Cultural Frames Research Articles

To be or not to be internationalised: students’ experience of intercultural encounters in Hong Kong universities

ABSTRACT With rising nationalism across the world, and increased tension between East and West, internationalisation of tertiary education is arguably more important than ever before. This paper reports on a study of international and local students’ experiences of intercultural encounters in two Hong Kong universities. More than 100 students from all over the world participated in small-group sharing sessions about the challenges and positive experiences they had encountered during their studies in the City. Using a discourse analytic approach, the article analyses some negative and some positive examples of intercultural encounters. The examples of ‘unsuccessful’ encounters show that students use their own cultural frame of reference to judge the behaviour of the other. An unexpected finding was that students with lesser perceived cultural differences struggled the most overcoming intergroup differences and animosities. The essence in the examples of ‘successful’ intercultural encounters is that students engaged in genuine intercultural dialogue and created a third space together and this changed them. They realised that you can accept cultural differences without understanding them, and this is arguably what internationalisation should be about.

Cultural Frames of the Digital: A Window into Subjectivity

In the following paper, I will examine the generational rift between the purported “Boomers” and “Zoomers” in the digital schema. In doing so, I will unpack the ways in which the dominant digital ideology structures the lives of individuals - providing the symbolic frame to define themselves against and within society through an internally splintered digital subjectivity. I argue that the ideological conflict between Boomers and Zoomers is reflective of much deeper antagonisms underlying the structure of class society.

Electroacoustic Improvisation and the Metaphysical Imaginary

In a previous edition of Organised Sound, I discussed the potential for using the North Indian sarode in electroacoustic music. In that article, I explored how electroacoustic music artists manage to integrate multiple cultural frameworks, while also acknowledging the importance of personal artistic agency. The primary question that emerged from that research is extended in this article: how does an electroacoustic performer of a non-Western instrument improvise outside the idiom of their tradition? In order to address this question, I draw on Tomlinson’s concept of the metaphysical imaginary. In my own performance practice, I employ the metaphysical imaginary as a framework to explore a transcultural, transcendent, perhaps even spiritual potential of electroacoustic improvisation. The metaphysical imaginary will be explored in two dimensions: the synchronic and the diachronic. The synchronic dimension looks horizontally across cultures, while the diachronic dimension looks in a temporal verticality, looking inwards and downwards, to a time before modern culture. In the article, I discuss the performance practice of other musicians working across different cultural frames who explore the metaphysical in their improvisations. The article also looks backwards in cultural historical time and investigates how improvisers draw inspiration from a pre-modern cultural world, combining these imaginaries with modern sound techniques. I will situate my own work within this mosaic of practices, concluding with a discussion of electroacoustic improvisations using the sarode, extended technique and the re-imagining of pre-historic sonic rituals.

Facts, Fictions, or Something in Between: The Constructive and Destructive Power of History Work

Drawing on the social-symbolic work perspective, we define “history work” as purposeful, reflexive efforts intended to change or maintain the history of an organization, a field, or a society for and among critical audiences. In particular, history work involves intentional efforts to shape or reshape a combination of discursive, relational, and material elements that constitute a meaningful presentation of the past. Building upon existing studies that regard history as socially constructed, we seek to develop this research agenda by reflecting on three distinct characteristics of history work: First, while previous studies tend to see history as strategically used by executives or entrepreneurs, history work in our view may be employed both in a top down fashion and from the bottom up. In other words, history work is not necessarily a deliberate product of firm strategy, as it can be emergent from organizational processes. Second, while previous studies often focus on the discursive aspect of constructing history, involving cultural framing and interpretation of the past, history work in our view also entails a material aspect that attends to the discovery, recovery, and recreation of historical artifacts. Thus, the construction and maintenance of history might entail a more comprehensive set of activities than previously assumed. Lastly, history work is often not just about history. Instead, the purpose of history work is often connected to the construction or destruction of other social-symbolic objects, including identities, strategies, and institutions. In other words, history work is adopted for its power to change or maintain other important objects in organizational life. Maintaining Craft: Knowledge Transfer, Collective Custodianship, and History Work Presenter: Joel Mohr; Smith School of Business, Queen's U. Presenter: Peter Dacin; Queen's U. Presenter: Tina Dacin; Queen's U. Episodic Continuity as History Work in Organization Change Presenter: Majken Schultz; Copenhagen Business School History Work in History Books: How the History Is Strategically Reconstructed Presenter: Milo Shaoqing Wang; W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State U. Presenter: Runjia Zhang; Peking U. Guanghua School of Management Historical Drift: When the Present Becomes Unmoored from the Past Presenter: David A. Kirsch; U. of Maryland

Dog Dreams: Oneiric Representations of Interspecies Sociality among Middle-Class Young Adults in the United States

Abstract The investigation of human dreaming offers significant insights to scholars of human-nonhuman animal studies. This article proposes that the ways in which companion species appear in humans’ dreams reveal the implicit ontological assumptions that undergird waking-life interspecies relationships. Focusing on dreams about dogs among middle-class U.S. college students, the analysis develops an updated model of dreaming that is synthesized from recent neuroscientific and anthropological theory-building. Themes of warm companionship, anxiety about dogs’ welfare, and preoccupations about their mortality suggest that dreams about dogs simulate and rehearse interspecies sociality in a cultural frame. They demonstrate both interspecies intersubjectivity and the significant place of canine persons in U.S. middle-class dreamers’ conceptualizations of their social networks. Such dreams challenge the public ideology of human exceptionalism, and suggest that human-canine sociality – in both waking and oneiric modes – may emerge as much from “egomorphic” as from anthropomorphic dispositions.

On The Constitutionality And Public Administration In Ancient And Medieval Armenia

Summing up, it should be noted that the state and regional government in ancient and medieval Armenia was realized via legal regulatory principles, consistent with the time and through sufficient constitutionality. Within the frames of Armenian intellectual culture, certain methodological bases were worked out, whereas the accumulated past experience, cultural heritage and the lessons of history in particular, deserve special attention in terms of the appropriate orientation of the civil society, the development of political thought and growth of efficiency in public administration.

Sea Country: Plurality and knowledge of saltwater territories in Indigenous Australian contexts

AbstractThere are distinct bodies of cultural knowledge attached to the sea. In this paper we orient the focus towards the nature and extent of cultural framings of sea territories, as inclusive of submerged landscapes, for Indigenous maritime peoples in northern Australia. This approach is distinguished by a pluralist methodology and reorients the primal focus of a human geography and broader geographical scholarship concerning submerged landscapes to begin with an Indigenous perspective. Engaging ethnographic accounts of Indigenous Australian knowledges of Sea Country, as inclusive of ancient pre‐inundation landscapes that lie out‐of‐sight on Australia's continental shelves, highlights the potential for a more expansive vision of human connections to the past and present continental landmass of Australia. Indigenous oral traditions, Dreaming Ancestor narratives and songlines provide extensive detail to assist in understanding these parts of the greater Australian landmass and in this paper are brought into relation with recent sea floor mapping efforts which operate to draw back the water and reveal commensurable geographies upon which to envision possibilities for socialised realms of human emplacement. Both bodies of knowledge generate information of submerged landscapes that call for an expansion of thinking on where the land ends and the sea begins and how submerged terrestrial landscapes are understood across cultures as part of human geography. The approach outlined here calls for a habit of bringing principled systems of understanding to stand together as part of an explanatory schema for a world populated by and yet differentially known by people.

Feeling a deep sense of loneliness: Chinese late-life immigrants in New Zealand.

ObjectivesTo explore Chinese late‐life immigrants' perceptions of loneliness and social isolation.MethodsA qualitative descriptive methodology underpinned this study. In‐depth individual interviews were conducted in Mandarin with purposively recruited participants. The twenty‐three participants in the study had all emigrated from China, were 65–80 years old on arrival and had lived in New Zealand for between 2.5 and 16 years. An inductive thematic analytic process was undertaken. The COREQ checklist was followed to ensure study rigour.ResultsThree themes, ‘high value placed on meeting family obligations’, ‘feeling a deep sense of imbalanced intergenerational reciprocity’ and ‘moving away from filial expectations’, were identified. Confucianist values of ‘women's domestic duty of caring for grandchildren’, ‘filial piety’, and ‘saving face’ to be accepted and respected by others negatively attributed to participants' understandings and experiences of loneliness. To plan for increasing frailty and to avoid family conflict while ameliorating potential loneliness, some participants reluctantly discarded prior customary filial piety expectations in favour of formal aged care options.ConclusionsParticipants' profound sense of loneliness was seen to be attributed to their deeply rooted cultural values and backgrounds from having lived for a significant period of time in China. Loneliness occurred as a result of the resettlement process in later life. These experiences highlight the importance of using cultural framing that takes into account beliefs and adaptations to host societies anticipated during the process of late‐life immigration.

Social Participation in Context. Participatory Culture in Spain and Germany

ABSTRACT This article aims to examine and describe the ways in which elderly people participate in post-industrial societies. The literature points out the benefits of social participation. However, the influence of context in features of civil society has remained relatively understudied. This article analyses the influence of context on the conceptualization of the phenomenon of social participation and civic engagement. In addition, the findings are linked to the broader academic debate on civil society. This empirical study consists of results from semi-structured interviews and focus groups conducted with experts on social participation and elderly members of different associations. The German and Spanish case studies confirm that socio-demographic variables, cultural frames, political structures and social structure shape the culture of participation. The article argues that each context creates its own participatory culture through the incorporation of four different conceptualisations of participation: (1) participation as a right; (2) participation as an attitude; (3) participation as civic engagement; (4) participation as a slogan. The Spanish discourse tends mostly to conceptualize participation as a right and/or a slogan. The German discourse conceptualizes participation mainly as civic engagement. These conceptual differences give rise to two different participatory culture models.

Dramatizing Displacement in Israel

Dramatizing Displacement in Israel Chen Alon (bio) and Sonja Kuftinec (bio) As coauthors, we have been in dialogue about theatre and nation-formation for close to two decades. We enter this dialogue from perspectives of ancestral displacement that index the flux of national borders, identities, and movements. In Kuftinec's Croatian family, this migration pattern traced economic opportunity to the United States, where assimilation into the dominant culture was eased by a passage into whiteness. For Alon's grandfather, migration from Europe to Israel offered asylum from the Holocaust. As Zionists, Alon's family felt saved by a return to their "homeland"; serving in the Israeli Defense Force to guard the Jewish "shelter" became a point of generational duty. But serving in the army in Occupied Palestinian territory eventually radicalized Alon. He began to see Israel not only as a safe haven, but also as a colonizing state, one which did not fully recognize Palestinian human rights. He created alliances with Palestinian ex-combatants, cofounding Combatants for Peace in 2005 (cfpeace.org). Shared rituals, theatre, and storytelling became key tools in rehumanization and dialogue, as well as prompting nonviolent direct action resisting Israeli Occupation. These practices of animating dialogue and engaging direct action—grounded in personal stories and collective analysis—informed later activist theatre work with African asylumseekers in Israel. Israel has a complicated relationship with the politics of migration and the embrace of asylumseekers. On the one hand, the state openly welcomes the diasporic return of Jewish refugees to their "homeland." Israel also strongly supported the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, advocating for global asylum. On the other, Israel struggles to navigate its relationship with the Palestinian diaspora, demands for return to (sometimes erased) ancestral communities, and with welcoming African asylum-seekers from areas such as Eritrea and Sudan. We focus in this essay on migration, movement, and polarization in Israel, with particular attention to refugees and asylum-seekers. We examine how vectors of migration align with ethno-national imaginaries—both iterated and challenged through theatre. We first sketch out the emergence of Israel as a state and as a Jewish refuge, while naming the tensions that mark its existence. We then review recent scholarship about Hebrew and Arab-language theatre that structures the social identity of the Zionist subject and reflects on the status of the refugee in Israel more broadly. Finally, we outline adaptations of Theatre of the Oppressed with Holot Theatre (2014–22). This case study of polarized alliances between African asylum-seekers and Israeli citizens models how theatre can reflect and shift the dynamics of migration and belonging, activating ethical citizenship beyond national identity. Establishing Israel as a State of Jewish Refuge The narrative of migration in and around the state of Israel is itself a polarized one, featuring two main historiographic accountings, both oriented around exile and return. For the purposes of this essay, we focus on a timeline beginning with Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth century, prompted by organized massacres (pogroms) in Eastern Europe, and further migration in the 1930s and '40s around the Holocaust. This migration pattern aligns Judaism with asylum-seeking and European nationalism. In the nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals in Europe began to understand [End Page 61] themselves as a nation rather than only as a religion (Berkowitz 84–85). Zionism emerged as a cultural framing for potential Jewish statehood in an Israeli "homeland," then known as Palestine, part of the Ottoman Empire and later British Mandate. Under the pressure of Jewish migration following the Holocaust, in November 1947 the United Nations proposed the creation of two independent states: Israel and Palestine. The Arab world refused to take part in this division, which they saw as an illegal land grab by newly arrived immigrants. The UN affirmed Israeli statehood in May 1948 and, from Israel's perspective, the Arab world attacked and Israel defended itself through the Independence War, in which Arab villagers "ran away" from their homes. In contrast, Palestinians frame the 1948 exodus as the nakba (catastrophe), a violent expulsion of natives by colonial settlers. In 1967, Israel fought allied Arab forces resulting in the occupation of Palestinian land and residents in the Gaza Strip and West...

Nationalism and production of precarious life: an anarchist critique of Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Following Anarchist theorist Rudolf Rocker, the current paper strives to see the role of state racism in perpetrating violence as depicted in Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaveera. The paper argues that state racism by majoritarian Sinhala elite defines a reductive notion of nationalism which inseminates genocidal violence against the minority community. This nationalism, providing normative definition of human dictates which lives are considered worthy and must be protected by bringing all apparatuses of state in action and which lives must be subjected to extinction by using the monopoly of state violence. The paper further intends to seek the nexus between nationalism and the patterns that it devises to subject ethnic minorities’ lives to precariousness. It further seeks to explore that the retributory forces replicate instead of eradicating violence. The paper further argues that nationalism not only defines worthy lives, it, also, provides a cultural frame for defining grievable death thus subjecting minorities to the violence of derealisation.

DYADIC OR MONADIC? A REVIEW ON PERSONALITY REFLECTIONS OF BILINGUALS

The purpose of this study is to review the current literature which produced evidence on split personality of bilinguals. In this research paradigm, split-personality does not refer to any psychological disorder, rather it denotes a personality feature of bi- or multilinguals. Although there is a plethora of research on bilingualism and bilinguals, data on split personality of bilinguals are scant. From the beginning of the 20th Century, the question of whether bilinguals have two personalities or not has been investigated on the basis of their language and cultural frame shift. We reviewed 13 studies that are directly related to split personality of bilinguals. These studies are discussed with respect to their purpose, methodology and major findings. Hence, we aimed to provide insights for the reader to have an understanding about the process of split-brain studies and the major findings that revealed how bilinguals reflect different personality traits depending on the language and culture they are interacting and residing. Further implications were provided for the researchers who seek answers in this area.

The Teaching of Initial Multiplication Concepts and Skills in Croatian Textbooks

The goal of this paper is to describe the teaching of initial multiplication concepts and skills, up to the multiplication table, in the Croatian educational system. As Stiegler and Hiebert (1999) concluded, teaching is a complex system rooted in a cultural script of a given society. To describe it without ignoring certain features of it that appear to be self-evident to an insider, it is necessary to step out of this cultural frame. For that reason, we study the teaching of initial multiplication in Croatia by comparing Croatian mathematical textbooks with textbooks from Singapore, Japan, and England. For the textbook analysis, we adapt the framework of Charalambous, Delaney, Hsu, and Mesa that examines a textbook as an environment for the construction of knowledge of a single mathematical concept. The analysis provides evidence that practice and automation are at the centre of the initial learning of multiplication in Croatia. The meaning of multiplication usually is not clear, and pupils are not provided additional tools for developing understanding, nor they are encouraged to use different calculation strategies in a flexible manner. The study also indicates that Croatian textbooks present mathematics as a practice that is closed and pre-given, restricted to the one and the only right way through it.

Organizational learning the Nordic way: learning through participation

PurposeIs there a specific way of thinking about organisational learning in Nordic countries? Are concepts such as organisational learning and learning organisations imported, or do they emerge with specific meanings from more local discourses? Beyond that, are they supported by specific learning theories? The purpose of this paper is to trace the way that the concepts of organisational learning and learning organisations appear in research and policy documents in Norway and to identify what sort of learning theories pertain to those concepts. The authors discuss whether Norway’s case exemplifies a Nordic way of thinking about learning in organisations.Design/methodology/approachThrough an archaeological investigation into the concepts of organisational learning and learning organisations, the authors explore the theoretical and cultural framing of the concepts in research and policy. The authors limit our work to large industrial field experiments conducted in the 1960s and to large education reform in the 2000s.FindingsDuring the industrial field experiments in the 1960s, the concept of organisational learning evolved to form participatory learning processes in non-hierarchical organisations able to contribute to democracy at work. Education policy in the 2000s, by contrast, imported the concept of the learning organisation that primarily viewed learning as an instrumental process of knowledge production. That strategy is incommensurable to what we define as a Nordic way, one in which learning is also understood as a cultural and social process advanced by democratic participation.Originality/valueThe authors add to organisational learning theories by demonstrating the importance of cultural context for theories and showing that the understanding of learning is historically and culturally embedded.

Systemic Oppression and Cultural Diversity: Putting Flesh on the Bones of Intercultural Competence

The author addresses the challenges and opportunities of working in intercultural spaces and explores the conditions favorable to the emergence of psychological resources. After discussing the role of context, he describes how oppression emerges from complementary frames of reference that promote overadaptation to the dominant culture. He proposes that this diminishes authentic intercultural dialogue. However, greater access to resources can come about by expanding the Adult and emphasizing cultural awareness of self and other. Intercultural clients develop and enhance their resources when they cocreate shared frames of reference and expand their cultural frames of reference while accounting for their individual identity.

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century

Jazz Feminism is to Soul as Purple is to Lavender

Jazz Feminism is to <i>Soul</i> as Purple is to Lavender

Exploring the diversity of conceptualizations of nature in East and South-East Asia

This article sheds light on the diversity of meanings and connotations that tend to be lost or hidden in translations between different conceptualizations of nature in East and South-East Asia. It reviews the idea of “nature” in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Tagalog, Cebuano, Lumad, Indonesian, Burmese, Nepali, Khmer, and Mongolian. It shows that the conceptual subtleties in the conceptualization of nature often hide wider and deeper cosmological mismatches. It concludes by suggesting that these diverse voices need to be represented in global reports on sustainability, which can be fostered by the direct involvement of experts from diverse traditions of thought who have access and interpretative knowledge of sources in languages other than English. To take into consideration the diversity of conceptualizations of nature can lead to better decisions about sustainability and improve the acceptability and efficiency of environmental policies in each local context, as well as internationally. Solutions and policies on the ground must be designed based on the local conceptual and cultural frames.

The Affectual-Social Ecology of Cultural Artefacts: Illegal Markets and Religious Vandalism in Swat Valley, Pakistan

Focusing on the rich social and affectual geography of heritage sites in Swat Valley, Pakistan, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to the complex synergy of the value registers of religion and economy and their role in the illegal antiquities market. We argue that ruptures like Taliban’s iconoclasm against the materiality of the pre-Islamic world requires a conceptual reframing of preservation, destruction, and looting within social and cultural frames of reference. Therefore, we reflect on how the illegal market of cultural artefacts in Swat is shaped by conflicting registers of religion and economy. We further examine how these conflicting value registers shape the ‘structures of feelings’ that shape and inform the preservation and destruction of heritage. To this end, we draw on interviews with illegal diggers and antiquity dealers, local archaeologists, heritage activists, and international experts on the Swat region.

Music, Insight and the Development of the Thinking Voice in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

This paper explores insight and the development of the thinking voice in the psychoanalytic process. It begins with music and images, narrating an important Australian historical event. The composers have created a dreaming space, and for this paper, a metaphor for the analytic space and the creative process. At once physical, aural and visual, it also exists within and reflects the patient's and analyst's shared historical and cultural frame. It is a liminal space, for exploration, crossing, and a product of the alchemy created between patient and analyst. Pickering's (2016) and Grier's (2019) consideration of musicality as an essential part of the analytic experience assists recognition of the multidimensional nature of the space created between patient and analyst. Ferro and Civitarese's (2015) conceptualization of the space where patient and analyst dream one another, and Baranger and Baranger's (2008) discussion of the bi personal field are pertinent here. Symington's idea of insight as an essential ‘thing in itself’, within the individual patient helps articulation of insight as a product of an internalized linking, or parental intercourse, enabling movement to a separate third position.