New project launched to explore the future of interculturality
A new project led by researchers in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies will explore the future of interculturality.
‘Futuring Interculturality’ reconceptualises interculturality and its contexts of application to investigate the many diversified boundaries dividing people and possibilities for crossing them. Through interdisciplinary dialogue and mutual cross-fertilisation between research, teaching and practice, the project addresses five research questions:
- How can research across disciplines at the University of Leeds contribute to futuring interculturality?
- What challenges and possibilities arise when applying an intercultural lens beyond international/interethnic/interlingual contexts?
- How can University research, teaching, policy, practice and services disentangle interculturality from internationalisation?
- How can experience of crossing traditional borders and boundaries of languages and countries be applied to other contexts whenever ‘us vs them’ dynamics emerge?
- How can interculturality, diversity and inclusion be conceptualised in relation to each other and operationalised in policy and practice?
Building on and aiming to expand the Intercultural Studies area, Futuring Interculturality invites Leeds academics across disciplines/Faculties, Professional Service colleagues, PGRs and student bodies to:
- question naturalised associations of (other) cultures with (other) nationalities/ethnicities/languages,
- push Intercultural Studies beyond communication between people of different nationalities/languages,
- promote a research culture that is actively participated by the University key areas, for a virtuous cycle in research-teaching-practices mutually informing each other.
We want to open possibilities for new thinking, teaching, learning and practice that
- critically examine the effects of conflating intercultural with international,
- apply an intercultural lens to any contexts where different affiliations, perceptions and sensitivities, dispositions and expectations, meanings, behaviours and/or worldviews emerge,
- explore its usefulness for tackling incommunicability, divides, stereotyping, discrimination, segregation and marginalisation in contexts that would not traditionally be conceived as intercultural.
Both the need and the potential for the project reside in:
- de-essentialising, de-colonising, and de-mystifying views of ‘others’ as homogenised culture=language=ethnicity/nationality,
- problematising views of ‘within’ through an intercultural lens,
- breaking disciplinary and institutional silos, through mutual cross-fertilisation between critical approaches and solution-driven ones, and between research, teaching, practices and policies, starting from our own University.
Project team: Elisabetta Adami, Haynes Collins, Ramzi Merabet, Corinne Painter, Leah Wang.
For more information, please contact Elisabetta Adami (E.Adami@leeds.ac.uk)
