Cosmopolitan speakers and their cultural cartographies

Language learners' increased mobility and the ubiquity of virtual intercultural encounters has challenged traditional ideas of ‘cultures’. Moreover, representations of cultures as consumable life-choices has meant that learners are no longer locked into standard and static cultural identities. Language learners are better defined as cosmopolitan individuals with subjective and complex socio-political and historical identities. Such models push the boundaries of current concepts in language pedagogy to new understandings of who the language learner is and a refashioning of the cultural maps they inhabit. This article presents a model for cultural understanding that draws on the theoretical framework of Beck's Cosmopolitan Vision and its related concepts of ‘Banal Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Cosmopolitan Empathy’. Narrative accounts are used to illustrate the experience of a group of students of Arabic and Serbian/Croatian and their use of the cultural resources at their disposal to construct their own subjective cosmopolitan life-worlds. Through the analysis of learners' everyday cultural practices inside and outside the educational environment, the scope of the intercultural experience is revisited and a new paradigm for the language learner is presented. The Cosmopolitan Speaker (CS) described in this article is a subject who adopts a flâneur-like disposition to reflect on and scrutinise the target culture. Armed with this highly personal interpretation of reality, CSs will be able to take part in their own cultural trajectories and imagine and ‘figure’ their own cartography of the world

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Index de l'obra ressenyada: Núria SALES, Tractà dels Pirineus, el Tractat dels Pirineus. Estudis d'Història Agrària, núm. 17 (2004

Evocación de Manuel de Terán, geógrafo, humanista y mentor (1904-1984)

On évoque le géographe espagnol Manuel de Terán, décédé en Mai 1984. On met en relief d'abord sa personalité comme géographe et humaniste, et ensuite on présente une bibliographie de l'éminent géographe que s'étend jusqu'à 1981.This presentation is in memory of the Spanish geographer, Manuel de Terán, who died in May 1984, firstly considering his personality and his contribution to human geography and secondly adjoining a bibliography of his works unti1 1981.Hom evoca la figura del geògraf espanyol Manuel de Terán, traspassat el maig de 1984. Hom destaca en primer lloc la seva personalitat com a geògraf i com a humanista; en segon lloc es presenta una bibliografia de l'eminent geògraf fins al 1981