1st Edition

Making Sense of the Intercultural Finding DeCentred Threads

By Adrian Holliday, Sara Amadasi Copyright 2020
    132 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    130 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    In this book we wish to find a new way of talking about, connecting and operationalising the third space, narratives, positioning, and interculturality. Our purpose is to shake established views in what we consider to be an urgent quest for dealing with prejudice.

    We therefore seek to draw attention to the following:

    • How Centre structures and large culture boundaries are sources of prejudice
    • How deCentred intercultural threads address prejudice by dissolving these boundaries
    • How, in everyday small culture formation on the go, the cultural and the intercultural are observable and become indistinguishable
    • How agency, personal and grand narratives, discourses, and positioning become visible in unexpected ways
    • How we researchers also bring competing narratives in making sense of the intercultural
    • How third spaces are discordant and uncomfortable places in which all of us must struggle to achieve interculturality

    This book is therefore a journey of discovery with each chapter building on the previous ones. While throughout there are particular empirical events (interviews, reconstructed ethnographic accounts and research diary entries) with their own detailed analyses and insights, they connect back to discussion in previous chapters.

    Chapter 1: Distant lands and the everyday

    Kati in Exia

    Main events, storyline and concepts

    Matt and the woman on the train

    The ‘getting on with life’ grand narrative

    Getting to the deCentred: The Moor’s account

    What it takes to listen to the deCentred

    Chapter 2: DeCentred threads resist the expected

    The problem with ‘integration’

    Working with children as expert agents of culture and identity

    The intertwined nature of identity construction

    A critical cosmopolitan, deCentred discourse of culture

    Searching for hidden spaces

    Chapter 3: Centred threads become blocks

    Choosing to find threads

    Dangerous threads: Kati and Eli

    Talking to Wissaal about clothes: threads of ambivalence

    Behind the scenes sense-making of threads or not threads

    Kati, Eli and Matt visit ‘the foreign’: blocks and threads at work

    Building interculturality

    Chapter 4: Who are we as researchers?

    Excavating our own researcher agendas

    In this together

    Chapter 5: Getting on with deCentred life

    Meeting undergraduate students

    Another unexpected deCentred thread

    Connecting back to other events

    Conclusions

    Biography

    Dr Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics & Intercultural Education at Canterbury Christ Church University.

    Dr Sara Amadasi is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the University of Modena & Reggio Emilia.