Making Sense of the Intercultural Finding DeCentred Threads

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 prejudiceHow deCentred intercultural threads address prejudice by dissolving these boundariesHow, in everyday small culture formation on the go, the cultural and the intercultural are observable and become indistinguishableHow agency, personal and grand narratives, discourses, and positioning become visible in unexpected waysHow we researchers also bring competing narratives in making sense of the interculturalHow third spaces are discordant and uncomfortable places in which all of us must struggle to achieve interculturalityThis 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 everydayKati in ExiaMain events, storyline and conceptsMatt and the woman on the trainThe ‘getting on with life’ grand narrativeGetting to the deCentred: The Moor’s accountWhat it takes to listen to the deCentredChapter 2: DeCentred threads resist the expectedThe problem with ‘integration’Working with children as expert agents of culture and identityThe intertwined nature of identity constructionA critical cosmopolitan, deCentred discourse of cultureSearching for hidden spacesChapter 3: Centred threads become blocksChoosing to find threadsDangerous threads: Kati and EliTalking to Wissaal about clothes: threads of ambivalenceBehind the scenes sense-making of threads or not threadsKati, Eli and Matt visit ‘the foreign’: blocks and threads at workBuilding interculturalityChapter 4: Who are we as researchers?Excavating our own researcher agendasIn this togetherChapter 5: Getting on with deCentred lifeMeeting undergraduate studentsAnother unexpected deCentred threadConnecting back to other eventsConclusions

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.