Creating a Culture of Encountering the Other, ETHER, University of Leeds, UK but Online, 6 April 2022, 9:30-15:30 (British summer time).
The theme centres on the notion of the ‘contact zone’… a space in which people with different biographies, understandings and social trajectories engage in everyday encounters. Linguistic ethnographers have generated detailed descriptions of communicative encounters that take place there. Artists and philosophers, on the other hand, have studied people’s emotional, imaginative and moral investment in such encounters. Organizers conceptualize these contact zones as metaphorical ‘unsafe spaces’ to highlight initial discomforts that encounters with difference are likely to produce. This seminar aims to explore ways in which such ‘disturbing encounters’ can be harnessed for the good. Participants will draw on insights from the previous two seminars and draw on experiences and questions of participants to map the transformative potential of these spaces across diverse layers of social activity. The seminar will engage participants with the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions of enabling such encounters in public life.
ETHER (Ethics and Aesthetics of Encountering the Other), an international AHRC research network, is a research partnership of the University of Leeds, the University of Stirling, Opera North, and Leeds Museums and Galleries. ETHER asks: ‘How do people of conflicting worldviews, memories and future visions encounter each other?’
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 