Abstracts (G-Z)
Hostility and Hospitality: The Umm El-Fahim Art Gallery - Legitimation Processes
Miri Gal-Ezer, The Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezrael and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
This article analyzes the divides in which the Umm El-Fahim Art Gallery operates, and the complex processes that the organization should enhance in order to develop its vision. Based on the cultural entrepreneurship and Habitus (Bourdieu, 1984, 1993) of Sa'id Abu-Shakra - an artist, founder, main curator and director, the gallery develops gradually in order to be the first Arab modern art museum in Israel. In recent years, until today, town mayors and municipal council members were representatives of "The Islamic Movement - The North Wing" a radical fundamentalist movement, which refuses to participate in general Knesset (Israeli Parliament) elections, that always include other Arab Israeli parties. Most Israeli people do not approve of the Islamic Movement, especially the north wing, which is considered to be a radical subversive movement that challenges the Israeli state's right to exist. Thus the regular suspicion and fear of the Arab Israeli citizens' intentions, turned into declared hostility especially after the October 2000 riots. The riots which began as demonstrations, took place in many Israeli Arab towns, including Umm El-Fahim. Some deteriorated into riots, and ended in 13 victims - Arab Israeli citizens who were shot dead by Israeli police. The finding of the Orr Investigation Committee, appointed after these events, are still under public debate. However, the Orr Committee reiterated the hard facts, revealed in many studies - massive institutional discrimination of Arab citizens in Israel (20% - 1,375,600 Arabs of a total of 6,986,300 Israeli citizens 31.12.05. http://www.cbs.gov.il 25.05.06): discrimination in housing, education, employment, public health, etc.
The idea of establishing a gallery entered Abu Shakra's mind in 1994, when he was invited to the Tel-Aviv Museum for the opening of a vast retrospective by the painter Issam Abu Shakra (1961-1991), his late talented nephew, who had died young of cancer. While the Mayor was speaking, greeting and comforting the family, Said Abu-Shakra was thinking about the possibility of inviting people to Umm El Fahim, in honor of his late nephew.
Then, in 1996, in order to gain the support of the mayor to open a gallery in an Islamic town, he told him that he had invited the then Minister of Education and Culture, Ms. Shulamit Aloni. Thus, the ministry funded half of the budget for the gallery opening and the other half was from the mayor, the head of the Islamic movement at the time, Sheikh Raed Saleh, and town residents' donations and working in the gallery's construction. Whenever there was a problem in the town, and governmental intervention was required, rituals were planned and administered at the gallery. There, with the opening of the art exhibition, everyone was civilized, polite and cooperative. The tradition of hospitality to foreigners began in 1999, when Yoko Ono was invited and exhibited the "Open Window", and the gallery is the annual host of an international ceramic symposium.
The article would focus on what seems to be the most complicated process of hospitality, that of the artists who are invited to exhibit in the gallery. Multiple tensions were observed during participant observations, interviews, and discourse analysis of catalogue texts. These tensions were revealing divides in ideology and conceptions about how to construct art and culture: would it be Palestinian, Arabic, Israeli, modern, traditional? What, if anything, would be the better combination? These tensions also cause inner hostility.
Intercultural Responsibility: Cosmopolitanism and Ethics in Professional Education
Manuela Guilherme, Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra
When I conceived and wrote down the rationale of the ICOPROMO - Intercultural Competence for Professional Mobility (www.ces.uc/icopromo) and of the INTERACT - Intercultural Active Citizenship Education (www.ces.uc.pt/interact) projects (2003-2007), whose proposals were approved by main funding European institutions, I had in mind a kind of professional education aimed at intercultural competencies focusing, to some extent, on intercultural ethics. While the idea of an 'intercultural dimension of citizenship education' was developed by the INTERACT project as a whole with regard to teacher education, eight topics were introduced within the scope of the ICOPROMO project and it was amongst these that I coined the term 'intercultural responsibility'. This theme was developed into practical activities by the Portuguese team. Both ideas, the 'intercultural dimension of citizenship education' and 'intercultural responsibility' in professional mobility, are therefore based on a solid consciousness of the need to grasp the relationship between cosmopolitanism and ethics in professional education. 'Intercultural responsibility' is an ambiguous and challenging term involving the idea that we should care for our peers in the same professional context, namely those considered as 'different', as we do for those belonging to the same ethnic community. Responsibility may wrongly imply some degree of inborn superiority and the right to be, to some extent, patronising those 'in need'. However, this notion should be replaced by a feeling of solidarity that comprehends reciprocal esteem, fulfilment, and collaboration on an equal status. Our proposal, while attempting to give it shape in practical activities to be performed by the participants in our workshops, was to avoid a humanitarian approach and, moreover, to unveil and address controversial and uncomfortable issues dealing with different sorts of discriminations and power imbalances that strongly and abusively determine the relations between the members of multicultural teams. Finally, it was our goal to dismantle the fear of the unknown and to dismiss all the reluctance to engage into working in multicultural teams. Otherwise, we were committed to promote awareness of the enriching nature of this process, not only with regard to the individual alone but also to the collective interaction per se and, eventually, to the task being fulfilled. These will be, in sum, the issues to be dealt with in this paper while the approach will be both theoretical and practical, in that theoretical discussions will emerge from the implementation of a practical activity, and therefore the mode will be interactive and based on a hands-on task and debate.
Face-to-face Tandem Language Learning for Intercultural Competence (the TaLLICo project)
Dr Fionnuala Kennedy (presenter) and Dr Áine Furlong, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland
This paper will show how the TaLLICo project (Tandem Language Learning for Intercultural Competence) at Waterford Institute of Technology can promote hospitality, cooperation, improved linguistic and intercultural skills among Irish and visiting Erasmus students. The context of the research is an Intercultural Communication module for Erasmus and Irish students taught in 2006 and 2007. The paper will focus on how a combination of intercultural communication training, face-to-face tandem language learning, and reflection on the process bring the learner from a passive knowledge of the theories of intercultural communication to a new and shared space of active participation in intercultural dialogue.
The need for the project became apparent, as it was clear that there was little dialogue of any substance between Irish and Erasmus students. The project aimed i) to maximise the unique human resources presented by Erasmus exchange programmes to create a direct link between two languacultures, ii) to develop the competence of the 'intercultural speaker' (Byram 2001) by providing opportunities for autonomous, reciprocal reflection on their own and their partner's culture.
The paper will outline the methodology used by the students, their response to the semi-autonomous nature of the approach and their reflection on the process and outcomes of the experience. The approach used by the researchers was to review student reports over the past 3 years, to show the progression in their linguistic and intercultural competence. Key words were identified i) to show evidence of reciprocity in the tandem exchanges, (ii) to identify growth in awareness of self and other through engagement with difference and (iii) to show students' emotional reaction at different stages of the partnership.
Analysis of the results will show an increase in learners' motivation to improve and use the language, a reduction of anxiety among the Irish students before their placement abroad, development of links between language learning and positive social representations (Rubenfeld, Clement, Lussier, Lebrun and Auger (2006), and a deeper and more diverse experience of 'otherness'. The approach has resulted in a change of experience for both groups: from one of academic tourists and consumers of local pleasures on the one hand and distant hosts on the other, to participants in meaningful intercultural dialogue. While the Irish students came through the perils of intercultural contact to a realisation of the pleasures it brings, the Erasmus students moved from the initial euphoria of the Erasmus exchange, which included only limited contact with their Irish peers, to meaningful dialogue with their hosts. Both groups gained in the process positive attitudes towards intercultural dialogue, deeper insight into their own and other culture, and personally relevant language skills.
References
Byram, M. (2001) Developing Intercultural Competence in Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Rubenfeld S., Clément R., Lussier D.,Lebrun M., Auger R. (2006) "Second language learning and cultural representations: beyond competence and identity". Language Learning 56:4, December 2006, pp.609-632.
Intercultural communication in the promotion of intercivilizational dialogue
Shanta Nair-Venugopal, National University of Malaysia
The Institute of Occidental Studies (IKON) situated in the National University of Malaysia was set up primarily to specialize in studies on Europe, inclusive of the Nordic countries, the Mediterranean and Russia, and elsewhere in the world where Europeans, in the last millennia at least, have settled and created a civilizational impact, such as, in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. Not only have Europeans made a civilizational impact and left cultural marks in these continents and regions of domicile, several countries in the Occidental world have clearly impacted global order, policy and politics as world powers. Given its geopolitical impact and significance, the Occident not only merits study, but more so from Non-Occidental perspectives that move away from the divisiveness of the "West versus the rest' polemic in intercivilisational dialogue.
In accepting that its raison d'etre is to engage in intercivilisational dialogue, IKON may well be able to offer the kind of discourse that moves away both from the polarities of much global political discourse and from the self-conceit of being situated in the East as the repository of ancient wisdom in becoming a conscious subject of that discourse. The challenge before us is what are we to make of East and West as the objects of that discourse in addition to other concerns within that same challenge, particularly the comparisons drawn between Easternisation and Orientalism and the contrasts between Occidentalism and Orientalism. The Institute may well be uniquely placed for such dialogue because historically Malaysia has been subject to the civilizational effects of Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism before the dominance of Islam and the spread of Christianity. The material and cultural imprints of some of the earlier antecedents still survive, perceptibly and otherwise. These serve as reminders of an inherent capacity for such dialogue, despite the cultural politics, jingoism and skepticism of more recent times.
This paper argues for a multidisciplinary approach to explore, identify, evaluate and present Eastern perspectives of Western discourses of the East. It shows how the East (as locatable in Malaysia) perceives of the ways in which the West presents or represents, and reproduces or reconfigures, the material and cultural influences of the East (in the form of civilisational impacts as well as forms of contemporary culture) in its discursive constructions of the East. It contends that the ways in which the West imbibes and partakes of these material and cultural influences of the East reflects and represents Western attitudes towards the East as exemplified in the 'gaze' of the West. The main consequences of such a gaze, it is posited, will be the prevalence of a praxis of Easternisation, as evident in the ways in which the West imbibes and partakes of these influences. And the main ramification of this praxis, it is posited, would be the cultural refashioning of the West as a corollary to the intellectual fashioning of the East, known more famously as Orientalism (Said 1978).
Regional Interpretations of Global Practice: Exploring Teachers' Attitudes to On-line Education
Robert O'Dowd, University of León, Spain
This paper looks at the effects of on-line learning on the identity and self-image of foreign language teachers and how the values inherent in many common models of on-line learning may clash with the learning and teaching cultures which exist in educational institutions.
Research by Reeder, MacFayden, Roche and Chase (2004) has clearly demonstrated how on-line learning tools such as virtual learning platforms clearly reflect the cultural values of their authors and developers. However, it has yet to be fully explored how virtual platforms and the on-line learning activities which they enable also reflect specific approaches to learning culture and pedagogical principles. It is also unclear how teachers react to on-line learning when they do not understand or subscribe to the learning principles supported by these platforms.
To explore these issues, this paper will report a case study of members of a foreign language department at a Spanish university as they come to terms with using an on-line learning platform in its foreign language and Applied Linguistics courses. The platform adopted by the department was a well-known piece of open-source software entitled Moodle, which is reportedly designed on the principles of socio-constructivism and on student-centered approaches to learning. However, although the platform may have been developed with these principles in mind, the qualitative data collected from many of these teachers and their classes confirms the findings of other reports (Dutton, Cheong and Park, 2004) and demonstrates that the technology is often used for more traditional forms of teaching which involve transferring current practices into an electronic format.
Based on this data, the paper explores the cultural, individual and institutional factors that influenced the local 'cultures of use' (Thorne, 2003) of the technology in the department and examines how the learning and teaching cultures which exist in this particular context influenced the way the technology was employed and valued. Qualitative data including in-depth ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1979) with staff and students is employed to explore issues such as the teaching philosophy of the teachers involved and the socio-institutional context in which they were operating. Important themes which emerge include the importance of being seen as an active on-line teacher, common local perceptions of what on-line learning should involve and the challenges which socio-constructivist models and learning practices may hold for teachers' self-perceptions.
Dutton, W., Cheong, P. and Park, N. (2004). The social shaping of a virtual learning environment: The case of a university-wide course management system. The Electronic Journal of E-Learning 2(2). Retrieved February 10 2006 from http://www.ejel.org/volume-2/vol2-issue1/issue1-art3-dutton-cheong-park.pdf
Moodle (n.d.). Retrieved February 10 2006 from http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy
Reeder, K., Macfadyen, L. P., Roche, J. & Chase, M. (2004). Negotiating Culture in Cyberspace: Participation Patterns and Problematics. Language Learning and Technology, 8(2), 88-105. http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num2/reeder/default.html.
The Discourse of Intercultural Communication and the Incitement to Responsibility
John P. O'Regan, Oxford Brookes University, UK and Malcolm N. MacDonald, University of Exeter, UK
In a paper presented at IALIC Passau in 2006, and subsequently published in the journal LAIC, we spoke of the discourse of intercultural communication in current IC pedagogy and research. We argued that in its most general formulation this discourse seeks to promote intercultural understanding as a positive and productive transformative experience for the persons who engage with it (as teachers, trainers, researchers, students, trainees, policy makers, community activists, etc.), and to act as a necessary counter to discourses of separation, exclusion, violence and oppression. We identified a transformative theory of practice, an intercultural politics, whose antecedents could be traced back to the thought of Kant, Hegel and Marx, and still further back to the teachings of Siddhartha. This 'politics of presence', as we termed it, had its foundation and its rationale in a desire to transform human consciousness - in our case intercultural human consciousness - towards a transcultured self. But even as we endorsed the plan and rallied to its cause, we purposely chose in our paper to confront the dilemmas, the 'aporias' as we called them, of the discourse in which we were engaged. These can be summarised as follows. On what grounds are we as interculturalists able to arrogate to ourselves the belief that our preferred transformative discourse - our 'truth' - is any better than the competing alternatives to which we are opposed, such as neoliberal globalisation, realist nationalism and religious fundamentalism? If intercultural understanding is an exercise in mutual and respectful tolerance, at what point does such tolerance end - are female circumcision and ritual stoning interculturally acceptable practices for example? If the discourse of intercultural communication leads to cultural relativism on the one hand and ideological totalism on the other, how do we get out of this dilemma? To subvert these logics we concluded that the principle of truth needed to be set aside in favour of a praxis of responsibility and an opposition to closure: 'By focusing on our responsibility to the Other, and therefore on our responsibility to openness in opposition to closure, the point is to determine not whether different truths are good or bad, but whether putting a particular discourse or set of discourses into practice might lead to a silencing of open alternatives, and therefore also a turning away from the Other' (O'Regan & MacDonald, 2007: 275). In these terms the discourse of intercultural communication can be understood as an 'incitement to responsibility' in the welcoming of the Other. In this paper we revisit this discussion in order to explore from an intercultural theory perspective what such a responsibility might entail.
Autonomy Abroad: Shopping for a Voice when the Host Culture Speaks
Helen O'Sullivan, Trinity College, Dublin 2
The proposed paper forms part of a wider research project which is examining how the Kantian concept of ‘Mündigkeit' or ‘maturity' may be represented in texts which contain subjective descriptions of language learning experiences, both semi-fictional and autobiographical, otherwise known as ‘language learner narratives'. These narratives are primarily written from the point of view of adults who are living in a foreign culture for an extended period of time and in many cases may be written in the non-native language. The narratives examined include Vassilis Alexakis' Paris-Athènes (1989), Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North (1998), Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation (1989), Nancy Huston's Nord perdu (1999) and Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Mutter Zunge (1998), among others.
The paper considers how the experiences related in language learner narratives contradict discourses of consumer culture which suggest that identity is a matter of personal choice, which can be changed at will and which is implied to be largely dependent on the capacity to purchase objects and experiences; a culture where you can be a monk for a month. Instead, it examines how these texts describe complex power relations involved in linguistic and cultural socialization which both contribute to the evolution and development of new identities as well as to the suppression and invalidation of the old.
In examining the relations between the host culture and the non-native guest, the paper pays particular attention to the metaphors used to represent the experience of living abroad. While bearing in mind the discursive construction of these narratives, it is argued that underlying the many metaphors employed in these texts can be found 'archmetaphors' which may suggest commonalities in intercultural experiences of language learners moving from and to a wide variety of cultures including, for example, Poland>France, Netherlands>Australia, US>France, Turkey>Germany and US>Japan. These commonalities are not found in the events, people and places the narratives are concerned with but in the emotional and physical experience of living in a foreign culture. The metaphors used include, for example, ones of 'imprisonment' and 'infantilisation', which reflect the restricted sense of self in the foreign culture as a new identity is imposed on the language learner by the host culture and as the learner finds him/herself at the mercy of native speakers who can act as a 'Vormund' or spokesperson for the non-native. At a more radical level it is an anthropomorphised foreign language, viewed in abstraction from its native speakers, which hosts the language learner - for some offering the prospect of refuge and comfort, but for others being perceived as an intimidating threat with the power to 'disappear' and/or disturb the first language discourses around which its guest's identity was originally constructed.
Intercultural parents: what is it like to parent a bilingual child?
Paula Rice, University of Dundee
Piller (2002a, 2002b, 2008) has written in some detail about couples involved in intercultural relationships and how those relationships are constructed through two languages and cultures. This study is concerned with how couples like this construct intercultural parent-children relationships through their two languages and cultures particularly when the parents involved have been brought up as monolingual in monolingual communities and their children are being brought up as bilingual in monolingual communities.
The parents who were interviewed for this study are all French or English speaking and many are now late bilinguals in French and English. They were all brought up in either France or part of the United Kingdom and now live in Scotland or France. Their children are all simultaneous bilinguals. It would appear that the parents' perceptions regarding their bilingual-bicultural children have an effect on their behaviour as parents and that the parents' own identities are both compromised and enhanced through their relationship with their bilingual children. The intercultural nature of the relationship between these parents and their children presents the parents with opportunities unavailable to monolingual families while also presenting them with a sometimes painful awareness of the constraints they are under.
The data for this study comes from a much larger qualitative study on bilingual children's identities and the parents of bilingual children.
References
Piller, I. 2002a. Bilingual couples talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Piller, I. 2002b. Passing for a native speaker: identity and success in second language learning. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 6(2): pp.179-206.
Piller, I. 2008 in press. "I always wanted to marry a cowboy": bilingual couples, language and desire, in T.A.Karis and K. Killian, eds. Cross-cultural couples: transborder relationships in the 21st Century. Binghampton: Haworth.
How Much is the Broken Jesus?
Leon Robinson, University of Glasgow
Shopping can be an occasion of sin. Purchasing confers ownership, and is therefore an invitation to equivocation. As buying the image is not buying the thing, particularly when the thing in question is divine, confusion in this matter runs the risk not only of idolatry, but of blasphemy and consequent damnation.
When considering articles of faith, Marx's "fetishism of commodities" is perhaps a less apt model than that provided by the well run pet shop. We buy pets, and in making this purchase, take on duties of care and a range of associated responsibilities, recognised in culture and in law, reflecting the intrinsic value of the animals in question. Any supposedly intrinsic value in religious artefacts may be usefully compared to the value of the living animal taken on as a pet.
The Church of the Middle Ages thrived on beliefs in the intrinsic value of inanimate objects, the trade in relics being what it was, but such commerce today is confined to the contemporary art market, with its bizarrely medieval cult of the artist's touch, somehow magically conveying authenticity and value. Meaning is created in the mind, but neither Catholicism nor many branches of theistic Hinduism would accept that there was no objective truth or value - the question is where such value might lie?
Catholics bury statues rather than bin them. Hindus dissolve their murtis rather than break them with hammers. When buying the virgin, you do not buy the right to wield the iconoclast's weapons.
Given this caveat to the emptor, is it appropriate to take offence when shoppers purchase religious artefacts for their camp appeal, with no intention of revering the item, but rather holding it up to ridicule? Is the ironic enjoyment of such items implicitly disrespecting anyone who takes the object seriously? What is the difference between a devotee buying a flashing icon, or a 3D postcard of Christ on the cross, whose eyes open and shut as they follow you around the room, and an otherwise indistinguishable shopper buying the same items for their fantastic, camp awfulness?
What of the devotee of the kitsch, the person for whom the cheap reproduction moves them to sincere feelings? Clement Greenberg's influential 1939 critique of kitsch (Avant-Garde and Kitsch) needs to be set against the implicit snobbery of those for whom "it's only water in a stranger's tear". The assumption that the feelings of an aesthete contemplating Michelangelo's pieta are somehow finer than those of an uneducated person confronting a small, plaster model of the same piece, is a highly questionable one.
This paper explores the relationship between buyers and their purchases; makers and their products; images and idols, and the motivations which inform and sometimes confuse these relationships. The paper will draw parallels between the mass produced images popular both in Catholic Christianity and in Hinduism, and will be illustrated with a range of popular prints bought on the streets of Madurai, and a fractured, discarded Jesus figure from a car boot sale in Barcelona.
British Female Converts to Islam: Choosing Islam as a Rejection of Individualism
Louise Soutar, University of Dundee
According to Lewis Rambo, 'most social scientists, and indeed many theologians, predicted the secularisation of society and pronounced the death of God' (1993: 1). Indeed, the practice of religion changed dramatically in the UK during the twentieth century; weekly church-going numbers have declined to less than fifteen percent and over half of those who attend church at the age of thirteen will have ceased to do so by the time they reach twenty (Köse, 1999).
Despite this, Islam is considered by many to be the fastest growing religion in the UK. As Poston points out, 'conversion to Islam [...] despite the tendency to downplay its importance, is occurring at an ever increasing rate' (1992: 7). This leads to the question why so many people are choosing to recite the shahada (the confession of faith) and becoming Muslims.
Therefore, in a country that is popularly considered to be secularised, voluntary religious conversion is a topic of great interest and fascination. This fascination is increased when the religion is Islam and the convert is female. In this piece of research, all of the respondents are British-born female converts who have chosen to become part of a religion that is often perceived as anti-female and anti-Western.
The thesis here is that many of these perceptions come from different cultural ideas on individualism and collectivism. Individualism is an important force in twenty-first century British culture and informs all parts of society from family life and community to the justice system. Islamic culture, on the other hand, has often been identified as more group-orientated and collectivist and this also affects ideas on family life, community and relationships.
Of course, the decision to convert to any religion is more than just a cultural issue; there are many personal, spiritual reasons for conversion which vary from person to person. However, this study seeks to identify through the use of in-depth, qualitative interviews whether this decision is linked to a dissatisfaction with British individualism and a desire to become part of a more collectivist community. This research looks at these cultural issues from the point of view of three British-born female converts and examines the cultural reasons for converting, concentrating on the individualist/collectivist dimension, but does examine spiritual or religious reasons for converting to Islam.
References
Köse, A. (1999). 'The Journey from the Secular to the Sacred: Experiences of Native British Converts to Islam' Social Compass, 46 (3), 301-312
Poston, L. (1992). Islamic Da'wah in the West: Muslim Missionary Activity and the Dynamics of Conversion to Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Rambo, L. R. (1993). Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Reflections on Students' Ethnicity and Inter-ethnic Communications: Preliminary Study
Anteneh Tsegaye, University of Giessen, Germany
The Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, is the first and oldest institutions of higher learning in Ethiopia, and it has been the most prestigious and productive institution that contributes a lot to the education of citizens who assume political, economic, social and intellectual responsibilities in different capacities. However, one of the most recent and well documented problems which have been adversely affecting the academic discourse and practice in general is campus unrest. There have been frequent campus unrest that stemmed from ethnicity related factors. As a lecturer in the area I was curious to know the possible reasons behind the conflicts. Therefore, I found it interesting to study issues of inter-ethnic communication as demonstrated by students in my own classrooms.
Students demonstrated poor inter-ethnic communication skills or inter-ethnic communicative competence. Classroom sitting arrangements and groupings (for assignments) clearly showed that students identify the ethnic background of their respective fellow group mates or classmates. Very few students have actually gone beyond the ethnic boundaries and joined different groups. Interview results showed that students preferred to work and live with students from their own ethnic group for they were not confident on others. It was reported that even though a student wanted to join any of the groups he/she could be avoided in one way or another. Most of the suspicions stemmed from wrong pictures and perceived political differences which had actually nothing to with what a particular student believed in. On the other hand, as the Students Affairs Committee document analysis reports, some poor performing students learned to attribute failure to the ethnicity of their respective teachers. Teachers were also conscious about such students and reflected their concern on issues of ethnicity as manipulated by poor performing students.
This qualitative reflection proves that misunderstanding and poor inter-ethnic communication skills result in campus conflict and unrest which erode the conduciveness of academic environment. Schools should teach cross-cultural skills and help students to acquire positive pictures about others. Since students come from different regions and ethnic groups, they should be taught how to interact cross-culturally and be aware of their own and others culture. The academic environment should teach tolerance and ability to respect human and democratic rights of others. Intercultural environments like Addis Ababa University should be models of tolerance, respect and intercultural learning.
Vignettes of intercultural performance in Higher Education: Disrupting Pedagogic Faiths
Joan Turner, Goldsmiths, University of London
The enactment of essentially routine encounters between tutor and student from the perspective of an institutionally (and culturally) embedded pedagogy is often disrupted when the interaction is intercultural. This is especially so when the other culture is genealogically distinct. Such is the case when a predominantly Socratic (talking) culture meets the Confucian pedagogic tradition of listening and guiding.
This paper will focus on a few vignettes, provisionally oriented around the themes, 'being stuck', 'getting help', and 'moving/not moving on', emphasizing how they re-stage assumptions and expectations regarding tutor and student roles as well as the outcomes of the interactions.
Framing tutor-student encounters as moments of intercultural performativity, is to highlight their experiential immediacy, as moments invoking both a sense of identity crisis and transformative potential. The power of cultural inscription is reciprocally enacted and at the same time disrupted. The cultural pasts surface in the intercultural present and the future is open. The proliferation of such moments where behaviour is re-staged, albeit often microscopically, is permeating the everyday of our increasingly international institutions, and also gradually transforming them.
The notion of the performative, a re-theorisation of Austin's speech act theory, is borrowed from the work of Judith Butler and others in performance studies (Phelan and Lane, 1998). The intercultural performative may be seen as working at two levels. On the one hand, a traditional application of Austin, looking at how the intercultural context can result in the mismatched uptakes of speech acts may inform the communicative analysis. On the other hand, the re-theorised Austin highlights the dynamic of the performance per se, as a constitutive part of the intercultural.
References
Austin, J. L. (1955). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butler, J (2006) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity New York; London: Routledge
Butler, J (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York; London: Routledge
Phelan, P., & Lane, J. (Eds.). (1998). The ends of performance. New York and London: New York University Press.
You speak first: Expectations of Chinese guest/host etiquette on the international campus
Beyond their significant contribution to the economy, international students are supposed to bring many other advantages to British higher education. For example it has been claimed that learning is augmented through a diversity of perspectives and that the British student experience is enriched through social interaction with cultural others. Longer term aspirations include the hope that such formative exchanges erode prejudice and promote future international harmony. But is social interaction between host students and other national and ethnic groups really taking place on the international campus at more than a cursory level; and is prejudice challenged or reinforced?
This paper describes a study involving twenty Chinese students at a single institution that was conducted using Dervin's Sense-Making approach (a framework for inquiry that emphasises the voice of the participant alongside that of the researcher) to investigate student's perceptions of significant moments of adjustment to the new milieu of British higher education. The resulting data revealed the subject of establishing 'guest'/'host' relationships as a recurring theme. The strictly reciprocal nature of Chinese interpersonal relationships was found to be a binding force that made it difficult for Chinese students to reach out beyond their co-ethnic groups despite aspirations for intercultural contact. Respondents also talked of their shyness and their disappointment that 'host' students tended not to break the ice at social gatherings and in interpersonal relations. Their reflections drew on notions of Chinese 'guest'/'host' etiquette where shyness is the polite, non imposing behaviour associated with the role of the guest. In return, the host is obliged to ensure that the guest feels at home, including taking the initiative in social interaction. Thus, 'shy' behaviour is a form of non-verbal communication designed to elicit reciprocal host conduct. The failure of host students to respond resulted in a loss of face for the guests, reinforcing preferences for co-ethnic group relations. Where contact with host students did occur, overtures of friendship often did not match the Chinese student's expectations of normative social practice, resulting in impressions of insincerity and superficiality. Notwithstanding the obstacles though, a small number of respondents did establish deep intercultural friendships, although it appeared to be those who either chose to abandon or were rejected by their compatriots. One account charts a sequence of revelations through interactions with new found British friends that lead indirectly to overcoming a long held prejudice towards Japanese people. Furthermore, sustained intercultural contact increased student's confidence in the use of spoken English.
Overall the respondent's experiences paint a picture of insularity, despite a desire to connect with cultural Others, suggesting that the claimed benefits of the international campus are currently overstated. However, it also appears that occasionally trust can form, prejudices do get challenged and transformation happens, at least temporarily. Given the potential benefits of facilitating increased intercultural connection on the international campus, further research should be undertaken to determine the generalisability of the findings and to explore ways of supporting students to go beyond parochial understandings of friendship making behaviour.
'Welcome to Reality': Representations of (in)hospitality in films from the German-Polish border.
Jane Wilkinson, University of Leeds, UK
International borderlands frequently lack the cosmopolitan characteristics of 'openness' (Delanty 2006) and 'cultural mixture' (Beck 2006) that one might expect to find where two or more nation-states meet. In the case of the German-Polish borderland, a long history of conflict and reciprocal resentment continues to impede the development of an open, cosmopolitan space in which German and Polish citizens interact willingly and freely across the border and 'foreigners' are offered 'unconditional hospitality' (Derrida 2000, 2001, 2005).
For the travellers who pass through them, borderlands are points of transit and transition; crossing points on the journey from one place to another. To whom transit is granted is, however, a question of privilege, and those who are not privileged remain trapped in the borderland; unable to reach their destination and, in many cases, unable or unwilling to return 'home'. They are thus forced to set up temporary home and to interact with the borderland inhabitants, with varying degrees of success. In stark contrast, tourists and business travellers with valid papers and money to spend, are invited to pause a while, to break their journey in the hotels, shops and restaurants of the borderland.
This paper examines the relationship between borderland inhabitants, migrants and tourists at the German-Polish border as represented in two German films. In Lichter (2003), director Hans Christian Schmid depicts the often tragic experiences of a group of Ukrainian refugees abandoned by traffickers on the wrong side of the then EU outer border. Their fate is almost entirely dependent upon the 'hosts' that they encounter in the borderland: a kind Polish student who opens his door to them, or the pariah-like people smugglers who lurk outside his café; a disillusioned and sympathetic interpreter working for the border authorities, or a poor taxi driver, desperate to make enough money to buy his daughter's First Communion dress and thus willing to exploit those poorer than himself. In Schröders wunderbare Welt (2007), Michael Schorr presents a borderland on the brink of Poland's admission to the Schengen zone and the luxury of 'free travel'. Shröder has found an American investor to fund his dream of constructing a luxury, tropical holiday resort in the run-down no-man's land between Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. Now that the unwanted migrants are stopped by EU controls at Poland's eastern border, wealthy tourists should be brought in to enjoy the unique hospitality of the borderland.
References
Beck, Ulrich (2006) Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Delanty, Gerard (2006) 'The cosmopolitan imagination: critical cosmopolitanism and social theory.' The British Journal of Sociology 57(1), pp. 25 - 47.
Derrida, Jacques & Dufourmantelle, Anne (2000) Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (2001) On Cosmpolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques (2005) 'The Principle of Hospitality.' Parallax 11(1), pp. 6 - 9.
A Comparative Study of Chinese and American Values
Zhou Xiaoxiang, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai University, PRC
Values are at the core of the culture. The studies of values form the basic lenses through which we view our own actions and the actions of others. This paper will begin from the definition of values in the context of culture and then introduce the traditional Chinese and American values. In the body part of this paper, value shifts in both countries, especially the youth value shifts will be discussed and compared so as to see if there is also a trend of global values integration in the time of global economic integration. In the study of Chinese youth values, the 70s is the generation to be focused on, while in the study of American youth values, the Busters and the Mosaics are the guards to be discussed. In the time of global economic integration, the young generations in China and in the United States do share some common value trends: First of all, young people in both countries become more and more individual-oriented; they embrace the idea of postmodernism; they value traditional cultural heritages and national virtue; and at the same time, they have become more and more global-minded.
However, because of different national conditions and different traditional cultures, there are also a lot of different features of value shifts in both countries: Inwardly, the 70s in China become more diversified and confused about the concept XINYANG; while the Mosaics in the United States become more enthusiastic about religion; as to the sense of achievement, the 70s show a clear tendency of utility and materialism; while the Mosaics want to be well educated so as to be more independent; toward marriage and family forms, the 70s in China become more and more tolerant; while the Mosaics, facing the high divorce rate, are dreaming of traditional love and family etc.
Joy van Helvert, University of Essex