Futuring Interculturality: Crossing Borders

(How) can experience and knowledge of crossing traditional borders and boundaries of languages and countries be transferred to other contexts, and put into use whenever ‘us vs them’ dynamics emerge?

Register here to participate in our next Futuring Interculturality event, on ‘Crossing Borders’.

Wednesday 26th February 2-4pm, room Liberty Building SR 1.11 - and on MS Teams

The event will address the project research question “(How) can experience and knowledge of crossing traditional borders and boundaries of languages and countries be transferred to other contexts, and put into use whenever ‘us vs them’ dynamics emerge?”

Maggie Kubanyiova (Education) and Maria Rovisco (Sociology) will open the discussion offering their visions-from-research, to prompt us into discussing possibilities, criticalities and ideas around the research question.

Blurbs of prompts

Relational ethics and intercultural encounters, Maggie Kubanyiova, School of Education

In my provocation, I want to push intercultural thinking and practice by considering the possibilities for ethical relations with others that open up when we commit to dwelling, through research and practice, in the conceptual space between a social category and singularity. I draw on insights from a larger collaborative inquiry into encounters with difference (Kubanyiova & Shetty, 2024) as well as my research in particular spaces of segregation and linguistic erasures (Kubanyiova, 2024) to ask what lessons can be drawn for encountering others ethically rather than reductively in interactions broadly defined as intercultural.

Artists, border crossings, and the civic imagination. Maria Rovisco, School of Sociology & Social Policy

Artists can be seen as quintessential cosmopolitans: that is, as a category of people who are particularly well equipped to engage in cross-cultural activities and work through difference

towards new and possibly better modes of living with others. In this short talk, I will argue that we need to take seriously the political and ethical agency of artists and the work of the civic imagination through which they imagine and realise their visions of a better social and political enviroment. When considering artistic activities, if we focus solely on the level of representation, we can critically engage with how distant or alien others are textually constructed as subjects. However, we cannot easily account for how the “other” came to represent what it does if we do not take into account the agency and subjectivity of the visual artist or the filmmaker (and other creative personnel) as they go about making artworks, which require them to engage in border crossings and cross-cultural encounters with people whose stories they want to tell and make visible in the public sphere.

About the project

In Futuring Interculturality, we want to involve colleagues and students from all key areas of the University: We aim to shape the future of interculturality at Leeds through a virtuous cycle of research, teaching, professional services, PGRs’ and students’ experiences and practices as mutually informing each other.

The events in the project are intended to be a working group on visions, criticalities and idea-generation with all those interested in collaborating on the topic. For a blurb on the core ideas behind the project, see and here