Games from around the world: Promoting intercultural competence through sport education in secondary school students

Intercultural competence (IC) is a key competence in individuals’ life. Educational programs carried out to date have been motivated by the presence of culturally diverse students. This situation calls for programs to be implemented in low cultural diversity contexts, considering its repercussion on all students.This study aimed to explore the impact of a Sport Education Model (SEM)-based program about games from around the world on seventh-grade students’ intercultural competence and friendship goals. A quasi-experimental control group design (pre-test, post-test, and retention test measures) was carried out. The experimental group (EG) followed a SEM-based program (18 sessions) about games from around the world, whilst the control group (CG) was not exposed to any specific treatment, continuing with its ordinary syllabus. Data were collected from questionnaires, interviews and field notes.EG obtained significant improvements on reward, help, intercultural understanding and friendship-approach goals; whereas CG had significant diminishment on both intercultural sensitivity and understanding, as well as on friendship goals. Qualitative results conveyed: (a) an approach to new cultural realities; (b) how the teaching content led to cultural reflection; (c) how students created new relationships; (d) greater collaborative relationships; (e) how the model helped to mitigate negative behaviours; and (f) how the intervention provided students with greater opportunities for participation. Games from around the world are shown to be a suitable content for developing IC, suggesting the need for expanding evidence about possible effects of new teaching contents when conjugated with SEM.     

Bulgarian pirates: At the world's end

The present article compares the strategies of the legitimation of piracy developed by Western authors such as Richard Stallman and Larry Lessig with those developed by everyday Bulgarian pirates. It attempts to escape from the usual debate between the entertainment industries and the supporters of free culture, and to open the field for new perspectives. In Bulgaria it is precisely “free” as in “free beer” that matters, since the prices of cultural products tend to be too high for the Bulgarian market. In many cases, there is no possible legal access to the cultural products desired. The digital library “Chitanka” illustrates how piracy as bottom-up initiative compensates for the lack of successful public policies oriented towards visually impaired people and Bulgarian emigrants abroad. Although mobility and de-territorialisation have made piracy possible, it is perceived as a deeply national cause. The article emphasises that a difference should be made between open non-commercial projects as “Chitanka” and commercial torrent trackers, which thrive in the grey economy and abuse the symbolic capital of free culture. Piracy should be analysed at the intersections of global economic shifts and their local repercussions, of transnational culture flows and local culture infrastructure. Only this kind of an approach is likely to help us trace the unstable border between the cases in which digital piracy is a problem of the grey economy, and those in which it offers original non-market solutions to deeper structural problems.     

Contesting Popular Dancing and Dance Music in Britain During the 1920s

ABSTRACT

This article examines various reactions to new forms of dance music and dance in Britain during the 1920s. It shows how these new cultural forms were part of broader social and economic changes, and notes how they are seen to represent a considerable break with previous cultural forms. In particular, such changes have been seen as symbolic of the widespread ‘Americanization’ of British culture. This article questions the degree to which this was true. It thus examines attempts by ‘professionals' to fashion ‘British’ versions of both dance music and social dances. In addition, it examines how audiences resisted and exacerbated these developments.     

Kim Kardashian is my new BFF: Video games and the looking glass celebrity

Mobile-based celebrity games are a by-product of a new, more feminized video game industry. Within celebrity games, the player engages with celebrity culture in a variety of ways, often being transformed into their own brand of celebrity. Celebrity games are a form of hypertrophic media, based on the dyadic interactions between the player and celebrity. Within this, one becomes a looking-glass celebrity—an enculturation process by which the celebrity text situates the player as closer to the titular star than the player actually is. In turn, the player uses this position to reflexively construct what the player believes constitutes a successful celebrity. The path to fame, however, is a hollow one, wherein the player can never really lose and never really win.     

Language Teachers’ Intercultural Identity in the Critical Context of Cultural Globalization and Its Metaphoric Realization

ABSTRACT

This study used questionnaires and interviews to investigate Iranian English language teachers’ intercultural identity and its metaphoric realization in the context of cultural globalization. While questionnaire findings revealed that the majority held first language cultural identity, factor analysis indicated teachers’ preference for American culture as representative of globalized culture. Interview data indicated teachers’ imagined direct exposure to the global village through the media. Metaphoric analysis revealed the conceptualization of local culture as closed home, which was valued by anti-cultural globalization teachers as protection while devalued by pro-cultural globalization teachers as a limitation. These findings have implications for expanding teachers’ intercultural identity.     

Museums and the material assets of dignity and memory: Confronting loss without compensation in Expolio and Francofonia

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the connections between memory and human dignity as it intersects with art and art museums. Two recent examples—the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos 2016 exhibit Expolio, and Alexander Sokurov’s 2015 film-essay, Francofonia—highlight the need for a larger conversation regarding the way accumulation and loss of cultural products uphold or denigrate human dignity, a concept that is not often thought of in relation to the assets of art museums. Using the historical frames set out by these examples, which span from the opening of the Louvre to the plundering of cultural artifacts in Syria, I argue that dignity has always been an asset of museums. It is through the merging of dignity and memory, in the context of art and culture, that the emerging field of human rights museology can begin to speak more broadly to art history and memory studies alike.     

Performing Bandung: China’s dance diplomacy with India,Indonesia, and Burma, 1953–1962

While dance was a common element of international diplomacy activities around the world during the 1950s and early 1960s, scholars have only recently begun to focus attention on this topic, especially as it concerns relationships forged beyond those of the Cold War superpowers. Using previously unexamined historical materials such as rare photographs and performance programs, dancer biographies, autobiographies and personal interviews, unpublished institutional histories, and contemporary periodicals, this article demonstrates not only that dance was an integral part of China’s inter-Asian cultural exchange between 1953 and 1962, but also that the PRC developed a distinct approach to dance diplomacy. Through a series of exchanges with India, Indonesia and Burma, China’s foreign ministers and dancers developed and refined a method of dance diplomacy in which the primary goal was to learn from, rather than export to, these neighboring countries. This approach harnessed the affective power of embodied aesthetic culture to literally “perform” Bandung ideals, namely, cooperation and mutual respect among Asian nations and an anti-imperialist cultural stance. Through the establishment in 1962 of the Oriental Song and Dance Ensemble, the PRC institutionalized this model of dance diplomacy, expanding it to include the entire Third World. Bandung-era dance diplomacy initiatives of the 1950s and early 1960s not only supported important new international alliances and political movements, but also asserted China’s self-identity as part of the East in the way that challenged Eurocentric ideals previously entrenched in China’s domestic dance field.     

Celebrity

ABSTRACT

Recent debates about the meaning and role of cultural history have focused on the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘society’. Some have taken this opportunity to position cultural history as a site of resistance to ‘biological’ explanations of human behaviour. In contrast, this article argues that ‘biological’ methodologies – particularly the perspectives of evolutionary psychology – can usefully contribute to the historical understanding of culture and social development. To this end, it outlines the fundamentals of Darwinist psychology, suggests options for interdisciplinary cooperation and uses the topic of interpersonal violence to explore the potential for uniting cultural, social and evolutionary psychological methodologies.     

How ‘should’ the majority group acculturate? Acculturation expectations and their correlates among minority- and majority-group members

Do minority-group members welcome or reject that majority-group members adopt other cultures? Acculturation is commonly defined as a process of mutual accommodation. Yet, the acculturation of majority-group members has only recently received research attention. To date, we do not know the extent to which minority-group members expect majority-group members to adopt the culture of minority groups and/or to maintain their mainstream culture. Knowledge is also lacking about how these expectations relate to minority-group members’ own acculturation orientations and symbolic and realistic threat perceptions. We further do not know whether such associations are similar among minority- and majority-group members. To address these gaps, we surveyed 246 Muslim minority-group members and 247 White Christian majority-group members in the United Kingdom. Muslim minority-group members’ acculturation expectations towards majority-group members were normally distributed around the midpoint of the scale, suggesting that they did not reject majority-group acculturation on average. Acculturation expectations were correlated with symbolic and realistic threat perceptions among majority-group members but not among minority-group members. Cluster analyses showed that integrated Muslim minority-group members found it relatively important for majority-group members to adopt minority-group culture and to maintain their own culture. In sum, the results support the idea that minority-group members, at least in some contexts and settings, view acculturation as a mutual cultural change rather than as cultural appropriation.     

Cultural policy indicators: reflections on the role of official statisticians in the politics of data collection

Cultural policy indicators are being constructed in many countries today as a consequence of reforms in public governance aimed at increasing cost-effectiveness and general efficiency as well as transparency and accountability. Drawing upon a project of the Finnish Ministry of Education, the article discusses the responsibilities of official statisticians in regard to the collection and processing of data to be used as “evidence” of the outcomes of cultural policies. Official statisticians are bound by an ethical code that emphasises the objective and independent production of information on different aspects of the economy and society. Direct involvement with the construction of cultural policy indicators may threaten the integrity of official statisticians, because such work would require close collaboration with administrators and decision makers who have their own particular interests in the cultural field. Moreover, the system of cultural statistics, which was established internationally at the turn of the 1970s, has a history of providing justification for public cultural policies. The Finnish project, in which two officials from Statistics Finland functioned in the role of commissioned experts, was officially about societal effectiveness indicators but was extended to encompass arguments for cultural policy. The final report even went as far as to propose that cultural considerations could be mainstreamed through indices and evaluation schemes covering all policy sectors. The article shows how easily official statisticians are drawn into the politics of data collection in the field of culture even when precautions are in place. The article concludes that the code of ethics of official statisticians serves as an indispensable buffer against partiality, but, to put this ideal fully into action, cultural statisticians need to develop reflexive practices that combine an applied approach and critical discourse. Such practices are similar to those outlined recently by cultural policy researchers.     

Teachers' Discoveries of Their Cultural Realms: Untangling the Web of Cultural Identity

Educators need to explore and understand their own cultural identities before they can comprehend and appreciate their students' cultural backgrounds. In this article, the author presents the findings from a qualitative study that investigated in-service teachers' awareness of and characterization of their culture. She also discusses the importance of affording educators opportunities to reflect on and make the connection between culture and their worldview. The author concludes by recommending useful and practical next steps once teachers have a better understanding of their cultural identities.     

On Shanghai’s middle class: a preliminary survey report

In the past 20 years, new concepts and vocabulary have kept emerging to classify and characterize China’s middle class, via cultural symbols related to consumerism. Today, the middle-class culture at its post-nascent state has taken on some new features. The current study, which is based on a survey of the cultural situation of the middle class in Shanghai, found that the new features are mainly manifested in three aspects. First, they like being outdoors, close to nature, doing some extreme sports. Second, being aware of the importance of fitness and wellbeing, they tend to pursue a healthy lifestyle. Third, they all suffer some sort of anxiety. These new features come as a result of three intertwined underlying causes, i.e. the rapid deterioration of the natural environment, the widespread home culture, and the mounting political and economic pressure. Together, they mark a turn in the middle-class culture from external identity to inward physical and mental needs. As Shanghai’s middle-class culture is most representative of that of the country, a basic judgement and preliminary conclusion can be made based on the survey about the cultural situation of the Chinese middle class as a whole.     

Measuring the Size and Concentration of Business Funding of Culture in the UK: Closing the Gap between Advocacy and Theory

In the past few years, UK public bodies have increased their calls for cultural leaders to diversify even further their funding sources and exploit the dynamics of the mixed-economy. So far only major cultural organisations in London have been able to successfully diversify their funding portfolio. A drop in public funding is likely to make it even more challenging for a large proportion of cultural organisations to close their income gap. To ensure the successful development of policies of funding decentralisation and inform organisational strategies, more theory-based empirical research on trends, drivers and motivations, and models of funding sustainability is needed. One of the many factors preventing the development of this line of research is a wide gap between research conducted for advocacy purposes and academia in the UK. This paper illustrates the extent and implications of this gap by providing a brief summary of the academic literature in the field and reviewing methods and results of existing data collection efforts by advocacy organisations, in particular the Private Investment in Culture survey by Arts & Business UK (A&B). The scope of this paper has been limited to business funding in the form of cash and in-kind sponsorship, donations and membership, since there is relatively more cross-sectional time series data and academic and advocacy studies of this form of funding than of individual giving and trust and foundation support. The paper proposes recommendations on ways of closing this gap, in particular by improving existing sampling methodology for this type of data collection and expanding and strengthening the existing academic research on motivations, market dynamics and concentration of business funding.     

Beyond the ‘feminization of masculinity’: transforming patriarchy with the ‘feminine’ in contemporary Japanese youth culture

Contemporary Japanese society has seen the emergence of aesthetically conscious young men who employ ‘feminine’ aesthetics and strategies as ways of exploring and practising new masculine identities. In this paper, I explore the significance of this emerging trend of male beauty by observing and analysing the expressions, strategies and intentions of those young men who have taken to aesthetically representing themselves in these ways. This cultural trend is often described as the ‘feminization of masculinity,’ echoing the gendered articulation of rising mass culture in terms of the ‘feminization of culture,’ which acknowledges aspects of the commercialization of masculine bodies in Japan of the 1990s onward. While this view successfully links important issues, such as femininity, beauty, and the gendered representation of the self in a broader context of capitalist culture, it does not sufficiently convey a sense of agency in the young men's lively practices of exploring and expressing new masculine values and ideals. Rather than viewing ‘feminization’ simply as a sign of commodification, I argue that these young men strategically distance themselves from conventional masculinity by artificially standing in the position of the ‘feminine’, where they can more freely engage in the creation of alternative gender identities. From this point of view, the use of the phrase ‘feminization of masculinity’ often implies a fear and anxiety on the part of patriarchy over the boundary‐crossing practice that seriously challenges the stability of gendered cultural hegemony. Moreover, such anxiety driven reactions easily merge with nationalist inclination, as those threatened tend to seek the consolidation of patriarchal/hegemonic order by eliminating ambiguities and indeterminacy in cultural/national discourse. I conclude that the cultural hegemony of contemporary Japan could better sustain itself by incorporating non‐hegemonic gender identities, which would allow it maintain an open space for critical imagination and effectively diffuse an obsessive and ultimately self‐destructive desire for transparency/identity.     

The Culture of Mexican-Americans: Its Importance for Early Childhood Educators

This paper provides an introduction to the Mexican-American culture, describing (1) cultural diversity and linguistic policies in the United States; (2) cultural and linguistic studies that have examined the backgrounds of Mexican-American individuals; (3) the characteristics of this population; (4) issues on discrimination and human relations; (5) the socioeconomic factors that Mexican-American individuals encountered due to their lack of education; and (6) the predominance of poorly paid and undereducated unskilled workers. Although many Mexican Americans have moved up the social ladder to the middle class, others have not. However, they have a richness of language and culture to share with the school.     

Breaking the chains of two dimensions: The tridimensional process-oriented acculturation model TDPOM

This paper considers the acculturation process and the ways in which it can unfold. The main focus is directed towards the possibility of creating novel ways of acting and living as a form of acculturation. Although this possibility has been acknowledged by researchers, it has been mostly integrated into typologies of biculturalism based on John Berry’s bidimensional acculturation model, and considered to belong to integration strategy. It is argued that such an approach poses logical and methodological problems, and that the form of acculturation, where something novel is created, goes beyond the bidimensional conceptualization of acculturation. A new model extending Berry’s model is proposed. It includes a third dimension which refers to the possibility of creating new ways of acting and living to the process which will be subsequently referred to as cultural creation. Distinctions and relationships with other tridimensional models and/or models including cultural creation process are discussed. Subsequently, another layer to the model is introduced which relates to the understanding of culture providing foundation for the model. Familiarity, unfamiliarity and novelty are proposed as reference points for the model’s dimensions, enabling the model to move away from the systemic conception of culture and integrate the constructivist understanding of culture. The potential mechanisms responsible for the creation of novelty within the acculturation process are discussed in context of two theoretical approaches: the creative cognition approach and the practice approach.     

Wittgenstein,Organic Form,and an Orientation to Intercultural Language Games

This essay revisits Wittgenstein’s work in relation to intercultural communication. Specifically, it considers how Wittgenstein’s philosophy relates to the analysis of cultural discourses as intercultural language games. The paper proposes a move beyond anti-essentialist interpretations of language games and towards the idea of cultures as family resemblance concepts in the context of Wittgenstein’s naturalism. The idea of organic form is proposed to distinguish this naturalism from that of the sciences. The possibility that Wittgenstein viewed languages and cultures as organic forms is a way to draw connections between his philosophy and more enigmatic, pessimistic views regarding culture and civilization. Together with the familiar philosophical concepts, it is argued that these views offer insights for intercultural communication research today.     

Hinduism and the State in Trinidad

Abstract

Between 1845 and 1917, a total number of 143,939 Indian immigrants were brought to Trinidad under the system of Indian indenture to fill the labour gap created by the abolition of slavery. Approximately 88% of these immigrants practised various facets of Hinduism. Upon completion of their five‐year periods of contracted labour, over 90% of the indentureds opted to make Trinidad their permanent home. From their very entrance into Trinidad society, Hindus were engaged in the practice of many aspects of their religion. However, in Trinidad, elements of religion were variously truncated, modified, diluted, intensified or excised. During the initial decades of Indian indenture, Indian cultural forms were met with either contempt or indifference. Yet, despite the arduous nature of the task, various dimensions of Indian culture have now been integrated into the Trinidad and Tobago's multicultural prism.

Whether within the context of colonialism, the immediate post independence ferment, or the post 1980s dynamic political ethos, Trinidad's ‘cultural’ diversity has consistently underscored intriguing, sometimes tumultuous dialogue between the State and various elements of the society. Predictably, the common factor and point of contention was the conflict between Hindu and non‐Hindu ideologies. This essay seeks to explore one dimension of that dialogue; namely, the engagement of the Trinidad Hindu community with the State, with specific emphasis on the issues that can be situated within the realm of culture. These include Adult Franchise, the Hindu Marriage Bill, the Divorce Bill, the Cremation Ordinance, the issuing of capitation grants, education, symbolic claims and ‘nationalizing’. Underscoring the dialogue are two, often contradictory, determinants: the attitude of the State towards Hinduism (and Indian culture on the whole), and the tension between the retention of ‘Hindu’ culture and the need to transcend the boundaries of communalist discourse into the nationalist frame. Therein resides the crux of a most intriguing interaction between two very dynamic entities.     

The story of xiao jie ('working' girls)

Abstract

This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contributions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be rethought. This conjuncture arose from thinking about culture in the framework of nationalism and the anti‐colonial struggle, and the alignment of women with national culture. I discuss briefly the trajectory of how we have gone about investigating the culture‐gender conjuncture, present a reformulation of what I think we're up against, and introduce some new research projects which are trying to take this on board. The focus in these projects is on the question of translation, and how the issue of ‘regional’ languages poses a challenge to prevalent ideas in the women's movement and in feminist teaching. The larger proposition is that we need to formulate curricula based on new kinds of research if we are to take feminism into the cultural studies classroom of the future.