Adaptability in Communication Styles: Balancing Assertiveness and Subtlety

While linguistic proficiency and cross-cultural awareness are essential to global competence, our experiences in and outside the classroom have shown that the ability to navigate communication nuances—such as non-verbal cues and cultural expectations—is just as important. In Chapter 3, we explore effective cross-cultural communication in today’s increasingly interconnected world, emphasizing the balance between assertiveness and subtlety in intercultural exchanges. We also provide practical examples and strategies to help students from the Asia-Pacific region develop assertive communication styles, while those from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Religious, and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures learn to appreciate implicit communication. The chapter also highlights that teachers play an instrumental role in helping students develop the cognitive flexibility needed to navigate between assertiveness and subtlety in communication styles through practice and reflection. By fostering intercultural flexibility and understanding, we can equip students with the skills to navigate the complexities of intercultural communication

Waste pickers struggle for formal incorporation into legal waste-collecting framework: Ankara, Turkey

New regulations incorporate EU standards on recycling and create a structured waste management framework following Turkey’s EU integration process. As a result, the volume of recovered plastic, metal, and paper increased significantly. However, approximately 500,000 waste pickers in Turkey, including 15,000 in Ankara, have been excluded from these developments. Many now face unemployment or declining income, especially with increased imports of plastic waste from the United Kingdom. Waste pickers in Ankara work long hours under poor conditions and are often stigmatised. The conflict escalated in 2006 when a waste picker was killed by municipal police. Since then, waste pickers have clashed with authorities over their right to work. Organised groups, such as the Street Waste Collectors Association, have emerged, advocating for legal recognition and better working conditions. They have gained support from international organisations, such as the International Labour Organisation, which has organised workshops to promote the inclusion of waste pickers in formal waste management systems. Waste pickers collect far more waste than municipal teams, yet firms cannot legally buy from them. Ankara’s waste pickers continue to push for self-employment status, personal insurance, and legal recognition, hoping for reform that ensures their inclusion in Turkey’s formal waste management framework

Buddha of Two Faces: interdependent yet opposite systems of meaning in Indic Buddhism

This work presents a new interpretation of Indic Buddhism. It is based on the investigation of a wider range of evidence than has previously been considered in a single work. The evidence includes archaeological finds, the architecture of Buddhist sites, images, epigraphy and the surviving texts; as well as the contemporaneous political-socio-religious context. It covers the whole historical period of the religion. The evidence reveals that Indic Buddhism comprised two interdependent yet opposite systems of meaning. One was signified by words and one was signified by images. In the words, Buddha was absent. In the images, Buddha was present. But because the words and the images were experienced in the lifeworld of Indic Buddhism in the same places at the same times, the meaning of Buddha comprised a conjunctive understanding of opposite meanings. The words belonged to a doctrinal tradition of wisdom which posited absence of self-hood. The images belonged to devotional tradition of animist worship of deistic presence. The two traditions presided over two different systems of meaning:—making absent the self from itself through wisdom so as as to acquire the salvation of buddhahood through attaining de-actualised emptiness (often conceived of as ‘nirvāṇa’ and extinguishment of any prospect of re-birth); and, alternately, making present, in material images, the deistic fullness of Buddha’s agency for worship by devotees in search of salvation—often a long and auspicious life and a good re-birth. Salvation could take life-times in the first; in the second, it was more immediate. These systems of meaning were abstract and concrete ways of defining Buddha. Between them, they ensured that, in the religion as a whole, Buddha was both absent and present. We apply semiology to interpret the meanings revealed by the surviving evidence of these two systems of meaning and show how the lifeworld of Indic Buddhism comprised a potent mix of the experiences they engendered, together. The wisdom tradition signified itself mainly in words of doctrine and practices of self-denial. The devotional tradition signified itself in images—mainly stūpas, buddha-images and maṇḍalas—as well as practices of worship. The wisdom tradition was doctrinal, monastically orientated (albeit respected by laity), and uniquely Buddhist. Its rituals comprised oft-repeated recitations of doctrinal discourses in dharma halls of monasteries amidst collective practices of self-denial. The devotional tradition was available for monastics and everyone else and focussed on the worship of images impregnated with Buddha’s sacred agency. This shared its ritual practices with other Indic religiosities, including the visual prowess of indigenous Indic darśan (deistic communion through eye contact). The two traditions comprised different religious approaches—one of apophatic wisdom by means of renunciatory askesis and one of cataphatic worship by means of deistic communion. They had their own systems of meaning and logic. They differed in respect of the nature of ultimate being, the nature of salvation and the route to salvation (i.e. ontology, soteriology and epistemology). Yet, despite their contradictions, they functioned together, interdependently, throughout history. And the experiential relativities between the two opposite systems of meaning led various monastics to take progressive steps to hybridise the two traditions. This tendency increased over time, until some monastics fused their meanings and rituals. This new interpretation of Indic Buddhism analyses, semiotically, the consequence of having two interdependent yet opposite systems of meaning—leading naturally to conjunctive understandings of opposite meanings. This permitted variable experiential relativities of absence and presence. Which led to an understandable proclivity for interactive reconciliation of meanings in doctrine and worship. It favoured the influence of imagistic presence, for the religion functioned across its two systems of meaning in an Indic culture where, as this work demonstrates, images spoke louder than words. The monasteries of Indic Buddhism were full of images. They were not (or not merely) illustrations of doctrine but were powerful deistic agencies in their own right; for Buddha was physically present in them. The images were perceived and understood in accordance with the extraordinary Indic capacity to see and interact with sacred agencies in images by means of Indic darśan. This was (and still is) Indic sacred seeing. In the context of cataphatic worship of sacred images it was the visual perception of deistic agency in the image and that agency’s ‘return gaze’ upon the devotee, capable of bestowing salvific benefits through the eye. However, whilst the devotional tradition of imagistic presence had an ever-increasing influence on the (later) doctrines of Mahāyāna, esotericism and Tantra, it was the meaning of absence of self-hood which remained the ultimate doctrinal legitimator in the relativities and tensions between the two traditions over the course of the history of Buddhism in South Asia. Indic Buddhism needs scholarship to follow the example of Buddhists in South Asia and find the ‘Middle Way’ through contrary meanings of words and images

National identity and the ownership of English in Nigeria

It has been argued that, especially in non‐Inner Circles of English, whether or not speakers consider language to be a harbinger of national identity affects their positioning as owners of that language. A plethora of prior studies have also demonstrated that language is of central importance regarding the ways in which people enact their national identities. In the case of Nigeria, national language(s) rhetoric has been particularly contentious. This study presents findings from a larger study employing a mixed‐methods approach to examine Nigerian university students’ perceptions (N = 387) of English language ownership. Analysis revealed that respondents’ sense of national identity was a major factor in enacting (English) language ownership. The findings from the study also indicated that the extent to which speakers outwith Inner Circle contexts exercise linguistic ownership over English can depend upon both the specific sociolinguistic milieu and the degree to which English expresses national identity

GVCs meet robots: smiling, smirking or flattening? The case of the automotive value chain

The paper contributes to the fast-growing literature on the structural dynamics of digitalization with a focus on robotization, and its heterogeneous diffusion and impact along and within global value chains. Specifically, building on an innovative granular analysis of the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) dataset, we provide new empirical evidence of the disproportional distribution of robotization across countries, sectors and along different stages and production functions of global value chains (GVCs). Moreover, with specific reference to the automotive sector, we identify some features that characterize industrial robots’ adoption across different applications and along different stages of the automotive value chain. Such characteristics are also assessed through a sectoral case study analysis based on primary data collection conducted in the automotive sector in South Africa

Diaspora mobilisation in the Global South: deterritorialised mobilisation strategies, ‘informal’ Filipino diaspora organisations, and the politics of social welfare protection

How and why do ‘informal diaspora’ organisations cope with domestic restrictions in the illiberal host states of the Global South? Despite their central relevance and contributions, scholars have yet to examine the complex transnational agency of ‘informal’ diaspora organisations and their institutional mobilisation strategies for seeking sociopolitical claims on diaspora welfare protection in the Gulf region, the largest host of diaspora in the Global South. Using informal Filipino diaspora organisations in the United Arab Emirates, I offer two arguments: firstly, informal diaspora organisations have institutionally deterritorialised their mobilisation strategies to navigate domestic restrictions and precarious temporary status to survive in the illiberal host states. Secondly, despite domestic restrictions, informal diaspora organisations employ three institutional mobilisation strategies – unauthorised, virtual, and proxy – to extend welfare for marginalised populations. These institutional strategies reflect the growing complexity of illiberal host states’ ‘tight grip’ over formal/informal diaspora organisations and the informal diaspora organisations’ bottom-up institutional resistance. Methodologically, I employ process tracing, semi-structured interviews with informal Filipino diasporas, and secondary analysis of newspaper/media publications. Overall, this study enhances our understanding of the global politics of diaspora mobilisation and illiberalism by elucidating deterritorialised diaspora mobilisations as survival mechanisms within the Global South’s illiberal host states