Both popular and academic discourses on The Cosby Show have focused on the eponymous family’s post-racial representation. Challenging historically negative television and film depictions of the African American as an exotic and/or savage ‘Other’, the program’s upper middle-class professional family presented 1980s white America with an image of blackness that had been fully assimilated into hegemonic culture. Academic analyses of this acculturation have considered both the impact of this ostensibly positive depiction of the black family for white audiences, and the subtle traces of African American social and cultural experiences which appealed to black audiences. Discourses about the show’s children have also positioned the characters’ relationships with their white contemporaries within a post-racial context, so that they undergo the same kind of bildungsroman angst and trajectory as other, whiter, 1980s coming-of-age narratives, without any particular experience rooted in racial difference. This essay situates the show’s children within a wider post-racial context that dominated American political and social culture during the period 1984-1992 when the show ran. This was the era of triumphant Reaganomics, punctuated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and bookended with Francis Fukuyama’s influential panegyric to neo-liberalism’s victory over every other possible form of ideology, The End of History and the Last Man. The Cosby Show’s professional American nuclear family is post-racial not only because of the gradual impact of socio-cultural and legal developments emanating from the Civil Rights movement. Even more fundamentally, the enormous popularity of the show’s Huxtable family, amongst both black and white audiences, in America and beyond, encapsulates Fukuyama’s color-blind ideological model – a celebration of hard work and cooperation leading to the enjoyable consumption of plenty, with any inconvenient impediments to this vision, such as race, class, gender or sexuality, overcome through virtuous labor and consumption. The show’s children, inheritors of the End of History, are the central drivers and beneficiaries of this process.

Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching explores various multidisciplinary visual and performing art forms, including creative writing, as ways to provide a rich contribution and understanding to research, learning, and teaching. Key figures in the field share their art-based research, arts practice, and philosophy, bringing the arts to life within their taught and learned contexts across a variety of art forms and levels of post-compulsory education.

This chapter explores the immigration-related topics in the news media during the EU referendum campaign in the UK (April–June 2016) and after (July–September 2016). The chapter argues that attitudes anti-EU immigration are a wave of “new(s)” racism (van Dijk 2000) in the UK and EU immigration is frequently used as an umbrella term for Eastern European immigration being often mixed with non-EU immigration and the refugee crisis. The data shows that the prevalence of negative news stories has led to a distinctive immigration-narrative, confirming the claim of Hoffner and Cohen (2013) that members of minority groups are almost always associated with violent and threatening media content.

Migration is not a new phenomenon in Chile as the country has long seen migrants coming from Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Colonial views about race and ethnicity adopted by Latin Americans as part of their class structure (Quijano 2000) established an early differentiation between the “civilized migrant” and the “uncivilized migrant” among groups that arrived on Latin America shores. Chilean news media has echoes of this binary vision between the “civilized = good” migrant and the “uncivilized = bad” migrant. The chapter aims to uncover the narratives of the civilized and uncivilized migrant within the printed news media, particularly in the two major newspapers El Mercurio and La Tercera, by focusing on how these ideas frame the way in which they cover migration.

This study examines the various discourses surrounding the return to Poland of migrants who left the country following accession to the EU in 2004. The data, which was analysed from the perspectives of discourse and narrative, stemmed from two complementary research projects. The first netnographic study examined a number of entries on an internet forum triggered by newspaper reports and articles related to (re)migration and published in the online issues of the ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ since 2004. The data gathered from online media was coupled with semi-structured interviews with returnees collected during an ethnographic project conducted in 2013–14. The analysis revealed two distinctive themes: a tendency to complain about the home country upon return and the prospect of remigration. This chapter will attempt to explain how discourses of migration, return and remigration are thematically linked with – and at the same time contextualized in – post-communist transition, as well as how the micro-level of individual/semi-private stories feeds into general patterns of (re)migration to post-communist European countries.