Interculturality in Fragments: A Reflexive Approach

Description

This book continues the author’s long-term reflections (over 20 years of scholarship and experience in intercultural communication education) around the fascinating and yet contestable notion of interculturality in education. As an unstable and polysemic notion, interculturality deserves to be opened up again and again and there is a need to engage with it continuously, observing, critiquing and problematizing its complexities. This book urges researchers, students and interculturalists to take the time to think carefully and deeply about interculturality and to find inspiration beyond the dominating ‘Western’ ideological world of intercultural research and education. This book starts from short fragments written by the author for himself over a period of one year. In these short statements and notes about interculturality, the author reflects creatively on the questions he had in mind at the time of writing and offers some (temporary) answers, which, in turn, are questioned and revised. Over the 1000 fragments that the author wrote, he selected about 100, for which he wrote commentaries, referring to and reviewing current research and debates on interculturality in the process. One of the specificities of the book is to be highly multidisciplinary to help us get used to looking for inspiration in other fields of research and creativity. The fragments can be read randomly – the reader may open the book at any page and pick any fragment. The author suggests reading each individual fragment first and then the accompanying explanatory texts. While reading them, the reader is also invited to reflect on any potential addition to what the author wrote – anything they might dis-/agree with, anything they would have wanted to discuss with the author. Questions have been added at the end of each chapter for readers to reflect on and to enrich their own criticality and reflexivity. The book serves as continuous guidance for engaging with interculturality. Praise for Interculturality in Fragments Contents List of Figures List of Illustrations 1 Introduction 1.1 What’s in a Fragment? 1.2 Another Book on Interculturality? References 2 What Interculturality Might Not Be About: Misconceptions, Hoaxes and Interculturalspeak 2.1 Interculturality Is Not… 2.2 Deconstructing Culture 2.3 Hoaxes About Interculturality 2.3.1 Interculturalspeak 2.3.2 Problems of Intercultural Scholarship References 3 What Interculturality Could Be: Uncertainties and Suggestions 3.1 Interculturality Is… 3.2 Metaphors 3.3 Uncertainties and Awareness 3.3.1 What We Could Do References 4 ‘Performing’ Interculturality: Focus on Stages and Backstages 4.1 First, Let’s Continue to Revise Our Visions of Interculturality 4.2 Interculturality as a Never-Ending Co-performance 4.3 Inspiration for ‘Doing’ Interculturality References 5 Ideologies of Interculturality: Building Up Awareness of the Predatory and Falsely Critical 5.1 Concepts, Notions and Ideologies 5.2 Ideologies in Conversation Fragments References 6 Othering as a Problematic and Yet Indispensable Routine 6.1 Benefitting from the Other 6.2 The Other Othered 6.3 The Other as a Mirror References 7 Shifting the Focus: Interculturality as Change References 8 Language: The Substance of Interculturality 8.1 Translation and Connotation of Words 8.2 Reflections Based on More Chinese Words References 9 Researching Interculturality Otherwise 9.1 Principles 9.2 Looking into the Mirror References 10 Coda References Glossary Bibliography