"It’s only other people who make me feel black": acculturation, identity and agency in a multicultural community

This paper explores identity work and acculturation work in the lives of British mixed-heritage children and adults. Children, teenagers and parents with mixed-heritage participated in a community arts project that invited them to deliberate, construct and reconstruct their cultural identities and cultural relations. We found that acculturation, cultural and raced identities are constructed through a series of oppositional themes: cultural maintenance versus cultural contact; identity as inclusion versus identity as exclusion; institutionalised ideologies versus agency. The findings point towards an understanding of acculturation as a dynamic, situated and multifaceted process: acculturation in movement. To investigate this, we argue that acculturation research needs to develop a more dynamic and situated approach to the study of identity, representation and culture. The paper concludes with a discussion on the need for political psychologists to develop methods attuned to the tensions and politics of acculturation that are capable of highlighting the possibilities for resistance and social change.