Welcome to a discussion and expansion on the inter-cultural. This is a series of posts with reflections and un/learnings from my recent studies at RMIT with Yaso Nadarajah leading a fantastic course about Inter-cultural Knowledges and Practices. I have just completed this course and if I could take it again, I would.
In the first week, we read about the inter-cultural and the relevance of reflexivity in the field. Here are some answers to the weekly reflections.
What do you understand by intercultural knowledges and practices?
I understand intercultural knowledges and practices to be a call to operate from the stand-point and understanding that we all have a particular and unique perspective that is affecting how we perceive and experience things. Fundamentally, working within the Inter-cultural means acknowledging that all knowledge is contextual, relationally created and possessing a particular geo-political positioning.
Another important aspect is the equity assumed for these different perspectives/positioning. One is not better or worse than others; all the perspectives and particular life experiences that we have work together: focusing on one will create imbalance and exclusion.
Intercultural knowledges and practices aim to counter balance to hegemony and monologue in academia, industry and practice to move beyond narrow disciplinary thinking, fundamentalism and narrow vision in knowledge creation and adoption. This kind of practice involves actively listening, questioning our positioning and always being ready to learn and unlearn by developing a critical ability to assess political-historical trajectories between cultures and knowledges.
What do you understand by critical-self reflexivity after having gone through week 1 readings and how can it deepen our engagement with intercultural knowledges and practices?
I understand critical-self reflexivity as a process of conducting practice, research or action by consciously questioning our positioning and putting ourselves in a role of learning and growing and adjusting. It involves going into something not only with a particular intention, but also along the way stopping, looking, reflecting, and going back into said activity (Attia & Edge).
Reflexivity is defined by Mann (2016) as being "focused on the self and ongoing intersubjectivities. It recognises mutual shaping, reciprocality and bi-directionality, and that interaction is context-dependent and context-renewing" (p.28). This means that we also recognise our interaction with all its unique aspects as an active agent in the research, practice and action, and as Sandywell (1996) comments: "Reflexive action changes the form of self: a reflexive practice never returns the self to the point of origin' (p. xiv).
In a Critical-self reflexivity, we are consciously changing ourselves and our practices through what we do, not only contributing from what we know and think from a specific pre-determined plan. To some degree this can often be the case of how research and practice takes place. However, making reflexivity a conscious aspect in what we do benefits us as we are not tied to the notion that a plan will always have to be the same, or that we already know enough, or that exactly what we expected is going to be the outcome of a project. In this way we are putting specific importance on understanding, learning and being open to change that can be extremely valuable and crucial in situations where, for example, inter-cultural practices are involved.
In Inter-cultural knowledges and practices, as the term suggests, involves the interaction and understanding between different cultures. This implies that in such a situation we are interacting with people or communities who might know different things and live different lives than we do, and how we view these practices might not be the way that they are understood from within the culture itself. In this way, adopting a critical-self reflexivity allows us to go into such practices acknowledging that first of all we need to learn from and understand cultures that are different than our experience in life and understand that our involvement will need to be an active consideration in these practices. Therefore, the way we conduct our work will need to be informed by what we learn not only at a starting point, but as an ongoing reflective and reflexive practice.
Figure 1: The Kathmandu monastery where I completed a Buddhist Philosophy and Meditation course. Source: Photo taken by the author.
References:
Attia, M. & Edge, J. (2017). Be(com)ing a reflexive researcher: a developmental approach to research methodology, Open Review Research.
Mann, S. (2016). The research review: Reflective practice and reflexivity in research processes. London:
Palgrave and Macmillan.
Sandywell, B. (1996). Reflexivity and the crisis of western reason. London: Routledge.
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