Futuring Interculturality

Location: Newlyn SR 1.01 (with refreshments) - attendance online also possible

Location: Newlyn SR 1.01 (with refreshments) - attendance online also possible

Register here to participate in our next Futuring Interculturality event, on ‘Issues with Belonging’.  

The discussion on the topic will be prompted by our guest speakers, James Simpson (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology) and Jessica Bradley (University of Sheffield). Here below the abstract of their talk: 

Abstract 

Belonging and interculturality: Opening up the enquiry with arts-based approaches 

James Simpson (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology) and Jessica Bradley (University of Sheffield) 

Questions of belonging, and indeed non-belonging, are central to critical conversations around interculturality and of the boundaries which divide people. Belonging can be broadly understood as a person’s experiences of identity in relation to affinity with places, spaces and groups. Belonging is dynamic, spatially, interactionally and temporally situated. Focusing on belonging enables us to interrogate and rethink traditional intercultural lenses, allowing a disentanglement of the intercultural from linguistic, national and cultural boundaries. 

Our discussion of belonging draws on examples from current research in diverse locations and contexts. The first of these examples questions what it means to belong, for people from South Asian backgrounds in Hong Kong. The Navigating Belonging project (James), running from 2022 to 2024, has aimed to understand how people in South Asian communities in Hong Kong define, find and negotiate their belonging. The research asks: How does belonging emerge in and through narrative and photography? How can we develop innovative approaches to researching belonging? How can our understandings of belonging be used to inform policies, practices and debate on social integration? Our second example is of recent research which explored community and belonging in the post-Covid landscapes for mothers and birthing parents (2022 onwards). Re-Emerge (Jessica) sought to understand the possibilities and affordances of creative practice for communities which had been particularly isolated during the Covid-19 pandemic in West Yorkshire. It asks: How do people come together through shared creative practice? How are experiences of belonging and non-belonging shared and communicated through creative methods? How might these experiences inform wider policies relating to health and wellbeing?   

In this session we present ways in which these research projects enable us to rethink interculturality. We refer to the artistic outputs and creative methodologies explored through both examples. These include digital stories that were devised during the Navigating Belonging Project, and the practices involved in their production, as well as creative artefacts, including collages, poems and zines for Re-Emerge. These practices involved people working collectively on individual outputs, thus bringing the individual into dialogue with the collective. We discuss how our research processes enable the questioning of accepted ideas of what belonging means in diversifying intercultural contexts, beyond bounded notions of the linguistic, the national, the political and the cultural.  

Bionotes 

James Simpson is a Professor in the Division of the Humanities at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests lie in the sociolinguistics of mobility. His work coheres around a concern with social justice, particularly for people on the move, and of what it means to belong. 

Jessica Bradley is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield where she is Co-Director of Internationalisation and Deputy Director of the EdD. Her research focuses on language, identity and belonging in creative settings and she uses ethnographic and arts-based approaches.