Interculturality In Fragments

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.

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.

This book starts from the premise that honest and constructive dialogue between scholars and educators of interculturality, especially from different geopolitical spheres, is needed more than ever. The book is about the important and yet contested notion of interculturality—a notion used in different fields of research. It was co-written by two scholars who have never met before and who got to know each other intellectually and personally in the process of writing this book, using interculturality as a looking-glass. (Re-)negotiating meanings, ideologies and their own identities in writing the chapters together, the authors enter into multifaceted dialogues and intercommunicate, sharing while accepting disagreements. The co-authors’ different profiles in terms of geography, generation, status, preferred paradigms and multilingual identity (amongst others) are put forward, confronted, and mirrored in the different chapters, leading to the joint negotiation of aspirations concerning interculturality in communication and education. While describing their current takes on interculturality they also conduct autocritiques of their past and present engagement with the notion. The following questions are also addressed: Who is talking the most about interculturality in the world today? Whose voices are not heard? How to disrupt current hegemonies around the notion for real? And how to promote epistemological plurality in the discourses and narratives shaping our understandings of the notion? Autocritiquing is proposed as a way of unthinking and rethinking interculturality ad infinitum. This book argues that engaging with the notion requires constant self-reflection, examining one’s positionality and intersectionality, listening to the voices that one projects onto the world of, e.g., research and education, and operating transformations in one’s thinking, trying out new paradigms, ideologies and methods.

Offering a unique reading experience, this book examines the epistemologies of interculturality and explores potential routes to review and revisit the notion anew. Grounded in different sociocultural, economic and political perspectives around the world, interculturality in education and research bears a paradoxical attribute of 'contradictions' and 'inconsistencies', making it a polysemous and flexible notion that has no definitive diagnosis and requires constant unthinking and rethinking. The author provides a toolbox of 'out-of-box ideas' in the form of fragmental yet standalone writings and follow-up questions concerning stereotypes about the very notion of interculturality and conceptual and methodological flaws in the way it is used. Readers are encouraged to critically reflect about interculturality as it stands today in global research and education. In identifying the paradoxes of interculturality and proposing alternative directions, the book stimulates a diversity of thoughts about the notion that goes beyond the 'West'. The book will be an essential reading for scholars, students and educators interested in education philosophy, applied linguistics and the broad field of intercultural communication education. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by University of Helsinki

This book continues the two scholars’ endeavours for opening up more spaces for alternative perspectives, analyses and praxis in interculturality. The main text features fragments that bear relevance to a wide range of topics including education, politics, personal experiences, social realities, hierarchies, self-critique, language and locus of enunciation. The book takes a step forward by using fragments as an alternative way of doing research and writing scholarship. The premise here is that fragments are human and they reflect our fleeting, inconsistent and unsystematic production of knowledge that today’s scholarship has presented to be linear, structured and aligned. The authors draw on fragments to make their points as forcefully as possible by constructing sentences that destabilize themselves and readers to consider other paths and perspectives. That is, writing otherwise may propel thinking otherwise since the very bases, upon which we push our insights to mould through and by, are shaken and ultimately transcended. The chapters include questions with (temporary) answers as an attempt to induce readers to think for themselves and to move beyond what this book has to offer. This book will be a great read to scholars and students in the field of interculturality, education and sociology. The authors hope that this book will be seen as a genuine example of de-linking from mainstream writing and thinking conventions about interculturality in communication and education without compromising epistemic depth and nuance.

Seeking to uncover underlying epistemic invisibilities in generating intercultural communication education and research knowledge and to open up space for envisaging interculturality alternatively, this book reexamines and problematizes the assumptions and ontologies in the conceptual systems of interculturality. In enunciating and critiquing what has been largely endorsed, normalized and taken for granted, this volume brings to the fore different, changing and situated understandings of intercultural ontologies and epistemologies in terms of premises, workings and objectives, unveiling the entangled factors and contexts that have delimited and circumscribed the realm. The authors believe that the field would benefit from some cognitive and sensory dissonance while reengaging effectively with notions to move forward. In particular, they endeavour to de-monumentalize and disrupt the very conceptual tenets that may have rendered interculturality myopic, repetitive, monolithic and aseptic in expanding the epistemic concerns of the “intercultural”, especially in the English language. This book will be an essential read for scholars and students of the sociology of education, educational philosophy and intercultural education and also for all readers interested in the broad field of interculturality.

This book is unique in presenting new perspectives on how to introduce interculturality to children. It proposes critical ideas for introducing sensitive topics around culture, race and intersectionality. The book develops the reader’s criticality and reflexivity, providing original and concrete tools to introduce interculturality to children and to make children aware of how intercultural issues matter in their lives and in the world at large. It includes case studies of children’s realities from across the world, and provides insights into how to approach sensitive topics such as culturalism, discrimination, inequality and racism in relation to diversity in different contexts. Written in the spirit of critical interculturality, the book will be of great interest to researchers and students in the field of intercultural studies, global childhood and early childhood education, as well as trainee teachers and educators.

This edited volume focuses on the thorny and somewhat controversial issue of teaching (and learning) interculturality in a way that considers the notion from critical and reflexive perspectives when introduced to students. Comprised of three parts, the book discusses the nuts and bolts of teaching interculturally, considers changes in the teaching of interculturality and provides pedagogical insights into interculturalising the notion. It studies both teaching im-/ex-plicitly about interculturality and how to incorporate interculturality into teaching practices or into an institution. By sharing varied cases and theoretical reflections on the topic, the editors and contributors from different parts of the world aim to stimulate more initiatives to enrich the field instead of delimiting it, especially in complement to and beyond the “West” or “Global North”, and also to build up further reflexivity in the way readers engage with interculturality in education. This will be a must read for teachers and researchers of intercultural communication education at different educational levels, as well as anyone interested in scholarship on education for interculturality.