Difference and awareness in cultural travel: negotiating blocks and threads

Three university students studying abroad employ a combination of two modes of thinking and talking about cultural difference within a non-essentialist paradigm. At some times they focus on the cultural threads that they bring with them that enable the sharing of cultural experience, the crossing of cultural boundaries and the potential for engaging creatively and critically with new cultural domains. At other times, within a softer non-essentialism, they focus on cultural blocks that, while acknowledging diversity, reinforce the notion of uncrossable cultural boundaries. Both are modes of making sense of and constructing culture; and their mixing demonstrates how we can all employ conflicting discourses of culture at the same time. However, for both cultural travellers and researchers, focusing on cultural threads will be more effective in combating the cultural prejudice and global politics that underpin essentialism. Revealing cultural threads requires a specific methodology in talking to people about culture and recognising the potentials for sharing. This could be a basis for intercultural learning

Performance, Politics and Media: How the 2010 British General Election leadership debates generated ‘talk’ amongst the electorate.

During the British General Election 2010 a major innovation was introduced in part to improve engagement: a series of three live televised leadership debates took place where the leader of each of the three main parties, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative, answered questions posed by members of the public and subsequently debated issues pertinent to the questions. In this study we consider these potentially ground breaking debates as the kind of event that was likely to generate discussion. We investigate various aspects of the ‘talk’ that emerged as a result of watching the debates. As an exploratory study concerned with situated accounts of the participants experiences we take an interpretive perspective. In this paper we outline the meta-narratives (of talk) associated with the viewing of the leadership debates that were identified, concluding our analysis by suggesting that putting a live debate on television and promoting and positioning it as a major innovation is likely to mean that is how the audience will make sense of it – as a media event

Encounters with the military : toward an ethics of feminist critique?

This conversation developed from a panel titled “Interrogating the Militarized Masculine: Reflections on Research, Ethics and Access” held at the May 2013 International Feminist Journal of Politics conference at the University of Sussex, UK

Citizenship education: social science teachers' views in three European countries

The aim of the study presented in this study is to map the diverse views of\ud secondary school teachers on citizenship education in Bulgaria, Croatia, and the\ud Netherlands; to explore these views and to compare them, in order to arrive at a\ud richer understanding and possibly to suggest ways for engaging in a debate aimed\ud at daily teaching practices. The book focuses on authentic teachers’ voices, with teachers talking about the ways they perceive citizenship, citizenship education programs and curricula, politics, and their role in the lives of their students and in their society

Africa's media: democracy and the politics of belonging

status: publishe

A quiet politics of being together: Miriam and Rose

This paper draws on fieldwork with a befriending scheme that pairs refugees, asylum seekers and local residents in the north east of England. It explores the ways in which a ‘quiet politics’ of encounter, embedded in intimate relationships, is caught up in and productive of complex inter-scale geographies, highlighting the ebbs and flows across security and insecurity. Critically, it foregrounds the relationality of emotions in enabling and maintaining intimate-geopolitics

The battle for the whistleblower : an interview with John Kiriakou

Whistleblowing, or speaking truth to power, is complex. How truth telling is shaped is an important issue, as is the legitimacy of the individual who speaks out. Both the person who blows the whistle, and the disclosure itself, may be framed differently depending upon the agendas of others. This is further shaped and complicated by the various mediums through which disclosures are made. In what follows we present an interview with CIA whistleblower, John Kiriakou, and discuss its implications for theories of whistleblowing including those drawing on the concept of parrhesia. This case demonstrates the complexities involved in establishing a voice and gaining legitimacy amid contemporary forms of media, alongside the effects of this for the whistleblower