| Symposium |

‘Decolonizing theories and methodologies for researching interculturality for social justice’

Programme

| 10.30am | Professor Maria Tsouroufli | Introductions and Research group focus/priorities and vision

| 10.40 am | Professor Nikita Dhawan | University of Gießen, Germany | What difference does difference make? Intersectionality, diversity and global justice

Focusing on the intersections, but also the tensions between key categories like race, class, gender, sexuality, religion and caste from a transnational postcolonial-queer-feminist perspective, this paper addresses the question whether the formative concepts of intersectionality and diversity are an efficacious tools for achieving global justice for marginalized constituencies or whether they inadvertently consolidate the hegemony of an entitled majority by failing to realize the emancipatory possibilities they promise.

| 11.00 am | Dr Giuliana Ferri | Senior Lecturer, Brunel University London | Beyond otherness: a post-human framework for intercultural communication

The paper problematises essentialist notions of culture and identity and instrumental notions of intercultural competence. I argue that the binary self/other from which much research on interculturality is theoretically dependent is increasingly problematic and fails to capture the complexities of intercultural experiences. The paper illustrates a theoretically informed methodological approach to the intercultural beyond the notion of ‘otherness’.

11.15 am | Dr Gunjan Wadhwa | ESRC Research Fellow, Brunel University London | Negotiating difference, contesting temporalities: Education as a site of struggle in Adivasi identities in India

In this talk, I highlight the dominance of colonial/temporal discourses of development in the production of indigenous Adivasi identities through education in a local village community in India. I illustrate how the Adivasis reiterate the dominant view of development, which invokes referring to themselves in deficit. However, I argue that the taking up of normative temporal discourses by the Adivasis is constitutive of their resistance to the regulatory categories and their struggles to demand social justice in a strategic navigation of their identities.

| 11.30 am | Professor Maria Tsouroufli Brunel University London and Dr Dorottya Redai | ‘The abject others’: Intercultural research on gender as a site of resistance of white hegemony, Anglo centrism and colonization

In this talk, we highlight the dominance of Anglo centric discourses of gender, culture, and religion in the conceptualization, conduct, and dissemination of empirical, funded research about social justice within a European context. We illustrate how European researchers/scholars resist dominant notions of female emancipation and progress encapsulated in colonial discourses of ethnic deficit and Anglo hegemony. We reflect on stereotypical notions of East-West and North-South divides and academic self-colonization in the framework of the current anti-gender political propaganda. We also discuss how through emotional labour, researchers negotiate difference and a safe space for completing intercultural work. We argue that although European research funding provides platforms for knowledge production and exchange across different cultures, it can also operate as a site for perpetuating entrenched inequalities and injustices.

| 11.45 am | Plenary

| 12.15 pm | Future meetings, membership of the Interculturality group, website presence

We look forward to seeing you all in January.

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