalence and nature of the mental health issues and each containing case vignettes from various Asian ethnic groups to illustrate the application of relational approaches. This book is an important cross-cultural reference for practising social workers and counsellors as well as for social work students undertaking clinical practice courses.

When Contemporary Asian America was first published, it exposed its readers to developments within the discipline, from its inception as part of the ethnic consciousness movement of the 1960s to the more contemporary theoretical and practical issues facing Asian America at the century’s end. This new edition features a number of fresh entries and updated material. It covers such topics as Asian American activism, immigration, community formation, family relations, gender roles, sexuality, identity, struggle for social justice, interethnic conflict/coalition, and political participation. As in the first edition, Contemporary Asian America provides an expansive introduction to the central readings in Asian American Studies, presenting a grounded theoretical orientation to the discipline and framing key historical, cultural, economic, and social themes with a social science focus. This critical text offers a broad overview of Asian American studies and the current state of Asian America.

In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture. Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the "foreigner-within." In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant--at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation--displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.

Meeting a crucial need for social workers and other practitioners, as well as students, this authoritative text covers the breadth of issues involved in working with immigrant and refugee children and families. Within an innovative conceptual framework, essential knowledge is presented to guide culturally competent practice with clients from over 14 immigrant groups whose numbers are growing in the United States today. Expert authors review the history of each group's migration to the U.S. and discuss key issues facing families, including cultural conflicts, trauma associated with refugee experiences and/or illegal status, and the effects of poverty and discrimination. Particular attention is given to ways that the practitioner can help families draw on culturally based resources for coping and resilience as they navigate the challenges of their new lives. Throughout, recommendations for strengths-based assessment and intervention are brought to life in detailed case examples.

Using a novel approach to consider the available literature and research, this book focuses on the psychology of social media based on the assumption that the experience of being in a social media has an impact on both our identity and social relationships. In order to ‘be online’, an individual has to create an online presence – they have to share information about themselves online. This online self is presented in different ways, with diverse goals and aims in order to engage in different social media activities and to achieve desired outcomes. Whilst this may not be a real physical presence, that physicality is becoming increasingly replicated through photos, video, and ever-evolving ways of defining and describing the self online. Moreover, individuals are using both PC-based and mobile-based social media as well as increasingly making use of photo and video editing tools to carefully craft and manipulate their online self. This book therefore explores current debates in Cyberpsychology, drawing on the most up-to-date theories and research to explore four main aspects of the social media experience (communication, identity, presence and relationships). In doing so, it considers the interplay of different areas of psychological research with current technological and security insight into how individuals create, manipulate and maintain their online identity and relationships. The social media are therefore at the core of every chapter, with the common thread throughout being the very unique approach to considering diverse and varied online behaviours that may not have been thus far considered from this perspective. It covers a broad range of both positive and negative behaviours that have now become integrated into the daily lives of many westernised country’s Internet users, giving it an appeal to both scholarly and industry readers alike.

Home to close to 60 per cent of the world’s population, Asia is the largest and by far the most populous continent. It is also extremely diverse, physically and culturally. Asian countries and regions have their own distinctive histories, cultural traditions, religious beliefs and political systems, and they have often pursued different routes to development. Asian populations also present a striking array of demographic characteristics and stages of demographic transition. This handbook is the first to provide a comprehensive study of population change across the whole of Asia. Comprising 28 chapters by more than 40 international experts this handbook examines demographic transitions on the continent, their considerable variations, their causes and consequences, and their relationships with a wide range of social, economic, political and cultural processes. Major topics covered include: population studies and sources of demographic data; historical demography; family planning and fertility decline; sex preferences; mortality changes; causes of death; HIV/AIDS; population distribution and migration; urbanization; marriage and family; human capital and labour force; population ageing; demographic dividends; political demography; population and environment; and Asia’s demographic future. This handbook provides an authoritative and comprehensive reference for researchers, policymakers, academics, students and anyone who is interested in population change in Asia and the world.