Category: Guest Posts

Juana Du & Mingshi Cui: Museums as Third Spaces for Intercultural Dialogue

Guest PostsMuseums as Third Spaces for Intercultural Dialogue. Guest post by Juana Du and Mingshi Cui.

There has been an increasing awareness in recent years regarding the indispensable role that museums can play in encouraging intercultural dialogues and enhancing social inclusiveness. The imaginary cultural space of the museum has propelled us to a realization that we are in an era where interculturality, transculturalism, and the eventual prospect of identifying cosmopolitan citizenship can become a reality. Researchers have been examining the museum-based pedagogy of transculturalism, viewing museums as a third space where visitors from different backgrounds could learn more about other cultures and how different cultures collide and interact with each other throughout history. Yet, there has not been much study on how the visitors navigate the museum collections on display by engaging in intercultural learning activities in a way that encourages self-reflection on cultural identities and enhances a sense of global citizenship. Thus, our research investigates the potentiality of museums to be transformed into third spaces where visitors may actively explore a complex multitude of identities and cosmopolitan citizenship.

This research offers several practical implications for both museum administrators and intercultural educators. First, it suggests that museum educators design interactive exhibitions creatively to encourage transferring exhibitions into a third space in order to facilitate intercultural dialogues. Second, this research suggests museum administrators can improve their services to a more diverse group of audiences so as to enhance the inclusiveness of museum exhibitions. Finally, we suggest that cultural sites such as museums and other cultural institutions or sites may find ways to incorporate diverse methods and transform themselves into a third space that provides a more favorable cultural context for learning and transcultural communication.

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Maria Flora Mangano: Seeds of Dialogue

Guest PostsSeeds of Dialogue. Guest post by Maria Flora Mangano.

NOTE: As someone who has received a set of the “seeds of dialogue” described here, this post is particularly meaningful to me. It’s a lovely gesture, and something that would be particularly easy for others to replicate.

This idea of a symbolic gift for students at the end of a course occurred to me in 2017. At that time, I was teaching transcultural dialogue to undergraduates, in addition to a course in communication of scientific research intended for doctoral students.

I prepared “seeds of dialogue,” as I called them, by using the seeds of seasonal fruit I had at home (such as oranges or apples), which I washed, dried, and stored. It was also a sustainable gift, as I packed the seeds using recycled materials: transparent cellophane and strand of raffia for the envelope, which I stapled onto cards made of reused wallpaper.

The intent was to wish for the students to continue to plant “seeds of dialogue” in the Other, as we had experienced during the course. The proposal was to place them beyond our class, and beyond the academic context, with the aim, far more broadly, to give these seeds a place in our everyday lives.

They are only seeds of fruit, but the meaning of the seeds as symbol is immediate: each of us, wherever and whenever, may begin to create a relationship with the Other by building a bridge, by planting a seed. .

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Knappitsch Guest Post: Empowering Remote-Ready Graduates

Guest Posts
Empowering Remote-Ready Graduates: The Transformative Role of Virtual Exchange in Career-Oriented Education. Guest post by Eithne Knappitsch.

The integration of Virtual Exchange (VE) and Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) into career-oriented education represents a significant evolution in preparing students for the modern workforce. These innovative educational models not only bridge geographical and cultural gaps, offering a responsible form of international exchange, but also align closely with the shift towards competency-based learning, equipping students with the necessary skills and competencies for remote work and leadership in virtual teams. Recent studies indicate that Higher Educational Institution (HEI) educators are increasingly aware of the potential of VE in contributing to innovation and skills development.

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Corbett & Holmes Guest Post: Critical Intercultural Pedagogy for Difficult Times

Guest Posts
Critical Intercultural Pedagogy for Difficult Times. Guest post by John Corbett and Prue Holmes.

Critical Intercultural Pedagogy for Difficult Times: Conflict, Crisis, and Creativity, edited by Prue Holmes and John Corbett (2023) is a volume of case studies and theoretical reflections which arose from an AHRC Research Network project, initiated, and led by Prue Holmes of the University of Durham in 2019. Holmes was interested in exploring the theoretical and practical issues involved in the creative application of critical intercultural teaching and learning in conditions of conflict and extended crisis. In short, how does critical intercultural pedagogical theory inform creative practice, and vice versa, in what Holmes and her team came to think of as ‘difficult times’?

As Khawla Badwan, in the title of her chapter, on intercultural communication and vulnerability, observes, “I’m afraid there are no easy fixes”. There are, indeed, no easy fixes, and, for those of us engaged in intercultural education, there seems cause, too often, for despair. However, the case studies reported in this volume affirm, through their modest tales of resilience, aspiration, and hope, that in the enveloping darkness there are flickers of light.

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Hughes & Bartesaghi Guest Post: Disability as Intercultural Dialogue

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Disability as Intercultural Dialogue. Guest post by Jessica M. F. Hughes & Mariaelena Bartesaghi.

Ethnomethodologist Carolyn Baker argues that culture is not a pre-made context for action to unfold, but rather an ongoing moral order of categories and categorization, where locally produced categories become “locked into place” (2000, p. 99). This is how we understand—and are able to talk about—disability in terms of culture, as an assemblage of voices, bodies and actions within a contingent and shifting social order(ing). Just as Bakhtin (1986) tells us that there is no first speaker, but rather language as coordination over time and amidst utterances in relation, disability can only mean in terms of what we are able to (co)produce it as meaning. In our book, Disability in dialogue (Hughes & Bartesaghi) contributors set out on empirical projects designed to trouble the categories of disability within several cultural frames: geographical settings, diagnostic accounts, political action, crisis events, and everyday occurrences.

Inasmuch as disability is a culture, an ordering of relations and identity projects, of what is and might be possible, of what is historically entrenched and institutionally regulated, then disability is also an intercultural doing. This is the case not merely in the exchanges between a culture of able bodiedness to which disability owes its constitution, but between the multiple and diverse identity positions of those who are incumbent within the culture of disability. These exchanges are dialogic through and through, for they always mirror, borrow, and often oppose each other. In Shotter’s words (2015), these dialogues are occasions for attunement (p. 8) and intercultural betweenness.

Analyzing disability discourses means appreciating dialogic tensions, the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work, the constant interplay between dialogue and monologue. And it means listening to the diverse voices that, as Bakhtin remarked, are everywhere and always in relation.

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Knappitsch Guest Post: The Global Case Study Challenge

Guest Posts
The Global Case Study Challenge: Competencies for the Future of Work in Virtual Environments.
Guest post by Eithne Knappitsch.

The Global Case Study Challenge (GCSC) began as a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL)/Virtual Exchange program, offering students an authentic and immersive intercultural learning opportunity. As the importance of New Work and remote work contexts grew following COVID, it became clear that students and professionals needed to develop more effective competencies to excel virtual and hybrid work environments. Initial iterations of the GCSC revealed that while students possessed strong digital skills, they frequently lacked essential digital collaboration competencies – the attitude, knowledge, and skills to become high performing teams in diverse, interdisciplinary, and international contexts. Recognizing this gap in competencies needed for future New Work environments and those acquired at higher educational institutions, the need for the GCSC to further develop into a transformative, career-oriented global teaching and learning program became obvious. At the same time, the GCSC management team – a virtual female-led team – became inspired by the potential for virtual exchange to contribute to a paradigm shift in higher educational settings as responsible and sustainable forms of education (and internationalization). The GCSC, over the five consequent iterations from 2018 onward evolved into a transformative program, resulting in the development of the GLOW model. This CID guest post explores how the GCSC GLObal Work (GLOW) model addresses these pressing needs and empowers students and educators with the competencies required to excel in virtual and intercultural work settings.

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Sommier, Roiha & Lahti: Implementing Critical Approaches to Interculturality in Higher Education

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Implementing Critical Approaches to Interculturality in Higher Education.
Guest post by Mélodine Sommier, Anssi Roiha & Malgorzata Lahti.

Critical approaches to interculturality have gained visibility over the years, both within and outside of academia. And yet, the increasing drive across European hHigher eEducation institutions to implement internationalization strategies is often articulated around assuming traditional notions of culture, diversity, and intercultural communication. This gap between critical research in interculturality and concrete implementation of intercultural education is what drove us to ask colleagues how they put critical approaches to interculturality into practice.

Indeed, inviting critical interculturality into classrooms is a holistic process that takes time since it asks teachers to familiarize themselves with that approach as well as to depart from the limitations of traditional pedagogical frameworks.

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Maria Flora Mangano: Saturday Morning (Intercultural) School

Guest PostsSaturday Morning (Intercultural) School. Guest post by Maria Flora Mangano.

NOTE: Maria Flora Mangano has previously written about dialogue as a space of relationship (2020, 2018, 2017, 2014) as long-term followers of this site will remember. 

Since the end of 2021, I have been involved in an after-school activity for 4 to 12-year-olds. This volunteer work supports pupils doing their homework once a week, on Saturday mornings. This activity was created by a teacher at the beginning of the current school term, in October 2021, and it takes place in a parish of the city center of my town, Viterbo, near Rome. The initial aim was to reach non-Italian children from the city center, which is mostly inhabited by non-native families. In a short time, additional children arrived from different zones of the town and the surroundings.

What the children experience at home, with relatives and friends of their parents’ culture, often coexists, interacts, and enriches – we may say “is in dialogue” – with what they experience at school, as well as in this after-school activity. At the same time, their daily sharing with Italian and non-Italian people (peers, teachers, or neighbors, for instance) feeds their knowledge, and it frequently provides precious input to their families. Some, in fact, help their parents in improving their understanding of the Italian language, in talking, reading, or writing; others assist Italian people (even us) to better understand their parents’ and family’s needs.

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Sabrina Sharma: Dialogue of Reflective Thought

Guest Posts

Dialogue of Reflective Thought. Guest post by Sabrina Sharma.

The “Dialogue of Reflective Thought” (DORT) approach is a type of dialogue allowing parties to engage without a mutual resolve or change per se.

DORT is a process whereby two or more parties engage in dialogue, each without the intention to transform the other’s thought process or to expect that the other party would be placed in a position of mandatory consideration of the other to birth a ‘perception changing’ view. Although a shift may ensue from the dialogue itself, the goal is rather to share experiences and thoughts. If a transition occurs, it appears in the natural course of the dialogue itself.

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Jinhyun Cho: Intercultural Communication in Interpreting

Guest Posts

Intercultural communication in interpreting: Power and choices. Guest post by Jinhyun Cho.

…by definition interpreter-mediated communication always involves speakers from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in dialogue

What is intercultural communication? For many years, scholars have attempted to address this broad topic, yet little has been explored in the realm of interpreting. This is surprising, considering the fact that interpreting is intercultural communication in itself, for by definition interpreter-mediated communication always involves speakers from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in dialogue. In my recent book, Intercultural communication in interpreting: power and choices (Routledge, 2021), I tried to address the gap by exploring interpersonal dimensions of intercultural communication in a variety of key interpreting contexts – business, education, law and healthcare – based on the unique perspectives of professional interpreters.

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