Fred Dervin, University of Helsinki, Finland
Keywords
intercultural identity, China
Abstract
Interculturality-identity is facing many challenges as a multifaceted reality, practice, ideology, discourse and policy. Its reality as a scientific-educational construct today is that it needs to be systematically deconstructed – and reconstructed again to be better deconstructed. The quote from the title of my talk is by the Russian artist Natalia Goncharova. It describes well what I have been engaging with over the past 5 years: interculturality-identity is not exclusive to ‘Western’ scholarship and education, it has been ‘practised’ elsewhere since the beginning of times, what could I thus learn ‘with’ other parts of the world? Having ‘navigated’ constantly between China and Finland for 5 years, and worked with many colleagues from mainland China, I have had multiple opportunities to try to understand how such an intercultural country as China has ‘done’ interculturality in the past and today. I will share with the audience what these 5 years of engagement with ‘China’ have brought me in terms of unthinking and rethinking interculturality-identity. The following principles and aspects of my current work on interculturality-identity will be discussed: 1. The need for genuine generosity; 2. The language of interculturality is both translation and critical reflexivity; 2. Chinese interculturality from within as a mirror for interculturality (what can we learn from other epistemologies, Knowledges and perceptions of the world?); 3. The need for real depaysement (the feeling of not being at home) in the way we reflect again and again on interculturality; 4. 外国月亮不比中国月亮更圆 (“the foreign moon is not rounder than the Chinese moon”).