International Doctoral Summer School

Identity and Interculturality: Research Methods

Date & place: 4-8 July 2011, Roskilde University, Denmark
Conveners: Fred Dervin (University of Turku, Finland) and Karen Risager (Roskilde University, Denmark)
Institutional affiliation: The international research network Cultnet and the Doctoral programme of Intercultural Studies, Roskilde University                                     

Sponsored by a range of institutions and collaborators, see below

Invited Guests

• Michael Byram (University of Durham, England)
• Claire Kramsch (University of California at Berkeley, USA)
• Alex Gillespie (University of Stirling, Scotland)
• Mike Baynham (University of Leeds, England)
• Iben Jensen (Roskilde University, Denmark) 

Aims and Target Group of the Summer School

The aims of the Roskilde Summer School are threefold:

• to help students grasp and critically engage with the notions of identity and interculturality and see how they are related
• to get to know various research methods that can help students to work within cultural and social complexity
• to discuss their own research topics and to get to test various research tools that can help them to move on in/improve their research

The Summer School is meant to be transdisciplinary, and the target group is PhD students from all disciplinary backgrounds who are especially interested in methodologies related to this field of study. 

Thematic Areas

Discussions at the Summer School are to be organised in four thematic areas:

• Education: identity and interculturality in education and learning
• Migration: identity and interculturality in migration and other kinds of mobility
• Literature: identity and interculturality in literary representation and literary practice
• Technologies: identity and interculturality developed via digital technologies and media 

Identity and Interculturality

The Summer School deals with an interdisciplinary field of study framed by the concepts of identity and interculturality. The focus is on how people (co-)construct complex identifications in space and time.

The concept of identity is one of the pivotal concepts of our times – but also one of the most controversial. It has been theorized from many different disciplinary angles in the humanities and the social sciences, and has been a central concept in the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies. It covers a richness of perspectives such as identity and experience, identity and the body, identity and politics, identity and recognition, etc., and a wide range of sociocultural parametres have been explored: identity and gender, age, profession, nationality, ethnicity, race, language, religion, class, etc. In today’s research – but this is not really ‘new’, cf. ancient Greek philosophers – there seems to be an agreement on the fact that identity doesn’t exist in itself but that it is constructed and thus not a given.

Interculturality has come to be an umbrella term for a view of the world that foregrounds complexity of meaning production and identity construction at both micro and macro levels. Here as well, the terms are legio to express these phenomena: cultural diversity, transculturality, cultural complexity, cultural hybridity, etc. Researchers now emphasize that these shouldn’t be used interchangeably as they are not synonymous. This means that researchers must position themselves clearly within the terminology.

The term ‘intercultural’ is used in a range of expressions illuminating different aspects of subjectivity: intercultural being, intercultural experience, intercultural identity, intercultural practice, intercultural communication, intercultural learning, intercultural competence, intercultural citizenship, intercultural responsibility.

The study of identity and interculturality is also the study of a whole array of social problems and power-issues like dominance, inequality, subalternity, exclusion/inclusion, minority/majority, othering, marginalization, discrimination, essentialization, ethnicism, racism, linguicism, culturalism – and their consequences for the subject, both the dominated and the dominator. 

Focus on Research Methods

In the vast and fertile field of studies on identity and interculturality the focus will be on research methods. For novice researchers the issue of researching complexity is very challenging. They often work within postmodern, post-structuralist or deconstructivist paradigms, which have questioned solid understandings of basic concepts such as identity, subjectivity and culture. But they may find it hard to identify analytical tools that can allow working within complexity, plurality and instability.

The focus will primarily be on qualitative methods, such as ethnographic studies, conversation analysis, dialogical studies, discourse and narrative studies, biographical studies, action research, as well as triangulations of these. However, we do not want to treat the qualitative/quantitative divide too absolutely. In some research projects on identities it may be highly relevant to supplement or contextualize by means of quantitative methods. (And ‘qualitative methods’ may very well exhibit quantitative aspects, whereas ‘quantitative methods’ certainly exhibit qualitative aspects.)  

In methodological reflections, the language aspect is often important, both in the sense that much of the research process is indeed discursive, and in the sense that all people involved in research, including informants, speak one or more languages, and choose to communicate in one or more language(s), perhaps mediated by an interpreter. In research on interculturality, in particular, the question of what languages are spoken and by whom, may be highly relevant, as the choice of languages is neither culturally nor politically neutral.

Working Methods

The Summer School will be composed of:

• lectures by experts + discussants
• parallel workshops on the above-mentioned four thematic areas. In the workshops students will present their work and get feedback from the experts
• roundtables on specific issues related to methodology 

ECTS and Assessment

Participation in the Summer School equals 8 ECTS. The assessment comprizes project excerpt focusing on methodology (33%), presentation and discussion (33%), and an essay containing further reflections on methodology based on the Summer School (33%).

Cultnet, Conveners, Invited Guests/Plenary Speakers, Other Teachers

Cultnet is an international research network of researchers and PhD students in the area of language and intercultural communication and learning. It was started in 1997 by Professor Michael Byram, Durham, UK (see below), and it has had regular meetings in Europe (mostly Durham) and in East Asia (recently Tokyo). It constitutes a strong and productive environment for theoretical and methodological development and has given impetus to several cross-national research projects and publications, e.g. Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural Competence (Lies Sercu et al. 2005), Living and Studying Abroad (eds. Michael Byram & Anwei Feng 2006) and Becoming Intercultural: Inside and Outside the Classroom (eds. Yau Tsai & Stephanie Houghton 2010).

See: http://cultnetworld.wordpress.com/

Intercultural Studies, which hosts the Summer School, is a Doctoral programme at the Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University, and it is also the name of a research group. It focuses on the problematics of cultural encounters in both Denmark and elsewhere. It deals with (intersections between) ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, race, gender and class, focusing on cultural representation, subject formation, identity construction and identity politics in a social, global and postcolonial perspective.

Fred Dervin is Adj. Professor at the University of Turku and the University of Eastern Finland, and a member of Cultnet. He has published widely on identity and interculturality within various contexts: academic mobility, language learning and teaching, digital technologies, and mixed couplehood. His approach to these issues combines anthropology and sociology of postmodernity, philosophy and psychology with French discourse analysis and dialogism. Selected publications: Students, staff and academic mobility in higher education (edited with M. Byram, Cambridge Scholars, 2008); Digital technologies of the Self (edited with Y. Abbas, Cambridge Scholars, 2009; Etudiants liquides: mobilité Erasmus, interculturalité et identité (L’Harmattan, 2010). 

Karen Risager is Professor of Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University and a member of Cultnet. She has published widely on language, culture and identity theorized in a transnational and global perspective. Empirical areas researched are the cultural dimensions of foreign language teaching and learning, the cultural dimensions of second language learning among migrants, and multilingual policies at the international university. Selected publications: Language Teachers, Politics and Cultures (with M. Byram, Multilingual Matters, 1999); Language and Culture: Global Flows and Local Complexity (Multilingual Matters, 2006); Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a National to a Transnational Paradigm (Multilingual Matters, 2007).

Michael Byram is Professor Emeritus of the University of Durham, and has been the organiser of Cultnet since its beginning in the late 1990s when he was approached by several students from other universities for help with their theses on intercultural language teaching. At his own university he has supervised over 70 doctoral students and examined many more in Britain and other countries. He has published several monographs (e.g. From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship, 2008), and edited, with Durham colleagues, several collections, some of which have arisen from the work of Cultnet (e.g. Becoming interculturally competent through education and training, 2009). He is the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning and Adviser to the Council of Europe Language Policy Division. 

Claire Kramsch is Professor of German and Affiliate Professor of Education at the University of California at Berkeley. She has published widely on language, discourse and culture in applied linguistics. Her recent work has focused on the ecology of language learning and teaching, subjectivity in language, and on post-structuralist approaches to the study of language and identity. Selected publications: Context and Culture in Language teaching 1993; Language and Culture 1998; Language Acquisition and Language Socialization: Ecological perspectives 2002; The Multilingual Subject 2009. 

Alex Gillespie is Senior Lecturer at the University of Stirling in the UK, and from mid-2011, he will be Co-Editor of Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. His research focuses on joint activity, intersubjectivity, self, and self-reflection. He is influenced by the work of James, Mead, Vygotsky and Bakhtin. He has a monograph entitled Becoming other: From social interaction to self-reflection published by Information Age Publishing. He is co-editor, with Ivana Marková, of a forthcoming volume entitled Trust and Conflict: Representation, Culture and Dialogue to be published by Routledge. 

Mike Baynham is Professor of TESOL and Director of the Centre for Language Education Research at the University of Leeds. He researches in literacy studies and has published extensively in this field. Recent publications include The Future of Literacy Studies (Palgrave, 2009) and Literacies: Global and Local (Benjamins, 2008) both edited with Mastin Prinsloo. He was co-coordinator in the mid 1990s to early 2000s with Mastin Prinsloo of the AILA Socientific Commission on Literacy, which became the focus of an influential series of international seminars. Another strand of research with which he is currently engaged is that of migration narratives, an interest arising out of his doctoral research. Recent publications include Baynham & de Fina (eds.) (2005) Dislocations /Relocations: narratives of displacement. He is currently co-coordinator with Stef Slembrouck of the AILA Research Network on Language and Migration, which is conducting a series of research seminars with a language and migration focus, to date in Leeds, Coimbra, Barcelona, Southampton, Fribourg.

Iben Jensen is Associate Professor at Roskilde University. She has published widely on intercultural communication, culture and cultural identity. She has conducted empirical research concerning job interviews, school-parent communication, Pakistani food culture and identity, intercultural network communication, and intercultural practices in education at globalised universities. Selected publications: “If Culture Is Practice …? A Practice Theoretical Perspective on Intercultural Communication and Mediation” (Transforming Otherness, 2011); “Rethinking intercultural network communication as a resource in public intercultural health communication” (with Bente Halkier, Journal of Intercultural Communication, 2011); “The Aspect of Power in Intercultural Communication Practice” (Bridges of Understanding: Perspectives on Intercultural Communication, 2006).

Birgitta Frello is Associate Professor in Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University. She holds an MA in Cultural Sociology and a PhD. in European Studies. Her research primarily focuses on constructions of cultural identity in various forms of media production, particularly as regards problems concerning conflict and power. Furthermore, she has published on theoretical and analytical issues related to questions of the construction, naturalization, and transgression of categories of identity and difference. Selected publications: Essentialism, Hybridism and Cultural Critique. (In Cultural Studies Now: Conference Journal 2007. www.University of East London); Towards a discursive analytics of movement: On the making and unmaking of movement as an object of knowledge. (In: Mobilities, 2(1), 2008); Dark Blood. (In: Kult, 7, 2010). 

Connie Carøe Christiansen is Associate Professor at the Department of Society and Globalization at Roskilde University, where she teaches International Development Studies and Global Studies. Using ethnographic methods, she has studied gender and reform movements in the Middle East, and recently she has published on identities and socio-cultural differentiation in studies of migration and social remittances in transnational villages, and on Islamic fashion as a new social force in Europe: “Migrants and non-migrants in Kücükkale: consumption and cultural differentiation in the transnational village”, forthcoming in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies; and “Visibly Muslim? Sartorial Strategies of Islamic fashion” forthcoming in ”Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Sponsors and Collaborators

• Roskilde University, Rector’s Development Fund
• The Doctoral programme of Regional Studies, based at the University of Copenhagen
• The Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University
• The Department of Society and Globalisation (International Development Studies), Roskilde University
• The CALPIU Research Centre, Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University
• The Network for Research on Multiculturalism and Societal Interaction (MCnet) of the University of Turku

Advisory Board for the Summer School

Michael Byram, University of Durham
Anwei Feng, Bangor University
Adelheid Hu, University of Hamburg
Auvo Kostiainen, University ofTurku
Claire Kramsch, University of California at Berkerley
Anne Lavanchy, University of Lausanne
Tony Liddicoat, University of South Australia
Simona Pekarek-Doehler, University of Neuchâtel
Martine A. Pretceille, University of Paris Sorbonne
Shi-xu, Zhejiang University

Secretariat of the Summer School

Student assistant Tinna Kryger   
Student assistant Shaho Pirani     
Head of the organizing committee: Professor Karen Risager