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

Searching for a third-space methodology to contest essentialist large-culture blocks

Here I present the third space as a methodology for contesting the essentialist large-culture distortion and colonising of both researching and engaging with the intercultural. This distortion is deep in the structure of intercultural studies and the everyday narratives that surround us as a major source of prejudice and false certainty. A third-space methodology therefore requires constant and uncomfortable deCentred questioning of the thinking-as-usual. The subsequent intersubjective implicatedness of the researcher requires this personal research history, alongside the 20 years of IALIC, of my own developing approach to the third space by means of whatever methods emeged as appropriate

Revisiting intercultural competence: small culture formation on the go through threads of experience

This paper argues that intercultural competence is not something that needs to be acquired anew but that needs to be recovered from our past experience of small culture formation developed during the process of socialization from birth. This small culture formation is on the go because it is a constant activity in response to everyday engagement with other people. It is activated by drawing threads of experience that can connect with the experiences of others. During cultural travel such threads can be pulled both from home to abroad and back again. This is however not a straightforward process because operating in the other directions are blocks that are created by Self and Other politics and essentialist discourses of culture that can enter into the process at any point, also fueled by our everyday understanding of the world and the global position and politics inherited from national structures. Any process of intercultural competence training needs to help intercultural travelers to recover existing threads and avoid blocks by means of ethnographic disciplines

Investigations of visual changes associated with the menstrual cycle and pregnancy

Background: There is a paucity of information on visual effects associated with the menstrual cycle and pregnancy and the current literature is equivocal. There are currently no guidelines for eyecare professionals on when it is appropriate to prescribe spectacles. Aim: To investigate, through scoping literature reviews and quantitative data analyses, possible visual changes and dry eye symptoms which are associated with the menstrual cycle and pregnancy. Setting: The COVID pandemic only permitted online self-reported measurements using validated vision and dry eye questionnaires and a visual acuity test at peak progesterone, peak oestrogen, and menstruation stages of the menstrual cycle. Methods: Scoping literature reviews provided an update on current knowledge. Novel online methodologies were developed, including use of eConsent and Web Apps for collecting data from the RAND NEI RQL 42, Sande dye questionnaires and the FrACT visual acuity test. Participants: Despite wide promotion through multiple routes, only 44 participants were recruited of which only 15 completed data collection at 2 or more stages of the menstrual cycle. Results: Baseline data on menarche and menstrual cycle duration is consistent with current literature. No statistically significant effects (tested using Wilcoxon’s Signed Rank test) were found for five NEI RQL 42 subscales, Sande Dry questionnaire or the FrACT visual acuity measurements studied. Using Cohens d values for effect sizes, the far vision and Sande dry eye question 2 subscales, for the 2 questionnaires only completed cohort, had large effect sizes with the Sande dry eye question 2 subscale having a medium effect size for the all 3 questionnaires completed cohort. There was a trend suggesting greater visual difficulties and dry eye symptoms around the time of peak oestrogen which reduce towards menstruation. Conclusion: Despite the disappointing lack of statistically significant findings, possibly due to insufficient data, the observed effect sizes for the far vision, glare and dry eye subscales indicate that future research in these areas might be most fruitful when considering visual changes associated with the menstrual cycle and pregnancy. This thesis provides the latest knowledge together with novel online methodologies that would enable further practice-based study of this topic and many others like it

Researching the intercultural: intersubjectivity and the problem with postpositivism

In intercultural communication studies, the positivist preoccupation with objectivist, essentialist, solid large cultures has been replaced by a postmodern recognition that the intercultural is liquid and ideologically constructed. However, a postpositivist resistance to this paradigm change, while recognizing the dangers of essentialism, continues to be objectivist and fails to address the intersubjective nature of the ideological construction of culture. This results in a soft essentialism. This methodological failure of postpositivism is driven by a neoliberal technicalized commodification of quantitative and qualitative methods that does not address the subjective implicatedness of researchers. It therefore prevents an understanding of the liquid nature of the intercultural and sustains the neo-racist implications of essentialism. An example of this is commodifying international students as culturally problematic to serve a quantifiable notion of intercultural competence. The methodological flaws of postpositivism can only be avoided by means of an approach to researching cultural groups in which large culture concepts such as nation are viewed as one of many possible, emergent, ideologically constructed variables rather than as the starting point for research

The yin-yang relationship between essentialist and non-essentialist discourses related to the participation of children of migrants, and its implication for how to research

There is a complex relationship between the essentialist and non-essentialist discourses that respectively fail to and succeed in recognising the potential for participation which the children of migrants bring with them into new cultural settings. These competing discourses curl around each other within the structures of educational settings and within all the people involved including the children themselves. A yin-yang framework helps us to see the nature of this entwined relationship and the hybridity which is the key to untangling it. It helps researchers to understand that getting to the bottom of what is going on is not straightforward and requires that they reassess who they are and how they should proceed. Sometimes it takes unusual and unexpected circumstances, such as those brought about by the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic to shake their thinking-as-usual and to see the unexpected

Cultural threads in primary schools

This paper explores headteachers’ and teachers’ perceptions of foreign languages (FL) and cultural learning in three primary schools in areas of disadvantage in England. Drawing upon a new theoretical frame for primary languages – Critical Cosmopolitanism (Delanty, 2006; Beck and Sznaider, 2006) and The Grammar of Culture (Holliday, 2018), we argue that the grand narrative of a target language inhabited by a target culture is outdated and approaches to cultural learning in primary schools could lead the way. There is substantial evidence that most learners find language lessons fun, particularly activities such as songs, stories and intercultural events (Driscoll et al.,2004, 2014; Cable et al. 2010). The discourse on conditions for inclusive practice is less commonplace and little is known about FL learning in areas of high deprivation (Nikolov & Mihaljević Djigunović, 2011). Teachers and headteachers in this study were committed to cultural learning and staff adopted creative approaches to teaching. The findings, however, also indicate that traditional notions of a mono or homogenised national culture with associated stereotypes linger in teachers’ framing of FL. There exists a need for a more personalised approach to cultural learning drawing upon children’s own cultural experiences. Data was analysed thematically following strict ethical guidelines and all names were anonymised to ensure confidentiality

Defying grand narratives of ‘being an international student’: finding ‘home’ in the Other

The PhD students in this study create a sense of being at home as part of their own way of being themselves. Their programme requires and allows considerable autonomy in how they choose to be with the people around them. Different to common expectations of the ‘international student’, their nationality and its ‘culture’ being apart from the ‘culture’ they find is not the major factor. Instead they draw resources from their personal cultural trajectories within which their lives in Britain form another stage in a lifelong journey of identity construction. They do not ‘assimilate’ in the expected sense. Their friends are not mainly ‘British’. Their brought multilingualism is characteristic of a natural hybridity that prepares them to be different selves in diverse social locations and with people of diverse origin on and off campus through an ongoing negotiation process of small culture formation on the go

Analysis and design of a modular multilevel converter with trapezoidal modulation for medium and high voltage DC-DC transformers

Conventional dual active bridge topologies provide galvanic isolation and soft-switching over a reasonable operating range without dedicated resonant circuits. However, scaling the two-level dual active bridge to higher dc voltage levels is impeded by several challenges among which the high dv/dt stress on the coupling transformer insulation. Gating and thermal characteristics of series switch arrays add to the limitations. To avoid the use of standard bulky modular multilevel bridges, this paper analyzes an alternative modulation technique where staircase approximated trapezoidal voltage waveforms are produced; thus alleviating developed dv/dt stresses. Modular design is realized by the utilization of half-bridge chopper cells. Therefore, the analyzed converter is a modular multi-level converter operated in a new mode with no common-mode dc arm currents as well as reduced capacitor size, hence reduced cell footprint. Suitable switching patterns are developed and various design and operation aspects are studied. Soft switching characteristics will be shown to be comparable to those of the two-level dual active bridge. Experimental results from a scaled test rig validate the presented concept

Defying grand narratives of ‘being an international student’: finding ‘home’ in the Other

The PhD students in this study create a sense of being at home as part of their own way of being themselves. Their programme requires and allows considerable autonomy in how they choose to be with the people around them. Different to common expectations of the ‘international student’, their nationality and its ‘culture’ being apart from the ‘culture’ they find is not the major factor. Instead they draw resources from their personal cultural trajectories within which their lives in Britain form another stage in a lifelong journey of identity construction. They do not ‘assimilate’ in the expected sense. Their friends are not mainly ‘British’. Their brought multilingualism is characteristic of a natural hybridity that prepares them to be different selves in diverse social locations and with people of diverse origin on and off campus through an ongoing negotiation process of small culture formation on the go