Full Description
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.
Contents
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
