Tag: Juana Du

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.

Download the entire post as a PDF.

Royal Roads University visit 2017

Director's ActivitiesI spent July, August, and much of September 2017 teaching a graduate seminar at Royal Roads University, located in Victoria, BC, Canada, as part of their Master of Arts in International and Intercultural Communication (MAIIC) for the third time (see prior posts for the first and second visits to RRU). This year the course was IICS 630: Advanced Research Methods, with students from Canada, China, Greece, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and the Ukraine. My thanks to Juana Du, program head of the MAIIC, for again inviting me to her beautiful campus to work with an incredible group of students!

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Ling Chen visited campus to give a guest lecture while I was in residence. She, Juana, and I went to Butchart Gardens, justifiably one of the major tourist spots in Victoria. This year I also was able to meet with Jan Bavelas, retired from the University of Victoria, and several of her former students, now research assistants.

Also while in Victoria, I connected with two my former students, Min He and Akari Takenishi. Min served as Assistant to the Director for 6 months, and both of them have translated Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue. Another of my 2016 students, Yan Qiu, has also translated some of the Key Concepts.

While at Royal Roads, I connected with a number of faculty and staff across a variety of programs, from Interdisciplinary Studies to Global Management, from the Centre for Teaching & Educational Technologies to Tourism & Hospitality Management. I look forward to maintaining connections with many of them.

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue
intercult.dialogue[at]gmail.com

Key Concept #50: Guanxi by Juana Du

Key Concepts in ICDThe next issue of Key Concepts in intercultural Dialogue is now available. This is KC50: Guanxi by Juana Du. As always, all Key Concepts are available as free PDFs; just click on the thumbnail to download. Lists organized  chronologically by publication date and number, alphabetically by concept in English, and by languages into which they have been translated, are available, as is a page of acknowledgments with the names of all authors, translators, and reviewers.Key Concept #50: Guanxi by Juana DuDu, J. (2015). Guanxi. Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, 50. Available from:
https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/key-concept-guanxi.pdf

The Center for Intercultural Dialogue publishes a series of short briefs describing Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue. Different people, working in different countries and disciplines, use different vocabulary to describe their interests, yet these terms overlap. Our goal is to provide some of the assumptions and history attached to each concept for those unfamiliar with it. As there are other concepts you would like to see included, send an email to the series editor, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. If there are concepts you would like to prepare, provide a brief explanation of why you think the concept is central to the study of intercultural dialogue, and why you are the obvious person to write up that concept.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Juana Du Profile

ProfilesJuana Du is associate professor in the Master of Arts in Intercultural and International Communication on-campus program at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC, Canada.

Juana DuShe draws on personal experience from working in Beijing, Hong Kong, Germany, United States and Canada to frame the way she studies culture, communication and organizations. Du’s professional experience includes cross-cultural adaptation, corporate communication, organizational culture and innovation. She has worked internationally with multinational enterprises, and has acted as a communication research consultant for subsidiaries of MNEs. She provided strategic and tactical advice to Western and Chinese companies to improve the performance of their global operations in talent management, negotiation, multi-cultural teams and innovation.

Her research fields of interest include Asian communication, intercultural communication, intercultural competency and organizational communication. Her interest in the role of culture in communication in different social contexts at various level of interaction and in intercultural encounters has been a center of research and scholarship. She has been conducting research on such topics as cross-cultural adaptation of sojouners, intercultural training, Chinese traditional value orientations, intercultural conflict in M&As, managerial communication in business organizations, organizational culture and learning, knowledge sharing and transfer in MNEs.

Her research on intercultural communication within organizational settings is driven by solving complex problems in the real world. She has worked with many multinational enterprises for different research projects. Currently she is working on a research project on intercultural competence with collaboration with CNPCI (China National Petroleum Co. International).

Du was a post-doctorate researcher at New York University, and a visiting scholar at Techinische Universitat Bergakademie Freiberg in Germany and at Ohio University in U.S. She has published numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed journal papers. She has presented at several international conferences, including the International communication Association, the National Communication Association, the Academy of International Business, and the Shanghai Normal University International Conference of Intercultural Communication. She got the Best Student Paper Award of intercultural communication division of ICA (International Communication Association) in 2009.

Work for CID:
Juana Du wrote KC52: Guanxi, serves as a reviewer of translations into Simplified Chinese, and has co-authored a guest post on Museums as Third Spaces for Intercultural Dialogue.