Cultural Brokers Research Articles

Touring as labour: mobilities and reconsideration of tour guiding in everyday life

The research adopts the mobilities approach to examining the everyday experience of tour guides. Scholars tend to highlight guides as service providers and cultural brokers, whose activities and feelings seem to be subordinate to tourism consumption. In contrast, the research moves beyond the context of business and economy and seeks to resituate tour guiding in ordinary life. It draws on the ethnographic fieldwork in Sanya, a coastal city in south China, and adopts the methods of secondary data collection, interviews and participant observation for data generation. Specifically, the research scrutinises how tourism mobilities are embedded into the production of local guides’ daily practices, emotions and feelings. Tour guiding is characterised by movement/stillness, instability and contested meanings. On working days, guides travel with tourists between scenic sites, receiving unstable income. The mobile work greatly shapes their everyday rhythms, social networks, familial lives and identities. On jobless days, guides are likely to confine ordinary practices to residence and suffer from deep anxiety. Immobilities arouse their feelings of inability and worries about the future, thus lowering their expectations of career and personal development. The research problematises the idiosyncrasy of tour guiding and underscores its close relationship with the production of everyday practices and experience, thus giving a wider view on tourism work. In so doing, it also enriches our understanding of the complexity of tourism mobilities and contributes to the debate on the de-differentiation of tourism.

Thomas Wyatt among the Florentines

Abstract The article considers how Thomas Wyatt—courtier, ambassador and poet maker—became Italianate. It discovers a youthful Wyatt, with other members of Henry VIII’s court, at the company of Giovanni di Lorenzo Cavalcanti and Pierfrancesco di Piero de’ Bardi in London in the 1520s. These Florentine merchant princes were international bankers and traders, and notable cultural brokers between England and Italy. Pierfrancesco was a scholar, a collector and donor of books. Wyatt bought fine Florentine fabrics from the company. They allowed his growing indebtedness, partly through friendship, but also because of their need for the patronage of his father, Sir Henry Wyatt, Treasurer of the Chamber. Wyatt was also part of the gambling fraternity in which Francesco di Bernardo de’ Bardi was a principal player. Leaving Florence for London, the merchants did not remove themselves from the turbulent politics of their city, for their wealth and prominence ensured their continuing involvement, especially once Medici popes ruled Christendom. When Rome was sacked, and Florence established a republic, London’s Florentines were called to their city’s defence. Before he ever travelled to Italy, Thomas Wyatt encountered Italians of wealth and culture living in the grandest style in London, between the worlds of the court and the city. Perhaps with them he began to learn Italian. The story of Wyatt among the Florentines leads to life in London and the court, to the defence of Italy, to the revolutionary politics of Florence, and to Henry VIII’s ‘Great Matter’. Wyatt was precursor, and inspiration, of the Italianate Englishmen and women gathered at the humanist court of Edward VI who were fascinated by Italian culture and won to reform.

Empowering interpreters to partner in palliative care (PC) conversations: Effect of a dialogue-based curriculum.

21 Background: Effective communication across cultural and linguistic barriers during breaking bad news, DNR, and EOL conversations requires professional medical interpreters skilled in PC communication and clinicians skilled in working with interpreters. But interpreters are rarely included in meetings preceding these conversations, or made aware of the patient’s prognosis or the emotionally-charged subjects likely to arise. They may know the patient and family, cultural norms, and identify the decision makers, but often do not feel empowered to offer this crucial information to clinicians. To be effective cultural brokers, interpreters must be trained in PC terminology and feel empowered to contribute. Methods: A six-session curriculum: Palliative Care Dialogues with Interpreters, facilitated by an experienced PC social worker (SW) and physician, was delivered to medical interpreters from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The curriculum included links to relevant materials, and structured 1-hour sessions including role-plays on: Initiating and managing a pre-encounter conference; Family meetings; Terms used in PC meetings; Family meetings to discuss code status and end of life-prolonging therapies; Cultural Mediating; Interpreting for SWs and chaplains (with SW and chaplains doing role plays); and Experiencing being a cultural mediator in End of Life Care. 41 participants completed a 23-question pre- and post-course survey on their confidence in interpreting these conversations. Results: There was a highly significant improvement in interpreter post-course confidence ( N = 41. p=1.4080 x 10−11). Facilitated dialogues enabled interpreters to assert concerns, share knowledge, and practice new behaviors in a “safe” space, behaviors they reported they then used in clinical practice. Dialogues provided clinicians an opportunity to learn about the challenging linguistic, cultural and emotional experiences of medical interpreters. Conclusions: Facilitated and well-structured dialogues, including didactics, discussions and roleplaying caused highly significant improvements in interpreter confidence in interpreting PC conversations.

Art as Refuge: Jewish Publishers as Cultural Brokers in Early 1920s Russian Berlin

The past twenty years have seen a renewed interest in the academic study of the history and culture of Eastern European Jewry. This upsurge was supported by the availability of new source material and the application of innovative media for electronic data storage and retrieval. At the same time, the field of textual studies broadened to include the study of context, and new conceptual frameworks developed to encompass both the humanities and social sciences. Yet, when it comes to the study of the Jewish mission in the context of Russian emigration, scholarly views still tend to be blurred. Adequate research methods are needed to fully understand the process and consequences of the kaleidoscopic fluxes of people and ideologies in a time of rapid social change during the years following the October Revolution. The aim of the present article is to improve this understanding. Borrowing the paradigm of “cultural brokerage,” the article advances a conceptual model laid out by Nicholas Jaspert on Jewish intermediacy in medieval Spain, and offers a path towards new insights into the complex and interwoven agency of Jewish publishers from Russia who, during the short but dynamic period of 1921–24, turned Berlin into a centre of transcultural activity. There were three main prerequisites for this: Berlin emerged as the first and, as it turned out, an ephemeral capital of Russian emigration; it became the centre of Russian publishing, and served as a hub for the globalisation of Russian art. More specifically, Berlin’s rise as a centre of Russian publishing is linked to a number of further coincidental factors, including the literary requirements of the Bolshevik elites, the city’s position as a centre of publishing competence and profit par excellence , Jewish expertise and mobility, and the favourable economic conditions during the German hyperinflation. The article demonstrates how Jaspert’s categorization of mobile agents as others , emissaries , and go-betweens allows us to scrutinize their space of activity, the preliminary character of their intermediacy, and the broad ideological spectrum of their outputs during the very period in history that saw the Russians or at least a considerable fraction of them become a “people of the book.” Beyond the scope of this article, it is hoped that the aforementioned descriptive distinction of the activities of agents will be a tool that enables us to pursue a more systematic and nuanced approach when analysing the Jewish contribution to Russian emigration.

A Review of the Use of Trauma Systems Therapy to Treat Refugee Children, Adolescents, and Families

ABSTRACTChildren and adolescents within refugee families face adverse childhood experiences emanating from multiple sources. These traumatic events can begin with persecution within their country of origin, during the migration process, and within their re-settled countries. More specifically, these children and their families are more prone to the four core stressors being: traumatic, acculturative, isolative and resettlement stress. Trauma Systems Therapy for Refugees (TST-R) is a promising treatment model to address child and adolescent mental health disparities revolving around direct and vicarious trauma. In TST-R, the treatment team systematically targets the needs of the child, while collaborating with cultural brokers from the refugee community, their school, and family unit. Researchers have used TST-R as an intervention for reducing trauma symptoms in Somali, Somali-Bantu, and Bhutanese children, adolescents, and their families. We review the strengths and limitations of this model. Further research is needed to determine its applicability to other communities within the United States and abroad.

A time to speak and a time to keep silent: Professional ethics, conscience, and the medical interpreter

Summary Professional medical interpreter training initially emphasized the role of the interpreter as a “conduit” who faithfully and transparently rendered the messages of both the healthcare provider and the patient to each other for maximum understanding. Professional ethical standards required the interpreter to communicate only what the other parties were saying, without adding or deleting from the words spoken. However, as professional standards have evolved over the last three decades, and practice has challenged theory, it has become apparent that the “conduit” model at times is too restrictive. Since interpreters occupy the unique position of having the most complete awareness of what is transpiring among all parties linguistically and culturally, they often face the need to go beyond merely transferring information to mediating any miscommunications caused by institutional, language, or cultural barriers. As such, the interpreter's role has expanded to allow circumstances in which they may also act as “culture brokers” or even “advocates”. In reality, the dynamics of the interpreting session demand a balance of trust, power, and control among all participants. This article will focus on the professional parameters that guide interpreters in deciding when to move beyond a neutral role in the best interests of the parties involved or when intervention adversely affects desired outcomes.

Culturally Responsive Services as a Path to Equity in Mental Healthcare.

Indigenous peoples, immigrants and refugees and racialized groups, as well as some long-established ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious communities, experience inequities in mental health in Canadian society. These inequities result from social structural determinants of health that are embedded in the cultural knowledge, values and attitudes of the specific group as well as those of the larger society. Culture shapes the experience and expression of mental health problems, modes of coping, pathways to care and the effectiveness of treatment and prevention, as well as the processes of resilience and recovery. Systematic attention to culture in the provision of mental health services can improve access, utilization and health outcomes. We review models to address diversity in mental healthcare and identify key areas in which we believe policy innovation is urgently needed: 1. Cultural competence, safety and anti-racism training and accreditation standards for practitioners and for healthcare education, service systems and institutions; 2. National regulations and quality assurance standards to ensure use of language interpreters; 3. Development of a cadre of culture brokers to improve clinical communication; and 4. Integration of attention to culture in service systems design, as well as clinical practice.

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

The ‘internal orientalism’: new encounter in Tibet tourism

ABSTRACTBased on Orientalism theory and the fieldwork conducted in Tibet, this article proposes the concept of ‘Internal Orientalism’ to illustrate the gap between the way in which the Tibetan people are gazed upon by tourists and the way they actually exist. This concept from Said’s Orientalism is now beyond geographical limitations, placing its explanatory power in tourist encounters. By analyzing the field material and postcards collected in Tibet using the software of Maxqda12, this research explores how the stereotypes of Tibet are produced, fabricated, and spread by the tourists, culture brokers, and even the hosts themselves. It reveals the contradiction between Tibet’s reality and the images created to meet tourists’ pursuit of pureness. The images used to promote Tibet characterize its culture as a weakened, feminized, and childrenized one, resulting problems for the locals’ identities, especially for the children–they are belittled to satisfy outsiders’ will for generosity. This process is sabotaging the self-growth of the children and damaging their self-perception. The fieldwork of this study was conducted in Tibet in 2017 and the main method used is qualitative analysis.

Spanish Interpreter Services for the Hospitalized Pediatric Patient: Provider and Interpreter Perceptions

BackgroundMany Americans have limited English proficiency (LEP) and difficulty communicating with health care providers, creating inequitable health care delivery. Despite widespread interpreter availability in hospitals, perceptions of interpreter services in the pediatric inpatient setting are largely unknown. ObjectiveTo investigate staff perspectives regarding: 1) roles of the interpreter and provider (attending, resident, and nurse) during an encounter, 2) modalities of interpretation, and 3) barriers to services. MethodsFocus groups were conducted with: 1) hospital-employed Spanish interpreters, 2) Pediatric Hospital Medicine attendings, 3) pediatric and internal medicine-pediatric residents, and 4) medical unit nurses. Sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed. Using Atlas.ti, 2 investigators created the coding scheme, independently coded the data, and achieved consensus. Qualitative methods were used for thematic analysis. ResultsFourteen groups (n = 59 participants) were held: 3 interpreter groups (n = 10), 3 attending groups (n = 14), 2 resident groups (n = 17), and 6 nurse groups (n = 18). Most believed the interpreter's role was to serve as a conduit (provide word-for-word interpretation), act as a cultural broker, and maintain transparency (not withhold information). All groups felt providers should interact with families as they would with English-speaking families. In-person interpreters were preferred over telephone and video for being more accurate, efficient, and personable. Barriers to accessing services included time needed for interpretation, overconfidence in language skills, variable family dynamics, and identification of LEP families. ConclusionsIn-person interpreters are highly valued, fulfilling complex roles. However, operational and human factors limit access to services in the hospital. These findings, along with family perspectives, can be used to optimize interpretation experiences.

Brokering Culture and Power in a Media-Driven World: Parents of Adolescents in Northern Thailand

Exposure to modern media alters cultural values and individual identities. Little is known, however, about whether and how media use alters cultural socialization processes in family relationships. In this study, 20 urban Thai parents of adolescent children took part in individual interviews in which they discussed media use in their families. Thematic analysis of interview data indicates that adolescents act as cultural brokers for their parents in a media-driven culture, and that this brokerage engenders adolescent agency, power, and the renegotiation of traditional age-based hierarchies in the Thai context. Data also indicate that parental power and authority are maintained and reasserted by way of parents placing restrictions on adolescent media use and mobilizing their children’s technological desires as opportunities to teach culturally salient lessons about necessity—a value that reflects central tenets of the late Thai King Bhumibol’s Sufficiency Economy and of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. Findings suggest that media use can both transform and maintain traditional cultural values and family dynamics in northern Thailand. More broadly, this study carries implications for the psychological science of globalization by applying the concept of cultural brokerage to communities undergoing rapid technological change.

The Complexity and Fear of Teaching the “Other”: The Role of Teachers in a Larger Process of Social Cohesion and Peace

Based on a narrative case study conducted in two in-service teacher preparation programs for English language teachers in Sri Lanka, this paper explores the role of English language teachers in promoting so-cial cohesion and peace. Set against Sri Lanka’s National Policy on Social Cohesion and Peace (2008), which recognizes teacher agency and teacher education in actively working towards bridging the es-tranged Sri Lankan communities, this paper critically analyzes what it takes for teacher education to prepare prospective teachers to be cultural brokers who are willing and able take an active role in pro-moting social cohesion and peace. The paper argues that national and program level policies and curricula changes are insufficient if micro level and more personal efforts are not made to assist new teachers to develop more inclusive mindsets. Conceptually this paper is grounded on transformative approaches to pedagogy that highlight the agency of teachers and the need for teacher preparation programs to support new teachers to shape and craft their emergent transformative practices. Such approaches to teacher education identify teachers as transformative intellectuals whose role is recognized as being in tune with their social, political and historical realities. This perspective aligns with an approach in which the teacher’s role extends beyond the mere transmission of knowledge and skills in the classroom to a broader, more inclusive vision of the whole socio-educational process. The paper argues how national policies, curricula interventions, and the creation of a multicultural teacher community by diversifying the pool of prospective teachers to provide greater opportunities for inter-cultural interactions are insufficient if personal efforts are not made by teacher education programs and teacher educators to ensure that the program provides prospective teachers the theoretical lenses to make sense of their experiences with those who are different from them. Instead, mere cultural immersion lacking active measures that provide teachers with attitudes and skills to embrace diversity, results in the recreation of the existing status quo and promoting further mis-trust among communities.

The gap between theory and practice: using cultural brokering to serve culturally diverse families of children with disabilities

Cultural brokering is one promising approach to support culturally diverse families and their children with disabilities who have divergent identities and needs. This qualitative case study examined the application of a cultural brokering model in a statewide family support program in the United States serving culturally diverse families of children with disabilities. Interviews with cultural brokers and key informants in the disability field were utilized to identify the critical roles of cultural brokers, challenges in cultural brokering and strategies for being effective cultural brokers. Gaps between theory and practice were uncovered in the understanding of cultural brokering as well as the design of a cultural broker program. Implications for community human service providers are discussed to help them effectively implement cultural brokering in community services.

A Favela That Yields Fruit: Community-Based Tour Guides as Brokers in the Political Economy of Cultural Difference

Reversing decades of fear and neglect as no-go zones for outsiders, Rio de Janeiro’s most iconic favela communities have become tourist attractions offering a glimpse of the purported “other side” of Brazilian society as well as panoramic vistas over the Marvelous City. Since 2010, tourism has become a vehicle and justification for security, infrastructure, and capacity-building projects in Rio’s favelas. Promoted as an exemplary favela in this social uplift scheme, Santa Marta has received thousands of tourists per year. In an unprecedented step, Santa Marta guides organized themselves into a committee to collectively manage the tourism enterprise and to promote themselves as a brand of community-based tourism in contradistinction to outside commercial tour operators. Their authority and authenticity as local experts hinge on the emergent perception of the favela itself as a resource and that their labor makes that value economically productive. This article analyzes the work of these guides as cultural brokers to think through the semiotically overdetermined yet shifting status of the favela as space of cultural alterity from the perspective of those who are both targets and agents of its transformation. Exploring how community-based guides have emerged as political and economic brokers, this article suggests that their performances as local experts, as well as their modes of organizing, shape tensions and contradictions of the favela as a commodified place. It demonstrates how collectivist and competitive interests among guides embody differing perspectives on state intervention in their community. The discussions and conflicts among tour guides themselves embody the tensions over the future of communities long marginalized by state and capital yet suddenly targeted for economic investment and cultural valorization.

Boundary brokering for cross‐cultural professional learning in international school contexts

Although much research has been done on the internalisation of education, issues related to intercultural professional learning, especially in the school education context, remain underexplored. This study examines the potential of boundary brokering in facilitating cross‐cultural professional learning in an international school context. This article reports the qualitative findings from an interview study with seven non‐ethnic Chinese language teachers who resided at the borders of Chinese and western communities of practice on their boundary brokering experience in bridging the different norms of being and practice in the Chinese teacher community and the western communities in international schools in Asia. Interview responses from the participants show that the participants’ cultural brokering generated critical and eclectic perspectives and practices, and reshaped the power landscape in the workplace. At the same time, their cultural brokering was shaped by the interactions among power relations within and across communities of practice, social suggestions on cultural brokering and the boundary brokers’ self‐positioning. The findings suggest that cultural brokering could serve as a potential teacher professional development tool to foster reciprocal learning across culture borders. The complex network of influencing factors at play suggests that, in order to facilitate positive cultural brokering, it is necessary to adopt a systemic approach that underscores resetting valued skills and expertise within and across communities, creating a positive school culture that encourages reciprocal learning and managing individual teachers’ brokering mentalities and capacities.

Performativity as cultural brokerage: An ethnographic exploration of the experiences of faculty mothers at an international university in Kazakhstan

In this ethnographic study, I explore the experiences of academic mothers who are international faculty in a highly internationalized residential university without tenure in Kazakhstan. Using participant observations, interviews, and auto-ethnography, I analyze how international female faculty perform their work and function within their family roles in the context of ambiguous overlapping cultural norms about gender roles and motherhood responsibilities. This study reveals that the participants could successfully combine and simultaneously enjoy their work and family lives. Moreover, these women could shape the emerging organizational culture of this relatively new higher educational institution in ways that are supportive of female faculty and student mothers. I use the cultural brokerage theory to explain the agentic capacity of female faculty and the way in which the theory may extend the previously used feminist performativity theory as a lens through which to investigate the transformative capacity of women on non-Western campuses.

AMBIGUITAS POLITIK ULAMA-KIAI

The political process in Indonesia has experienced reform, and succeeded in overthrowing the political construction of the old regime which was monolithic authoritarian and militaristic while opening the way for the process of democratization and social transformation. Nowadays, the involvement of kyai as an actor in national politics has taken the attention of public and political observers. From the long history of the kyai's political stage, there has been a shift and change in direction, especially the shift from national politics to power politics. Kyai who initially moved on the cultural path, called the cultural broker, in the current political process seemed to be the actor who gave political legitimacy. The line of kyai's struggle began to shift along with political changes in the country. Kyai began to explore the political area of the party with all political maneuvers such as giving support (legitimacy) known as blessing. Politics is profane which necessitates the existence of tendencies, and consequently narrows down vision, mision and advocacy only to certain groups or mass of supporters. Necessarily, the legitimacy of kyai is not obtained through power and political supports but from his attitude and moral actions, in addition to the religious authority. So that going into politics does not further strengthen the prestige and charisma of kyai, but rather politicians’ hegemony kyai.

Toward a Hermeneutic Model of Cultural Globalization: Four Lessons from Translation Studies

Many scholars study the global diffusion of culture, looking at how institutions spread culture around the world or at how intermediaries (or “cultural brokers”) adapt foreign culture in the local context. This research can tell us much about brokers’ “cultural-matching” or “congruence-building” strategies. To date, however, few scholars have examined brokers’ interpretive work. In this article, the author argues that globalization research needs to pay more attention to interpretation. Building on translation studies, the author shows that brokers’ work is shaped by (1) how they imagine their dual roles, (2) how they imagine different parts of the world, (3) how they interpret a text’s intertextuality, and (4) how their audience imagines the foreign Other. In this way, the author lays the groundwork for a hermeneutic model of cultural globalization.

‘In a rush’: Time-space compression and its impacts on cruise excursions

With the increase in large-scale cruise tourism worldwide, researchers have highlighted the inauthenticity of the cruise experience and the reconstruction of space. This research deals with new aspects: fast tourism through time-space compression, and the formation of enclosed, customized ‘tourist bubbles’ that confine the tourists and promote a constructed authenticity of the experience on-shore. The second aim is to advance applied research in slower cruise excursions, especially in emerging cruise destinations. The research is based on extensive field work conducted during nine cruise-excursions to the sand desert and an oasis in the Sultanate of Oman. Oman is in the early stages of developing mega-cruise tourism while having received little attention in tourism research. For this study, in-depth interviews were conducted with German-speaking cruise tourists, cruise employees as well as with local cultural brokers and the Minister of Tourism. Moreover, participant observation, travel ethnography and photography were applied. Results indicate while moving from one customized ‘tourist bubble’ to the next one, time is controlled and enhanced through fast modes of transportation and a tight schedule of the excursion. The tourists and their cultural brokers are ‘contained’ in time and space, while some are struggling for more authentic experiences. They are shielded off from the local environment, ‘grazing’ destinations within a short time.

Challenges in health-care service use among Burmese refugees: A grounded theory approach

ABSTRACT The timely use of health-care services is essential to achieve the best health outcomes. We explore barriers to health-care access among refugees from Burma through interviews with key community informants who serve their community as interpreters, health-care professionals, paraprofessionals, and/or representatives. The interviews with a convenience sampling of 11 leaders from Burmese and Karen ethnic communities revealed three stages of health-care use (i.e., before, during, and after doctor’s appointments), in which their community members encounter difficulties in accessing health-care services. Using grounded theory analysis approach, specific difficulties and cultural considerations for each stage were emerged. This study suggests that training programs for health-care providers on refugee populations’ needs, cultural expectations, attitudes, and health behaviors may ease the process for refugees during each of these three stages. Interpreters as cultural brokers have an important role in facilitating cross-cultural communications not only before and during the appointment but also after doctor’s visits, such as in the pharmacy and labs.