Evaluating the self and the other: Imagined intercultural contact within a ‘native-speaker’ dependent foreign language context

Recent research has shown that imagined intercultural contact, being based upon the adoption of principles of mental imagery and imagination, is able to elicit similar emotional, attitudinal and motivational responses as actual lived contact experiences. Furthermore, it has been noted that possessing the multiple competencies required to successfully negotiate an intercultural contact encounter with a target language speaker represents one of the most prominent sources of motivation for many foreign language learners. Therefore, situated within the context of a Japanese foreign language university which exhibits a dependency on ‘native-speaker’ English teachers from inner-circle (Kachru, 1985) countries, this paper showcases a social psychological study undertaken with 120 Japanese English language learners which sought to explore various dimensions of imagined intercultural contact via evaluations of the self and three intercultural others of different racial and ethnic appearance across two specific contact situations (positive and neutral). The outcomes are discussed in relation to underlying theories, as well as to the practical implications created for the improvement of foreign language teaching and learning practices which specifically seek to incorporate an explicit intercultural dimension.     

Developing intercultural communicative competence in foreign language classrooms – A study of EFL learners in Taiwan

Internationalisation has accentuated the importance of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) among language learners in higher education in the 21st century. As in the case of Taiwan, universities worldwide have begun to emphasise intercultural ‘literacy’ in language classrooms. Following Byram’ (1997) ICC model, this study adopts an intercultural approach to language classroom in order to investigate the effectiveness of explicit instruction in developing ICC among EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners in Taiwan, and to discover how this development is related to the background factors of overseas experience and English proficiency. The accompanying research therefore has two purposes: (1) to evaluate the effectiveness of explicit instruction on EFL learners’ development of ICC by employing both self-assessment and other assessment tools and (2) to investigate the relationship between the development of ICC and two background factors. The results show that (1) explicit instruction is effective in raising students’ development of ICC, especially the knowledge and skills dimensions, and (2) English proficiency and overseas experience are significantly related to better acquisition of ICC.     

Birds of different feathers? The relationship between multicultural personality dimensions and foreign language mastery in business professionals working in a Dutch agricultural multinational

The relationship between personality dimensions, measured with the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), and foreign language mastery were studied in a Dutch-based multinational company in the agricultural sector. In a survey, differences were studied between internal and external stakeholders to determine whether MPQ dimensions and language mastery allow us to discriminate between them. The internal stakeholders were divided into international and non-international employees; external stakeholders were the business contacts of the international employees (clients and business partners based or working abroad). The international employees were found to be more open-minded and flexible than the non-international employees, and the former group was found to be more emotionally stable than the group of business contacts. On average, the international employees reported speaking one foreign language more than both other groups. Also, the number of foreign languages correlated with the multicultural personality dimensions open-mindedness and emotional stability. It is concluded that emotional stability, open-mindedness, and the number of spoken foreign languages are to some extent predictive of differences between the various stakeholders distinguished in this sample.     

Bandung plus 50: a call for a tri‐continental dialogue on global hegemony

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to present a few arguments about the importance of holding a second Bandung Conference, broadened to include the Tri‐Continental regions, including Latin America and the Caribbean region, in the conference.     

When is a discovery? The affective dimensions of discovery in music consumption

ABSTRACT

This article explores the concept of music discovery and seeks to provide a definition of the act of discovering music content. Research on music consumption has weakly theorized what the moment of “discovery” consists of, since it has been more preoccupied with debates about the conditions of discoveries, which either highlight the importance of individuals’ social milieus or the enhanced technological agency that they enjoy in the digital age. Drawing on qualitative data about musical experiences, this article frames discoveries as affective responses to music content that occur within individuals’ life narratives and mediate their interpretation and definition of music.     

My Wild Lily: a self‐criticism from a participant in the March 1990 student movement 1

Abstract

The ‘Wild Lily’ student sit‐in in March 1990 was often praised in the later political transformation process as a crucial moment when the ‘pure and innocent’ students facilitated democratization in Taiwan. From the perspective of a participant in the protest, the author argues that the sit‐in was actually a failure of the ‘popular democratic’ wing of Taiwan's student movement in the 1980s, which championed a more radical vision of democracy. The idea of ‘popular democracy’ was an anti‐elitist ideology arising from critiques on the elite‐led political reform movement. However, due to its historical constraint, practices along this line were unable to alter the bourgeois democratic character of 1980s' democratization process in Taiwan.     

Return of the Kyai: representations of horror,commerce, and censorship in post‐Suharto Indonesian film and television 1

Abstract

In about half a decade since May 1998, changes have taken place in the content, production, distribution, exhibition, and discourse of Indonesian cinema. During Reformasi (1999–2001), the rules and regulations of cinema authorized under the New Order government of President Suharto began to be contested and re‐negotiated. The rise of new film genres and changes in concepts about existing genres and formats took place, new discourses emerged, and different communities and institutions arose that identified themselves with certain film genres or which used the medium of film for particular means, such as a medium for advocacy of human rights issues. Five to six years after 1998, it is apparent that besides changes, there are also many continuities: many old film institutions and structures for film production, distribution, and exhibition are still in place, and topics of discourses often recall past discourses of the New Order period or those held in the newly independent 1950s. This paper considers some of the changes in the understanding of genres and formulas within horror films, and discusses modes of representation and constraints in choices of subject matter in narrative practices in contemporary Indonesian cinema.     

Scandalous equivocation: a note on the politics of queer self‐naming

Abstract

This paper discusses the political and theoretical implications of the various performances of queer self‐naming (or the refusal of which) in the face of the ongoing backlash against unconventional or non‐normative genders and sexualities. It argues that, instead of a hasty call for the discarding of identity terms or naïve recourse to them, we could keep (re)using the signs without endorsing their normative meanings and line of demarcation. Through analysing some of the feminist counter‐discourses against the backlash, arguments for indigenous Japanese queerness, and a performance by a Japanese lesbian artist, Ito Tari, it shows that the queer gesture of equivocally assuming the scandalous ‘name’ may be one of the few effective survival strategies for those who have already been scandalously (mis)named.     

The idea of South Asia: a personal note on post‐Bandung blues 1

Abstract

This paper mainly discusses the transformation of the idea of South Asia in Post‐Cold War era.     

What's it like to be a Singaporean intellectual? An interview with Chua Beng Huat

Professor Chua Beng Huat is an internationally well-known and respected sociologist and cultural studies scholar from Singapore. In early 2015, his long-time collaborator and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies co-founder, Kuan-Hsing Chen, and his former student turned present colleague, Daniel Goh, interviewed Chua on the eve of his retirement as the Head of the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. This wide-ranging interview tracks a colourful biographical trajectory that expresses both the contradictions of the illiberal capitalism underpinning Singapore's rapid development and the strategic dilemmas and tactical travails of an intellectual clinging on to the representations of truth.     

The ‘Non‐dit’ in the Zenana: representations of Muslim women in Islamic canonical texts,the neo‐colonial imagination and a feminist response from Bangladesh

Abstract

This essay recognizes that representations of the ‘Muslim woman’ as the Othered ‘object’ of the ‘Western’ gaze and the domesticated ‘object’ which the Islamic apologists strive hard to defend, are both constructions and false antitheses of each other. It seeks not the ‘truth’ regarding the Muslim women in the world of social reality but to examine how various representations of the women are constructed and to what effects and consequences these representations are mobilized. The essay proceeds in three stages. The first stage shows how the patriarchy mobilizes the Qur’an and the Hadith in order to construct the woman as the negative, the inessential and the abnormal of the man so as to exert complete subordination over her. However, the very act of attempting to mute the woman in Islam is the most strident proof that she is engaged in resistance against patriarchal control and the degree of resistance must be judged by the degree of patriarchal control. The second stage demonstrates how patriarchy operates in colonial and neo‐imperial landscape: it legitimizes the appropriation of Muslim woman ‘possessed’ by the Other (as exemplified by the orientalist seduction fantasy in William Dalrymple’s The White Mughals), but, haunted by the fear of rape and anxieties regarding the sexuality of the White woman possessed by the Self, it attempts to maintain strict control over her (as in the cases of Miss Wheeler in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 and Private Jessica Lynch in the Iraq War). This struggle over the feminine body is perfectly in line with Islam’s hyper‐anxiousness to hide the female body and rigorously ensure monopolic possession over her. The third stage shows how Taslima Nasreen, a late‐20th century feminist from Bangladesh, speaks the unspoken and thereby attempts to subvert the normative representation of the muted women in her autobiographical novella, entitled āmār Meyebelā. In thus examining the representations of the Muslim women, this essay seeks an alternative ‘third space of enunciation’ and takes a distinct political stand located outside of the axis of the dichotomy of the ‘Western’ gaze and the construction of the Islamic theologians.     

Advancing the literate behaviors of a Hmong American fifth grader through cross‐age,paired, interactive tutoring

The adoption and teaching of multicultural education appears not to have transformed society's responses to difference in any obvious way. Consequently, it is proposed that multicultural education, as it is currently practiced, which focuses on teaching about other cultures, be refocused in favor of moral education, which will provide participants with a set of moral principles they can refer to when confronted by difference. To arrive at this proposal, a context is constructed, in which the disputatious nature of the concept, culture, is presented. This shows its controversial nature, yet it is used as an unproblematised point of departure in multicultural education. Social constructions of culture are then discussed and these are shown to be caricatures of what culture really is; yet these caricatures are often communicated as being representative of people's cultures. Finally, it is contended that the political dimension of multicultural education is not confronted; yet this dimension is crucial to our understanding of the asymmetrical relations of power that continue to characterize multicultural societies, and this is perpetuated by unchallenged assumptions that are made in the teaching of multicultural education.     

From boot camp to bu‐bu? IT surveillance,patriarchal familism,and labor control: a South Korean case study

Abstract

Information technology capable of real‐time evaluation has changed the nature of labor control by completely monitoring a system. This homeostasis of real‐time control eliminating the space barrier has increased workers' stress and anxiety and weakened the workers' solidarity. An IT surveillance system, frequently called an electronic panopticon, has been viewed as the sophisticated form of the Talyor principle of scientific management. However, IT surveillance has operated in the way of combined form with the cultural values of a certain society. In this paper, I show how cultural values influence labor control through IT surveillance using a case study from the tire industry. H tire company has introduced the DAS (Data Acquisition System) for increasing productivity through a new control system. Real‐time evaluation, an instant report of each workers' merit on the monitor, and compensation have made workers feel constantly under surveillance and under stress due to competition with other workers. This IT surveillance has more deeply influenced labor control when combined with patriarchal familism – composed of features such as group‐oriented attitudes, hierarchical relations between the old and young, subordination to one's seniors, etc, which have come to be viewed as some of the typical cultural values prevalent in South Korea. Although the basic principle of technology may be the same in all societies, the effects of applied information technology depend on specific socio‐historical contexts: not only culture, habits, and politics, but also the power relations between managers and workers. I will tentatively designate this as a ‘hybrid form’ of labor control, in the sense that cultural value is added or intermingled with the principle of IT surveillance.