This thesis analyzes the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB)’s treatment of culture in recent family sponsorship decisions. Drawing upon theories of cultural difference, identity construction, and Critical Race Theory, it examines IRB decision-makers’ assessments of cultural factors and their influence on the evaluation of parties’ credibility. This thesis argues that appellants and applicants before the Immigration Appeal Division often had to demonstrate that their family class relationships were “performed” in accordance with the norms of their culture. Many IRB Members relied on essentialist conceptions of culture, and thus generated problematic images of both cultural minorities and Canadian society. Further, the identity of parties was often constructed in terms of defined categories such as ethnic background, religion, marital status, age, and disability. In conclusion, this thesis offers reflections on how issues of cultural identity can be more fairly and sensitively addressed by administrative tribunals such as the IRB.

An increasing number of educational policies, academic studies, and university courses today propagate ‘interculturality’ as a method for approaching ‘the Other’ and reconciling universal values and cultural specificities. Based on a thorough discussion of Europe’s colonial past and the hierarchies of knowledge that colonialism established, this dissertation interrogates the definitions of intercultural knowledge put forth by EU policy discourse, academic textbooks on interculturality, and students who have completed a university course on the subject. Taking a decolonial approach that makes its central concern the ways in which differences are formed and sustained through references to cultural identities, this study shows that interculturality, as defined in these texts, runs the risk of affirming a singular European outlook on the world, and of elevating this outlook into a universal law. Contrary to its selfproclaimed goal of learning from the Other, interculturality may in fact contribute to the repression of the Other by silencing those who are already muted. The dissertation suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, which is not framed in terms of cultural differences but in terms of colonial difference. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad, which derives from the struggles for public and political recognition among indigenous social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. By bringing interculturalidad into the picture, with its roots in the particular and with strong reverberations of the historical experience of colonialism, this study explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook. In this way, the dissertation argues that an emancipation from colonial legacies requires that we start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural. / Fokus för denna avhandling är spridningen av begreppet interkulturalitet inom utbildning. Utbildningspolicy, akademisk litteratur och mängden kurser i högre utbildning ägnade åt begreppet vittnar alla om dess betydelse i försöken att förena det kulturellt partikulära med det universella. Med Europas koloniala förflutna i åtanke och dess skapande av hierarkier mellan vad som definieras som kunskap, ämnar denna avhandling undersöka vilka kunskaper som krävs för att bli interkulturell. Syftet är framför allt att besvara frågan vad som händer med interkulturalitet om kulturella skillnader istället förstås som koloniala skillnader. Utifrån ett dekolonialt perspektiv som fokuserar på hur skillnader skapas och upprätthålls utifrån föreställningar om kulturella identiteter, analyseras EU-policy, akademisk litteratur samt intervjuer med studenter som avklarat en kurs i interkulturalitet. Analysen visar på hur interkulturalitet, i dess nuvarande tappning, riskerar fastna i en singulär europeisk utblick på världen upphöjd till universell lag. Snarare än att mildra eller förändra maktrelationer och skapa möjligheter till mellanmänskliga möten, riskerar därför interkulturaliteten att bidra till fortsatt förtryck av den som anses kulturellt annorlunda. En alternativ utgångspunkt står att finna i en annan översättning av interkulturalitet – interculturalidad – hämtad från ursprungsbefolkningarnas kamp för att bli synliggjorda, att dela makten, på den offentliga arenan i Bolivia, Ecuador och Peru. Genom att lyfta fram begreppet interculturalidad, som just har sitt ursprung i singulariteten och bär med sig själva erfarenheten av kolonialism, tillförs en möjlig distansering från interkulturalitet med dess implicita eurocentrism. Avslutningsvis argumenteras för att befrielse från kolonialismens ok kräver att interkulturalitet omkodas som inter-epistemisk.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2017-06-02T15:44:18Z No. of bitstreams: 1 marialuizaalmadamoreira.pdf: 574704 bytes, checksum: 802fa424152772a2174afb0062cf111b (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2017-06-06T12:15:08Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 marialuizaalmadamoreira.pdf: 574704 bytes, checksum: 802fa424152772a2174afb0062cf111b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-06T12:15:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 marialuizaalmadamoreira.pdf: 574704 bytes, checksum: 802fa424152772a2174afb0062cf111b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-04-27 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Neste trabalho, a partir de uma reflexão em torno do escritor amazonense Milton Hatoum, pretendemos desenvolver um estudo sobre a figura do intelectual, procurando sublinhar o lugar não-fixo e errático que este ocupa na contemporaneidade. Por meio da leitura dos romances Relato de um certo oriente e Dois irmãos, procuramos desenvolver a hipótese de que o "exílio" pode funcionar como uma metáfora da condição do intelectual. Ou seja, o lugar do intelectual é um lugar outro de enunciação, a partir de onde ele interpela os discursos hegemônicos da cultura, ora dialogando com eles, ora questionando os seus centramentos e a sua fixidez. E ainda, a partir dessa questão do lócus de enunciação, desdobramos a análise das obras, focalizando o espaço como localidade cultural. Assim sendo, destacamos a paisagem amazônica e os discursos que moldaram, ao longo do tempo, um imaginário acerca dessa região, buscando compreender como ela é atualmente revisitada pelos novos discursos críticos. / In this paper, from a reflection about Milton Hatoum, a writer from Amazonia, we intend to develop a study about the intellectual's figure, trying to underline the unfixed and erratic place that this occupies in the contemporaneity. By means of the reading of the novels Relato de um certo oriente and Dois irmdos, we try to develop the hypothesis that the "exile" can function as a metaphor of the intellectual's condition. That is, the intellectual's place is another enunciation place, from where he debates the hegemonic culture discourses, or dialoging with them, or questioning its centrality and fixity. In addition, from this enunciation locus question, we unfold the works analyses, focusing the spaces as cultural locality. Thus we highlight the amazonian landscape and the discourses that shaped over the years an imaginary about this region, trying to understand how it is currently revisited by new critical discourses.

Recent developments in today’s art music reflect a general trend of cultural globalisation: It can be characterised as an oscillation between a standardisation of compositional idioms (usually following standards established in the West) and claims for sustainable forms of cultural difference. Even though it is obviously necessary to counterbalance and criticise an academically established »avant garde’s« ethnocentrism and its tendency to dominate a worldwide discourse of new music, references to cultural difference can prove to be naïve or self-deceiving, since they are often linked to essentialist, post-nationalist concepts of (musical) culture. A critical discussion of paradigms and paradoxes in the aesthetics of cultural difference is opened with an analysis of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s universalist Telemusik (1966) as a main example showing how compositional processes can easily eradicate those »cultural« peculiarities in musical styles that the composer claims to preserve. Whereas such processes are often due to a fundamentally mono-cultural discourse and – in Stockhausen’s case – can be traced back to the 19th century Western universalist concept of »art religion«, the three remaining case studies introduce works from Asian contexts that exemplify a dense interpenetration of political, historical and aesthetical strata of both Asian and Western origins. While José Maceda’s Pagsamba (1968), Ge Ganru’s Yi Feng (1983) and Yuji Takahashi’s Sojo Rinzetsu (1997) all use highly idiosyncratic »Asian« material, their works remain informed by key principles of Western modernity, namely incommensurability and the deconstruction of cultural or stylistic stereotypes. This allows for the conclusion that the »space« in which their musical art evolves is a globalised cultural memory that reflects the inner contradictions and the historicity of music as a »cultural« technique.

This research explores the availability and potential educational uses of different forms of poetry that can be read using a postcolonial approach. The focus is on contemporary France and Spain, two contexts where people with different cultural heritages coexist and need to negotiate cultural imbalances inherited from colonial and neo-colonial domination. This research highlights poetry’s overlooked suitability to engage young people in the expression of cultural difference in a progressively globalized world where cultivating cross-cultural understanding and tolerance needs to be at the top of our agendas. For this reason, the dissertation includes an analysis of poems (currently available for young people) aiming to foreground the possibilities of a postcolonial reading. I also studied similarities and divergences between the French and Spanish scenarios based on evidence gathered during a survey of the Spanish and French fields of poetry for young people and from interviews with informed agents. The survey of the field consists of the exploration of textbooks and anthologies but also the examination of poetry circulating through on-line channels. The interviews were undertaken with selected French and Spanish representatives of people currently involved in the production and dissemination of poetry for young people. I observed that the number of poems showing connections to a postcolonial legacy was scant in the French school material and even more in the Spanish books that I examined. I also confirmed that little attention was given to oral ways to deliver poetry especially showing little regard for the oral literary practices and traditions of non-European French and Spanish speaking communities. The Spanish lack of attention to these traditions is more salient. This contrasts with observations about non-school contexts. Spanish and French young people can nowadays easily engage with varied cultural traditions in poetry which circulate in poetry events and social media. Interviewees confirmed these observations but also raised issues about Spanish and French poetry education that need to be dealt with so as to improve school attention to mixed cultural heritages in poetry. The main contribution to knowledge of this thesis consists in identifying the underused and unexplored educational potential of French and Spanish poetry currently available for young people that can be fruitfully approached using postcolonial lenses. The evaluation of the information gathered in this research reveals that dominant French and Spanish approaches to poetry and limited poetry repertoires hinder the visibility of some contemporary forms of poetry and restrain the effectiveness of some poetry already present in mainstream poetry corpora. However, the comparison of scenarios shows that France offers more accessible and relevant ‘places of enunciation ’ than Spain does for poets to address young people. For instance, comparing contexts, French young people have easier access and more support than Spanish youth to engage with poets’ expressions of being culturally displaced.

This study unites the burgeoning academic field of exhibition histories and the critiques of race-based exhibition practices that crystallised in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. It concerns recent practices of presenting and contextualising black creativity in British publicly funded art museums and galleries that are part of a broader attempt to increase the diversity of histories and perspectives represented in public art collections and exhibitions. The research focuses on three concurrent 2010 exhibitions that aimed to offer a non-hegemonic reading of black creativity through the use of non-art-historical conceptual and alternative curatorial models: Afro Modern (Tate Liverpool), Action (The Bluecoat), and a retrospective of works by Chris Ofili (Tate Britain). Comparative exhibitions of the past were typically premised on concepts of difference that ultimately resulted in the notional separation of black artists from mainstream discourses on contemporary art and histories of British art. Through a close and critical textual analysis of these three recent exhibitions, which is informed by J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts (1955), the study considers whether, and to what extent the delimiting curatorial practices of the past have been successfully abandoned by public art museums and galleries, and furthermore, whether it has been possible for British art institutions to reject the entrenched, exclusive conceptions of British culture that negated black contributions to the canon and narratives of British art in the first place. The exhibition case studies are complemented and contextualised by an in-depth history of the Bluecoat’s engagement with black creativity between 1976 and 2012, which provides a particular insight into the ways that debates about representation, difference and separatism have impacted the policies and practices of one culturally significant art gallery that is frequently overlooked in histories of black British art. With reference to the notion of legitimate coercion as defined by Zygmunt Bauman (2000), the study determines that long-standing hegemonic structures continue to inform the modes through which public art museums and galleries in Britain curate and control black creativity.

No description available.

薩爾曼•魯希迪的《摩爾人的最後嘆息》運用想像與史實描繪出一個印度家族的故事。這個四代家族所經歷的時間橫跨整個二十世紀，一般說來在這個世紀前半部分大多數國家經歷了殖民統治與帝國主義，而在後半部分則面臨去殖民與國家主義的風潮。因此，書中論及的這些殖民與後殖民的經驗也引發了一些重要的議題，像是混雜、多元文化，和國家主義。霍米•巴巴提出‘閾限空間’這個概念有助於對這本小說做深入的評價與賞析，特別是能促進對以上三個議題更深入而具體的認知。霍米•巴巴將許多概念納入‘閾限空間’這個總括性術語的討論範圍，因此本論文將從中擷取三個概念來論述這本小說，分別是混雜、文化差異、及國家意識。 本論文的導論先闡釋霍米•巴巴‘閾限空間’這個概念並且發掘魯希迪這本小說中許多重要的後殖民議題。這些議題與‘閾限空間’ 這個概念的關係密不可分，因此這個概念所延伸論及的理論便可用於理解並賞析這本小說。接下來的三章將分別以混雜、文化差異、及國家意識來發掘並建立《摩爾人的最後嘆息》與‘閾限空間’這概念之間的關係。第二章將藉由霍米•巴巴對殖民者與被殖民者之間的矛盾關係的論述進而深入理解小說中意欲呈現的殖民混雜與後殖民混雜。這種矛盾的關係理論上與他者化的過程有關聯，在這過程中身分認同與主體化不論是在後殖民理論還是此本小說中都是值得商榷的議題。第三章利用霍米•巴巴的‘文化差異’來重新檢視並且重新定義所謂的多元文化。魯希迪在小說中巧妙地將現在的印度重疊在過去由摩爾人統治的西班牙之上，這種後殖民的羊皮紙影像便可藉由文化差異與多元文化的概念得到更具體的意義。此外，閾限空間也是一種不同文化的接觸地帶，這樣的中介地域也有助於理解魯希迪在流行文化與高等文化間所採的折衷主義。第四章則著重於探討霍米•巴巴如何發展閾限空間與國家意識的理論關係，還有國家與敘事之間的關係。此章也將利用國家與敘事的關係來理解魯希迪是如何在這本小說中運用許多文學技巧在小說世界中重構國家形象，尤其是文本互涉的材料與歷史的指涉這樣的技巧。 最後的總論將重申在本論文中提及的一些重要的論點，藉由重申這些論點來總結論文提及的一些重要概念的大意，並且讓魯希迪的《摩爾人的最後嘆息》與巴巴的‘閾限空間’這個文本與理論相互闡釋並佐證的關係更為清楚。 / Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh delineates, fictively and historically, a family saga in India. The four-generation family approximately spans the twentieth century that, generally speaking, has gone through colonization and imperialism in the first half as well as de-colonization and nationalism in the second half. Accordingly, they bring forth a few significant issues, such as hybridity, multiculturalism, and nationalism. Homi Bhabha’s idea of ‘liminal space’ is conducive to the evaluation of the novel, and expressly to the discussion of the above three concepts in a more specific way. He subsumes a lot of ideas under the umbrella term ‘liminal space’, so this thesis is to extract three ideas—hybridity, cultural difference, and nationness—to elaborate on the novel. The introductory chapter expounds Bhabha’s idea of ‘liminal space’ and also explores a few post-colonial issues in the novel. The issues in question are related to Bhabha’s idea of ‘liminal space’, from which some key ideas are derived so as to appreciate the fictional world Rushdie constructs in the novel. The following three chapters are respectively based on the three liminality-related ideas, whereby to find the relation of the novel with Bhabha’s ‘liminal space’. The second chapter is to obtain a deeper apprehension of colonial and post-colonial hybridity through Bhabha’s argumentation concerning the ambivalent relationship between colonizer and colonized. The ambivalent relationship is theoretically associated with the othering process. In the process, identification and subjectification are moot questions not only in post-colonial theory but in the novel as well. The third chapter is intended to make use of Bhabha’s idea of ‘cultural difference’ to review and redefine what the word ‘multiculturalism’ is like. In turn, it helps to shed much more light upon Rushdie’s palimpsesting modern India over Moorish Spain. In addition, liminal space refers to a contact zone of cultural difference that elucidates Rushdie’s eclecticism between popular culture and high culture in the novel. The fourth chapter is to discuss the way Bhabha colligates liminal space and the idiolect ‘nationness’ and the way he relates the idea of nation to narration. The relationship between nation and narration is applied to the understanding of how Rushdie utilizes literary techniques, especially intertextual materials and historical allusions, for a re-construction of a nation in a fictional world. The conclusive chapter is to reiterate some important arguments that are germane to the above key concepts and to the reciprocal clarification between Bhabha’s ‘liminal space’ and Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh.

This thesis, dedicated to the analysis of the cross-cultural management, presents in its first part a literature review in order to comprehend the actual stage of the cross-cultural management research. From this point of view we will approach general aspects of the human resources management and of the organizational culture, perceived as managerial instruments for the management of the cultural differences into an organization (chapter 1). In the following chapters (2 & 3), the analysis concerned the discourse on cultural difference and the post-socialist work ethic, perceived as the major cultural difference that impacts the crosscultural interactions in the foreign enterprises from Romania. These aspects will be developed from an applied perspective in the second part of our thesis. The chapters of the second part of the thesis are dedicated, on one hand, to the analysis of cultural differences management in the foreign SMEs from Romania, and, on the other hand, to a methodological proposition regarding the study of the cross-cultural management in Romania. These analyses and propositions are based on the identification of the main crosscultural management practices in the multinational corporations in Romania, through the analysis of the interviews, from the Romanian economic press, with employees and managers of the multinational corporations and on three case studies on SME with Italian participation on social capital, from textiles and wood industries / Cette thèse, consacrée à l’analyse du management interculturel, présente dans la première partie une revue de la littérature afin d’appréhender l’état actuel des recherches dans le domaine du management interculturel. Dans cette perspective, nous abordons les aspects généraux de la gestion des ressources humaines et de la culture d’entreprise, entendus comme des instruments managériaux de gestion des différences culturelles dans une organisation (chapitre 2). Dans les chapitres suivants (3 & 4), l’analyse a porté sur le discours relatif à la différence culturelle et sur l’éthique postsocialiste du travail, entendue comme la principale différence culturelle qui affecte les interactions interculturelles dans les entreprises étrangères en Roumanie. Ces aspects seront davantage développés de manière appliquée dans la deuxième partie. Les chapitres de la deuxième partie de la thèse sont consacrés, d’une part, à l’analyse de la gestion de la différence culturelle dans des petites et moyennes entreprises (PME) implantées en Roumanie et, d’autre part, à une proposition d’ordre méthodologique en vue de l’étude du management interculturel en Roumanie. Ces analyses et ces propositions prennent appui sur l’identification des principales pratiques de management interculturel dans les entreprises multinationales (EMN) actives en Roumanie relevées chez les managers et employés des EMN et sur trois études de cas réalisées sur des PME de l’industrie du textile et du bois avec participation italienne au caprftital social

Der vorliegende Band wirft einen Blick in verschiedene Forschungsfelder, die an der Professur Interkulturelle Kommunikation der Technischen Universität Chemnitz in den letzten Jahren von Studierenden im Masterstudiengang ‚Interkulturelle Kommunikation – Interkulturelle Kompetenz‘ bearbeitet wurden. Die den sechs Artikeln zugrunde liegenden Studien nutzen Methoden der qualitativen Sozialforschung zur Datenerhebung und -auswertung. Die Artikel thematisieren interkulturelle Lernprozesse in internationalen Workcamps und interkulturellen Trainings, Erfahrungen während eines Auslandsstudiums und im interreligiösen Austausch sowie die Zusammenarbeit in multikulturellen Teams. / This volume gives insight into different research projects conducted by students in the master‘s programme ‚Intercultural Communication – Intercultural Competence‘ at the Chair of Intercultural Communication at Chemnitz University of Technology. All empirical studies on which the articles are based use methods of qualitative social research for data collection and analysis. The articles focus on intercultural learning processes in international workcamps and intercultural trainings, experiences during studies abroad and in interreligious dialogues as well as cooperation in multicultural teams.