Intercultural Twinnings

Intercultural Twinnings presents innovative practices that enable direct contact between people of diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, languages, and religions. This collection explores models and intervention tools to support the work of teachers, researchers, practitioners, and students.

"This book explores the theory and practice of rhetoric and professional communication in intercultural contexts, providing a framework for translating, localizing, and internationalizing communications and information products around the world"--Provided by publisher.

This book argues that the effective protection of fundamental rights in a contemporary, multicultural society requires not only tolerance and respect for others, but also an ethics of reciprocity and a pursuit of dialogue between different cultures of human rights. Nowadays, all cultures tend to claim an equitable arrangement that can be articulated in the terms of fundamental rights and in the multicultural organization of the State. Starting from the premise that every culture is and always was intercultural, this book elaborates a new, and more fundamentally, pluralist view of the relationship between rights and cultural identity. No culture is pure; from the perspective of an irreducible cultural contamination, this book argues, it is possible to formulate constitutional idea of diversity that is properly intercultural. This concept of intercultural constitutionalism is not, then, based on abstract principles, but nor is it bound to any particular cultural norm. Rather, intercultural constitutionalism allows the interpretation of rights, rules and legal principles, which are established in different contexts.

How we interpret and understand the historical contexts of legal education has profoundly affected how we understand contemporary educational cultures and practices. This book, the result of a Modern Law Review seminar, both celebrates and critiques the lasting impact of Peter Birks’ influential edited collection, Pressing Problems in the Law: Volume 2: What is the Law School for? Published in 1996, his book addresses many critical issues that are hauntingly present in the 21st century, amongst them the impact of globalisation; technological disruption; and the tension inherent in law schools as they seek to balance the competing interest of teaching, research and administration. Yet Birks’ collection misses key issues, too. The role of wellbeing, of emotion or affect, the relation of legal education to education, the status of legal education in what, since his volume, have become the devolved jurisdictions of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland – these and others are absent from the research agenda of the book. Today, legal educators face new challenges. We are still recovering from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on our universities. In 1996 Birks was keen to stress the importance of comparative research within Europe. Today, legal researchers are dismayed at the possibility of losing valuable EU research funding when the UK leaves the EU, and at the many other negative effects of Brexit on legal education. The proposed Solicitors Qualifying Examination takes legal education regulation and professional learning into uncharted waters. This book discusses these and related impacts on our legal educations. As law schools approach an existential crossroads post-Covid-19, it seems timely to revisit Birks’ fundamental question: what are law schools for?

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume contains a selection of papers from a special session of the International Pragmatics Conference (Antwerp, August 1987) and from the Symposium on Intercultural Communication (Ghent, December 1987). Studying the communicative styles of cultures and social groups, both at the descriptive level and at the level of pragmatic theory construction, should be a target of pragmatics as a discipline. A clear view is needed of the restrictions on adaptability involving potential fields of conflict in intercultural and international communication. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, very little should be taken for granted in this respect.

This volume contains a selection of papers from a special session of the International Pragmatics Conference (Antwerp, August 1987) and from the Symposium on Intercultural Communication (Ghent, December 1987). Studying the communicative styles of cultures and social groups, both at the descriptive level and at the level of pragmatic theory construction, should be a target of pragmatics as a discipline. A clear view is needed of the restrictions on adaptability involving potential fields of conflict in intercultural and international communication. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, very little should be taken for granted in this respect.

This book proposes an interdisciplinary methodology for developing an intercultural use of law so as to include cultural differences and their protection within legal discourse; this is based on an analysis of the sensory grammar tacitly included in categorizations. This is achieved by combining the theoretical insights provided by legal theory, anthropology and semiotics with a reading of human rights as translational interfaces among the different cultural spaces in which people live. To support this use of human rights’ semantic and normative potential, a specific cultural-geographic view dubbed ‘legal chorology’ is employed. Its primary purpose is to show the extant continuity between categories and spaces of experience, and more specifically between legal meanings and the spatial dimensions of people’s lives. Through the lens of legal chorology and the intercultural, translational use of human rights, the book provides a methodology that shows how to make space and law reciprocally transformative so as to create an inclusive legal grammar that is equidistant from social cultural differences. The analysis includes: a critical view on opportunities for intercultural secularization; the possibility of construing a legal grammar of quotidian life that leads to an inclusive equidistance from differences rather than an unachievable neutrality or an all-encompassing universal legal ontology; an interdisciplinary methodology for legal intercultural translation; a chorological reading of the relationships between human rights protection and lived spaces; and an intercultural and geo-semiotic examination of a series of legal cases and current issues such as indigenous peoples’ rights and the international protection of sacred places.