Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality: Autocritiques (Encounters between East and West) 9811966710, 9789811966712

Table of contents :
About the Authors
Praise for Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality
Contents
List of Figures
1 Spiralling Through Interculturality
Abstract
1.1 An Intercultural Smile
1.2 A Brush in Each Hand at the Same Time
1.3 Spiralling Together
1.4 Book Structure
References
2 Paralleling Realities
Abstract
2.1 Identity Matrixes
2.2 Determinants and Positions in the Field of Interculturality
References
3 Core Voltage
Abstract
3.1 Struggles and Emotions
3.2 Impetuses
3.3 Ambitions
3.4 What Are We Allowed to Hope For?
References
4 Devenir-être; Devenir-langue
Abstract
4.1 Influences
4.2 Looking Into Each Other’s Mirror—Reading Each Other
4.3 Devenir-langue—The Power of Words
References
5 Fragmenting Intercultural Research
Abstract
5.1 Who Are We Writing to?
5.2 Why Critique?
5.3 On the Need for Fragmentation in Intercultural Research
5.4 Rebalancing?
References
6 Looking-Inward, Moving Forward and Destabilizing Our Rhetorics
Abstract
6.1 Our Privilege/Subalternity A Priori?
6.2 Double-Peripheralization
6.3 Early Literary Influences
6.4 Revealing Political and Religious Beliefs in Interculturality Research: Unwise Practice?
6.5 Reorganizing the Table
6.6 Other Languages to Speak: A Different Taste of Interculturality?
6.7 ‘Disobedience’ in Interculturality Early-Careers’ Epistemologies
6.8 Moving Forward Not Moving On
References
7 Zone
Abstract
7.1 Fantasized Dialogues
7.2 Challenges in Writing the Book
7.3 Learning About Each Other
7.4 Learning with Each Other
7.5 Dissonance
7.6 Repositioning Interculturality?
7.7 Concepts to Take Away
7.8 Summarizing Our Main Messages
7.9 Proposals for Research Practices
7.10 Moving to and fro…
References

Citation preview

Encounters between East and West: Intercultural Perspectives

Fred Dervin Hamza R’boul

Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality Autocritiques

Encounters between East and West Intercultural Perspectives

Series Editor Fred Dervin, The University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

This book series publishes volumes problematizing the issue of East versus West. The topics covered in the series represent past, current and future trends in intercultural encounters and communication between the East and West, including: The role of language in such encounters, for example plurilingualism and English as a global language. - The impact of digital technologies in East/West interactions. - The construction of the East/West in different kinds of discourses, such as in media, fiction, educational products and services, marketing and tourism. - Diachronic examinations of encounters between the East/West. - The impact of mobility/migration. - Comparison of different but similar populations in the East/West (e.g. migrants, teachers, etc.). - Redefinitions of the East/West, in terms of changing frontiers, political terms. The series also demonstrates innovative ways of conducting intercultural research. It has now become a cliché to say that intercultural encounters have increased over recent decades. Interculturality is not new – far from it! Encounters between people from different backgrounds speaking different languages have always taken place, but the difference today is the speed and ease with which they occur. Research on interculturality and intercultural communication dates back to the 1950s with different paradigms emerging over the years. However, we have now reached a mature stage of scientific development and discussions on this topic. While initially a simple understanding of ‘national culture’ was used to explain what happened when people from different countries met, today analyses of interculturality are more complex and also take into account elements such as gender, religion, social class and age. The last decade has seen major changes in the way interculturality is studied, with a shift from an overemphasis on culture to a focus on identity. Global politics has also changed since the 1950s and some countries that used to be colonies or ‘closed’ societies have (re-)emerged and in some cases taken on economic, political and symbolic positions. The dichotomy of the East vs. West has also reappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This largely imaginary and political characterization of our world now deserves more attention, especially in relation to intercultural encounters and communication between these two spheres.

Fred Dervin · Hamza R’boul

Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality Autocritiques

13

Fred Dervin   Faculty of Educational Sciences University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

Hamza R’boul   Department of International Education The Education University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China

ISSN 2364-6721 ISSN 2364-673X  (electronic) Encounters between East and West ISBN 978-981-19-6671-2 ISBN 978-981-19-6672-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6672-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

About This Book

This book starts from the premise that dialogue between scholars and educators of interculturality, especially from different geo-economic-political spheres is needed more than ever. Through the Looking Glass of Interculturality is about an important and yet contested notion: Interculturality. The book was co-written by two scholars who have never met and who got to know each other intellectually in the process of writing, using interculturality as a looking-glass. (Re-)negotiating meanings, ideologies and their own identities in writing the chapters together, the authors enter into multifaceted dialogues and intercommunicate. The co-authors’ different profiles in terms of geography (Dervin: Finland/China, R’boul: Morocco/Hong Kong), generation, status, preferred paradigms and multilingual identities (amongst others) are put forward, confronted, and mirrored in the different chapters, leading to the joint negotiation of critiques and proposals concerning interculturality in communication and education. The authors argue that engaging with the notion requires constant self-reflection, examining one’s positionality and intersectionality, listening to the voices that one projects onto the world of e.g. research and education, and operating transformations in one’s thinking, trying out new paradigms, ideologies, and methods to enrich one’s take on interculturality. Scholars and educators who are eager to discover fresh and exciting ideas and debates concerning interculturality will find Through the Looking Glass of Interculturality: Autocritiques a perfect addition to their reading lists.

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Praise for Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality

“Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality is an intellectually stimulating and much needed contribution to the field of intercultural studies. Fred Dervin and Hamza R’boul understand better than anyone that conversations on interculturality cannot be separated from geopolitical and body political questions of knowledge. This timely book fills the gap in this area of research. I encourage anyone interested in questions around interculturality, multiculturalism and other issues connected to our globalized and postcolonial world to read this book.” —Robert Aman, Linköping University, Sweden, author of Decolonising Intercultural Education: Colonial Difference, the Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Inter-Epistemic Dialogue (Routledge) “A standing ovation for Fred Dervin and Hamza R’boul for their enlightening virtual dialogues through the looking glass of interculturality. The computer screen opens the path for the authors’ adventure in the post-pandemic dystopialand. While reinventing Alice’s coming of age journey, Dervin and R’boul question the underlying rules of interculturality and (auto)critically reflect on the struggle to accept the fragmentation of intercultural research. Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality can be viewed as the key for a world that suddenly appears both recognizable and unfamiliar, in desperate need for renewed intercultural connections, dialogues and educational practices, as the ones explored in this book.” —Clara Sarmento, Centre for Intercultural Studies, Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal “Through the Looking–glass of Interculturality is an excellent, informative and original work. It captures elegantly and skillfully the complexities of interculturality, globalization, and intercultural dialogue, which is a must read for scholars specialising in cultural identities and interculturality globally.” —Joseph Zajda, School of Education Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

vii

Contents

1 Spiralling Through Interculturality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 An Intercultural Smile. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 A Brush in Each Hand at the Same Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.3 Spiralling Together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.4 Book Structure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2 Paralleling Realities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.1 Identity Matrixes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.2 Determinants and Positions in the Field of Interculturality. . . . . . 14 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3 Core Voltage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 3.1 Struggles and Emotions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 3.2 Impetuses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 3.3 Ambitions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 3.4 What Are We Allowed to Hope For?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 4 Devenir-être; Devenir-langue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 4.1 Influences. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 4.2 Looking Into Each Other’s Mirror—Reading Each Other. . . . . . . 48 4.3 Devenir-langue—The Power of Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 5 Fragmenting Intercultural Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 5.1 Who Are We Writing to?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 5.2 Why Critique?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 5.3 On the Need for Fragmentation in Intercultural Research. . . . . . . 65 5.4 Rebalancing?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

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Contents

6 Looking-Inward, Moving Forward and Destabilizing Our Rhetorics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 6.1 Our Privilege/Subalternity A priori? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 6.2 Double-Peripheralization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 6.3 Early Literary Influences. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 6.4 Revealing Political and Religious Beliefs in Interculturality Research: Unwise Practice?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 6.5 Reorganizing the Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 6.6 Other Languages to Speak: A Different Taste of Interculturality? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 6.7 ‘Disobedience’ in Interculturality Early-Careers’ Epistemologies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 6.8 Moving Forward Not Moving On . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 7 Zone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 7.1 Fantasized Dialogues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 7.2 Challenges in Writing the Book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 7.3 Learning About Each Other. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 7.4 Learning with Each Other. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 7.5 Dissonance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 7.6 Repositioning Interculturality? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 7.7 Concepts to Take Away . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 7.8 Summarizing Our Main Messages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 7.9 Proposals for Research Practices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 7.10 Moving to and fro… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

About the Authors

Fred Dervin  is Professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Prof. Dervin specializes in intercultural communication education, the sociology of multiculturalism and international mobilities in education. He has widely published in different languages on identity, interculturality and mobility/ migration (over 150 articles and 70 books). His latest books include: Dervin & Jacobsson (2022) Intercultural Communication Education. Broken Realities and Rebellious Dreams (Springer) and Dervin (2022) Interculturality in Fragments: A reflexive Perspective (Springer). Exploring the politics of interculturality within and beyond the ‘canon’ of intercultural communication education research has been one of Dervin’s idée fixes in his work over the past 20 years. Hamza R’boul  is a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of International Education‚ The Education University of Hong Kong‚ Hong Kong‚ China. His works examine the western hegemony in knowledge production and dissemination in different contexts including intercultural communication and English language teaching. He has published in e.g. Journal of International and Intercultural communication‚ Language and Intercultural communication‚ Journal of Multicultural Discourses and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. His research interests include intercultural communication and education‚ cultural politics of language teaching‚ postcoloniality and geopolitics of knowledge.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 The spiral principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Fig. 3.1 Recurrences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

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Chapter 1

Spiralling Through Interculturality

Abstract This chapter introduces the topic of the book arguing that encounters and dialogue between scholars and educators of interculturality, especially from different geopolitical spheres, are needed more than ever. The authors also justify the need for books like this one; they then present and problematize their conditions of knowledge co-construction for the book as well as the specific working methods adopted in the book (spiral-like progression; devenir-langue/languaging, criticality of criticality). Using the spiral principle guiding Through the Lookingglass of Interculturality: Autocritiques, the authors introduce the specificities of each chapter and suggest ways of engaging with the ideas developed by them through their dialogue and encounters. Keywords Spiral ·  Criticality of criticality  · Languaging · Encounters ·  Dialogue  ·  Knowledge co-construction

1.1 An Intercultural Smile This book is a miracle. It could well not have happened but it did. Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality: Autocritiques is both an ‘odd sign’ (to hint at the translation of the two characters composing the Chinese word for miracle, 奇迹 Qíjī) and a ‘smile’ (Proto-Indo European smei- for to smile, laugh is the root of Latin miraculum). Reading through our email correspondence, Fred found one of the first messages that he exchanged with Hamza on September 10th, 2020, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic: Dear Colleague, Thank you very much for sending all this [Hamza sent details about his latest publications as requested by Fred]. I am so excited to have found you! Looking forward to reading it all.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 F. Dervin and H. R'boul, Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality, Encounters between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6672-9_1

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1  Spiralling Through Interculturality

2

The world of research NEEDS you. The state of intercultural research is still worryingly White European-American. We need voices like yours beyond the ‘tokens’ that the West is abusing (so many PhD students from outside the West who parrot ‘our’ stuff about culture, democracy bla bla bla). Maybe we should schedule a Zoom meeting to discuss ‘face-to-face’. I can tell you about my current plans and we can talk about your future? Please suggest a couple of dates and times. Thanks again for getting back to me. Best wishes, Fred

Fred had just finished writing a couple of books inspired by the major crises that the world was experiencing (Dervin & Jacobsson, 2021; Dervin & Simpson, 2021). Hamza recalls what happened then: Writing this book with Fred reminds me of how life is unpredictable and how we may be oblivious to what scenarios serve our subjectivities. In 2020, Fred and I agreed to meet virtually and discuss some matters on Skype on Tuesday at 10. I informed my closest individuals that I was meeting Fred Dervin out of my excitement. I spent quite some time rehearing the ideas I will be sharing and the type of impression that I would like Fred to have of me. It resembled the process of a writing a journal article more than having a conversation. I woke up early, got ready and sat somewhere nice waiting. Unfortunately, Fred never showed up and I kept sending emails thinking that there may have been some misunderstanding concerning the day, time and/or platform, etc. There was no reply and, then, a feeling of anger and frustration started to seep into my psyche and mind. I was thinking ‘why would someone think it is okay to leave me hanging? and why my presence was not even considered?’. These questions quickly brought about more acid and squeaky thoughts. These feelings escalated into telling myself that ‘I do not need to meet him; I can do what he has done and maybe more if I work harder’. That anger and frustration fuelled an intense momentum and desire to prove myself that I exist and that I can think. That day, I started working on several manuscripts; an act of existence or an existential crisis that developed this rigour and initiated the pace that I’m working by until now. Maybe, I have learned and benefited more from not meeting Fred than what would have been the case if we met each other that day. It is a journey from being abandoned on a Tuesday’s morning to co-authoring this book in which my voice is as principal as Fred’s.

Fred had gone through difficult personal issues in September 2020, which made him close himself up in a cocoon for the months to come. A year later, we got to meet again at an online conference in which Hamza was speaking—Fred was listening to ‘young scholars’ sharing their research on intercultural communication education. We started chatting and real collaboration began. In winter 2022, we started corresponding on the Chinese application Weixin (Wechat) and the idea for this book was born.

1.2 A Brush in Each Hand at the Same Time Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality is about two scholars, from different backgrounds, getting to know each other, sharing ideas and opinions, disagreeing and reconciling themselves (temporarily) about the notion of interculturality. Our

1.2  A Brush in Each Hand at the Same Time

3

different profiles in terms of geography (Fred: Finland/China, Hamza: Morocco/ Spain), generation, status, preferred paradigms and multilingual identities (amongst others) are put forward, confronted and mirrored in different chapters, leading to the joint negotiation of a catalogue of critiques and desires concerning interculturality in communication and education. The book is embedded within our separate work and is to be considered as a (temporary) piece of our ‘intellectual jigsaws’. The book starts from the premise that dialogue between scholars and educators of interculturality, especially from different geopolitical spheres is needed more than ever. It was written by two co-authors who have never met before and who got to know each other intellectually in the process of writing this book, using interculturality as a looking-glass. (Re-)negotiating meanings, ideologies and our own identities in writing the chapters together, we enter into multifaceted dialogues and intercommunicate [communication relating to the idea of making common, sharing while accepting disagreements]. Most importantly, we conduct autocritiques of our past, present and future engagement with the notion of interculturality. At the same time, we reflect on the questions of who is talking the most about interculturality in the world today? Whose voices are not heard? How to disrupt current hegemonies around the notion for real? And how to promote epistemological plurality in the discourses and narratives shaping our understandings of the notion? Autocritiquing is proposed as a way of unthinking and rethinking interculturality ad infinitum. As such we argue that engaging with the notion requires constant self-reflection, examining and confronting one’s positionality and intersectionality, listening to the voices that one projects onto the world of, e.g. research and education, and operating transformations in one’s thinking, trying out new paradigms, ideologies and methods to enrich our take on interculturality. [If the reader wants to have a visual metaphor for our work in the book, they may want to watch Jan Švankmajer’s (1983) 12-min short films entitled Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu) which portray perfectly, through stop motion animation, the complex processes which we experienced]. In the book, we continue exploring interculturality—a notion that deserves to be discussed, problematized, inquired, conceptualized, criticized, modified and written about again and again. Following Barthes (1977: 127–129), as a complex object of research and education, interculturality is a fashion-word, a value-word built by oppositions, a colour-word with varied ‘sonorous charms’, a Mana-word which answers for everything and a medium word. By interrogating interculturality as a multifaceted word, we aim to open more doors [maybe not necessarily ‘new’ doors, what is new and for whom?] for ourselves and our readers. We also wish to contribute to move away from contagious ideas circulating in the field of intercultural communication education today. Our goal is not to set interculturality in stone. Pastiching Hamann (quoted by Canetti, 2021: 5) ‘[We] have as little faith in concepts that are clear as [we] do in those that are unclear: either can lead one into darkness’. We take interculturality for what it seems to be: a highly ideological and yet easily changeable and malleable notion [In Chinese, we note that chemistry translates as 化学 (huaxue), with 化 referring to change, transformation and

4

1  Spiralling Through Interculturality

学, the study of—a perfect word for what we do in the book somehow: interculturality as a study of change]. This is a book of two ‘angry’ men who have a lot to say about interculturality and with different rationales, sources and ontologies. The book is constructed like a spiral to reflect this ‘good-humoured anger’—‘winding around a center or pole and gradually receding from or approaching it’ (Merriam Webster, 2022). Our working method is based on a series of questions that we asked each other in writing, pushing each other to think further. Although the readers don’t have access to the paratexts of this book [i.e. texts beyond the main text such as messages exchanged between us on Weixin], the book is also a reflection of the hours of discussions, hesitations and dis-/agreements that we had in other spaces of communication. The book is thus embedded in chains of discourses and conglomerates which form a whole here while, at the same time, revealing, e.g. our distinct identities and thoughts. The Chinese idiom 双管齐下 (shuāngguǎnqíxià) summarizes well the complexities of the book: we both painted a picture with a brush in each hand at the same time. In some chapters, we introduce topics, to which we come back later in the book, reflecting and commenting on what we had written earlier and reacting to what the other was saying, never closing the doors behind us, expending arguments, ideas and vocabularies spiral-like. Half-way through writing the book, Hamza sent a message to Fred saying: ‘This question-based approach is just great. Maybe it is most effective in producing knowledge’. The result is like a ‘volcano’ [Hamza] or ‘1913’ [Fred: a highly creative and rebellious year in European classical music with the likes of Debussy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky producing very different but extremely avant-garde pieces, which would influence music of the twentieth century—just before the First World War].

1.3 Spiralling Together Some parts of the book were written individually, others together. When each of us speaks (using ‘I’), we do not indicate who is speaking as we wish to let the reader explore our individual discourses without locking them up in predetermined borders between us. We also wish to create some potential enunciative confusion while reading the book to reflect the inherent simplexity (simplicity + complexity) of interculturality. In most cases, who is speaking will appear obvious but as we move forward in the book, boundaries might not always be as clear as they might have been at, e.g. the beginning of the book. The spiral principle of the book also leads us to return to previous individual utterances and to change together. On other occasions, the borders between us remain or are reinforced. Since our interest is in the inter- of interculturality, we also want our readers to witness some of this inter- occurring between us. The spiral principle adopted in the book represents a concrete attempt to operationalize Fred’s call for interculturalizing interculturality and Hamza’s

1.3  Spiralling Together

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meta-intercultural ontologies and epistemological polylogue. It also exemplifies an alternative way of knowing that is not anchored in Western grand narratives. Three keywords summarize the basic working methods supporting the spiralling process: Languaging, criticality of criticality and looking inward. Languaging about interculturality is given a central role in the book, i.e. interrogating systematically the words that we use to talk about and (re-)negotiate what we have to say about interculturality. Since the book is in English as an international academic language, we make references to, e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Finnish and French to open up discussions about the ‘favours’ and ideologies found behind what we say about interculturality (see Dervin, 2022; Dervin & Jacobsson, 2021). As multilingual authors, Canetti (1989: 37) represents an important inspiration for us when he writes: More and more frequently I am drawn to examine the words that I carry within myself; they occur to me singly, coming from different languages, and then I wish for nothing more than to reflect on a single such word for a long time. I hold it before me, turn it around; I handle it like a stone, but a marvellous stone, and the earth in which it was embedded is myself.

Languaging around interculturality is a recurring theme in the book. Alongside language, criticality of criticality, a principle Fred has proposed in reaction to [his own and others’] one-sided critiques in intercultural communication education, urges us to look systematically at oneself being critical (Dervin, 2022). In The Zhuāngzi, an ancient Chinese text from the late Warring States period (around 470 BCE–391 BCE), which contains stories that depict the lighthearted attitude of the ideal Taoist sage, at least three interesting metaphors are used to describe aspects of criticality of criticality: 井蛙不可以语于海者, 拘于虚也 (A frog in a well cannot be talked with about the sea—it is confined by its space) 夏虫不可以语于冰者, 笃于时也 (An insect of the summer cannot be talked with about ice—it knows nothing beyond its season) 曲士不可以语于道者, 束于教也 (A scholar of limited views cannot be talked with about Dao—one is bound by the teaching one has received).

These remind us of the necessity to keep an eye open, considering other conditions of knowledge (sea vs. water in a well; winter vs. summer; one ideology vs. another). Being aware of, stating and revising our thoughts, perspectives and ideologies about interculturality constantly are difficult and yet rewarding processes. Although they can never be achieved fully, they still push us to try to break off from some of our (lack of) privileges, blinded takes on the world, self and other. Following hooks (2003) we do not simply indulge in ‘stating complaint’ and ‘being cynical’ in the book (criticality of criticality for the pleasure of being critical of criticality), we also engage in proposing concrete (and incomplete) actions for shifting the way interculturality is ‘done’ in research and education, especially

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in relation to epistemic imbalance and injustice between the Global South and Global North. Criticality of criticality goes hand in hand with looking inward in the spiralling process. Here, Schoenberg’s (in Auner, 2003: 233) take on teaching is an important reminder to us as scholars-educators: The teacher must have the courage to admit his own mistakes. He does not have to pose as infallible, as one who knows all and never errs; he must rather be tireless, constantly searching, perhaps sometimes finding. Why pose as a demigod? Why not be, rather, fully human?

In the book, the reader will find many examples of both of us revising our thoughts, admitting to making mistakes and/or not knowing—beyond the usual ‘demigod’ of the academic writer, to pastiche Schoenberg. Finally, the raw material of our own everyday lives [e.g. moments of happiness, misfortunes, embarrassments] also feeds in our writing, at times in more or less palpable ways.

1.4 Book Structure Figure 1.1 summarizes our spiralling process, with each element derived from the chapters composing the book. Chapter 2 ‘parallels’ our realities for the reader, providing snapshots of our identity matrixes and of our determinants and positions in the field of interculturality. As part of the spiralling process, we revisit these elements in the other chapters too. Chapter 3 revolves around our ‘core voltage’, i.e. our struggles and emotional engagement with the field of interculturality, our impetus and ambitions and potential ‘allowed’ hopes. Chapter 4 is based on two neologisms from French: Devenir-être and devenir-langue—which can translate as ‘becoming-being’ and ‘becoming-language’. These two phrases emphasize the importance of considering influences on our work as ever-evolving/-changing—becoming. In this chapter, we explore together, e.g. literary influences on our work; we look into each other’s mirror and reflect on the power of words for talking about interculturality using the endless principle of devenir-langue to do so [the word languaging can be considered as a potential synonym for devenir-langue]. Chapter 5 focusses on research, proposing to look at it with the idea of fragmenting in mind, i.e. research as something unfinished/unfinishable, always ‘in transit’. The questions of Who are we writing to? Why critique? and How to rebalance research globally? are considered in the chapter. The final chapter contributes to the spiral by reflecting on looking inward, moving forward and destabilizing our rhetorics of interculturality. The issues of privilege, subalternity, peripheralization and disobedience are problematized, while devenir-langue makes yet another return to the front of the stage. In the last chapter entitled zone (in reference to the Greek etymology of the word which describes the act of tying a belt, but leaving it loose here), we come back to the elements covered in the previous chapters and offer hints at

References

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Fig. 1.1  The spiral principle

what is to come in our future cooperation around interculturality in research and education. As a whole, the book is a book of (self-/other-) discovery, which asks a lot of questions and proposes (temporary) answers. The book was written with others in mind too and we hope that the reader will find themselves in it, adding their voices one way or another to our discussions. This is why we have included further questions for you to reflect on at the end of each chapter. Use the book as a looking-glass for yourselves and, we do hope, inspired by Brecht’s (in Craven, 2017: 514) suggestion about the use of art, as a hammer too… The following pages deliberately leave discussions open, inviting multifaceted responses and counter-responses to the questions the book poses.

References Auner, J. (2003). A Schoenberg reader. Yale University Press. Barthes, R. (1977). Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. University of California Press. Canetti, E. (1989). The secret heart of the clock. Farrar. Canetti, E. (2021). Notes from Hampstead. Macmillan. Craven, D. (2017). Art history as social praxis. Brill. Dervin, F. (2022). Interculturality in fragments: A reflexive approach. Springer Dervin, F., & Jacobsson, A. (2021). Teacher education for critical and reflexive interculturality. Palgrave Macmillan. Dervin, F., & Simpson, A. (2021). Interculturality and the political within education (1st ed.). Routledge.

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hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community. A pedagogy of hope. Routledge. Merriam Webster (2022). Spiral. Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spiral. Accessed19 Oct. 2022. Švankmajer, J. (1983). Možnosti dialogu. Prague: Krátký film Praha.

Chapter 2

Paralleling Realities

Abstract This chapter allows looking behind the stage of what Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality: Autocritiques is about. It offers peeking into the authors’ different (and, at times, similar) realities—paralleling them. Meeting, getting to know each other and writing the book together from a distance required the authors to ‘grow’ closer to each other. The chapter thus reveals snippets of the authors’ identity matrixes (incomplete complex arrays of who they might be for themselves and others) as well as how they are determined and positioned in the global field of interculturality. As a first entry into the book, the paralleling of the authors’ realities continues to spiral back and forth for the rest of the book. Keywords Identity · Academia · Parallels · Inequalities · Simplexity ·  Positions This chapter allows the reader to look behind the stage of what this book is about. It offers peeking into our different (and, at times, similar) realities. The word parallel is from the combined Greek words para- for beside and allēlois for each other, with the latter potentially derived from Proto-Indo-European for to grow, nourish. Meeting, getting to know each other and writing this book from a distance [we have never met physically] require us to ‘grow’ closer to each other, based on snapshots of snapshots of snapshots… of who we are and of what we think as scholars and individuals. The chapter reveals aspects of our identity matrixes (incomplete complex arrays of who we might be for ourselves and others) as well as how we are determined and positioned in the global field of interculturality. As a first step into the book, the paralleling of our realities will spiral back and forth in the rest of the book. The chapter is based on the following preliminary questions that we asked each other:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 F. Dervin and H. R'boul, Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality, Encounters between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6672-9_2

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• How might our different identities influence how we see and conceptualize interculturality? Where do we situate ourselves for example politically and in terms of worldviews? • How do we see our own positions in the global field of intercultural research? How would we define the kind of intercultural scholars that we are?

2.1 Identity Matrixes I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then. (Carroll, 1865)

How many times have we had to introduce ourselves in our lives? How often have we rehearsed identification with and through the other? On how many occasions have we resisted playing this game? As much as we spend half of our lives sleeping, at least a quarter of our breathing time has to do with putting our cards on the table, saying who we are and revealing things about ourselves. Who am I? Who am I allowed to be? Who are we (allowed to be) together? Identities are never just about me, but about what I do with and through others and about how we perceive each other ad infinitum [I often add this Latin phrase in my writing as a reminder that it is, obviously, a never-ending process; using it is tautological but I insist on including it in my texts]. Maybe we should ask the question Who am I? to the people around us but also to our readers, students and colleagues. Let me list ‘my’ identities here—the ones that I am happy to admit or share—like one would show an identity document when crossing a border. These identities can only make sense when confronted with other people, other identities (Bauman, 2004): • I am White • I am a man • I am 47 years old • I live in Finland • I speak 5 ‘European’ languages [I put European between inverted commas since, e.g. the Finnish language is not originally from ‘Europe’. What is more, languages do not have passports or geopolitical exclusivity in a glocally connected word—which means that a language labelled as European or Asian can also be spoken outside these imaginary spaces,, e.g. officially and/or ‘clandestinely’] • I have lived in different parts of the ‘Western’ and ‘Asian’ worlds • I am a professor of multicultural education. As I am listing these and imagining who I could be for others, I create my own (un/conscious) hierarchies of identities. 10 years ago, or in 10 years, I would/will not probably list them the same way. Today I start with white [is it because I am co-writing this book with Hamza or because of current ‘skin colour’ discussions in Europe?], maybe in the future, and depending on who is asking about my identities, I might start with age. What do these identities tell us? To me they send

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warnings: (1) My world is limited [an important reminder that must be with me all the time], (2) Many of these identities could be perceived as ‘reeking’ of privilege, (3) One of these identities contains an ideological construct that I do not necessarily support through my work (‘multicultural’). How have these identities influenced the way I see and deal with interculturality in research and education? Since most of them have to do with privilege, I have had to remind myself constantly—increasingly over the last few years—that I need to survey myself all the time, revising my thoughts and ideologies while listening to what other people have to say about interculturality, especially from ‘underprivileged’ contexts. [I must admit that rereading this last sentence, I feel uncomfortable by the (somewhat patronizing) privilege it contains: Do others, ‘underprivileged’ ones (whoever this might refer to), care about me listening to them? Should they care about me at all? Considering the limited amount of languages that I speak and my limited epistemic world, they might in fact see me as ‘underprivileged’ myself]. The identity related to language also sends the message that my linguistic skills are very Eurocentric and thus restricted and that they do not allow access to knowledge, ideas, discourses, imaginaries and words from many parts of the world. My name, affiliation to a Nordic university, skin colour and gender (amongst others) also urge me to bear in mind the fact that some people might treat me ‘nicely’ or wish to be ‘associated’ with me because of what I represent for them, i.e. ‘good’ academic and social capitals, often a springboard for promotion and local fame (‘he has worked with Dervin from the University of Helsinki’). When I meet people, it is not always about me as an individual that we meet but about the imaginaries and ideologies that I represent for them [Again, although this has been my experience many times, this sounds too aggrandizing. Some colleagues from, e.g. the Global South have not dared to question my ideologies at first, thinking they were the ‘right’ ones, coming from the North]. Interestingly, the pressure to publish and to be ‘international’ is so intense in some parts of the world that I have had people ready to do anything to ‘cooperate’ with me [meaning having their names put next to mine, especially before mine on publications], without them contributing a single word in joint publications or even being interested in what I might be saying about interculturality. More importantly, all these identity elements and the fact that they have embedded me in a specific context (the ‘West’, ‘Europe’, Finland, University of Helsinki), could indicate that my views and take on interculturality could be very much influenced by ideas, concepts and worldviews that are not necessarily shared by people outside this context. I am aware that some of the ideologies that I have promoted in my work have to do with my geopolitical location. The best example is that I have insisted for many years now on the necessity to take into account both difference and similarity (which I now call differilitude) in the way we approach the other, having been very much influenced by a non-differentialist perspective through the education I have received as a child in France [however I found a somewhat similar ideology in Chinese Minzu education through, e.g. the discourse instrument 美美与共—Měi měi yǔ gong (a diversified and harmonious world)]. Examining discourses and practices in, e.g. China and the US has made

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me aware of the diversity of positions and ideologies that one could have around interculturality. Trying to pull myself in all directions and becoming aware of and shifting ideological perspectives have been my endeavours for the past years. This awareness is the first step in interculturalizing interculturality as an object of research and education and a lifelong one (see Dervin & Jacobsson, 2022). Let me say a few words about a topic that is rarely discussed openly in research on interculturality: The political. In Dervin and Simpson (2021), we confronted this issue, which is always there, lurking behind, but never thrown onto the main stage. I would even argue that as soon as we use the notion of interculturality, we enter the realm of politics. I think that the idea of the political can be taken from a broad perspective here. If I continue with my identification, first, I can say that I have no affiliations with any political party or big ‘organizations’ that promote distinct political ideas. On the right–left spectrum I would position myself on the left but what the left means today or englobes is very indeterminate to me (see Trepanier & Havers, 2021 on the topic). I am not attached to any supranational institutions directly, having done one report for the UNESCO once and being part of EU ‘research’ projects a few times [I put research between inverted commas because they often turn out to be ‘pedagogically oriented’ projects obsessed by dissemination and ideological indoctrination disguised under the name of research]. In terms of religion, I did all my primary and secondary schooling in a private Catholic school but I never identified as a Catholic—my family was partly protestant. The school I attended was excellent and prepared me well intellectually but I never enjoyed the morning services and all kinds of religious activities, which I found to be too ‘cold’ for my taste (singing, repeating, performing…). Ideologically, I suppose that I fall into the capitalist-neoliberal agenda, having like all of us, no choice but ‘bend down’ and ‘obey’. I could claim that I try to resist as much as I can [‘I hate money!’; ‘I don’t care about money’, which is easy to state when one has money] but I know that it would be dishonest. Like everybody else, on a daily basis, I consume and buy things, images, ideas and communication—sometimes without noticing that I am enticed to do so. In academia, however, I try to run away from ‘trendy’ ideologies—even when they are labelled as ‘critical’. [But am I successful in avoiding ‘trends’? It is hard to say. Probably not. It is always much easier to notice how others follow trends…]. In Finnish academia, backed by ‘big’ money and Politics, two main trends are dominating at the moment: sustainability and social justice. What they really mean and entail is not always transparent to me—and to others, I assume. I often worry about how easily we consume such ideologies, forgetting to evaluate how honest those who push them down our throats are in believing themselves in their values, what these ideologies are asking us to do and their influence on those we work on in research and education (students, research participants). I have noted, for example, how easily we criticize colleagues from certain parts of the world for being a-critical and ‘swallowing’ and rehearsing, e.g. political discourses, while doing the same but in what might appear less obvious manners. For example, many of us ‘recite’ discourses passed down to us in-/directly by, e.g. the EU and the US in our research and practice, without evaluating them.

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Who am I? Who am I allowed to be? Who are we (allowed to be) together? Throughout my work, I have left some (changing) clues about who I am. Is this really me? Probably not… Who I am is what we make of me and what I make of you ad infinitum. * * * It is quite clear that Fred and I belong to different sociopolitical and geocultural contexts which, in one case or another, influence how we see and conceptualize interculturality. I do recognize that my positionality shapes how I fathom the ‘intercultural’, especially in the sense where I am positioned amongst the others; I think that I am currently in the lower side of the spectrum where my identities belong more to the ‘Global South’, ‘Peripheral’ and ‘Subaltern’. However, as much as this is potentially an unfavourable positioning, it affirms the legitimacy of my enunciation and rhetoric [reflecting on these lines, I am feeling increasingly uneasy about how I may be using these overlapping notions of subordination as evidence of being a miserabilist who extols being marginalized as a virtue and as a way of reaffirming his legitimacy to weep and blame others]. Although it speaks of marginalization and unequal power relations, it is a state of relative enunciative privilege to speak for others and to have a legitimate capacity to discuss certain matters thanks to one’s positionality. My identities are even more relevant in interculturality research. I am not obsessed with identity, origin and culture, but I am drawing momentum and force from my own marginality as an African Arab subject universally connected and keen on dismantling colonial-like relations where ensuring the smooth functioning of interculturality is a burden carried only by Southern subjects. I situate myself within interculturality research as a scholar who reflects an understanding of being-in-the-world that is neither totally Southern, African, Moroccan nor European and/or Western. How I see and conceptualize interculturality is framed by this double ideology with a sense of African Moroccan Arab and the exposure/ influences of the West [at this moment, I realize that interculturality is quicksand sucking anyone resting on its succour and solace. As much as I am digging deeper into myself, the more I am self-conscious of how I may be subtly capitalizing on my geopolitical location to demand more recognition; I am asking whether this visibility should be granted on the basis of my scholarly contributions or my identities; it is getting blurry and more of a grey area]. Within this reasoning, I find what Moroccan sociologist Abdelkébir Khaitbi refers to as une Pensée-autre to be accurately descriptive of my situatedness politically and in terms of worldviews. It is a conception that designates an ‘other way of thinking’ or ‘thinking other’ about the Southern, Subaltern and Postcolonial subject’s being-in-the-world. Khatibi recognizes that through its subordination, its minority position and its ascendency by the West, the Third World acquires the possibility of crystallizing ‘une pensée plurielle qui ne réduise pas les autres (sociétés et individus) à la sphère de son autosuffisance’ [a plural thought that does not reduce others (societies and individuals) to the sphere of its self-sufficiency] (Khatibi, 1983: 18). This idea draws on Heidegger’s philosophy of selfhood

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presenting an ontology of the ‘being of all beings of a character other than its own’ (Heidegger, 1962: 33); pensée-autre is a framework of thinking of and knowing about the other otherwise, in a way that emphasizes the significance of imagining identity as ‘being-already-alongside with others’. Pensée-autre is both a recognition of ‘cet héritage occidental’ (this Western/Northern heritage) as well as ‘notre patrimoine’ (our patrimony/heritage), which has usually been defined, understood and projected by its postcolonial malaise and nationalist rhetoric (Khatibi, 1983: 12). I do not wish to be identified/stuck in this box of a Southern scholar speaking about Southern issues since that is not the ultimate objective of interculturality (although I am not sure what the objectives of interculturality are). Overall, I tend to endorse, which is something interculturality further accentuates, that subjecthood is endlessly evolving in a metamorphosis/becoming that is ‘unlimited and unending’ (Heidegger, 1962: 33). I am aware of the dimensions that frame my thinking and argumentation and how I make sense of the intercultural, but this question has been penetrative in the sense that it exposes and highlights one’s positionality, which is a picture I do not want to have permanently attached to my representation as an intercultural scholar. As much as my situated mode of knowledging is influenced by my identities, it is also a source of empowerment and enunciative legitimacy. I have this sense of double ideology (non-Western and Western despite their contested natures) which is reflective of interculturality and reconfirms that we need to live and embody interculturality while theorizing and researching interculturality. To extend the discussion, I would like to ask Fred the following questions: • Do you write with the conscious realization that your identities (or what you referred to as ‘identification’) may have shaped what you think or say? • Do you feel that your works are politically neutral? • Since this book is about inter-epistemic dialogue, between North and South (although I am not sure whether you endorse these labels) which is the essence of interculturality or should be at least, do you genuinely think that we can actually realize this kind of dialogue and that we can transcend power imbalances?

2.2 Determinants and Positions in the Field of Interculturality In my imagination, the kind of scholar that I am is that of an outsider who does not belong to any ‘tribe’, who refuses to be part of groups and/or communities but who is happy to associate temporarily with others, in writing, speaking and/or reading, to move forward in his work—without any endpoint or direction. I label myself as an intellectual, which is to me a calling, rather than as a researcher, which sounds like a job for which one has the ‘right to holidays’ and an 8-h per day routine. The word intellectual comes from Latin intelligere ‘to understand, discern’. For me an intellectual…

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• asks questions but does not necessarily answer them. • worries about indoctrination and the hidden power of the economic-political. • is never satisfied with what they think and what other people think. • finds inspiration and connection for their work, and the questions (and some answers) they want to address, from anything (an encounter on the subway, a book on medieval beliefs, an object). • takes notes all the time and does not feel that they need to think in a ‘straight’ line, navigating between thoughts, unthoughts and re-thoughts ad infinitum. • admits their own mistakes. • cares about language use and interrogates systematically the words in what they read, hear, see and write. • does not necessarily need to (believe that they can) make an impact on their society and the world, being aware that this ‘big’ world is unfair and not prone to ‘real’ change. • is not necessarily faithful to concepts, theories, ideas, ideologies and people— they know they have to change to move forward, discarding these in the process [I saw a fascinating T-shirt once on the streets of Beijing once which said ‘I need 3000 concepts’].1 In my work since 2020—a year that marked big changes in my relation to people, the world and scholarship—I have tried to stick to this (current) understanding of who I could be as an intellectual working on interculturality. Most of the time I feel that I am failing at making these happen and, on rare occasions, I feel that I am close to their essence—and soon again I fail. Our own positions in the global field of interculturality are always determined by others in a sense. As such I feel that the question of positionality in the field should be answered by others—those we have engaged with in-/directly: Scholars, students, decision-makers, educators but also friends and family. As far as my family is concerned, I have rarely discussed this issue with them. They know what I am researching and are aware of the fluctuations I have experienced in unthinking and rethinking interculturality [We have had endless conversations about that and they have inspired new ideas on many occasions]. They seem to be taking it for granted that I have some kind of fame for my work globally, but they never mention it, never boast about it or praise me. They know that I take my work seriously and care about trying to make a difference, so they give me space and let me invest my time as I wish. This is a very privileged position. For others, the way they perceive my position probably depends on what they think about my work (some have labelled me as too ‘destructive’, too ‘intellectual’, too ‘critical’, too ‘philosophical’ [an adjective that seems to come back again and again and that we discussed with Hamza. He noted that it could be a way at times to dismiss

1 [At a keynote I gave at the end of June 2022, I added the following element, which I find central in intercultural scholarship and education: Bear in mind that your research on interculturality is also part of your autobiography].

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someone’s work. I argued that it is also a way for them to show that they do not necessarily understand what I am trying to say and/or that they do not see any connection with intercultural scholarship, the way they have been ‘brainwashed’ to engage with it]; what they have heard about me as a person (heard randomly: ‘arrogant’, ‘heartless’, ‘harsh’, ‘Dervin is Dervin’); what my institutional affiliation tells them (wrongly) about me (Helsinki is well ‘ranked’ internationally); the ‘tribes’ they associate with (‘friendly’, ‘distant’, ‘enemy’ groups to me); the way they (have been made to) situate me scientifically (‘Is he a sociologist?’; ‘He is not a real educationalist’; ‘He is just a linguist’) and even what my identity papers say (‘Are you a ‘real’ Finn?’). Depending on how people will ‘imagine’ me to be when they engage with these issues, will determine for them and for those around them who I am in the global field of intercultural communication education. What I place in my biodata found on my books or for keynotes also contributes to create certain (wrong) images of who I am for the world (e.g. ‘He has published over 150 articles and 60 books’) [A friend from Germany, asked me recently about the pertinence of this piece of information. I replied that in China, for example, such information mattered. She added: ‘Why not say that you have published in different languages instead?’]. There is often a gap between the fantasy of who we think we are in a global field of research and education and the reality—or again in the way people perceive us to be. Actually, the question we might ask ourselves here would be is there such a global field as interculturality? As our readers will be aware of, there are tens of different labels on the market that are available in English to refer to something similar to interculturality: multicultural, transcultural, crosscultural, culturally responsive etc. [we’ll certainly come back to these later]. What does ‘global’ mean here? Who is included and excluded from the label? Does ‘global’ mean the contexts of international journals, international conferences, international publishers only? If we think about research as a ‘real’ global space, it gets very complicated. I have written mostly in English and French, which means that people who work on interculturality and can read the two languages might have seen my name pop up, depending on the field they belong to (e.g. communication studies, applied linguistics) and their openness to knowledge produced in other subfields of intercultural knowledge. I have had books published in Chinese and Finnish too but I am not sure how much of an impact they have made—actually in China, they republished one of my English books too. There are hundreds of languages in the world and if one accepts the fact that there are scholars in the world who do not (wish to) read or publish in English or French, these represent many people who have never engaged with my work. So, from this perspective my position in the ‘global’ field might actually be very limited. But I am not going to be too insincere: I think that having published in English and French, especially having been affiliated with ‘Finland’ (a country most people will admire without having stepped a foot in Helsinki or Hollola) have contributed to have my voices heard in international spheres. I use the word voices in the plural here because, depending on who I write with, depending on the stages of my career and depending on the constantly changing influential figures used in my

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work, my voices on the notion of interculturality have fluctuated. When I started in the broad field of intercultural communication education, I was very eager to learn about it and especially, to meet scholars who worked on different aspects of interculturality. I was very active in organizing international seminars and conferences, getting some people to Turku and Helsinki and in editing books to cooperate and to listen to the voices of others. As a result, I must have joined forces with hundreds of people from different parts of the world, with differing levels of success [at times I notice that some of them are still very active, with some ‘emerging’ as names in the field]. This ‘pilgrimage’ took many years and probably also contributed to have my name ‘out there’. It is important to remember that I was able to travel the world, being invited by institutions or having sponsors pay for my trips [another privilege that many people don’t have]. People started recognizing my name (although many spell it with a W as in Derwin) and some often sent me emails to express their ‘admiration’ for my work [my answer is always the same when I get such emails: I don’t think that we should admire people (admiration can kill thinking), concluding paradoxically that I am sure that I will admire these admirers back in the future] [I note that Hamza and I disagreed about the idea that admiration can kill thinking, which I had formulated originally in the peremptory admiration kills thinking. I am always reminded that admiration shares the same etymology as the adjective ‘wonderful’—Latin mirus—an adjective that tends to be used as a meaningless automaton today, blinding us from noting real substance. Although I systematically reject admiring someone, I believe that I must have admired someone without realizing or I could have experienced admiration as something else (Friendship? Stimulation?)]. After years of ‘pilgrimage’, interacting and cooperating with the most ‘famous’ figures, I started focussing on new contributions and reflecting on what it was that I wanted from my own work. I had often struggled to understand what it was that we were all trying to achieve in research on interculturality. Like many other scholars, I had noticed inconsistencies and contradictions such as critiques of culturalism accompanied by highly culturalist analyses of data (see Dervin, 2012a, b) [I do recognize now that contradictions and inconsistencies must be at the core of interculturality as an object of research and education to reflect the realities of interculturality as a simplex (the continuum of simplicity + complexity) set of realities (Dervin, 2016). We shall probably come back to this later]. What I had noticed during the years was that we often rehearsed the same arguments and ideologies and took things for granted, rarely questioning them. I also discovered that there was a ‘star-system’ in the field, which I disliked from day 1. Again, I do believe that admiration goes/can go hand in hand with losing one’s capacities to think for ourselves and to contribute knowledge. This all goes back, obviously, to the important question of what the point of being a researcher is. At some point, I burnt out, I saturated and I became tired of reading and hearing the same things (even the ‘critical’ ones). Things were repeated like litanies and their meanings were (being) emptied. I was, myself, repeating litanies about non-essentialism and non-culturalism but I was not satisfied, I knew that what I was writing about and what I witnessed on a daily basis did not match, I knew that the research

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participants I was ‘researching’ were being judged unfairly for being as human as I was—i.e. classifying, categorizing humans, with some moments of ‘liquidity’. I believe that non-essentialism as a research practice [treating the other beyond a static essence] is morbid, a dead end, since one cannot move further but just preach for it or collect (too obvious and manufactured) evidence that it is happening. I believe sincerely that there is nothing else that we can do for interculturality from this perspective. One day I made the decision to cut off from ‘tribes’ and to practice what I call ‘criticality of criticality’, i.e. to be critical of any critical idea and thought that I might introduce in my work. My engagement with Chinese scholars was decisive here since it pushed me to test myself to the limit. Since then I have been sending out the same SOS in my writing: we must also practice interculturality in our own ways of researching and teaching interculturality. To treat a fluid, uncontrollable and, often,2 contradictory object with ‘solid’ concepts, economic-political ideas (that do not even hide from the political), research methods that go against our own ideological takes (e.g. how to analyse the imaginary success of a non-essentialist perspective?), makes no sense. This is why I retracted myself from groups and ‘tribes’ that pretended, to my eyes, to be fakely generous, opening their doors to, e.g. scholars from the Global South, on the condition that they supported their ideologies and worshipped them in-/directly. For one of these ‘tribes’, I even got into trouble when I dared to note openly the worshipping of ‘white guru members’ when it was meant to be a global and inclusive movement. I have always had issues about ‘gurus’, about ‘leaders’ showing the way. In my life, I have systematically questioned ‘leaders’ and run away from them. Recently, someone accused me of attacking ‘gurus’ from the field in my writing, while I am myself—they asserted—a ‘guru’. I have never considered myself to be a ‘guru’ since (to me) a guru is someone who revolves around a group of people who ‘follow’ them; a guru is someone who has economic-political power and can influence the lives of people around them and beyond; a guru is someone who enjoys being worshipped (even modestly), makes sure that the worshipping continues and who needs worshipping to keep their status of a guru. Finally, a guru will not change their ideologies drastically not to unsettle their followers. I am not a guru: I have no ‘court’ around me (I reject systematically people who wish to create one; all my colleagues and students know about this); my ideologies of interculturality are so changeable and unstable that no one can follow them [I am not just (Dervin, 2016) but (Dervin, 2023) already]; I have no real economic-political power, refusing systematically to support, e.g. supranational institutions like the EU or local governments; and I loathe ‘worshipping’, which makes me extremely uncomfortable and even, at times, furious. ‘Leaders’ and ‘gurus’ create hierarchies and feed on these hierarchies to spread their ideologies. [One question: is my way of being critical an ideology that I impose on my readers and students?].

2 I

had first written ‘at times’ and changed it to ‘often’.

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To conclude on the way I perceive my position in the ‘global’ field of intercultural communication education—if there is such a thing—I could say that it is the position of someone who is privileged, has the power to speak but who is also an outsider who does not really worry about who listens (or not) to him. I would like to reflect further on names here. Fred Dervin—actually my first name if Frederic but I have never used it privately or publicly—is an ‘easy’ name to memorize [This is a mere assumption. In French-speaking contexts many people don’t know if Dervin should be pronounced with a nasal ɛ-̃ sound at the end]. As a young student, I remember meeting an American scholar in Hong Kong who, when he heard my name, said ‘this is such a perfect name for a scholar. A bit like ‘my name is James, James Bond’’. One of my colleagues is called Mei Yuan, which is also a very easy name I believe. Yet I have noticed that many people often struggle with it—either remembering it or saying it. At times I wonder if they struggle because it is ‘Chinese’… Actually, a study should be made on scholars’ names and their influence on the opportunities to be quoted and mentioned, alongside their ‘real’ contribution to knowledge. If we look at the names of the most cited people in the broad field of intercultural communication education, some of them are monosyllabic (Hall, Kramsch) or disyllabic (Bennett, Jackson, Piller) and not too challenging to pronounce [or am I imagining this ease?]. Byram’s name, which is also disyllabic, is minimally difficult since I have heard many people pronounce it as [Biram]. Deardorff’s name might also be met with a few problems. Other pluri-syllabic names are either ‘straighforward’ (Holliday) or ‘hazy’ to decipher (e.g. Gudykunst, Hofstede, Risager). What all these names seem to have in common is that they are from the ‘West’, which means, for example, that one might have an idea of how to pronounce these names, memorize the way they are written and make a difference between first names (e.g. Adrian, Claire, Jane, Karen, Mike, William) and family names. One of the most cited scholars of interculturality, located in the UK, has a Chinese name, Zhu Hua. Most of the people whom I have heard try to pronounce her name struggle if they don’t speak Chinese. What is more, most of those who quote Zhu Hua are not sure if they should place her under Z or H in their bibliography. Although this discussion around names might appear superficial and far-fetched, I believe that there could be something to ‘dig into’ in the future: people’s position in the global field and how ‘reader-friendly’ and ‘catchy’ their names are perceived to be. [After reading this paragraph, Hamza and I discussed his name. R’boul. I was particularly curious about the presence of an apostrophe in his family name and how he might see it being mistakenly positioned in a different part of his family name (e.g. Rb’oul*, ‘Rboul*) or removed (Rboul*). This discussion reminded me of previous talks I had with some of my Chinese PhD students who had been wondering if they should use a ‘Western’ name (e.g. Adam, Julie) in their publications or if they should keep their Chinese name. The decision is up to individuals so I would never position myself here. But I always feel that it is important to ‘correct’ people when they mispronounce or misspell your name, when they mix first names and surnames or avoid using names not to lose their face. I witnessed a somewhat surreal situation once with two of my Chinese PhD students. We were chatting with

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another professor who had confused their names and kept referring to student A, using student B’s name. No one corrected the professor—I did not even take the initiative. When the professor left, I asked my students why they had not mentioned the fact that the professor was using the wrong name. One of them replied that it did not matter and that she did not want to embarrass her. I will sound very judgemental here but how can one exist if others cannot remember one’s name? This is where (the acceptance of) power differentials too easily ‘sneak into’ our practices as interculturalists]. * * * The question of position in the ‘big’ field of interculturality is a bit troubling in the sense that it entails unravelling my ‘current’ position in intercultural research [writing this book signals that I have been doing something right; as much as it is a privilege, it places intense pressure on me to take the initiative and maintain the momentum. I am feeling that I am epistemologically growing up and that I am peering more closely into the workings of my scholarship and what I imagine to be possible to be accomplished]. Defining oneself and the use of ‘I’ is quite dreadful since the pronoun personalizes the discourse and may potentially frame one’s perspective and how the readers/scholars evaluate one’s research. However, it is indeed a self-exploratory journey to visualize my ‘unrealized’ position within a field that is notoriously known for its intersections and ambivalence. As an intercultural scholar, I centre criticality but at the same time, I am learning to question the criticality of my critique (this is something I was introduced to by Fred in his works). That is why my positionality within the field (as described here) is tentative and may prove later to be myopic. We need to unearth our unexamined assumptions as individuals and scholars in what I regard as a dialogical and reflexive biographical practice. I certainly perceive and present myself as an emerging scholar who is attempting to offer alternative theorizations and understandings of interculturality. The very premise of theorizing interculturality otherwise has been appealing to my intellectual reasonings. As an intercultural scholar, I recognize the dichotomies, differences and polarities that have shaped my perception of intercultural communication. At a certain point, I started to critique the type of knowledge we have and to question the extent to which the dominant perspectives have entirely determined the type of understandings that encapsulate how we theorize, teach and do interculturality. What I have been trying to develop the rationale for is that I see myself as an intercultural scholar who is making genuine efforts to draw attention to less-popular ontologies. I can see that without asserting my epistemic capacity as a priory, it would be difficult to affirm the legitimacy of what I say and establish grounds amongst international scholars [I am not sure whether my works, up to this point, have sought to establish the legitimacy of my knowledge or to actually advance our understandings of interculturality; this is certainly a double bind here since I am critiquing geopolitics of knowledge in interculturality and at the same time I am writing and publishing in ways that appeal to the Western world in order to acquire more economic and social capital. It does not seem to be a win–win

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situation here; it is more of oscillating between innocence and guilt in a possibility of reproducing what we claim to disrupt]. I do not desire to follow trends, sing hymns of others or/and sound Western/central. To probe the dominant logics involves producing culturally–politically implicated ideas. I am well aware that to critique is not to destroy but rather to deconstruct; that is why it should not be construed as a declaration of rebellion and dismissing the insights we have. It is more of an endeavour to explore insights that have not been accentuated yet but to ensure there is room for new ideas we need to transcend others. I understand intercultural research as a space for generating knowledge on how the political influences the personal and consequently shapes human communication; intercultural research has established, to some extent, its theoretical concerns and epistemological pillars in alignment with the concerns of the Western cognitive empire which I do not entirely endorse and I advance an imagination in which intercultural research needs to be expanded, questioned and politicized. [I am not sure whether interculturality is the right word to explain what some are doing since I do not see how the other is meaningfully considered. The other is still struggling to exist within interculturality but we have already assumed that the other is there; I am unsure whether we discuss the other in its existent capacity or in our imagination; is this evidence of absence or absence of evidence? Interculturality may be a misnomer or an empty name referring to what it does not actually stand for in our works and reality]. Intercultural research is complex and it draws on various fields of inquiry where several elements (language, psychology, politics, pragmatics…) are either foregrounded or diluted. Intercultural research is an intersecting knowscape where the personal, the common, the cultural and the political interweave. I remain wary of any convenience to characterize interculturality research as harmonious intellectual labour. This is a recycled simplistic discourse that would gainsay the epistemological intricacies of the field. All that has been said so far reflects my imagination of things which might belie reality depending on my ontologies. Writing this book with an ‘eminent white European scholar’ and answering this particular question which is the basis for this dialogue further accentuates my positioning. I venture to surmise that both Fred and I do not implicitly assume that ‘the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured’ (Mignolo, 2009: 1). And I would like to witness what Fred thinks about this and to what extent he believes that his positionality has contributed to his large influence on interculturality theorizings; I am wondering if Fred envisages himself as a space where presumably two or more dichotomous selves/ others/entities are combined, exchanged and fragmented. For example, how has China influenced in some way his understanding of interculturality? I think these questions to each other can further draw our attention to some dimensions that we do not often perceive. I think I am epistemologically troubled by this necessity to theorize from within and speak back in a way that simultaneously questions the taken-for-granted narratives but also ensures the internationality and relevance of my scholarship to others.

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These questions take me to my next point. Fred and I are critical scholars (with a great doubt on the word ‘critical’ and of course if Fred allows me to) but our criticality is processed through different routes of engagement, reception and acceptance and varying levels of risk. Critical scholars in the Global South risk their careers and opportunities by challenging and critiquing dominant narratives and discourses. The very feedback and appraisal of what scholars enunciate might be partly shaped by ‘who’ says ‘what’. We need to understand that reading may be more political than writing. Although I do not deny the complexity of thought, I am very conscious of how some critiques may come from the comfort of life experiences in the Global North. My ‘criticality’ is not similar to Fred’s since we are conditioned by different elements, circumstances and conditions. I will continue pushing but not too hard; it is about recognizing one’s allowed space for critique and when it is self-damaging to question. There are indeed several restrictions on epistemic freedom as one has to sound ‘central’ in order to integrate and to be welcomed amongst those who are in power. I do wonder what Fred thinks about these ideas. Kant (2009: 35) emphasized the idea that each and every one of us is required to ‘make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another’. Such a call demands making up our own minds, independently from the external pressures and constraints imposed on us by others (Kraus, 2020). This is what I think I have aspired to do but it remains hard unless one wants to be historically excluded due to epistemological eeriness. The bulk of scholarship on epistemic injustice continues to foreground the variety of harm done to socially marginalized people in their capacities as knowledge producers. I agree with the notion that socially marginalized subjects can suffer epistemic trust injustices when scientific understandings are generated without their contribution, and when the social conditions required for creating a responsibly placed trust in them by the epistemic institutions fail to transpire (Grasswick, 2018). This recognition is certainly an essential understanding in my standing, rhetoric and knowledging. Although this may entail a situation in which I selectively choose to underline an aspect of my identity that serves my argumentation but I do want to alert the readers that I am aware of this possibility and it is taken into account while I am writing. All these being said, I do not feel that this account has been quite accurate or comprehensive as I see myself as an intercultural scholar who is continuously becoming, culturing, languaging and identificating. As Khatibi (1971) notes, we are in an intercultural scenario in which two systems and ontologies (Southern/ African and Other) come into contact, leading to culture, identity, language and knowledge being hybridized and shattered and then fused together again [there are more than two; people are not twos; no one is twos; it is either many or no one]. I often do question if what I say is dictated or driven by an implicit desire to sound and look different for the sake of sounding and looking different from the other [especially since the field of interculturality has to welcome people like me to reinforce its ‘interculturality’; the practice of interculturality scholars welcoming and appreciating Southern scholars sounds ostensibly very intercultural]. While this remains a possibility, it does not negate the fact that given my

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oscillation and/or hybridity between African and Western, Self and Other we seek to ‘uproot Western knowledge from its central place within ourselves, to decenter ourselves with respect to this center, to this original claimed by the West’ (Khatibi, 1971: 106). The conception of being which is a constant process of becoming is ‘always in between the past and the future [since] it moves in both directions at once’ (Deleuze, 1990: 1–2) which indicates that being ‘is never fixed (even when it appears to be so) [it is] a continual process of change without destination’ (Young & Genosko, 2013: 41). [Conversation with Readers] • Do you think that interculturality is a global field of research and education? How do you justify your view(s)? • What do you make of the word ideology that we often use in the book? How do you see it in relation to interculturality in research? • For one of us, ‘intercultural research is a space for generating knowledge on how the political influences the personal and consequently shapes human communication’. After reading this chapter, would you agree? When you read the rest of the book, try to keep in mind this argument and to confront your views to it. • One of us writes: ‘I had often struggled to understand what it was that we were all trying to achieve in research on interculturality’. What do you think scholars are trying to achieve globally? What about you? • How many scholars from the Global South working on interculturality and its companions (cross-, trans-, multi-…) do you know? How often do you use their work in your own research and for what purposes (theory, concepts, methodology, contextualization…)? • How many scholars from the Global South are included in your own (research) team? What roles and positions do they have? How often do you cooperate with them? What does ‘cooperate’ mean here? • How much have you thought about the potential link between being from the Global South and enunciative power in research on interculturality? • In the chapter Hamza discusses the fact that critical scholars in the Global South risk their careers and opportunities by challenging and critiquing dominant narratives and discourses. Is this an issue that you are well aware of? Do you know examples of scholars having experienced this problem? • Have you ever thought about the potential influence of a scholar’s name on their fame or citations? Does the question make any sense to you? Go back to what you have read and written concerning interculturality, and observe the names of the scholars whom you quote. Which ones can you pronounce, memorize and use actively? Are there names that you have been struggling with? Can you say why? • How often do you have to introduce yourself in academic circles? How do people react upon meeting you? What are the most meaningful and relevant aspects of your identity for your work on interculturality? What is the gap between who you think you are/claim to be and how others see you? Have you ever rejected certain ways of being treated and labelled in academic encounters?

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• Who are you allowed to be as a researcher-educator? Who do you feel you are not allowed to be? • One of us asked: ‘Do you write with the conscious realization that your identities may have shaped what you think or say?’. How would you answer this question? • What do your identities tell you about your own potential (lack of) privilege? • How restricting are your own language skills? What knowledges related to interculturality do you feel your language skills do not allow you to have access to? • What does your own location (e.g. a specific institution or country) ‘dictate’ in terms of ideologies of interculturality? What terms do you use to talk about interculturality derive directly from a specific economic-political context? • Do you feel that you belong to any research ‘tribe’ of interculturality? How ‘free’ are you from ‘floating away’ from it? Explain. • What does the word intellectual mean to you? Would you use it instead of researcher to talk about your engagement with intercultural research? What’s your position towards Fred’s take on this figure in the chapter? • One of us claimed: ‘I believe that non-essentialism as a research practice is morbid, a dead end, since one cannot move further but just preach for it or collect (too obvious and manufactured) evidence that it is happening. I believe sincerely that there is nothing else that we can do for interculturality from this perspective’. How do you position yourself in relation to non-essentialism? How important is it for you? What do you make of the critique addressed to it in the quote? • Finally, summarize for yourself our different positions and identifications in the field of interculturality. Also, try to speculate about what we might dis-/agree on in the rest of the book and what we can/will learn from each other.

References Bauman, Z. (2004). Identity. Polity. Carroll, L. (1865). Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Macmillan. Deleuze. G. (1990). The logic of sense. Columbia. Dervin, F. (2012a). A plea for change in research on intercultural discourses: A ‘liquid’ approach to the study of the acculturation of Chinese students. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 6(1), 37–52. Dervin, F. (2012b). Cultural identity, representation and othering. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of intercultural communication (pp. 181–194). Routledge. Dervin, F. (2016). Interculturality in education. Palgrave Macmillan. Dervin, F. (2023). The paradoxes of interculturality. Epistemological questions for intercultural communication education. Routledge. Dervin, F., & Jacobsson, A. (2022). Intercultural communication education: Broken realities and rebellious dreams. Springer. Dervin, F., & Simpson, A. (2021). Interculturality and the political within education (1st ed.). Routledge.

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Grasswick, H. (2018). Understanding epistemic trust injustices and their harms. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 84, 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246118000553 Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. HarperCollins. Kant, I. (2009). What is enlightenment? Penguin. Khatibi, A. (1971). La Mémoire Tatouée: Autobiographie d’un Décolonisé. Denoël. Khatibi. A. (1983). Maghreb Pluriel. Denoël. Kraus, K. (2020). From inner experience to the self-formation of psychological persons. In Kant on self-knowledge and self-formation: The nature of inner experience (pp. 1–14). Cambridge University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7–8), 159–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409349275 Trepanier, L., & Havers, G. (Eds.). (2021). When the political left turns right. Lexington Books. Young, A., & Genosko. G. (2013). The Deleuze and Guattari dictionary. Bloomsbury.

Chapter 3

Core Voltage

Abstract  This chapter deals with what the authors refer to as their ‘core voltage’ (what constitutes their own ‘vital energy’ in researching and educating for interculturality in their specific context(s) and through their writing, researching and teaching). The authors discuss the struggles and burdens that they have faced/are facing; share snapshots of the emotions that have gone into their work; detail some of their impetuses and ambitions and speculate around the ‘hope’ that they are allowed to have for interculturality as an object of research and education. They conclude by suggesting that, although working on interculturality in academia is testing, pushing forward, refilling and feeding in one’s core voltage constantly, are needed to deal with interculturality as an object of research and education endlessly. Keywords Writing · Struggles · Impetuses · Influences · Lifelong engagement  ·  Interculturality as an object of research and education This chapter deals with our ‘core voltage’, i.e. what constitutes our own ‘vital energy’ in researching and educating for interculturality in our own context(s) and beyond, through our writing, researching and teaching. We discuss the struggles and burdens that we have faced/are facing; share snapshots of the emotions that have gone into our work; detail some of our impetuses and ambitions and speculate around the ‘hope’ that we are allowed to have for interculturality as an object of research and education. Following Camus’s (2013: 145) take on the Myth of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus is punished by pushing a boulder up and down a hill forever, the reader will note that we consider ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart’. In other words, although working on interculturality in academia is testing, we both push forward, refilling and feeding in our core voltage constantly. The chapter is based on the following original questions: • Why do we research and educate for interculturality?

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 F. Dervin and H. R'boul, Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality, Encounters between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6672-9_3

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• Why do we choose some topics over others and ask questions but not others? • What are the ultimate goals we seek to achieve in our works? • Kant suggests that the question ‘What am I allowed to hope for?’ is essential to social beings. How do we see it in relation to interculturality? What do we think we are allowed to hope for interculturally?

3.1 Struggles and Emotions I research what is most relevant to my struggles; I research what makes most sense to me; I research what I intimately know about. One can study and research a certain topic and be referred to as a ‘scholar’ and ‘expert’, but it remains debatable whether one can have the same level of profound feeling and deep understanding as someone with the relevant real-life experiences and struggles [I do not dismiss the works of others that examine phenomena that are not closely related to their positionalities and real-life; I am more concerned about epistemological theft and epistemic extractivism which are destructive ways to know and to disseminate knowledge; it is an aggravated act of silencing that entails not only marginalizing but also stealing and claiming to own that knowledge and to preach how it is supposed to be understood]. I am very much in line with Nietzsche’s perspective that ‘Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit…He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader’ (1978/1883: Chapter VII). My fundamental understanding of research is based on the premise that epistemology and ontology are inextricably linked. Therefore, I am strongly inclined to produce a scholarship that is grounded in my real-life experiences. I endeavour to research topics and ask questions that deconstruct the borderlines between absence and presence. However, this quagmire of writing about absence in order to promote presence entails writing to visibilize before assuming that what you say has receiving ears that are willing to listen and engage. While writing is a metaphor here, it is very reflective of the type of dichotomies and challenges involved in researching interculturality. Self, Other, Identity and Culture are omnipresent but, at the same time, they can be treated as empty vessels ending up writing about certain things and/or writing about nothing [it is again the double bind of interculturality; continuously asking whether I am saying anything that is relevant to everyone or at least to others as well who are not me; if we produce knowledge about interculturality that is most relevant to me or my community only, then is it really knowledge about interculturality? Is it an intercultural knowledge that transcend boundaries which is primarily the premise upon which interculturality is founded? Interculturality may be contradictory and idealistic that would be better situated within metaphysics if it does not actually do what it claims to do]. The questions I ask help me in at least delineating the type of understanding I would like to frame interculturality. Rather than assuming that any analysis falls short in supplying a comprehensive engagement with interculturality, I try to foreground that it is closely connected to the reality I experience. What prompts the

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type of scholarship I currently produce is that scholars in the Third World, despite my recognition of the contested significance of this concept, feel a need to refer to works in the Western grand narrative without scholars from the Global North feeling any need to reciprocate. The Southern ‘intercultural’ scholar becomes the singer of a body of writings that was constructed elsewhere and whose constitutional premises are hardly questioned. I am also troubled by the possibility that I may be developing knowledge that remains in the shadow of the others—an alternative type of knowledge that is peripheral and derivative [we end up voicing a critique that would never be heard; we may be developing a critique in vacuum; a critique for ourselves only although it is basically for others. A critique that keeps bouncing and it ultimately rebounds back to us; can it be referred to as critique if the ones addressed by that critique do not even know it exists and/or they completely ignore?]. The following is a particular incident that happened while writing this book; it exemplifies the type of injustices that may characterize some aspects of academia: [I added these paragraphs after discussing this incident with Fred on Wechat]

[I was interested in applying for a postdoctoral fellowship in an Anglophone country within the Global North. I reached out inquiring about how I could move forward since applicants were required to contact the school before preparing an application. I sent an email outlining my research interests with my CV attached. I received a reply the following day explaining that my publication record is not competitive enough: Your track record is definitely emerging, but in this scheme it won’t quite be competitive with other applicants from our Centre. I know that is hard news to receive and I’m sure you’re doing incredible work; but we find that to be competitive our applicants need (with some variation for different disciplines) 6-8 publications, and to be a good fit for the Centre.

I am sure that they did not even bother to read the CV since I had way more than 6–8 publications; even if we limit my publications to only one form of research output either journal articles or book chapters, I still had the double of that. Going through this, I realized how some slogans are not exercised in reality and they remain nothing but empty speech. I was not angry or frustrated because of that outcome since there have been better opportunities, but it is problematic that some people would be subject to such acts of inequality and injustice]. These frustrations, which should be taken as sources of empowerment and purpose, may offer ‘marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice’ and a feeling of ‘anger’ that ‘saturates the silences that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious’ (Bailey, 2018: 93) [this again bears relevance to what Fred has been discussing concerning how anger and frustration fuel us to move forward and to remain epistemologically alive and eager]. Nevertheless, it should not be understood as an image of conflict and disaccord; it is more of an attempt of embracing ourselves and the other in equal terms without falling into the trap of simplifying and homogenizing. I ask this type of questions because ‘l’Occident est une partie de moi, que je ne peux nier que dans la mesure où je lutte contre tous les Occidents et Orients qui m’oppriment ou qui me désenchantent’ (Khatibi, 1971: 106) [‘The Occident is part of me, a part

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that I can only deny insofar as I resist all the Occidents and all the Orients that oppress and disillusion me’ (translated by Amine, 2013)]. Taking these insights into account, I have a few questions for Fred: • Do you feel that your subjectivity sometimes interferes with your work? • Do you ever feel that you research topics and ask questions that are particularly convenient to you? • Is interculturality research about comfort, real-life experiences or cognitive exploration? • Do you feel that we, scholars, run the risk of reproducing what we actually critique? * * * I don’t think that I (should) have ultimate goals in research or education. In fact, I often ask myself why it is that I am (still) writing about interculturality, what pushes me to do it? Figure 3.1 presents what seems to be recurrent in my research, starting with the core and exciting question of what is interculturality in and for education? Finding a research topic or a question to ask often relates to different factors: the context we live and work in; the people we interact with in academia and beyond; the scholars and thinkers whom we read; our own observations; our life

^ƚƵĚŝĞƐŝŶĚŝīĞƌĞŶƚ ĞĚƵĐĂƟŽŶĂůĐŽŶƚĞdžƚƐĂŶĚ ĐŽƵŶƚƌŝĞƐ;Ğ͘ŐŚŝŶĂ͕ &ŝŶůĂŶĚ͕&ƌĂŶĐĞ͕DĂůĂLJƐŝĂͿ

/ŶƚĞƌĚŝƐĐŝƉůŝŶĂƌLJ ŝŶƐƉŝƌĂƟŽŶƐ;Ğ͘Ő͘ ĂŶƚŚƌŽƉŽůŽŐLJ͕ůŝŶŐƵŝƐƟĐƐ͕ ƉŚŝůŽƐŽƉŚLJͿ

DĞƚŚŽĚŽůŽŐŝĐĂůĂƐƉĞĐƚƐ ;Ğ͘Ő͘ƌĞŇĞdžŝǀŝƚLJ͕ĐƌŝƟĐĂůŝƚLJ ŽĨĐƌŝƟĐĂůŝƚLJ͕ĚŝƐĐŽƵƌƐĞ ĂŶĂůLJƐŝƐͿ

tŚĂƚŝƐŝŶƚĞƌĐƵůƚƵƌĂůŝƚLJŝŶ ĂŶĚĨŽƌĞĚƵĐĂƟŽŶ͍ ;Ğ͘Ő͘ŝĚĞŽůŽŐŝĞƐ͕ĚĞĮŶŝƟŽŶ ŽĨĐŽŶĐĞƉƚƐ͕ĐŽŶƚƌĂƐƟŶŐ ŽĨǁŽƌůĚƚŚĞŽƌŝĞƐͿ

Fig. 3.1 Recurrences

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experiences; a (simple) question asked by a student or a family member, etc. As long as a topic ‘speaks’ to us and matters professionally and (especially) personally, that’s all that matters. The closer the topic is to ourselves, the more meaningful. I find research on interculturality that indicates personal engagement with the issue at hand to be the most stimulating. I am a bit tired of research that pretends to place a boundary between the one writing about interculturality and the one experiencing it, often protecting the researcher by locating them in an imaginary ‘fortified castle’. I suppose that this is a remnant of modern European objectivising, rational times. I believe in the power of intuition in identifying a ‘good’ research topic [good for whom? One might ask]. When I think about the research topics that I have worked on, many were very ‘trendy’, ‘obvious’ and ‘safe’ back in the days (e.g. study abroad, intercultural competence), while others were based on personal interests such as intercultural couplehood, the influence of objects (‘silent partners’) on interaction and identity, cocoon communities and China. They have all grown from each other, like a garden-like expansion. My recent writing has been very much about unearthing ideologies of (‘critical’) interculturality, especially since the pandemic started. I know that this has earned me a few more ‘enemies’ who have felt destabilized by my critiques [as much as I have been ‘knocked off-balance’ by them too]. I used to focus on culturalism (naively)—an obvious and easy target—while promoting ideologies that I would confront myself later (non-essentialism, non-culturalism). As far as questions are concerned, I am often pushed to ask them when I get annoyed or outraged at something that I have read, seen or heard. I always take notes, just write down a few words in a notebook and then type them on my computer in the evening. Although ‘anger’ and emotions are often viewed as ‘unscientific’, I do believe that they matter when it comes to working on interculturality. In fact, there is so much injustice in our field that one cannot but get exasperated from time to time. In the past years, students have also helped me identify new questions by reacting to what I have said in my seminars. I must pay homage to my students here, who have been so generous with their time, their patience and curiosity over the years. They are in fact the few people I interact with directly these days. I think that there are many research topics that we don’t dare to approach because they are either taboo or too close to ourselves—again: as if we were trying to find some objectivity in doing our research. Some of the topics that I would have loved to explore include sex and interculturality (to my knowledge there is very little research on the topic, beyond research on intercultural couplehood); money issues in intercultural encounters; power relations in producing research on interculturality with others and anything to do with politics with a big P and its direct influence on interculturality. Generally speaking, I think that any research on the unsaid of interculturality is fascinating, although it might be considered taboo. I suppose that I still have many years in front of me and I hope that I can ‘confront’ some of these topics with colleagues from different parts of the world.

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3.2 Impetuses Interculturality is everywhere and it relates to almost everything in our lives. My earliest interest was mainly in English language teaching and applied linguistics (and they are still my academic interests in addition to interculturality), but interculturality has become a central point of focus in my career because it has offered me the possibility to engage more critically with linguistic, cultural and epistemic issues and to import analytical tools from other fields such as postcoloniality, sociology and knowledge studies. I research and educate for interculturality because it delivers a nuanced and profound account of how my positionality and intersectionality interweave with others. Also, I have always been interested in philosophy and how our perspectives are not valued compared to Western perceptions. I feel this is a field where I could speak and confront the ideologies and understandings that cripple the development of my people and context. Interculturality is quite interesting in the sense that it is not epistemologically bound by particular lenses; it certainly interrogates and questions more than it answers, which is certainly captivating and makes it equally difficult to assume epistemic correctness or accuracy [again, this is my perception of what interculturality is, which is not necessarily how it is understood in other academic works and arenas]. My readings in literature and philosophy have enabled me to think more critically and to appreciate qualitative reasoning and engagement [I realized that the adjective ‘philosophical’ can be used to belittle the analytical rigour and scientificity of our works; as Fred and I were discussing this particular topic, I realized that he had been subject to similar critiques; I am not really sure about the legitimacy of this critique since philosophy is all science and it is the underlying tradition of what all fields are based on. I think that some people associate philosophy with tautology which is quite telling of their flawed logic and their feeble understanding of what epistemology and knowledge are about; philosophers are usually the epitome of knowledge in our popular cultures and minds]. I remember reading Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky (1864, translated 1992) and the brilliant accounts of how the underdogs are struggling to assert the legitimacy of what they enunciate and think. Then, reading The Metamorphosis (1915, translated 1996) by Kafka was a mesmerizing experience that has expanded my horizons. As I was extensively reading the works of these two great writers, I felt that I can relate to their narratives and how they were placed behind and their perception of themselves was mostly through the eyes of the others [this reminds me again of how knowledge produced by Southern scholars may be subject to more screening and critical appraisal; their identities may be seen as evidence of potential epistemological mediocrity; we also need to ask whether Southern scholars get to publish in prestigious journals because of their valuable and authentic knowledge or because they serve a ‘tokenistic’ purpose even if their scholarships are not rigourous in their eyes]. I felt that, although they belong to cultures different from mine, we shared more things than I initially surmized and I had this notion that interculturality provides closer penetration into these intersections of humans and

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how their relations are shaped by a myriad of factors. Maybe what I write and how I think are heavily influenced by the literature that I have read, but novels are wonderful explorations of the human psyche. What I am trying to convey here is that interculturality represents and reflects literature in more academic terms, at least to my mind. Literature is about oneself, the other and what is amongst us, what we share and what we do not. I would like to ask Fred what he feels about this and whether he sees any proximity between literature and interculturality. As far as the research is concerned, it is a matter of finding an academic space where we interrogate, question and analyse how humans’ creations (languages, ontologies and epistemologies) are communicated, perceived and valued across the world; this is quite a generic characterization of interculturality but it does establish how interculturality is a field of dichotomies, complexities and intersections. I would like to draw the readers’ attention to the fact that Fred and I are writing a book about interculturality which is itself an intercultural process and encounter in which we share our perspectives. It is more of an act of meta-interculturality; exercising interculturality in/while theorizing interculturality. It is an act of doing interculturality to speak of interculturality. I am interested in exploring whether this has been the rationale behind Fred’s idea for this book and for how it is structured and written. I am also excited about exploring Fred’s answer to the question about literature; he has had more intercultural and literary experiences than I have, so I am hoping to know to what extent his readings in literature has contributed to his interest in interculturality. I hope that I have clarified why I research and educate for interculturality; maybe I did and maybe I didn’t but I have certainly done so in a way that makes sense to me at least. Finally, I would like to note that I feel that I am a man of words, ideas, rhetoric, analysis and argumentation more than presumably an objective engagement with how humans interact and this is certainly something that interculturality offers considerable opportunities for considering its theoretical underpinnings, methods of analysis and underlying objectives. *  *  * Why do I (continue) write(ing) about interculturality? Since 2020, I have published 14 books, either written alone or with colleagues. The anger, disappointment and frustration that I have experienced with the COVID crisis have pushed me to write more. My irritation is not against the virus but against what we as humans are doing. The virus has unveiled many problems that we were very much aware of before 2020: economic, racial and class inequalities; multifaceted discrimination; a world dominated by money before people; a world manipulated to believe in all kinds of lies about others; a world unable to look at itself in the mirror; a world where (fake) criticality is promoted while censoring other voices explicitly or implicitly. On the other hand, what this period has shown us is that we are all more humans than we thought, and that, at times, we share more similarities than differences: we all want to survive and protect those we love (whether we accept wearing masks or getting vaccinated); we all want to enjoy some form of freedom (I am not sure what I mean by freedom here but probably

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being able to decide by ourselves what we can do alone and with others and think a minima); we all want to be treated fairly and respectfully (amongst others, the two adverbs would need to be problematized further, e.g. respectfully can have many different connotations). These were important reminders that motivated me to write. Over the years that I have worked on interculturality in education and research, my goals have shifted from a political position concerning the ‘personal’ (how to counter the fact that communicating interculturally can ‘damage’ us when we are mistreated—othered?—and when we mistreat others?) to a political position that identifies, criticizes and attacks similar phenomena within research and education. My interest in the broader issue of interculturality as an object of research and education—rather than as an interpersonal phenomenon—derives directly from the observation that the way we have dealt with it is unfair. Certain ideologies have dominated the field for decades, while other ‘newer’ ideologies (borrowed with a bit of time delay from other fields of research) are starting to be out there, ‘lecturing’ people about what they should (not) do. An ideology for me is an order passed onto people to tell them how they should think and behave. Scholarship on interculturality has always been about that, from E.T. Hall to A. Holliday—and my own work has also done the same! For some it is about learning about other cultures to communicate with people; for others, it is about refraining from uttering stereotypes and changing one’s imaginaries (a dream!). In-between these ideologies, there are a certain number of other orders which need to be deconstructed and analysed as a warning to their potential users. I am thinking here of the ideology of ‘democratic culture’ as backed by M. Byram (see critiques in Dervin & Simpson, 2021). The worlds of education and research are full of such ideological orders about interculturality. At times, I have noticed that people are not even aware of their ideological backgrounds and that they tend to use them as ‘nice’ and ‘attractive’ tools to do research or train, e.g. teachers. By so doing, they circulate dominant ‘Western’ ideologies to their societies and ‘brainwash’ the people around them without even knowing. In China, for example, I have noticed that Byram’s idea of intercultural citizenship is becoming popular (Byram, 2008). I think that Byram uses citizenship instead of competence, having been influenced by the political supranational institution of the Council of Europe. The keywords of democracy and human rights are at the centre of this institution: what do they mean in this European context and in China? Are they even compatible? When a Chinese scholar works on intercultural citizenship à la Byram, do they even know what they are doing? Do they know how this works with the Communist Party of China’s take on these issues? What are the consequences for the students? Having spoken to some Chinese teachers who use these constructs, I realized that they use them simply as ‘neutral’ concepts—instead of, e.g. ‘competence’—and that they are not aware of their political stance. Another ideological construct—to which I have contributed myself—is that of non-essentialism in interculturality, or how to remove any sign or discourse of ‘solidifying’ self and other (e.g. Holliday, 2010). It is clearly both an ideal and an illusion. One cannot approach oneself or the other without ‘freezing’ them. We always look at someone/something, see and listen to them, through specific lenses, thus essentializing and culturalizing them.

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Non-essentialism as an educational goal is essentialist in itself because it assumes that one can deal with this complex world out there and the people who compose it from a super-position that disenfranchises us from solidifying them. This makes obviously no sense. Yet this take on interculturality is starting to dominate the field. After decades of ‘uber-culturalism’ and ‘uber-essentialism’ whereby people were treated by researchers and educators as cultural, ethnic and racial automatons, now is the time to feel liberated and to dig into the ‘liquid’. Yet, one cannot do ‘liquids’ without ‘solids’—these two being inseparable sides of the same coin. What I notice is that most White Western scholars working on interculturality now rehearse this litany of non-essentialism, while adopting a very objectivist perspective of the observant. I wonder if this is a new way to both keep one’s privileged position in the field and to prevent discordant voices from emerging. By claiming non-essentialism for oneself (although again it is both an ideal and an illusion), one cannot be accused of being a ‘bad’ person or someone who is, e.g. a racist, a neo-colonialist. By denouncing essentialism, one becomes an untouchable. But these positions can be counterproductive and serve as ‘weapons’ against the ‘underprivileged’ [this unstable and imaginary figure again!]. If one does not follow the order of non-essentialism, one will be labelled as ‘a bad essentialist’. Let me mention an example: Cultural appropriation. This ‘Western’ critical concept refers to situations whereby someone borrows cultural elements, artefacts from another ‘culture’—especially a ‘culture’ that is deemed less powerful. The concept emerged from the US context. Many American stars have gotten into trouble for wearing, e.g. dreadlocks or a Japanese outfit. Fair enough: this is part of our ‘Western’ narrative of identity politics today and it is spreading to most countries in Europe. However, I once witnessed the following: a White British scholar told a Han majority Chinese wearing, e.g. a Chinese Minzu ‘minority’ costume, that they were doing cultural appropriation. Was that acceptable? In this particular situation, the Chinese did not understand the reproach and claimed that he was in fact paying homage to the other group and that they were quite happy about this [‘they’ being an imagined voice here]. The Chinese turned the critique back onto the British scholar, asking him if eating with chopsticks was cultural appropriation for him then? Transplanting a ‘Western’ discourse of non-essentialism needs to be ‘done’ carefully and we need to open up our minds to other ways of engaging with critiques. Different contexts, different realities, different languages and different subjects will lead to different takes on these issues. To conclude, my motivation to continue writing about interculturality includes all the following elements. I want to reflect on the complexities of this notion as an object of research and education. I want to identify mistakes, contradictions and incoherencies so we can be fairer and more open to other ways of thinking about it ad infinitum. I believe that the more we open up to other ways of conceptualizing interculturality, the better it could prepare us to ‘do’ interculturality as individuals (see Dervin, 2022; Dervin & Jacobsson, 2022). So, my focus is on the metalevel of interculturality at this stage rather than on the concrete and even more complex level of human relations. I don’t feel that I am entitled anymore (I did this in the past!) to tell people how they should understand interculturality and how they

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should do it. My starting points, my life experience, the political and ‘scientific’ brainwashing that I have experienced in my own corner of the world, and my limited language skills, do not permit me to give orders to others. All I can contribute is co-reflection on what it is that we are talking about, forcing myself to listen to multiple voices and being inspired by all kinds of phenomena, from art to everyday life encounters. Although many people will not find my approach of interest (‘it is too far from the reality!’, ‘it is too philosophical’ —again!), I do believe that longterm, lifelong engagement with these issues can make a difference in terms of who is (allowed/entitled) to speak and be listened to, epistemic fairness, awareness of our own limited views and opportunities for honest but, at times, necessarily painful dialogues. I did find an interesting formulation in Chinese by Confucius concerning the basic functions and values of, e.g. literature, which are fitting for what I am suggesting: 兴观群怨 (xìng guān qún yuàn). The four characters translate as stimulation, contemplation, communication and criticism. This is how they are described by the authors of Key Concepts in Chinese Thought and Culture (2022): ‘Stimulation’ means that the appreciation of literary works arouses imagination, stimulates reflection on society and life, and inspires aspirations and interests. ‘Contemplation’ means that reading leads to understanding nature, society, life, and politics. ‘Communication’ means that reading encourages discussion with others, and exchange of thoughts and feelings. ‘Criticism’ means learning how to critically express oneself about state affairs and voice inner feelings.

This ‘model’ of engagement with literature is very much relevant and the four keywords summarize well, I feel, what we two are trying to achieve in, e.g. this book. In my work, like a sleepwalker, I have floated from one topic to another, from one concept to another, from one interest to another, from one thinker to another and from one co-author to another—being stimulated, contemplating, communicating and critiquing (in any kind of order). Sleepwalking aimlessly and in a somewhat confused state through interculturality has enriched my (changing) take on the notion of research and education.

3.3 Ambitions In simple terms, I am seeking to achieve more epistemic equality and justice through my work. Anyone familiar with what I write would notice recurrent themes such as alternative perspectives, Southern knowledge and skewed geopolitics of knowledge. I think I focus on these issues because I believe that humans correspond to knowledge and when their ways of knowing are underrepresented then their whole existence is doubted. This is an issue that Fred has discussed in his texts as well and I would venture to claim that he agrees with my rationale and objectives. I wonder if Fred seeks to achieve similar goals and whether his positioning and experiences warrant such a call. My endeavour to shed the light on these issues and to demand more effective and institutional changes has led me to target decolonial impulses which I often draw on in my work.

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I understand that these attempts can be problematic because readers can ask about the internationality of localized Southern perspectives. I would answer that a fundamental reason for the dominance of the Western cognitive empire is the assumed universality of Western perspectives and their relevance and applicability in other contexts, without any further contextualization or nuance. I agree that global perspectives are indeed important, but they should not ultimately overshadow any sense of locality. I do not seek to provide such wide-encompassing and generally relevant perspectives to almost everyone; I do appreciate the limited scope of what I write and how it may be pertinent to only a set of people. The very endeavour of producing globally appreciated ideas that are germane to all contexts and people is running the risk of generating inaccurate insights. I think this presumable ‘global vision’ may obfuscate the struggles, challenges, specificities and particularities of some people and contexts. The aim to be global entails some level of coloniality as it is more of an attempt to extend one’s views to others and one may produce knowledge that has been informed by a stark lack of reallife experiences. Again, I am hoping to explore what Fred thinks about this and whether this is an aspect that he takes into account in his research. The question of the ultimate goals that we seek to achieve in our scholarship is somehow perplexing since our answers are certainly framed by our current positionality as individuals and by our status as intercultural scholars. Maybe my goals in a later stage would be indeed different from my current goals and the same goes for Fred. I would think that his current goals are not necessarily the ones he had at the beginning of his career. Taking all these ideas into account, I am not always convinced that we write with goals in mind. In academia, we do not always write for the sake of writing as may be the case in literature. We sometimes do write to keep up with the contemporary pressure to publish in order to get academic positions, tenure or fellowships. We need to acknowledge that our works are not always reflective of what we genuinely feel and think; this is important so that we do not assume that all academic writing is goal-oriented, objective and that it serves a specific purpose. I would like to go back to decoloniality and how it is a central argument in my writing because it accounts for the struggles and challenges that I endure [the conundrum of decolonization is that it is overshadowed by adamant normalizing practices that reseat Northern epistemologies and ways of doing. There is no terminus or a final stage; decolonization is a never-ending resisting process that does not promise fulfilling its inherent promises. We need to grapple with the notion that decolonization is not possible and we have to adjust our ways of speaking of and doing decolonization]. For me, a goal I am hoping to achieve is to transcend this idealistic perception of the other in a way that centres colonial mentality responsible for southern subjects doubting their intellectual labour. I am actively trying to offer a genuine example of an academic meeting in which both Northern and Southern perspectives are doing interculturality and their epistemic legitimacy is equally perceived and acknowledged. I do not feel that my contribution to this book is tokenistic; it is rather an actual instance of inter-epistemic dialogue in which two scholars belonging to different sociocultural and geopolitical locations

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are co-constructing knowledge that is relevant to both of them and anchored in their situated understandings. It is an authentic expression of the great potential of inter-epistemic dialogue (R’boul, 2022a), epistemological polylogue (R’boul, 2022b) and pluri-perspectivality (R’boul, 2021). This book embodies these endeavours and our pursuit of constructing perspectives that are not fully encapsulated in Western thinking traditions. We can provide a scholarly text that reflects what epistemological plurality looks like without any pressure to comprise or adapt one’s rhetoric, reasoning and argumentation to others. This is a circumstantial and time-dependent account of the goals that I am seeking to achieve in my work—these goals may change if the rationale behind them is not pressing anymore. I have indeed underscored ‘decoloniality’ in multiple instances, but I would like to reiterate that it is used more as a critical lens of analysis rather than simply a sought-after goal (although it is as well). To clarify how intersections of the personal and the academic manifest in my works and the type of goals I hope to achieve, I would like to draw the readers’ attention to this quote which beautifully captures the essence of decoloniality and how I make use of it in my research. Decolonizing methodologies are mainly about ‘forcing us to confront the Western canon in its entirety, in its philosophy, pedagogy, ethics, organizational practices, paradigms, methodologies and discourses… origin mythologies and the stories that it tells to reinforce its hegemony’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021: xii). Despite my closer readings of Fred’s works and how he seeks to achieve similar goals but with different rhetoric, analysis and approaches, I would like to ask him two questions: • What is his take on postcolonial and decolonial narratives in interculturality research? • How does Fred envisage the effective approach for promoting the epistemic visibility of the Global South (although I am not sure whether he agrees with this terminology)? * * * Like many scholars, I have sacrificed all my holidays since I started in the field to write and to produce articles, chapters and books and to talk about them. Why is that? I think that it has to do with the anger and often the discomfort and disgust that I experience while reading the news about the violence that people experience on a daily basis, the lies and manipulations across the world which have consequences on millions of people; the silly racist, xenophobic comments and remarks that I hear; and the general unfairness of this world. All of these urge me to write to make sense of what is happening for myself and with others. I don’t think that I have even proposed any solution to these issues, maybe only for scholarly engagement with interculturality. But I need to be careful here: my perspectives have changed and will change and I don’t intend to make any proposal that will be set in stone or even long-lasting. I only believe that changing one’s thinking, one’s views on how we (are made to) see the world and the actions we (propose to) take, is what I can modestly offer to the world. My work is like a sizeable extended family, one idea grows into another, an article into a book,

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continually evolving. Some people will read me, dis-/agree, discard my work, laugh at what I am writing, call me an ‘idealist’ and ‘a grumpy old man’… This is always bound to happen and I am rejoicing at the idea of someone getting annoyed and/or happy while reading me. As much as what I engage with to write (ideas, thoughts, concepts, ideologies) makes me react, I do hope that my readers and my students re-act [act again, think again] to what they hear in me. Feelings and emotions are important for scholars and educators as they can push us further. Maybe my ultimate goal is not to have concrete goals but to just let go, to do what I find pleasing and important at moment X, listening to what the world has to say, responding to these voices and listening again. Just moving forward.

3.4 What Are We Allowed to Hope For? Reading again what I have written in the previous sections, I think that I have already provided clues about what my hope might be for interculturality. Kant (1999) says ‘may/allowed to hope for’, which makes an important difference. Hoping for can, of course, be too idealistic, unreasonable and in the kind of academic and educational worlds that we live in, hope is limited. This world relates to the broader world of US-centrism, capitalism and neoliberalism, where money, preferred political stances and ready-to-think ideologies seem to dominate. Within this sphere, it is hard to be allowed to hope for much… Disrupting these systems would be one way to be ‘allowed to hope for’, e.g. change. But who is powerful enough to do so? One can always retract oneself from US-dictated systems of evaluation and ranking of universities and research (and from, e.g. specific ways of speaking), but then one risks being even more isolated and talking to oneself and to a few selected ‘friends’. In research today, we see many calls for decolonialism. Although most are probably genuine, entering the mould of US-led research outlets (journals, research evaluation systems), discredits many such calls. When one publishes in English for example, how much freedom does one have to use, e.g. forms of ‘postcolonial Englishes’ or to mix languages as one does on a daily basis in different parts of the world? Hamza and the ‘Darija’ language is a perfect example. My mélange of a limited amount of ‘European’ languages with friends and colleagues is another. Officially I am allowed to hope for a lot of things and, again, one might hear many voices calling for change in intercultural research. But who allows who and how? Who is in the position of being allowed and in the ‘superior position’ of allowing? Are the latter genuine in their intentions to allow others to hope for something? Are they ready to push hope further, to let go of their power to allow? Is hope for actually enough? At what stage can we move to real actions? What am I allowed to hope for as a White European scholar with some symbolic power? I would hope that everybody allows themselves to question people like me. I would also hope that people like me be quiet for a while and listen to others seriously, not just using a few ‘tokens’ from the Global South who rehearse

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our own beliefs and ideologies to make us feel ‘good’ and ‘generous’. I would also hope that we were pushed to think, unthink and rethink, not in our own terms, re-imposing our own (‘critical’) ideologies, but through the eyes and ears of the other. Finally, following A. Schoenberg (in Auner, 2003), I would hope for more space for ‘feelings’ in intercultural research, and to put an end to the false dichotomy of ‘theory’ and ‘emotions’—pretending that we can approach interculturality with ‘masks’ and ‘protective gear’ (to borrow COVID-19 era terminologies). In a letter to the painter Kandinsky from 1911, Schoenberg wrote (in Auner, 2003: 102): ‘In particular, I do not agree when you write, if I understand you correctly, that you would have preferred to present an exact theory. I do not think that is necessary at present. We search on and on (as you yourself say) with our feelings. Let us endeavour never to lose these feelings to a theory’. * * * What I hope for is not about the epistemological nuance or theoretical depth of interculturality research; I hope for structural changes that exemplify interculturality within the interculturality arena. The field has already contributed substantial and groundbreaking knowledge that has altered our understandings of human communication and our intersections, challenges and resistances. Being an early-career researcher, I am not confident that I can naively assume that I have got to the point where I can preach and ask others to support my politics. I am aware of my temporality, my politics and the type of rhetoric that would be commensurate with my current status as an intercultural scholar who is making his way through the field. Again, this is an attempt to speak back and steer the wheel to engage, critique, think and understand otherwise. That is why what I feel that I am allowed to hope for is that dominant discourses would not always be rehearsed by others in an attempt to procure approval and endorsement; I think this is quite the antithesis of the very premises of interculturality and what intercultural research is about. I suppose it is time we open the doors for others to take part in theorizing interculturality in a way that makes sense to them and their communities. I hope for interculturality research to resemble genuine epistemic justice that would be regarded as an example and inspiration for other fields. I am sure that discourses that have alerted us to this state of affairs in which all narratives are equally received and appreciated are not novel; research has indeed deconstructed these structures and their implied assumption that what is currently the case should remain so. I hope that interculturality would be genuinely intercultural; this is delicate and subjective but it would certainly be understood on a large scale as the epistemic diversity that would reflect the wide range of worldviews and perspectives in the world; this dimension is fundamental to the legitimacy of including the concept of ‘intercultural’ in our narratives. However, I also hope that this critique would not be treated as a deliberate attempt to problematize and induce controversy; it is simply a humble intervention encouraged by how I see myself as an intercultural scholar within the field and my imagination of how the field could be even more remarkably profound. Moreover, I am hoping for interculturality research to be taken seriously by decision-makers. It would be hardly

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doubted that intercultural research has contributed impressive accounts that bear great relevance to everyday and to our political issues. I believe we need to be careful about what we hope for interculturality. In other words, we need to be critically hopeful in the sense that we do not hope for what will maintain the current and impede changes for the better and the more diverse. My hope is also decolonial. My understanding of decoloniality is about disrupting the possibility of the dominance of one epistemic pattern and/or empire. My understanding of the decolonial exercise is about going beyond critiquing colonialism and coloniality; I perceive decoloniality to be about opening up possibilities for feeling, imagining and knowing ‘the world differently and offering different solutions to problems caused by colonialism and the failure of power structures to address these historic conditions’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021: xiii). I am hoping that we can make interculturality based on epistemic self-trust and trust in others as an approach for promoting epistemic justice. Genuine equitable knowledge exchanges amongst all contributors would foster epistemic self-trust which can ensure the most illuminating epistemic goods (Dormandy, 2020). [Conversation with readers] • As scholars and educators, do you feel that we are entitled to tell people how they should understand interculturality and how they should do it? One of us felt that he had no right to do so, what arguments did he provide? What are your views on the issue? • One of us wrote: ‘I research what is most relevant to my struggles; I research what makes most sense to me; I research what I intimately know about’. Why do you do research? What are your main motivations? What impact do you want to have on the field, people and, e.g. decision-makers? • When we write about interculturality, should we write with ‘our blood’ as Nietzsche suggested? • Is the issue of subjectivity in research and education on interculturality relevant to you? Is this something you reflect on constantly? Should emotions guide us in intercultural research and education, be repressed and/or worked upon? • About the place of fiction and art in your engagement with interculturality as an object of research and education, how often do you turn to them for inspiration? Have you ever found a new research idea or coined a concept while engaging with, e.g. a novel? • One of us referred to the Chinese idea of 兴观群怨 (xìng guān qún yuàn) from literary work, i.e. stimulation, contemplation, communication and criticism. Which of these concepts do you find central in research on interculturality and why? • For one of us: ‘The Southern ‘intercultural’ scholar becomes the singer of a body of writings that was constructed elsewhere and whose constitutional premises are hardly questioned’. Explain what this means to you and if you identify with the argument. • How would you define the idea of inter-epistemic dialogue? Is this something you practice in your work as a researcher and/or educator? • Observe your own research production and/or that of a ‘big’ name in the field. Can you clearly tell the kind of ‘sizeable extended family’, with, e.g. one idea

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potentially growing into another, an article into a book, that has animated your/ their work? • Let’s turn this question to you: What are you allowed to hope for interculturality? • What do you make of the idea of moving forward in the field of interculturality? Would you rather use another expression to describe what you endeavour to do? • How much ‘sleepwalking aimlessly and in a somewhat confused state’ are you doing in research and education? Can you discuss the results of these processes? • What are ‘secretly’ the kinds of research topics about interculturality that you would like to explore but feel you cannot? Try to explain why.

References Amine, K. (2013, March 27). Double critique: Disrupting monolithic thrusts. Textures. http:// www.textures-platform.com/?p=2800 Auner, J. (2003). A Schoenberg reader. Yale University Press. Bailey, A. (2018). On anger, silence, and epistemic injustice. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 84, 93–115. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246118000565 Byram, M. (2008). From foreign language education to education for intercultural citizenship: Essays and reflections. Multilingual Matters. Camus, A. (2013). The myth of Sisyphus. Penguin. Dervin, F. (2022). Interculturality in fragments: A reflexive approach. Springer. Dervin, F., & Jacobsson, A. (2022). Intercultural communication education: Broken realities and rebellious dreams. Springer. Dervin, F., & Simpson, A. (2021). Interculturality and the political within education (1st ed.). Routledge. Dormandy, K. (2020). Epistemic self-trust: It’s personal. Episteme, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1017/ epi.2020.49 Dostoyevsky, F. (1864/1992). Notes from the underground. Dover Publications. Holliday, A. (2010). Intercultural communication and ideology. SAGE. Kafka, F. (1996). The metamorphosis and other stories (S. Appelbaum, Trans.). Dover Publications. Kant, I. (1999). Critique of pure reason. Cambridge University Press. Key Concepts in Chinese Thought and Culture. (2022). Stimulation, contemplation, communication, and criticism. https://www.chinesethought.cn/EN/shuyu_show.aspx?shuyu_id=2195 Khatibi, A. (1971). La Mémoire Tatouée: Autobiographie d’un Décolonisé. Denoël. Nietzsche, F. W. (1883/1978). Thus spoke Zarathustra: A book for none and all (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Penguin Books. R’boul, H. (2021). North/South imbalances in intercultural communication education. Language and Intercultural Communication, 21(2), 144–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.18 66593 R’boul, H. (2022a). Epistemological plurality in intercultural communication knowledge. Journal of Multicultural Discourses. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2022.2069784 R’boul, H. (2022b). Postcolonial interventions in intercultural communication knowledge: Metaintercultural ontologies, decolonial knowledges and epistemological polylogue. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 15(1), 75–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513 057.2020.1829676 Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2021). Introduction to the third edition. In Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (pp. xi–xxxiii). Zed Books.

Chapter 4

Devenir-être; Devenir-langue

Abstract Based on two neologisms, devenir-être (Be(ing)coming) and devenir-langue (Becoming-language/Languaging), the chapter engages with the idea that the (endless) processes of becoming are inherent to the work of the scholar and educator interested in interculturality. Attempting to be-come (together with others, ideas, concepts, objects) and to become-language (digging into the simplexities of words, discourses, voices, transforming meanings, connotations and ideological flavouring in the process) support the authors in reviewing their own experiences in the field of interculturality. As such, they provide details about the importance of other scholars, philosophers and literary figures in their work and examine words from other languages that are (temporarily) relevant and wellsuited to discuss certain aspects of interculturality. Keywords Languaging · Philosophy · Fiction · Ideology · Becoming ·  Voices Two neologisms from the French language guide us in this chapter: Devenir-être (Be(ing)coming) and devenir-langue (Becoming-language/Languaging). Both words represent hints at and transform Byram’s (1997) somewhat static savoirs [French for know/knowledge] from his model of intercultural communicative competence [can we really know?]. For us, the (endless) process of becoming is inherent to the work of the scholar and educator interested in interculturality—as much as it is central to interculturality as a phenomenon and an experience. As such we constantly attempt to be-come (together with others, ideas, concepts, things) and to become-language, digging into the simplexities of words, discourses, voices, transforming meanings, connotations and ideological flavouring in the process. The chapter focusses on what has shaped/is shaping us in our (un-)(re-)thinking interculturality. We start by discussing the importance of other scholars, philosophers and literary figures in our work. We then delve into each other’s work, reading each other, identifying elements that would need to be further discussed

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 F. Dervin and H. R'boul, Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality, Encounters between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6672-9_4

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in the book. Finally, devenir-langue is explored by examining words from other languages that we feel are (temporarily) relevant and well-suited to discuss certain aspects of interculturality. Movement and change guide us in navigating through the following questions: • Who are our favourite writers and why do they matter for interculturality? • What is it that we like about each other’s work? What aspects would we like to discuss further? • What are our three favourite words in any language to discuss interculturality today? What are the three ones we dislike? Why?

4.1 Influences In recent years, I have been reading works from various scholars with different narratives, theoretical approaches and methodological frameworks; my aim was to explore alternative discourses that may not have been at the forefront of interculturality research. I feel that my understanding of interculturality is deeply shaped by Fred Dervin and Adrian Holliday because their writings appeal to my reasoning and logic. I do not want to present this account as a serious engagement with their works. It is not to praise or vilify; it is more of a succinct personal opinion of why these scholars are important to interculturality. My early readings were those works imbued with a sense of complexity and nuance. Having been interested in philosophy, I have always been drawn to the scholarly productions in which things are not taken-for-granted, concepts are continuously remoulded, contested and questioned. Dervin, as an intercultural scholar who is incessantly deconstructing in order to construct, matters greatly for interculturality in the sense of his ability to locate the flawed logics and/or inaccuracies in dominant discourses (e.g., Dervin & Simpson, 2021). The very attempt to rework and rethink the concepts that are routinely used in interculturality works supplies a sense of epistemological comfort-disruption. His questioning of the very endeavour to define culture, identity and even interculturality reaffirms the complexity of interculturality and does not gainsay the epistemological intricacies involved in a field that is bound by a variety of fields of inquiry. The concepts that constitute the cardinal structures framing interculturality discussion are questioned and, consequently, our taken-for-granted narratives are doubted as well. Dervin continues to problematize without falling into the trap of inducing controversy for the sake of it; Dervin’s narratives are important for interculturality to advance the field and reconsider our assumptions. As far as I understand, Dervin is continuously endorsing and contradicting himself since the narratives which underpin his works are often later critiqued. For instance, his conception of ‘Liquid Interculturality’ was an essential element in my argumentation in some of my papers. Yet, he has recanted this notion and moved to characterize more nuanced understandings. I think it is a refreshing practice to have

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scholars who do not present their discourses as entirely and eternally accurate and who are driven by the objective of problematizing rather than providing conclusive answers that may repudiate reality. Holliday, on the other hand, delivers a different taste of interculturality. My first encounter with his works was from the perspective of applied linguistics and his critique of native-speakerism. I think Holliday has managed to assert the relevance of the personal and the everyday in researching the intercultural. He emphasizes how ‘it is an immense resource if we can connect with everyday experience’ especially considering how ‘the intercultural is not a distant place to do with foreign lands and international travel. It is all around us all the time’ (Holliday, April 2022 is his blog on involving the everyday in researching the intercultural). Holliday’s writings appear reflective as he draws on his personal experiences; I am not aware of how his experiences have shaped his understandings, unless noted in his blog and more apparent in his recent book on contesting the grand narratives of the intercultural (Holliday, 2022). I appreciate that he is one of the few scholars with a closer inspection of non-popular cultures, specifically eastern. Holliday has made great strides in making sense of the intercultural such as his interrogation of the grand narrative of Orientalism, and his critique of essentialism and national cultural traits. I believe that Holliday is important for interculturality in the sense that his narratives make use of personal experiences and everyday encounters rather than mere theoretical exploration that may be far away from reality or simply extracted by means of surmise and conjecture. * * * Thousands of people have influenced me in the way I have been thinking about interculturality, from scholars to painters, from composers to philosophers—some more than others. My devenir-être as a scholar, an educator and a person could have been very different under other influences [and it will continue to change!]. In my book with Simpson (Dervin & Simpson, 2021) I have listed some of the main influences. My interest in others’ writing shifts constantly, although there have been constants in my life (e.g. the philosopher Henri Bergson [1859–1941] or the composer Kaija Saariaho). Reading has obviously a major impact on my production as someone researching interculturality, but one could say the same about listening to music and experiencing art. These two have also had a major influence on my research. And here again, my foci change constantly and ‘colour’ my research in different ways. Today fiction is probably as important for my work as scientific publications. Just like music, where I find so much pleasure and inspiration from people like Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) (in both his musical production and writings about it), novels, plays and poetry open up doors that research does not seem to do at this stage of my career. When I read a novel that talks to me, I am often reminded of a principle about literature from Chinese: 幻中有真 (Huàn zhōng yǒu zhēn, lit. Truth in imagination or real in fantasy). 幻中有真 reminds us that, although a work of fiction is imaginary [or is it?], it often reflects realities

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in society—as much as research might reveal some realities but also the scholar’s own imaginaries. Unlike research, fiction does not need to pretend that it is complete, finished or ‘perfect’ somehow. Fiction corresponds to the simplexity of life. Just like interculturality: It is always incomplete because we never really know what is going on between us (Are we honest to each other? Do we mean what we say? Do we really understand each other? Why is it that one day I like you, the other I despise you?…). Interculturality is a mutilated, misshaped and incomplete beauty (残缺美), another term used in Chinese to refer to crackled patterns created by fire on porcelain. Fiction reminds us of this imperfect beauty and in that sense talks to us in ways that research does not. At the moment (spring, 2022) the two writers who are ‘with me’ all the time include Elias Canetti (1905–1994) and Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)—two White European men from the past two centuries. Flaubert, I had read as a child and rediscovered some years ago ‘by mistake’ (I found one of his novels in a bin in Paris!). I was very much aware of Canetti and re-engaged with his writings while working on a book with Andreas Jacobsson (Dervin & Jacobsson, 2022), when I was writing about my ‘rebellious dream’ about interculturality. One of my favourite novels by Gustave Flaubert is entitled Bouvard and Pécuchet—A tragi-comic novel of bourgeois life (1904). In the novel, two friends aim to write a book about every subject in the world (agriculture, biology, chemistry, gymnastics, politics, etc.) by educating themselves in every possible field. However, their overly ambitious, unrealizable and somewhat absurd project ends as a disaster as they become engulfed by the complexity of knowledge available—they give up! Although it is meant to be tragi-comic I am very fond of this novel because it reminds me, in a sense, of what I have experienced with interculturality as an object of research and education. For the past 20 years, I have endeavoured to read as much as I could in all kinds of fields (from anthropology to fiction, often limited to some parts of the world and languages, although I could have access to translations), convinced that all of this could infuse new ideas into my research. It is a never-ending story and a life time would never be enough! Unlike Bouvard and Pécuchet, however, I will never give up although I am aware that my knowledge is and will always be restricted. Like most scholars, I often review research papers on interculturality and I am surprised to see that the knowledge used is systematically either from the broad field of intercultural communication education or from a ‘subfield’ such as language and intercultural communication—and, in most cases, restricted to knowledge published in English. The same voices are rehearsed and I can feel my mind getting tired and bored while reading these papers—working like driving an automatic car! I cannot deny that being aware of what is being done and discoursed in these fields is important but I believe that a bit of Bouvard and Pécuchet idealism is needed to enrich our views, thoughts and research topics. Read, read, read, and be curious, move beyond the small corner of knowledge that you have! [although it may sound as if I am talking to the reader here, it is actually to myself that I am speaking]. Interculturality is

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not just a ‘thing’ of the field named intercultural communication education (or one of its subfields), but is located in all aspects of knowledge… I rediscovered Elias Canetti in summer 2020. He was born in Bulgaria and lived in different parts of Europe (Austria, Britain, Switzerland). A multilingual individual, he wrote mostly in German. In 1981, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Canetti was very much interested in topics that are close to my heart: languages, (denouncing) fascism and crowds. Interculturality was always at the centre of what he wrote, from plays to fiction, from autobiographies to aphorisms. He is known for his work on crowds entitled Masse und Macht (1960, Crowds and Power); collections of aphorisms and fragments: Das Geheimherz der Uhr (1987, The Secret Heart of the Clock); Die Fliegenpein (1992, The Agony of Flies) and a series of autobiographies including Die Fackel im Ohr (1980, The Torch in My Ear) and Das Augenspiel (1985, The Play of the Eyes). In 1935, he published one of his most famous books: Die Blendung translated as Auto-da-Fé or The Tower of Babel. This somewhat comedic and yet gloomy novel is about a reclusive German sinologist between the two world wars. Although the professor tries to withdraw from the world in his library, Canetti describes how he is constantly manipulated by others. The book shows how people from different ‘worlds’ clash and try to influence each other in bad ways, although they could just let go, refrain from doing so and live in harmony. This novel has always resonated very much with me, having, over the past years, become myself somewhat of a recluse, moving away from crowds and groups, buried in books, music and art. In all of Canetti’s writings, his books of fragments or aphorisms are my favourites and they have always inspired me. Whenever I need inspiration or stimulation, I go back to, e.g. The Agony of Flies. Let me share some of my favourites: • ‘Mental hypocrisy: Whenever a truth threatens, he hides behind a thought’ (Canetti, 1989: 21). • ‘If you had travelled more, you would know less’ (Canetti, 1989: 46). These small pieces of ‘jewellery’ have helped me unthink and rethink interculturality and urged me to start writing my own fragments related to the notion over 2021–2022. I have published two volumes of fragments on interculturality (Dervin, 2022, 2023). I like the fragment format because it does not give you the illusion that you are writing in a straight line. You are moving forward but not on [we shall come back to this nuance]. Life itself is a collection of desorganized fragments, with some overlapping at times. We constantly come in and out of conversations, relations, experiences, words, discourses and ideologies. In the early twentieth century, the fragment was extremely popular amongst artists, musicians, writers and philosophers. I think it had to do with the anxiety that they had built up with the emergence of modernity, the fear of the uncontrollable feeling and madness that would lead to two (soon three?) devastating world wars. Today’s world is probably more fragmental than ever, especially with the omnipresence of social media (tweets and Weibo posts are in fact fragments). Our thoughts, relations and foci are disrupted and distorted all the time. Interculturality itself is obviously

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fragmental too and we still treat it as if it were ‘complete’ or ‘total’. Fragments help to focus one’s mind by their short format. They also help practice the fact that ideas need to ‘float’ and that they don’t need to be coherent, especially when dealing with interculturality, a notion that is so ‘simplex’ (simple + complex at the same time). As scholars, our engagement with the notion often relates to ‘short’ in-/direct conversations with others through social media, the arts, a book, a film, etc.; shifting life experiences; fluctuating impressions, beliefs and convictions; changing moods and atmospheres, etc. Engaging with interculturality is never in a straight line. Canetti’s work has helped me explore and feel comfortable about these aspects of scholarship on interculturality. Other interesting questions related to our ‘favourites’ could be: why is it that we are attracted to certain scholars, thinkers, writers and not to others? How have we been introduced to them? And finally, how blinded are we by our choices? [I added this paragraph after reading Hamza’s text] In one of my recent books, I claim that I enjoy reading fiction and plays—more than, e.g. research articles—because they are less one-sided or ideologically governed than what I read in research. A novel related to interculturality (e.g. Lao She, 2013) is often much more inspiring than a ‘cold’ piece of research, which follows one ideological path, ‘judging’ (we say ‘analysing data’) someone’s narrative (we say ‘research participants’) through this single lens, thus reducing the complexity of what the participants said in small pieces (‘excerpts’), trying to ‘govern’ what they say and simplifying their identities in the process. This is a caricature of course. However, e.g. research interviews (which are co-constructions, meaning neither ‘objective’ nor necessarily ‘true’) do not compare to a beautiful novel dealing with similar issues. I guess I miss the aesthetic enjoyment of reading good fiction when I read research articles today—especially when one considers that the way the data is analysed is often misleading and misinterpreting, reshaping many participants’ discourses into ideological fantasies.

4.2 Looking Into Each Other’s Mirror—Reading Each Other I hope the readers would not construe my answer to this question as a cliché or an attempt to flatter my co-author. Fred has genuinely been the biggest influence on my understanding and engagement with interculturality and I can assure the readers that I am making conscious efforts to engage in intercultural inter-epistemic dialogues with Fred as a peer, not an aspiration. I would draw on three main aspects that comprise my admiration for Fred’s work. First, Fred’s works cannot be epistemologically contained, framed or described in a way that characterizes their wholeness; what I mean is Fred’s publications, as I perceive them, are adamantly ambivalent in the sense that they are consciously shattered, rearranged and reconsidered; they are indeed incessantly

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evolving, which is very telling of Fred’s reasoning and thinking. A lot of ‘famous’ scholars are typically associated with one concept or theory that has brought them to the fore; in the case of Fred, that is a bit difficult, since he is persistently moving beyond what he has written before. His conception of ‘Liquid Interculturality’ was certainly a frame of reference that transformed my perception of what culture, identity, self and others are. Surprisingly, he recently shared the insight that he does not believe in its merit anymore. This state of positive instability and the absence of repetitiveness and monotony keep his writings alive and engaging. Second, Fred’s rhetoric is unminced, unsoftened and not attenuated, which renders reading as exciting as insightful. There is already a lot of diplomacy in how we write assuming that we are not subjective beings; being overly suggestive and not outspoken may belie the very essence of what is being said or hinted at. Fred reminds me of Nietzsche and I do find a lot of similarities in their rigour, rhetoric, argumentation and passion exhibited in their writings. His works are highly dialogical and philosophical in that they further problematize what we know instead of endorsing what others said. This is surely an approach to moving the field forward; being epistemologically rigourous and, most importantly, critical of what has been theorized or taken-for-granted. Third, Fred keeps asking us if we really mean what we think we mean. I would venture to say that Fred’s main contribution resides in his continuous critique and engagement with the fundamental concepts that have long constituted and shaped our understandings of interculturality. He destroys in order to build, critiques in order to theorize and engages in order to improve. Fred has provided multiple conceptions that form the foundational groundwork of how interculturality and intercultural education are currently understood and theorized. I can mention revising the notions of culture, identity, other and intercultural competence (Dervin, 2012, 2016), the emphasis on the political construction of differences rather than differences per se (Dervin & Simpson, 2021), critical and reflexive interculturality (Dervin & Jacobsson, 2021), introducing alternative non-Western theorization of interculturality and education, e.g. Chinese Minzu (Dervin & Yuan, 2021), the meaning of criticality in education research (Dervin & Simpson, 2021) and critiquing the dominance of Western knowledges and epistemologies in interculturality and intercultural communication education (Dervin & Jacobsson, 2022). These are only recent examples and I do admit that it would be quite difficult to pinpoint Fred’s most major insights since there is a wide range of ideas, critiques and conceptions. I have been wondering whether I currently have the efficient knowledge and necessary tools to chart my disagreements with Fred’s work; I would not call them disagreements but more of different angles of analyzing matters. One point I would like to raise is how we discuss the ascendency of the Western cognitive empire on interculturality research. Fred has the insight of an insider who has had quite some time in the field engaging and interacting with various perceptions while I may be still fresh in the sense there is a lot yet to learn and to discover. That is why Fred supplies a perspective that I have not been able yet to witness. I can confidently say that I have no disagreement; what I have is more of building

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on some of Fred’s ideas to move forward. I would like to discuss three points with Fred, which are presented here in the form of questions: • Do you think it would be interesting to draw on African, Asian and Latin American epistemologies in your theorizing and engagement with interculturality? • Since we both critique Western hegemony on knowledge production, how do you see yourself positioned in this skewed geopolitics of knowledge? • Why do you examine and critique the ascendency of certain voices on how interculturality is understood although you may not endure the silences and challenges that Southern scholars go through? What I mean is why do you disturb your comfort and make genuine efforts to call for more inclusion of non-popular voices although it is not necessary on your part? Is it an intercultural act? I am very interested in exploring your perspective on this. * * * I first contacted Hamza two years ago after reading one of his first papers entitled ‘North/South imbalances in intercultural communication education’, which was published in Language and Intercultural Communication (2021). I was writing books with A. Simpson and A. Jacobsson at the time and the article impressed me, giving me a gust of fresh air (and hope!). I appreciated its clear critical positioning and its very much relevance for global scholarship of interculturality today. In the article, Hamza proposed interesting ways of reconciliating Western and non-Western ontologies, which are developed in future articles. In his work, in general, Hamza doesn’t mince his words and name things as they are. He speaks of ‘enduring colonial-like actions’ in the way knowledge about interculturality is produced; he denounces the absence of indigenous knowledge in Global South institutions, systems of exclusion and marginalization and the unidirectionality of research in the world (from the West/North to the rest). But his critique always appears to be balanced and non-aggressive—which I admire! I tend to be more provocative and, at times, antagonistic in front of this injustice to which I have contributed in-/directly. I also find the entry points to be very original in his papers: Moroccan intercultural communication scholarship, internationalization in the Global South (2022a) and leading journals in intercultural communication (2022b) (amongst others). Hamza’s papers are also interdisciplinary and reading through the lists of references I see a lot of fascinating papers, chapters and books that I was unaware of. While he has identified and deconstructed problems in relation to interculturality research in the Global South and North, Hamza has also proposed many solutions (R’Boul, 2022c). The concepts and notions that he uses to do so reflect his own creativity and urge to make a difference: e.g. (SouthSouth) inter-epistemic dialogue, meta-intercultural ontologies, pluri-epistemologies (amongst others). I can see a lot of overlapping in our work, although we don’t necessarily frame things the same way, which might have to do with different types of literature that we use—which has an influence on how we ‘discourse’ things. Hamza’s work on leading international journals is very important because

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it reminds us that such gatekeepers of knowledge might be ‘double-faced’ and while they project an image of interculturality themselves, in fact, they might give very little space for interculturalizing interculturality—i.e. pluri-epistemologies in Hamza’s vocabulary. I had myself written a paperback in 2012 where I looked at how researchers working on ‘the’ Chinese student abroad from intercultural perspectives were themselves ‘biting their own tails’ by essentializing the students through misinformed and stereotypical references to, e.g. Confucianism [which is by the way a philosophical movement imagined by the West, with no real name in the Chinese language]. Although the paper was not appreciated (you should never criticize openly your colleagues, I was told at the time!), it still represents one of the most meaningful things that I have ever produced. It was liberating at the time and to see some of the scholars I had scrutinized promote non-essentialism and even postcolonialism today always makes me laugh [as much as I close my eyes with shame when I reread my own papers where I have clearly essentialized my participants]. In Hamza’s writing, I see a similar but subtler need to point at such mistreatment of the other. I have a few questions for Hamza: • Can I ask you: when you are writing, who are you speaking to? Who is/are your target audiences? Do you picture them when you start writing? • Who do you think is the easiest/most difficult to convince with the ideas that you present in your work? Why? Do you think that your work might face some resistance in certain parts of the world? What might be the consequences? Should we care about that? • How to ensure that your work will not be ‘misused’ by those who have the power to speak, especially in the ‘West’ (note: I am not writing ‘by Westerners’, I say in the ‘West’, which means that I include any scholar, even from the Global South but located in the ‘West’)? What I mean by this is that your work brings in very important critiques and proposals that could be mentioned in passing (to save a scholar’s face, to play the ‘good decolonial-friendly scholar’, to use the other’s voice as a way to protect one’s uncomfortable position) but not taken so seriously in the way thinking and ‘doing’ intercultural research is performed? How to defend your position and your thoughts? How to make sure they get the discussions they deserve? Or does this matter at all? Should we just let it be and allow the ‘power’ of your work to take over ‘naturally’? • In a similar vein, how to spread the word about the alternatives that you propose? How to make sure that you are listened to (people are quiet, take notes and actions) rather than heard (people acquiesce) and by different kinds of individuals from educators to decision-makers in different parts of the world? How to ensure real action? • How to develop a new critical language for interculturality in English that represents a break from ‘Western’ critical discourses? Can we be liberated from them? Is it possible/desirable?

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• Finally, I believe that there is a need for a real revolution to change this epistemically unjust world of interculturality research and education. What are your views on this (extreme) view? What would a revolution in non-revolutionary capitalist-neoliberal times be like for knowledge production and dissemination?

4.3 Devenir-langue—The Power of Words ‘Je m’intéresse au langage parce qu’il me blesse ou me séduit’. [I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.]. (Barthes, 1973: 171)

Talking about words we like and dislike needs to be treated with care. Liking and disliking can quickly turn into promoting and discarding, see banning. Words are just words although some will be more powerful than others. All words are valuable, regardless of if we like them or not, for whatever reason. When a word is considered as a hero or an enemy, we establish some form of symbolic violence around it, especially when we are influential. When I look at my writing, it is clear that I have ‘abused’ a certain number of words such as ‘liquid’ and ‘identity’—abused in the sense that I have overused them, up to the point where I got tired of seeing them. I think I still use identity today but I rarely talk about ‘liquid’, which I had borrowed from Zygmunt Bauman (2004). I think that it has become some kind of a cliché now. Interestingly, the word ‘culture’ is in fact the concept that I might have used the most, although I have never taken it seriously. I have written about it to deconstruct it mostly. Some of my students have asked me if they should stop using it— some even self-censor in front of me and refrain from uttering it. But again, I have never had anything against the word ‘culture’ itself—it is just a word. One can, of course, use it. It is what might hide behind the word (a substitute for something we cannot name or a monstrous generalization; an ideology) or the silences it contains that have disturbed me. In what follows I am listing three words that I like/dislike. This is obviously an extremely subjective exercise. What this can do is reveal where one stands at moment X. My three favourite words to discuss interculturality in spring 2022 include harmony, shendu and change. Harmony is a word that I used to despise before I started working with my Chinese colleagues. When I heard the word before, I would think of a ‘fake’ situation where everyone pretended to be ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ to each other, protecting and ‘giving’ everyone’s face, reproducing unbalanced power relations. I use the verb to give here on purpose. While in English we say to protect one’s face (self-centrered), in Chinese the phrase is to give one’s face to someone (other-centrered). While researching the concept of harmony with my colleagues, I discovered that the notion in Chinese is much more sophisticated than what the word might mean and how it connotes in English. The Chinese word for harmony, 和谐, should in fact be translated as diversity in harmony in English, indicating that harmony

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is about balancing otherness with otherness and refuting sameness. Harmony is thus about co-constructing, about the inter- of interculturality, about balancing of self and other (without any of them ‘winning’, ever). The endless (counter-)balancing relationships have been a constant in Chinese philosophy (Tian & Dervin, 2022). Like Ancient China, Ancient Greece also gave much importance to music for discussions and negotiations. Political agreements often occurred with music being played in the background. And, as a reminder, the English word itself is from Greek harmonia for ‘agreement, concord of sounds’. Although to my ears, the English word harmony still sounds somewhat distant, artificial and ‘forced’, increasingly I have come to appreciate what it could connote when looking at it from other perspectives. Harmony could be the inter- of interculturality, a central component of the unfinished task of be(coming) together. The second word that I ‘cherish’ for interculturality is a Chinese word: 慎独 (shendu). This word refers to the act of behaving the same way by oneself as when one is with other people. For example, when I am by myself in my study writing this, I try to act the same way as I would if someone were sitting with me. This represents the ultimate lack of performance with and for others, which I think could guide us in the way we see and do interculturality [I had written ‘should’ in this sentence before, but I replaced it with ‘could’ in a later version as a reminder that it is A possibility NOT an order]. I have seen many people who engage with ideas around interculturality in ‘noble’ and ‘endearing’ ways but who, when they leave their computers or the university, behave in appalling ways with others— leaving behind all the ‘beautiful’ ideologies that they share with, e.g. their readers and students. 慎独 reminds us that we should strive to stick to our ‘good’ principles—e.g. what we expect from students—and make life and, e.g. scholarship just one as much as we can. [Note that in this sentence I use ‘should (strive)’—not ‘could (strive)’—since I believe that one has the right to expect such behaviours. However, at the same time, am I being too idealistic? Can we really apply what we ‘order’ others to do when these orders are often ‘unrealistic’ (e.g. no stereotypes, live a non-essentialistic life…)?]. Change is a simple word that we often use on a daily basis. I have come to realize over the years that I have engaged with the idea of interculturality that it is probably the key term for what interculturality is about. As such when I decompose the word interculturality, the three components indicate and focus on change: inter- (among, between, a connection between leading to change), -ality (a process of change) and culture (from Latin colere for to till, cultivate). I note that in Chinese the word for culture contains a character for change, transform. Examining interculturality should be looking into the change, the transformations that take place between us because, when we are in contact with others, we always change—for good and bad, whatever these might mean and there is no standard we can agree upon to evaluate them. Change is part of who we are as human beings (e.g. Bergson, 2012). Therefore, observing change is not easy because it happens all the time. Using three Chinese words/phrases related to change, we might find clues as to how it occurs between and within us as far as interculturality as an object of research and education is concerned: 化 can translate as turn, melt,

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transform, expend and change into. It indicates gradual and subtle change; 变 means change, become, transform and vary, pointing at the manifest and obvious change; 潜移默化 can be translated as silent transformations, unknowingly changing. This idiom from a Confucian scholar reminds us that we go through quiet and unconscious transformations when we experience new things (see Dervin, 2022). We are always moved and changed by any encounter with the other, nolens volens, and this change is at the core of interculturality. Resistance to change is also part of the process and might itself change into change. Again: change here does not necessarily hint at something positive but it can also be (perceived as) negative. Evaluating change is often a viewpoint. Do we have, e.g. research tools that can allow us to ‘grab’ change? All the models of intercultural competence available in the hybrid academic-business market give us the illusion that we can do so, driven by very specific ideological positions (‘efficiency’, ‘democracy’, ‘ethnorelativism’ and other -isms). A positive change for me might be negative for you and vice versa. I believe that by saying that interculturality is about the change I fall into a somewhat too obvious position but it is a good reminder that, like Sisyphus or Wugang (吴刚), we are doomed to run after something that is unrealisable [doomed here is not meant to be negative]. Finally, let me say a few words about the three words that I have an aversion to today. They all have to do with the ‘litanies’ that are rehearsed today (in 2022), often in what I consider to be unconvincing ways: (1) Democracy, (2) Social justice and (3) Citizenship [some readers will probably see, e.g. harmony as a Chinese ‘litany’ too]. I often associate these words with cold administrative language, with slogans and mottoes and desperate attempts to save our ‘Western’ identities. They are used in such ways that often negate disagreement or questioning and that present them as ‘obvious’ and ‘taken-for-granted’. However, what they really mean is often a mystery to me. This ‘silent’ political turn in research on interculturality has very much to do with the ‘West’ feeling somewhat ‘castrated’ by the emergence of alternative voices from the big wide world. Once, I asked a proponent of the use of the idea of democracy in intercultural research how they defined the word. They responded that my question was ‘silly’, that there was no need to define it since ‘democracy is democracy, passed onto us [the person was from the US, a White man, I am not sure who “us” referred to here], by the Greeks’. What this person probably did not know was that, e.g. ‘Greek democracy’ did not include women … and that the myth of ‘Greekness’ in ‘us’ deserves our full attention today. Why we like and dislike words in English and other languages to talk about interculturality is a complex issue, which is worth exploring. Amongst the words I like today [I say today because I know that tomorrow I will prefer other words], I was very much influenced by reflections around their use, meanings and connotations in the Chinese language, which made me change my mind, or gave me new perspectives on them. If I had been born in another part of the world or lived in a part of the world where the litanies of democracy and social justice were rare, I might have chosen them instead. Again, it is important for us to bear in mind that our connections and preferences for words over others to talk about interculturality

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change overtime and that keeping an eye on them could be considered a good practice to, e.g. open up to other ways of thinking about the notion. I’ll finish by adding that having access to other languages (very different from ours) or even having the opportunity to discuss around words, idioms and ideologemes (words reflecting pieces of ideologies), are necessities today to enrich our takes on interculturality. I would say in a somewhat arrogant way that we cannot work on interculturality without being curious about how things are phrased and framed in other languages. Ignoring this aspect means keeping ourselves closed up in one very small cage. * * * I would like to discuss three words from my mother tongue which is ‘Darija’ or commonly known as Moroccan Arabic; a language that is mixed with Arabic, Tamazight, French, English and Spanish. The first word is ‘Gawri’ (masculine) and ‘Gawriya’ (feminine) which can be roughly translated into ‘a foreigner’; although this may be the best possible translation, it does not really convey the embedded meaning of this term and the type of understanding it delivers. ‘Gawri’ or ‘Gawriya’ refers to, in Moroccans’ minds and psyches, a White green-/blueeyed man or woman living in a developed country. Therefore, foreigners who are dark-skinned, Asian, Latin American or African may not be referred to as ‘Gawri’ or ‘Gawriya’. ‘Gawri’ and ‘Gawriya’ are also used as standards of beauty; that is why a great compliment in Darija would be to tell someone that they look like ‘Gawri’ or ‘Gawriya’. Fred, for example, would certainly be referred to as ‘Gawri’. Moreover, Moroccans who are intellectually and sexually liberal and who embrace attitudes, perspectives and ontologies different from the dominant Moroccan understandings may be introduced as ‘like Gawri’ and ‘like Gawriya’ (a mixture of English and Darija here); these concepts generally have highly positive connotations in Moroccans’ minds. For instance, If I speak English with an American accent, people may say that I sound like a ‘Gawri’, which is certainly a very positive compliment coming from a Moroccan to another Moroccan. Considering all these representations, these terms are overt evidence of privilege/ marginalization and superiority/inferiority manifestations in the language (specifically Darija here) and they indicate the type of notions that Moroccans might have about themselves and others. Another word is ‘bera’ which can mean ‘outside’ in some contexts and ‘abroad’ in others. I am interested in deconstructing the second meaning since it subscribes to the same linguistic, cultural and epistemic hierarchical implications entailed in the first two words. For example, when a Moroccan says ‘Ana ghadi l bera’ which means ‘I am going abroad’, it conveys the particular understanding that they are going to Europe, North America or Anglophone countries. I do not think that a Moroccan would use ‘bera’ to refer to countries located in Africa, Asia and Latin America. ‘bera’ designates these developed countries with a majority of White people. It indicates these privileged spaces that are characterized by economic prosperity; that is why it brings such a feeling of pride when someone says ‘ana khedam ola aaych bera’ (‘I am working or living abroad’). It might also induce

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a sense of admiration on the part of the receiver to hear such a statement. I may venture to translate this word, to be more accurate, into ‘the Global North’ referring to these spaces that hold a central role in global affairs. Finland, for instance, is certainly considered to be ‘bera’. In particular, people who were educated in the Global North would say that ‘I studied bera’ (another mixture of English and Darija) in an attempt to elicit admiration, although it can also be an innocent speech intended to provide a piece of information. I have been thinking and trying to get more information on the etymology of these terms and specifically their connotations and embedments, but not sufficient insights were found. I can assume that these terms may have come into Darija during the French colonial policy of the twentieth century but that remains a mere surmise. What matters here is that these terms exemplify the type of impact that long-continued colonial relations have had on Southern, specifically African subjects’ minds and psyches. They have inculcated a deep sense of mental coloniality which has precipitated how some Moroccans, for instance, doubt their intellectual capacities, perspectives and beauties while they value/prefer Western conceptions, images and standards. Anything coming from ‘bera’ is appreciated and valued over local products, minds and norms. These insights are very telling of how ontology is manifested in language which in turn shapes our understandings of others. On the other hand, there are other words that carry some racist significance that are used to designate people coming from other peripheral contexts. ‘Azzi’ or ‘Azzia’ are words that are used to refer to a Black-/dark-skinned man or woman. When Black Moroccans or Africans are called ‘Azzi’ or ‘Azzia’, it is not a form of affection or admiration although it is sometimes used for friendly teasing and humour, but it remains slightly pejorative in a sense in Moroccans’ minds. I think these are racist micro-aggressions that are not challenged or opposed vehemently; they are indeed addressed lightly and they seem not to qualify as a ‘concern’ in Moroccan society. I personally perceive these terms to be racist pejorative concepts that we need to get rid of and signal their emotional toll on others. It simply seems that racism is not an issue for some Moroccans. Racism is not openly denounced or even discussed as a problem in Moroccan society. I do think that there is implicit racial discrimination against Black Moroccans and Africans that some Moroccans do not really pay enough attention to. It is discussed only when racism is directed against Moroccans abroad not by Moroccans towards others. Again, I have to emphasize that Morocco is a post-slave society that witnessed centuries of the trans-Sahara slave trade. It is a complex situation where the Global South is exercising coloniality against the Global South. Morocco remains an interesting context in the sense that it is complex and it is a space where the two opposites are co-living and interacting. I do see that Morocco is an intercultural space although its cultural diversity may not be as deep as European or Anglophone countries. Finally, to better fathom the type of complexities in the sociocultural fabrics of Morocco and Finland as countries that may be situated within the Global South and North, I would like to ask Fred two questions:

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• Are there any similar words in Finnish that convey such preferential and admiration-invoking attitude of others? • Are there any similar words in Finnish that convey such pejorative and subalternizing understandings of others? * * * There is a lot that could be written about derogatory words used in Finnish to refer to the Other (like all languages). Twenty years ago, for example, the Finnish equivalent to the N-word was still very much in use, with people arguing at the time that it was not a negative word as such (Atabong, 2018). A word that I find fascinating in Finnish is the word for foreign, foreigner, which is based on the ‘preposition’ ulko for external, outside. Ulkona means outside the house; ulkomailla and ulkomaille in foreign countries (to be located in or to go to); ulkomaalainen is the foreigner (the one from outside, in a word-for-word translation). Like in English (foreign is from Latin foris or ‘outside’, ‘out of doors’, foris is a door), but from a more direct way, relations to the other are external, outside our home. Kotimainen, the Finnish word for domestic, contains the idea of the home (koti) like the English word (domus = home in Latin). The word is often used in Finnish, for example, to refer to products ‘Made in Finland’, with the undertones of ‘can be trusted’, ‘is of excellent quality’, ‘has provided jobs and money locally’. When I read what Hamza wrote about ‘Gawri’/ ‘Gawriya’ I was reminded of a Chinese word: 洋气 (Yángqì). The first character refers to both the foreigner and the vast, with a potential hint at the ocean. The second character is for gas, air, vital energy or the famous qi which is central in, e.g. Chinese medicine. 洋气 is often simply translated as ‘Western style’ (reducing the foreigner to the West, which, in turn, tends to be reduced to anything having to do with the USA1). What it actually refers to is someone who dresses like a ‘foreigner’, a ‘Westerner’ and who ‘releases’ or ‘radiates’ special, modern, foreign and admirable energy (and again: in many cases, related to the USA). It is often used in a very positive way. I note that in Chinese the same character, 洋 (Yáng), is also found in the word for a doll: 洋娃娃 (Yángwáwá). Word for word this refers to a baby (wáwá) from outside, abroad (yang). [Conversation with readers] • What do you make of the ideas of devenir-être and devenir-langue? Review your own life story as a scholar, educator and individual as well as the keywords that you use to refer to interculturality: What happens to them when you start considering them through the lens of devenir-..?

1 As I was writing these lines, university graduations were in full speed in China. In one post on Chinese social media describing the trend to ‘sinicize’ aspects of the ceremonies, someone referred to the elements worn by students and staff (the robe, sash, mortarboard cap and tassel) as being ‘Western-style’. However, in most European countries, this attire might be unknown, ‘exotic’ and seen as American or British.

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• Think of your closest colleagues working on interculturality. What is it that you know about them? What kind of struggles have they experienced in academia? How might this have influenced their work? What do you dis-/like about their work? What aspects of each other’s work would you like to discuss further? What about them? What do they know and think about you? • Both of us appreciate Adrian Holliday’s scholarship on interculturality and recognize his important influence in the field. How much do you know about him? What have you read from him? What did you learn from engaging with his ideas? What might you dis-/agree with in his work? • One could claim that we all have ‘pet’ theories, ‘pet’ concepts and ‘pet’ scholars. In your opinion, why is it that we are attracted to certain scholars, thinkers, writers and not to others? How have we been introduced to them? How ‘blinded’ might we be by such choices [if these are deliberate choices at all!]? • Do you feel that data analysis ‘is often misleading and misinterpreting, reshaping many participants’ discourses into ideological fantasies’? How do you understand the idea of ideological fantasies in research? Can you find some examples? • Which of the words from other languages that we present in this chapter do you find interesting and/or irrelevant? Why? Can you find specific words in the languages that you know which might express similar ideas or words that would be useful for intercultural scholarship? • Have you noticed the ‘silent’ political turn in recent research on interculturality? Can you think of scholars and concepts that might have to do with this turn? • At this stage in the book, summarize for yourself what you feel are similarities and differences between us the authors (in terms of, e.g. identities, struggles, ideologies, experiences).

References Atabong, A. A. (Ed.) (2018). Antiracism education in and out of schools. Palgrave Macmillan. Barthes, R. (1973). Le Plaisir du Texte. Seuil. Bauman, Z. (2004). Identity. Polity. Bergson, H. (2012). Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique. PUF. Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence.Multilingual Matters. Canetti, E. (1989). The secret heart of the clock. Farrar. Dervin, F. (2012). Cultural identity, representation and othering. In J. Jackson (Ed.), The routledge handbook of intercultural communication (pp. 181–194). Routledge. Dervin, F. (2016). Interculturality in education: A theoretical and methodological toolbox. Palgrave Macmillan. Dervin, F. (2022). Interculturality in fragments: A reflexive approach. Springer Dervin, F. (2023). The paradoxes of interculturality. Routledge. Dervin, F., & Jacobsson, A. (2021). Teacher education for critical and reflexive interculturality. Palgrave Macmillan. Dervin, F., & Jacobsson, A. (2022). Intercultural communication education: Broken realities and rebellious dreams. Springer.

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Dervin, F., & Simpson, A. (2021). Interculturality and the political within education (1st ed.). Routledge. Dervin, F., & Yuan, M. (2021). Revitalizing interculturality: Minzu as a companion. Routledge. Holliday, A. (2022). Contesting grand narratives of the intercultural. Routledge. R’boul, H. (2021). North/South imbalances in intercultural communication education. Language and Intercultural Communication, 21(2), 144–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1 866593 R’boul, H. (2022a). Intercultural philosophy and internationalisation of higher education: epistemologies of the South, geopolitics of knowledge and epistemological polylogue. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 46(8), 1149–1160. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098 77X.2022.2055451 R’boul, H. (2022b). Epistemological plurality in intercultural communication knowledge. Journal of Multicultural Discourses. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2022 R’boul, H. (2022c). Postcolonial interventions in intercultural communication knowledge: Metaintercultural ontologies, decolonial knowledges and epistemological polylogue. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 15(1), 75–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513 057.2020.1829676 She, L. (2013). Mr Ma & Son. Penguin Modern Classics. Tian, X., & Dervin, F. (2022). Intercultural communication education beyond ‘Western’ democracy-talk? Zhongyong as a way of decentring democracy-based teaching. In J. Zajda, P. Hallam, & J. Whitehouse (Eds.), Globalisation, values education and teaching democracy. Springer.

Chapter 5

Fragmenting Intercultural Research

Abstract This chapter revolves around the idea of fragments in intercultural research. Based on a Latin word, fragmentum, for a remnant, a piece broken off, from frangere for to break, the authors argue that the very word fragments allows them to identify and free themselves from (their fear) of contradictions and indoctrination in research and education. Following Dervin (2022, Interculturality in Fragments: A Reflexive Approach. Springer), they believe that fragments can enrich the scholar’s and educator’s critical and reflexive thinking about a transient notion like interculturality which they always experience through inconsistencies, contradictions and mistakes. For the authors, accepting the fragmentation of intercultural research can allow developing one’s critical thinking, criticality of criticality and reflexivity. Keywords Fragments · Inconsistencies · Contradictions ·  Critical thinking  ·  Reflexivity This chapter revolves around the idea of fragments in intercultural research. Based on a Latin word, fragmentum, for a remnant, a piece broken off, from frangere for to break, the very word fragments allows us to identify and free ourselves from (our fear) of contradictions and indoctrination in research and education. Fragments, as Fred has suggested in his recent publications (e.g. Dervin, 2022), can enrich our critical and reflexive thinking about a transient notion like interculturality. As such, our engagement with interculturality as scholars and educators is always fragmentary—as much as our world and thinking are always incomplete somehow. It is something that we should accept as scholars, having to cross ideas, people, encounters, ideologies, words… all the time. It is something that we should accept as scholars as we experience inconsistencies, contradictions, mistakes. Accepting the fragmentation of intercultural research can allow us to see, e.g. ‘on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based …’ (Foucault, 2000: 456).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 F. Dervin and H. R'boul, Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality, Encounters between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6672-9_5

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The following questions frame the chapter: • Who are we writing to in research on interculturality? • Why is there a need to critique how interculturality is treated as an object of research and education? • How could we rebalance scholarship on interculturality considering, e.g. the significance of epistemic injustice in the field?

5.1 Who Are We Writing to? In our dialogues, Hamza asked a lot of fascinating questions. Actually, reading through his text, I felt somewhat uncomfortable because I noticed that Hamza systematically tried to include me in his reflections, by putting questions forward. Going through again what I wrote, I don’t see this strong generosity and curiosity from my side—at least not in the same manner as Hamza. There are questions but they are not always addressed to someone directly. I realized that, in my writing, I am interested in the reader’s reactions but indirectly; maybe this has to do with the fact that writing a book or an article creates distant dialogues. We know that people read us but we rarely ‘hear back’ from them, except, at times, in their own writing, at events or if people send us an email [I note here that some might also borrow my (heavy) style of writing and/or ideas without referring to me directly. This has also been the case with some former students who have been trying to break away from my (heavy) ‘influence’, in order to make—rightly—a name for themselves (beyond: ‘yes, he was Dervin’s PhD student’)]. So, my tendency is to ‘ignore’ the reader while hoping that my texts will trigger some kind of reaction in them and (maybe) ricochet back to me in some way or another. In my latest books, however, I have systematically included direct questions for the reader at the end of each chapter, to stimulate some kind of ‘imagined’ dialogue. I think that there would be a need to take into account the idea of readership in intercultural research more seriously. As such our relations with the reader are ‘hyper-intercultural’ (if I may use this ugly neologism). Anyone can read us from any part of the world and the way we influence them (or not), the way our ideas are mis-/understood remains a mystery most of the time. One question that I had asked Hamza was about who he was writing to (and maybe indirectly for). This question is in fact important but a rather tricky one. Who should we write to? Who is this imagined entity who reads us? When I write I think that I have in mind certain groups of people such as so-called novice scholars who are looking for ways of entering the field of interculturality but also scholars who are (maybe) tired of ‘Black and White’ ideologies such as essentialism/non-essentialism, culturalism/non-culturalism, East/West… I know that I also write against certain people who will probably never read me. Having worked for many years now with scholars from China who (are) often (made to) feel ‘inferior’ in their knowledge and abilities by people from ‘my’ part

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of the world, I also want to talk to them through my books and articles to remind them that they do have the ‘power to speak’ and especially to be ‘listened to’ and that they need to actively find these outlets, gather their courage and just do it [This might sound patronizing—who am I to ‘empower’ them? Is this my role? Do they need me for that? Am I the right person to disturb their humility?]. I don’t think that many people from certain ‘academic tribes’ located in the West read me because they know that I will be deconstructing their ‘gurus’— although many would want to get out of these ‘tribes’ to find fresh air, the freedom to explore new aspects and stop reciting their gurus’ litanies. Some, of course, do read my work to look for their own ‘trace’, ‘mark’ in what I write… In general, I think that in my mind I often imagine other scholars and students to be the main recipients of what I read. I believe that I should learn to speak to other kinds of people about interculturality, from the media to a complete stranger met on the streets. I don’t often talk about my work to, e.g. decision-makers, which is a shame. My experiences haven’t been too positive in that area. I often ask too many questions and in my own limited understanding of what decision-making is about, one should come up with more concrete answers—which I don’t feel I can provide. There is a need for us to produce texts for more general audiences.

5.2 Why Critique? Hamza asked me why it is that I wish to denounce the aforementioned ‘Western’ tribal system since I am myself well established and on ‘that’ side of the game [in fact, one could ask if there is such a system, maybe we should use the plural ‘systems’. I see how different major actors in the field have managed to create ‘tribes’ or ‘courts’ around them to expand their influence. Some important figures are more free-floating and uninterested in having followers]. I will use a cliché word to respond: justice. I find it terribly upsetting today that this very word is abused all the time in research by some colleagues in the ‘West’ who rehearse it again and again, while in their own practices, they completely misbehave as far as justice is concerned. Justice for the other often appears to be for us in the end—to show a positive face, to show that we care while, at the same time, collecting points behind the stage. Justice for the other often appears to be decided in our own terms: we decide who we fight for, how and what ‘they’ should do to be deemed ‘fightable for’. In Finland, I see all these privileged White scholars, comfortable in their ivory towers, asking for, e.g. social justice, anti-racism and decoloniality, while keeping the status quo by still hiring people who look like them, spreading ‘their’ knowledge and showing in fact very little interest in the other whom they are trying to ‘save’. Rarely do we hear from this other, only through mediated discourses (research discourses where their voices are embedded, integrated into grand narratives of social justice à la Western). This is what I wish to fight against

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today. This façade generosity, these beautified, filtered discourses about ourselves by making use of the other. In intercultural communication education research, the same is happening through clichéd use of non-essentialism—non-essentialism being a call for justice, which is unrealisable (one cannot but essentialize one way or another). In the West, non-essentialism has become an excuse for pushing through our already established privileges. We become untouchables! We can protect ourselves: I am non-essentialistic, I am a superhuman; on the other hand, this other white man or this Japanese student are essentialistic. Bad, bad, bad. I believe that it is worth fighting against this kind of abuse. Hamza asked me if I felt that we scholars run the risk of reproducing what we actually critique. I think that this is a very good example of us experiencing this problem. Critique as a discourse is in a sense unachievable as a fully coherent practice. When I ask my students to be non-essentialist in the way they treat others, I am asking them to do the impossible. I know that it makes no sense and that no one can achieve non-essentialism. I somehow put myself on a pedestal. But within seconds, in the classroom or as soon as I leave the classroom, I have essentialist thoughts, discourses or actions. Nonessentialism is often judged based on what people say and/or do. But what about what is going on in their heads? Why is it that we still pretend that human beings are completely transparent in the way they engage with realities, i.e. that what we say corresponds to what we mean? This false engagement with this problematique today is another issue that I feel we need to denounce and fight against. Too easily, discourses of non-essentialism (vs. what it is that we really think and do) will have us celebrate a ‘victory’ of intercultural communication education. Such discourses go well with the zeitgeist: it has to do with positivity, see happiness. We can be beyond the ‘evil’ that is inside of us. We can be ‘fully’ good people, embracing the other through our discourses. I believe that this is a dangerous placebo that could comfort those who dominate the field of intercultural communication education in their own dominating position. Another practice to examine critically is the aforementioned provincialized perspective on ‘European democracy’ and the citizenship-talk that goes with it (e.g. Yulita, 2018). Although this is somewhat targeted at ‘European’ scholars and educators, its ambitions go well beyond the borders of ‘Europe’ [I use inverted commas here because I don’t know ‘which’ Europe this is about: the EU? Countries that identify as being part of the European continent? etc.] The ideological entry of ‘democratic culture’ as put forward by Byram and his teams in Strasbourg has marked a clear ‘apolitical politicized’ turn in intercultural communication education. I say apolitical because for many of its ‘users’ they don’t think about it as being a political option, but as a mere ‘scientific, pedagogical, methodological’ tool. Obviously, by the use of the very idea of democracy (‘Western’ democracy) this is clearly a political move—and interestingly people like Joe Biden himself keep reciting the word in the fights that they are picking with other parts of the world today. As a reminder: when the US invaded Iraq, that was in the name of democracy—and we now know the fiasco and bunch of lies that this led to. I always like to remind people that when the Council of Europe started to work on

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the ‘ancestor’ to the Framework for Democratic Culture, the concept of intercultural competence was the main focus. Overnight it shifted to democratic culture… This change was meaningful in many ways and we must be sensitive to and interrogate such political changes. This is our role as scholars and intellectuals. The political must be recognized as such in research.

5.3 On the Need for Fragmentation in Intercultural Research If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see? (Carroll, 1865)

Hamza did introduce the issue of fragmentation in his text. For me, fragmentation in the researcher’s work should be the norm. I am one of the only scholars of interculturality to have dared to come out and say that we must accept change, incoherence, inconsistencies and contradictions in what we represent, do and say in relation to interculturality. We also have a duty to accept defeat and to be honest about it. Doing research is based mostly on thinking, and thinking is never done in a straight line. We do, undo and redo all the time—at least that’s what we should do. Interculturality has always been and will always remain a burning issue for which there is not just one answer, but an uncountable number of (unstable) answers. Engaging with the different voices that revolve around the notion is vital in scholarship. ‘Sticking’ to one’s ideology [note the singular] is a sign of laziness and disregard for the rest of the world. What is more, as researchers, we can no longer take a superior position and ‘look down’ upon, e.g. the ones we analyse, claiming that they are full of stereotypes, prejudices, that they lack critical thinking, etc. As human beings, and as researchers we also experience these all the time and especially in and through our research. We do contradict ourselves! We preach for e.g. non-essentialism here and utter the worst stereotype about ourselves and others there! So, fragmentation is part of us, and we must feel uncomfortable, shaken and hesitant in our research and share about these in our writing. Often, when I read research articles, I don’t feel the writer, I don’t sense their presence or even their voice. What I often witness is pages after pages of ‘cold’ fakely objectivizing writing. Where is the writer? Why aren’t they talking with me? Why are they hiding behind masks? Who is the person manipulating all these voices behind the stage? I know that they are there but they are hiding, probably following the advice of supervisors, journal editors—or their own beliefs and imaginaries. So, as a dialogical discourse analysist (e.g. Marková et al., 2006), I find myself analysing the voices I find, the ‘traces’ of (inter-)subjectivity to know more about the one who is writing: what are their (hidden) intentions/agendas? How do they position themselves in relation to certain ideologies in-/directly? How do they ‘treat’

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their research participants, e.g. do they judge them for not being this or that or for not ‘following’ their own ideological orders? What are they silencing but at the same time revealing about themselves? Since I do a lot of work on Chinese education, I do find a lot of such ‘bad’ practices in research papers, whereby one can see the researcher’s biases against China and the Chinese in what they write, even when they try to hide behind objectivized discourses. Hamza asked me if I believe that ‘subjectivity sometimes interferes in your works’. I think that I replied partly about others’ work in what precedes. Subjectivity is always there, even when we try to hide, repress and censor it. We always externalize ourselves when we deal with interculturality in research and education. As soon as I write, I subjectivize. I cannot do otherwise. Hamza uses the interesting verb of ‘interfere’ here—which I see as negative. The ‘intrusion’ and ‘interference’ of the subjective in an explicit or (mostly in research) implicit way is not a problem in itself. The problem is when we pretend that it is not there, that it is not occurring, when we treat it as an enemy that we need to fight against, an ‘evil’ that we need to get rid of, while it is always part of what we say and do. The choice of the words that we use in research is always subjective too: interculturality (instead of, e.g. multicultural or global), democracy, decolonial, essentialist… these choices are based on decisions that we make. Of course, we often (but not always!) justify their use by referring to other scholars or strands of research. But can we do it in such a way that shows that these decisions are made on ‘purely’ scientific grounds? This intersubjectivity (e.g.: ‘in this paper I use Byram’s model of intercultural communication competence’) is rarely objective for the following reasons: 1. The academic market of interculturality is often limited (a handful of dominating models of intercultural competence, ‘paradigms’, globally); 2. Research evaluation is based on the number of citations and indexes, which limits our choices and alternatives [journal editors often ask for us to make direct references to previous issues of their journals to boost their citations while claiming that it would situate one’s work in relation to the ‘field’. However, a given journal is not ‘the’ field but a component of the field. Different journals have different ideological positions and papers outside these positions have very little chance of getting published in them]; 3. We often fantasize that pet theories, pet concepts, pet ‘gurus’, correspond to either our own intercultural experiences or those of the ones we research. That is why we must come clean about the words, theories and ‘gurus’ that we use when we talk about interculturality and interrogate them in relation to others (within and outside the dominating bubble). What is that part of implicit (inter-)subjectivity in our work? Interrogating these elements multilingually also represents a way of recognizing that our choices may not always be as objective as we fantasize them to be.

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5.4 Rebalancing? Let me now move on to another recurrent issue in what Hamza wrote: the attempt to transcend power imbalances in scholarship on interculturality. I would not be honest if I declared that I believe that this is possible. Power relations are so much ingrained in us and the system that it would take either a global revolution or the end of humanity to put them to rest. As long as two people are together there will always be power issues between them. In writing this book, we are attempting to disrupt such phenomena while knowing that we are embedded in power imbalances that cannot be removed: our professional statuses; fame and seniority; the fact that there is a first author and a second author, who will be quoted in a given order in people’s papers; and many other elements which hide behind the stage but are part of broader imbalances (e.g. money, opportunities to travel the world, the ways people see us when we walk the streets in different parts of the world, etc.). Of course, these will change. Hamza is much younger than me and he will get stronger academic capitals in the near future, while I will ‘slide down’ towards the grave. Transcending power imbalances has to be conceptualized realistically when you start working with someone: what is it that we can change in us together to be more ‘equal’? There is in fact very little that we can do as individuals about the aforementioned elements. However, de-re-constructing knowledge together is the place to invest in [I speak like a businessman]. For all of us, this means confronting oneself with other ideas, worldviews and ideologies and stepping out of one’s comfort zone (revising and abandoning, if necessary, pet concepts, pet languages, pet ‘gurus’…). Finding the a-critical in what we believe is critical is another central aspect of this process. Showing others that we are not perfect and admitting defeat are also essential in this process. The more we can balance weaknesses and strengths with and for the other, the more we can listen to each other and co-construct together (you give, I give, we give; I/we do, I/we undo, I/we redo…) the more we can readjust our positions. The metaphor of the seesaw is good for describing this process. This might all sound very idealistic and many readers will think that this scenario never occurs. It’s never easy, I admit, and gaining both trust and co-strength can be challenging [but isn’t it for all kinds of academic cooperation, domestically too?]. However, if one is serious about learning with each other, rebalancing power imbalances in knowledge co-creation and production has to be done through honest, direct and (at times) painful discussions, being clear about one’s (changing) agenda and ambitions [e.g. I have to work ‘internationally’ to get a promotion]; asking question after question [e.g. about the connotation of a concept in different contexts], ‘digging’ in for new knowledge [e.g. about the most important theoretical tools used glocally?], pushing for intellectual co-change [e.g. co-developing a definition for a notion], etc.

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Finding opportunities to work with others, from outside one’s own comfort zone or geopolitical sphere, can be challenging, I admit. For example, we tend to work with institutions that only support certain types of cooperation (e.g. with institutions ranked at the same level or with ‘strategic’ countries). This tends to create circles of cooperation that reinforce academic inequality. My encounters with colleagues from outside the West have often been random, never programmed. With Hamza, it was different. When I read his research for the first time in 2020, I knew that I wanted to work with him in the future. I knew that I wanted to be pushed, to be disturbed, to be liberated from even more of the ‘a-critical criticality’ that I had gathered in me. Reading him, I knew that he has the power to speak and to be listened to. As the first step in our cooperation, this book and the hundreds of messages and pictures that we have exchanged on the Chinese app Weixin over the past months (which constitute conversations which also fed in our conversations here), have already helped me unthink many of my ideologies. What is interesting about this cooperation is that it blends in real-life experiences, feelings and cognitive explorations—as Hamza puts it. As much as we are discovering each other intellectually, we also get to know each other more personally. I am also very eager to know more about the Moroccan context and the types of interculturality occurring there and how people conceptualize them. Thanks to Hamza, I discovered the great work of Khatibi in French (e.g. Figures de l’étranger; La mémoire tatouée), of which I was completely unaware. I am also learning to be more tolerant and interested in decolonialism, which I never found to be very convincing in intercultural research. It is obviously a very complex field of research and my knowledge from other fields is limited to the basics. However, in intercultural communication education, I have found engagements with the decolonial to be a bit too ‘preachy’ and ‘rehearsed’ in unconvincing ways—as if by stating that one is doing decoloniality, one is a ‘good’ or ‘better’ researcher, disenfranchizing the self from decolonizing and thus critiquing oneself. I have also often felt uncomfortable with a lot of the jargon that many scholars seem to borrow from certain decolonialists (e.g. ‘postcolonial subjectivities’). We all use some kind of jargon (myself first!) and the word is not a very positive one, however, the problem with jargon is that it excludes others, it only speaks to the converted, the one who knows and uses it. As a perspective that pushes for inclusion, I believe that we need to pay attention to the words and phrases that we use so we can include and challenge a maximum of readers or listeners [and challenge oneself in the process, obviously!]. If we want to make a difference and to be listened to by other scholars, we might have to bear that in mind. I am sure that many of my readers also believe that my writing is too complex and that the words that I use are incomprehensible. Through Hamza, I notice that decolonial voices can be powerful and that, although we don’t use the same vocabulary, we do speak the same ‘language’—devenir-langue! But I would like to come back to another question that Hamza asked about ‘an effective approach for promoting the epistemic visibility of the Global South’. A very important but challenging issue: How could we understand ‘effective’, ‘promoting’ and ‘visibility’? Promoting and visibility could easily refer to superficial

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and performative phenomena (‘showing’, ‘making visible’, ‘publicizing’). And about ‘effective’: effective for whom and by whom? For each pole of the dichotomy of Global North/Global South? For subgroups within each pole (none of them being a coherent and consistent entity)? These questions need to be asked by those who wish to tackle the point raised by Hamza seriously. I don’t have ‘big’ answers to these questions but I am very sensitive to them. For example, I have noticed that many international PhD students in my own institution ‘run away’ from the knowledge available back home—or they simply don’t think that it could be relevant. I have examined many PhD dissertations about education in other parts of the world, where the entire literature was in English and based on work published by scholars located exclusively in the US and the UK. I remember this PhD dissertation about Chinese Minzu ‘ethnic’ education defended in the Nordics. The student, who was originally from China, had used knowledge from the US to ‘judge’ (that’s what she was doing!) a specific form of education on another continent, in the Global South. No literature from the Nordics was used either. To me, it makes no sense to use a specific ideological perspective from an American professor working on ‘Black American education’ to look into ‘Chinese Minzu education’… leading to Chinese teachers being labelled as ‘racist’ and not caring about social justice! There is both a clash of ideologies and epistemic injustice here, which need correcting! I believe that supervisors have a duty to require from students who speak other languages and who work on other contexts to include systematically knowledges from these different geopolitical spaces. Interestingly, recently I was discussing with a PhD programme director in Finland who explained that her institution was now imposing both knowledge of the Finnish language and Finnish society on any reviewer evaluating a PhD dissertation (written in English) related to Finnish education to make sure that the work would be fairly assessed. Fair enough! When I asked her if she was going to support the same proposal for other contexts of study (requiring the use of other languages), she stayed silent and told me after a while that she had never thought about this problem. This, I would refer to as ‘double-faceism’ or simply… a lack of care or interest in protecting the other in research… Today, when I review a PhD I look at who (co-)supervised, who served on the PhD committee and the list of references (inclusion of references in other languages or translated from the Global South). If the PhD was written by someone from the Global South, and none of these include colleagues from the Global South and/or contain references to a specific place, I systematically comment on this in my report and take it as a negative aspect of the work. A supervisor once told me that this was a mere detail. For me it is a professional and ethical mistake. At the moment, I see different initiatives taking place around the world trying to promote the Global South. In Finland for example I attended a session a few weeks ago where scholars from China, Ghana, India and South Africa were asked to discuss what their countries had done to promote education for all during the COVID-19 crisis. What surprised me [or did it?] was that the session was led by a White Finnish female professor, who gave the floor to speakers in turn. Many questions came to mind: why do we need for the ‘North’ to still organize this kind

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of event? And why is it that the speakers still accept that game? Only one of the speakers had critical words against the very use of the idea of the Global South. Being from China, she wondered why she had been labelled as a scholar from the Global South, when in the Middle Kingdom, this phrase is never used to refer to China herself. I really believe that epistemic visibility should be tackled by scholars located in the Global South themselves—maybe in cooperation with scholars from the Global South located in the Global North. At the first stage, I would not include scholars from the Global North (located in the Global North) [I can hear many readers protesting already] not to create some form of counter-discrimination but to allow people from the Global South to come together and to share experiences of academic inequity and to create their own space of counter-hegemony, another epistemic space of encounters with the creation of journals, book series, academic events to promote inner dialogues. This could avoid ideological disruptions from the ‘West’ about, e.g. democracy, models of competences, etc. Who would sponsor all these activities is of course an issue. If one asks international publishers to support them financially then one still owes to the ‘West’. At some point, one could let people like myself in to discuss and take part in these activities. (…) Let me stop here since this all sounds unconvincing. My problem in reflecting on this is that I know that: 1. Financial issues will close the door to many people; 2. Since everything is so interrelated in higher education globally, if one tries to ‘unplug’, it would not work; 3. This assumes that scholars from the Global South should be aware of knowledges from outside the Global North and from their own glocality (but are they?); 4. English would still probably have to be used to negotiate knowledges and ideas, which means that discourses would still be ‘flavoured’ in specific ways, excluding many other connotations and ideologies. So, cutting off and taking a cocoon-like approach to the issue may not be the best option, although this could represent safe spaces where one could retract to think together as ‘outcasts’ and with dominating voices. Let’s see how Hamza and I can think of other more realistic options. In what follows I discuss how my engagement with Chinese scholars might have influenced my work on interculturality over the past years—which I consider to be an important element in my own rebalancing. Let me start with ‘China’. The influence of the Middle Kingdom is increasingly obvious in my work and has been over the past five years. I have clearly noted changes in my own thinking and ways of engaging with the notion of interculturality thanks to my cooperation with colleagues from different parts of the country. I started—maybe like most interculturalists—from Confucianism and realized early on that it is extremely complex (much more than the few stereotypical elements

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used in research on the Chinese in intercultural communication education) and somewhat confusing. Confusing because (1) There have been so many different waves of Confucianism in China throughout her history and different uses and abuses (Dervin, 2020; Yao, 2000), (2) The different translations of The Analects (the ‘dialogues’ of Confucius) that I have used seem to represent different versions of what the thinker is meant to have said. In order to be competent in Chinese philosophy, one needs time, one needs patience and one needs to study the texts in Chinese. I did this for a few years focussing on the main figures of Confucianism and I still do today. Although I learnt a lot about and from Confucianism, I realized that working on interculturality in China would benefit more from the idea of Minzu, which is often translated as ethnic, nation or nationality in English (in fact: mistranslated as) [As I reread these words, I wish to remind the reader that, in fact, Minzu ideologies are also embedded in Confucianism, sharing many keywords and slogans (Dervin, 2022)]. I have written extensively about this important stage in my life so there is no need to write about this here again (see Dervin & Yuan, 2021). I’ll just say that my Minzu ‘stage’ opened up many doors to new thinking and disrupted my take on interculturality. I discovered very specific (but also, at times, similar) ways of talking about us vs. others, diversity, national identity, language, etc. This all shook me and I realized that I had been so brainwashed by different strands of politics of European intercultural education in my thinking. Minzu served as a mirror to my own narrow-mindedness and Eurocentrism. Minzu is very much embedded in economic-political discourses—like the intercultural or the multicultural in the ‘West’—and I like the fact that there are many bridges with other aspects of ‘Chineseness’ such as Confucianism. Working with students in China at Minzu University in Beijing and other institutions has been a blessing. Listening to them very carefully, to how they formulate and explain things and having them cooperate with students in Finland were also very rewarding and real lessons for me. They helped me reflect on word use, potential mis-connotations of words when we speak about interculturality in English together, ideological formation of their views on interculturality (amongst others). My long-term experience of China has also opened up my mind to, e.g. my constant struggle between essentializing/judging and new views, new attitudes, new takes on self and other. All of these also often confirmed some feelings that I had had about what interculturality could be about and entail. I wrote below some of the main ideas that my conversations with Chinese colleagues and students, knowledge of Confucianism and Minzu, have brought to me over the past few years. These three aspects could apply especially to the work of the researcher focussing and cooperating on interculturality and are meant to be taken for what they are: Notes about interculturality as I see it on June 24, 2022. CHANGE AS FOUNDATION • Treat interculturality as perpetual co-change in yourself and the other • Be at ease with change • Accept and work from the incidental • Accept and navigate contradictions/consider both opposite and complementary;

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PROXIMITY AND DISTANCE WITH THE OTHER • Be unattached, take a bit of distance from things and people to gain a deeper understanding • Be proactive but prudent • Acquire as much diverse knowledges as possible • Listen to what you say and others • Identify interconnections in likes and dislikes, different and opposite things; ETHICS AS AN OVERARCHING PRINCIPLE • Practice introspection, reflect, unthink and rethink • Practice integrity-moral (not use others, not be used by others; not fantasize about the other becoming you and vice versa) • Don’t preach • Be considerate (refrain from imposing own likes and dislikes) • Develop a balanced attitude • Push for harmony (balancing otherness with otherness, refuting sameness and not sacrificing some of your principles). Obviously, many of these elements still need to be developed and some are still unclear at this stage (what is a ‘balanced attitude’?). Yet I note that change is always the foundation—or co-change. One can see constant tensions and contradictions in these different elements, which I think are very fitting for interculturality as I tried to explain earlier. There is also a strong element of ethics in these, which I tended to ignore in the past. After years of speaking to and spending time reading about, e.g. the (complex) history of Chinese thought, these are some of the elements that are now part of my own ‘always evolving’ system. [Rereading these elements, I believe that many of them could serve as ‘guidelines’ for Global South-Global North interactions…]. [Conversation with readers] • What are your views on the idea that the political must be acknowledged and taken into account in research? • How much do you take your reader into account when you write about interculturality? How do you include them and who do you target? When you read, are you sensitive to the author ‘dialoguing’ with you? • Are you currently engaging with the idea of non-essentialism in your research? One of us maintains that non-essentialism is a ‘placebo’ in the scholarship of interculturality, what might this mean? • One of us argues that ‘finding the a-critical in what we believe is critical’ is a central aspect of scholarship on interculturality. How much of this criticality of criticality do you apply to your own work and when engaging with others’ ideas? • Explain in your own words the ideas of ‘the power to speak’ and ‘to be listened to’ in relation to intercultural scholarship and education.

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• Try to find out more about Chinese Minzu and how it could inspire you to reflect on your own takes on interculturality. • In his description of his current understanding of interculturality, Fred describes the influences of Confucianism and Minzu on his ideas. Examine the three components that Fred discusses (change as foundation; proximity-distance with the other; ethics as an overarching principle) and reflect on their specificities and/or similarities compared to your own take on the notion of interculturality. • Are there attempts being made in your own context(s) to decolonize intercultural research and education? How, who and what impact? • How could you (re-)balance your own work epistemologically? Explain. • What concrete steps would you suggest we take to transcend power imbalances in the way we do research and cooperate around interculturality? • Finally, have you had the opportunity to work with colleagues and students located in the Global South/Global North? Reflect on the experience and especially on unfavourable elements such as epistemic injustice and the lack of power to speak that might have hindered cooperation. What solutions to these problems could be explored?

References Carroll, L. (1865). Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Macmillan. Dervin, F. (2020). Creating and combining models of Intercultural competence for teacher education/training: On the need to rethink IC frequently. In F. Dervin, R. Moloney, & A. Simpson (Eds.), Intercultural competence in the work of teachers: Confronting ideologies and practices (pp. 57–72). Routledge. Dervin, F. (2022). Interculturality in fragments: A reflexive approach. Springer Dervin, F. & Yuan, M. (2021). Revitalizing interculturality: Minzu as a companion. Routledge. Foucault, M. (2000). Power: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984. Penguin. Marková, I., Linell, P., Grossen, M., & Salazar Orvig, A. (2006). Dialogue in focus groups: Exploring socially shared knowledge. Equinox. Yao, X. (2000). An introduction to confucianism. Cambridge University Press. Yulita, L. (2018). Competences for democratic culture: An empirical study of an intercultural citizenship project in language pedagogy. Language Teaching Research, 22(5), 499–516.

Chapter 6

Looking-Inward, Moving Forward and Destabilizing Our Rhetorics

Abstract This penultimate chapter guides the reader towards unthinking and rethinking what they can take away from the book. After problematizing the idea of moving forward in research and education, the need to destabilize one’s rhetorics of interculturality is reinforced, building up on previous chapters. These movements urge everyone involved with interculturality in research and education to revisit their own potential privilege or and to rethink their reasons for experiencing either of these positions. The chapter also delves into the important but controversial issue of revealing, e.g. one’s political and religious beliefs in intercultural research. Finally, a Table Metaphor is proposed to ‘revise’ the power imbalance involved in the field of interculturality globally. Keywords Rhetorics · Revise ·  The political  ·  The religious  · Unthink ·  Rethink This chapter leads us towards the end of this book—but does not say The End. After problematizing the idea of moving forward in research and education, the need to destabilize our rhetorics of interculturality is reinforced, building up on previous chapters. These movements oblige us to revisit our own potential privilege or subalternity [which can be unstable at times, shifting from one position to the other] and to rethink reasons for experiencing either of these positions. A Table Metaphor is proposed to ‘revise’ the power imbalance involved in the field of interculturality globally. The chapter also delves into the important but controversial issue of revealing, e.g. one’s political and religious beliefs in intercultural research, which has to do with power. Finally, devenir-langue comes back to the stage to confirm the need to ‘taste’ interculturality differently again and again.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 F. Dervin and H. R'boul, Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality, Encounters between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6672-9_6

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6.1 Our Privilege/Subalternity A Priori? I think it is a bit dangerous to bestow the permission to define ourselves on others; it is such a massive power given to them at the expense of our own situated ontologies and ecologies. It may be an implicit form of acquiescence that tells our fear that how we define ourselves may not be approved by the others in the sense that we are seeking to look good in their eyes, not in our own.

At a personal level, others do not have full access to our failures, challenges and conditions and, thus, their ability to answer the question of who we are is quite limited and myopic. I believe it can be running the risk of placing our projection and the process of defining our positionality at others’ mercy. I have been living in Morocco my entire life and I do not honestly expect someone living somewhere not characterized by similar conditions to fully grasp who I am; their lenses may prove incongruent to any analysis of myself in a way that substantially hinders their capacity of accurately producing judgements on my being and ontology. Defining oneself and others is remarkably subjective and I am not sure that allowing others to define us is helpful in this morass. At the academic level, I would like to delve more into Fred’s idea about how others (scholars, colleagues…) could be answering this question; this leads me to another question: what parameters would be used to do so? I am asking about whether others’ understandings of us would be really only based on our academic credentials, publications and public engagements or the personal and the geopolitical would be involved too. You, Fred, have been able to help readers better fathom how you may be seen from various eyes and I greatly respect the note on how much you recognize your privilege. For me, I do not think that I have been able yet to construct an idea of how others see me because my interactions are still finite and I do not imagine how I am positioned in the global field of interculturality (I acknowledge and agree with Fred’s idea on ‘global’ as something to deconstruct). I would venture to say other scholars would see me as an emerging voice who is increasingly getting more recognition and the fact that I am writing this book with you is cogent evidence of this. Again, I have to confess that I find it a bit troubling to speak of how others see me because I feel that I am at the mercy of others, but I genuinely better comprehend how others do contribute to our reflection in the eyes of others. Fred’s text made me think about my own positionality again, specifically my potential subalternity and how it relates to my position in interculturality research. First, I am certainly more aligned with the parameters, criteria and standards established in the Western world. My works are certainly there amongst the current discourses published and discussed in the Global North. I do not claim that I have not consciously joined Western academia and that I remain outside of it; I may claim that I am currently at the margins but I am not sure that would be something credible to say at the moment since I am just starting, compared to other mid-career and senior scholars. I am asking whether I am critiquing other systems and foregrounding the fact that I am from Morocco within the Global South in

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order to justify any form of invisibility that I would encounter. I am aware of this complexity and I do not wish to convey the assumption that everything I say is because of my current positionality. I will continue enunciating what I currently enunciate because it is legitimate and these issues are worthwhile. My positionality may change and I may be at the other end of the spectrum, e.g. privileged if I am affiliated with a Western university, but that does not mean that I would change my rhetoric and narratives. I am more interested in epistemic diversity and justice because they are essential topics in interculturality. I think Fred is another example of someone who is not at the receiving end of these asymmetries but continues to deconstruct and dismantle these epistemic imbalances. I do not wish to be framed and I hope I have clarified the rationale behind that and how I am endeavouring to tackle these matters. They should not be understood as reflections and/or characterizations of my positionality overall and my position in the interculturality field specifically. Fred casts aspersions on his position in the ‘global’ field which might be very limited since he reads and writes in only a number of languages. Fred is, in the sense you explained, more global than a lot of scholars in the field. The very fact that he writes in English, French, Chinese and Finnish is impressive and I do not know if anyone else does that in interculturality research. Fred might not be ‘global’ but he is certainly ‘more’ global than the actual standard. I, myself, write only in English; I am interested in writing in Arabic, but I cannot afford that at the moment. I am often asked to supply a ‘convincing’ answer to why I write in English although I critique the dominance of English as an academic lingua franca and its potential contribution to the ascendency of the Western cognitive empire. I am tempted to answer that ‘I doubt that you would know who I am if I were writing in a language other than English’; this is a witty answer but it does not take us forward. My answer is that, although I recognize this dichotomy which I have no power to challenge, I am left with the aspiration that I could use English to speak back and cast off any potential colonial connotation it may have on my logics and writings. My critique and my endeavour to foreground alternative knowledge would be meaningless if I did not write in English. The wider objective is not only to ‘visibilize’ our ways of knowing in my respective context but to affirm the legitimacy of non-popular ways of knowing in other contexts, especially the Global North because that is the place from where my people derive their perception of what knowledge is valuable or not. Maybe, I would look good in the eyes of some people if I wrote in Arabic, but I guess that is not helping anyone because that would restrict the internationality and the accessibility of what I enunciate. I have no intention to take risks that I cannot afford. Also, I have not been educated in the Anglo-sphere so I feel that I am not deeply trapped in this Western-centric circle; I do not sense that I am struggling to vocalize my ideas using English; I am not restricted and I have a firm belief that I can use English to speak back. Fred noted that having been affiliated with Finland has contributed to having his voices heard in international spheres; I am not quite sure about this idea because although it is essential to recognize one’s privilege, it does not mean that one’s privilege has been the only and the main factor propelling their visibility. I

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am sure that there are scholars who share certain aspects of Fred’s positionality but they may not have a similar wide reach. If a reader construes what Fred says in that sense, they should also note that Finland may have contributed something to your ‘fame’, but I do not see its contribution as much as it would be the case of the US and the UK. This is not to underestimate any context; I am just trying to convey that I do not think that Finland has been a major factor in Fred’s influence and reach. I hope that readers understand that when one is acknowledging their privilege, it does not mean that it is now even more opportune to dismiss one’s intellectual labour or entirely ascribe their ‘success’ to that privilege; it is a very complex situation here and we should not mistake acknowledging privilege or marginalization with the very confession that our works and ideas are completely conditioned by these aspects. [Finland is a good platform for visibility but it is not the only reason for having my voice out there in limited sections of global academia. In China, I have a split personality because people know me as the professor working on intercultural ‘something’ (education/ communication/ philosophy?) and a professor from Finland who should know everything about Finnish education. In the past, many people have invited me to give talks about ‘the wonders of Finnish education’ [which I systematically deconstructed] but they knew nothing about my work on interculturality. In other words, they did not invite me to speak for what I am known for but to promote a system of education that they have fantasized as ‘perfect’ and that they use for pushing through reforms in China. In that sense, and in reaction to Hamza’s comment, for me, depending on my scientific identity [I am not sure if ‘knowing about Finnish education’ is a scientific identity], my affiliation to Finland has served at times as an obvious magnet, which, e.g. a scholar associated with the UK would not have enjoyed—UK basic education does not have a good reputation in China]. I also note that Fred does not see merit in ‘admiration’ even if it is for his work. At least for me, admiration is about establishing a sought-after standard; the higher it is, the more empowering it is. Admiring someone with exceptional credentials means that I would like to be in their position and that I would work hard to be like them, nothing else. It is an impulse and a source of motivation; even if it is a negative practice, it would never harm the person being admired maybe only the admirer. I use ‘admiration’ as a springboard to aim higher and continuously seek more and never be satisfied. However, I do understand Fred’s point; I think Fred pointed out the drawbacks of this religious-type admiration when one shuts their minds and starts singing the other’s hymns. I appreciate how Fred sees value in not identifying with a particular group and not having his work driven by an endpoint or direction. I agree because that is what intellectuality is about; being an intellectual is about being free and thinking without boundaries, presuppositions and objectives. I would like to add that being an intellectual is also about caring about the others in the sense that it is not only about the truth and analyzing reality, it is also about contributing to the making of a better reality for oneself and others.

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6.2 Double-Peripheralization I think Fred’s take on the question of why he continues writing exemplifies how some scholars keep doing it because of their incessant urge to engage in intellectual labour. I do feel that interculturality for Fred is more of a field where his thinking and reasoning crystallize but his impelling force is probably his epistemic ardour. That avidity is generated through the anger, exasperation and disappointment that he feels from global inequalities and the lack of ‘calling a spade a spade’ attitude in academia. Isn’t it what interculturality is about? Should we only produce benevolent, poetic and gracious accounts that draw reality with pink paint? I believe a lot of people could write and publish, but it is a matter of writing about what matters, writing to reshape and improve rather than writing for the sake of it. What I want to deliver here is that I do not feel that Fred writes with this liberator ‘fetish’ that seeks to help others emancipate themselves and embrace finer and superior ideas. I think his accounts clearly say that he does not represent himself, as a scholar, to be a good Samaritan with a mission of telling other people what to think and do. I am not sure what interculturality is about when others are not seriously taken into consideration in our rhetoric; for me, without the other, there is no interculturality. Maybe, I would venture to say that ‘interculturality is the other more than oneself’. I agree that it is essential to probe into how the previous theorizations and engagements with interculturality have been unfair. Although I am not certain how ‘unfair’ can be construed here, I assume that it is about imbalances in knowledge production more than unfairness in the sense of doing injustice to the other. It is completely irrational to expect people in the periphery/the Global South to propose solutions to epistemic hierarchies. It places immense pressure and it misleads marginalized groups into thinking that the burden of rectifying these inequalities and establishing epistemic diversity and justice should be carried by them only. It delivers a sense in which the Global North is not responsible and it is not required to make genuine efforts to strike some balance. The Global South is not the origin of these problems; they have been subjected to them and the very demand of providing effective solutions because we critique is even more silencing. It is more like deluding us into thinking that we may be responsible for our own peripheralization and subalternity because we have not been able yet to suggest productive solutions. We are expected to find solutions to some complexities and problems that we did not really create; they are the amalgamations of several overlapping systems of privilege/marginalization making current states of followship even more deeply rooted, adamant and persistent. I would like to call this practice ‘double-peripheralization’ which refers to the act of presenting those who are peripheral to be responsible for their own peripheralization. It is such a powerful imagination that reminds me of the relative impossibility of altering and restructuring the current state of affairs. I am agonizingly self-reminded that it is not about what I say; it is more about where I say what I say and who says what I say. I am writing this from a small city in Morocco, and

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I am trying to nudge myself to not make this sound like a territorial struggle. I think it is indeed challenging to separate the personal and the political from the intercultural. I would like to ask Fred why he uses ‘epistemic fairness’ instead of ‘epistemic justice’ which is quite the norm in the literature. I am not sure whether he used it more as a synonym or if there is some significance behind that choice of words. Here, Fred seems to be more optimistic about the future explaining that ‘I do believe that long-term, lifelong engagement with these issues can make a difference in terms of who is (allowed/entitled) to speak and be listened to, epistemic fairness, awareness of our own limited views and opportunities for honest and sometimes painful dialogue’. For me, I am more cautious in this regard that there may be some epistemic justice, but which epistemic justice? Is it the epistemic justice theorized within the Global South (I do not assume here the homogeneity of discourses on epistemic justice within the Global South)? Or is it the epistemic justice theorized within the Global North (no claim of homogeneity again) that may centre the Northern perspectives about what justice is and whose terms we would exercise epistemic justice in? Again, we need to be honest and reflective on our calls for more epistemic justice. I find it a bit hard to make my people (I am hesitant to say ‘Moroccans’ because it can already be used to limit the scope of what I am saying next) ask questions about their subalternity and how they may be implicated in their own peripheralization. I have a firm belief that we will not be able to decolonize if we do not recognize and question our colonial mentality. I think we can make it easier to be colonized when we are not dialogical and critical about our choices. I keep pointing out how Moroccan universities are insistent on inviting keynote speakers exclusively from the US and the UK and make that a fundamental element in affirming the epistemic value of their conferences. We need to zoom out and reflect on this particular idea; inviting others from the outside to assert what we do on the inside. I am not against this at all, but I am calling here for some more symbolic diversity by inviting scholars affiliated with universities in, for example, China, Argentina, Jamaica and Finland. Fred and I are both addressing the same issue here but we approach it from different lenses which may be telling of our geopolitical locations. I hope the readers will see these insights more as complementary rather than two separate perceptions; I hope they are seen as an inter-epistemic dialogue that supports the multiplicity of perspectives.

6.3 Early Literary Influences I would like to take this space to interact with Fred’s questions: ‘why is it that we are attracted to certain scholars, thinkers, writers and not to others? How have we been introduced to them? And finally, are we blinded by our choices?’. I enjoyed reading Fred’s entry on the type of literature that he has been reading and how it has come to shape his understanding of various matters. I was a bit

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irresolute about discussing the key literary figures in my previous account because I thought that readers may end up doubting the scientificity of what I said. I think Fred has already refuted that and I feel more encouraged not to censor myself. I believe that literature has provided me with the necessary philosophical tools to engage more profoundly with interculturality. In my early readings, I was remarkably fascinated by nihilism and its notoriety in constructing a compelling rationale for embracing perspectives and notions that centre on meaninglessness. It was not my credo but it was certainly an interesting frame of reference that soothes one’s struggles and hardships. I do admire the works of Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Cioran (1911–1995), but I cannot say that I ardently endorse their ideas; I think I have been impressed by their attitudes of being outspoken, frank and not sugar-coating. Their impacts are not transient but I do not sense that I would like to parrot what they have said and then, contextualize and reproduce that into interculturality. I do feel that Fred and I are on the existentialist side of interculturality; I even venture to claim that some may imagine Fred on the nihilist side of interculturality. Does that dismiss the legitimacy of our works? I do not think so. Although I am again feeling uneasy about framing myself, I am hoping that we can dig deeper into the rationalities entailed in being attracted to certain scholars, thinking and writers. The first time I read a whole book was back in high school as I was discovering Mustafa Mahmoud (1921–2009), an Egyptian philosopher and author. Being as naïve as I was in secondary school, I tended to imagine Arabs’ thinking to be entirely anchored in Islamic philosophy. Mustafa Mahmoud destroyed that imagination and guided me to realize that ‘yes, Arabs can think’. I was introduced to some mesmerizing ideas that I was asking myself ‘how can a human being come up with these notions and think so deeply?’. Mustafa Mahmoud made me realize the epistemic capacity of humans and, thus, mine as well. Mustapha Mahmoud spent his entire life in Egypt and was able to get some international recognition and managed to write 89 books. I was thinking if Mustafa could achieve that growing up in Egypt, then maybe I can do that growing up in Morocco. I kept reading his books and I was able to follow the shift in his logics throughout his books. I have read only his philosophical books because I believed he was not framed then, he was free and able to speak without any sort of ready-made conclusions. Moreover, he taught me that Western White people are not more cultured, smarter and wiser than the rest of the world. Being 16, that was not something I thought about at that time, but I could see the merit in what he was saying. I think his influence has been greater than the other writers I have read; his influence resides in the fact that he made me think and induce me to think critically. Another writer whose works have been quite inspiring is the Moroccan novelist Mohamed Choukri (1953–2003) who is widely known for his internationally acclaimed autobiography For Bread Alone (‫ يفاحلا زبخلا‬in Arabic, which is the original). I have read all of his novels but I do not vividly remember all the stories. I still recall the poignant depictions of the human desperation of someone who has been deprived of most basic human rights. His works and descriptions are

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touching, moving and intense. He taught me not to criticize my own people just for the sake of looking good in the eyes of others. It may seem a simple insight, but it is indeed exceptionally profound and philosophically sound. It has prompted me to consider the skewed geopolitics of knowledge and to doubt the prefix ‘self’ in how we construct our self-image and self-perception. I was thinking about whether we really develop perceptions about ourselves based on how we see ourselves through our own lenses or those of others. All these ideas presented my first encounter with the other and interculturality. I believe these readings have contributed to how I treat interculturality in the sense that I do not focus on the aspect of communicating and intersubjectivity that much; I am more interested in deconstructing the political aspect of interculturality and how differences are politically constructed (Dervin & Simpson, 2021). To answer Fred’s questions mentioned at the beginning of this section, I am not sure that I know why we like certain scholars, thinkers, writers and not others; maybe, they say what we want to say but in more eloquent expressive rhetoric. Maybe, they were our first readings and, therefore, they shaped our subsequent thinking and perception of others. Some people do read much but they do not read many writers from different contexts with dissimilar backgrounds and conditions and, thus, they keep exposing themselves to the same narratives and discourses. Again, we may only read what appeals to our reasoning and dismiss others’ words without even reading them, just relying on others’ characterization of their works. I do know that literature has shaped my perspective and the type of rhetoric I appreciate and read in interculturality research; I am attracted to the forcefully expressive. As a final note, I am convinced that we may write hundreds of books, but certain things remain unwritable, unspeakable and unexplainable, simply because language is limited in that aspect. Some argue that language is the prison of the mind; I may agree but we need to think about what the alternative could be. Fred has introduced me to paintings, pictures and memes as a way of expressing certain ideas and perspectives and I see a great value in that. Maybe, what is semiotic has equal importance to the written text.

6.4 Revealing Political and Religious Beliefs in Interculturality Research: Unwise Practice? I think Fred has certainly uncovered several layers of his identities that readers may have been interested in exploring. Maybe I have not provided the readers with similar revealing insights into my identities, but I think at this stage I would rather have people focus on my ideas. I am not sure whether exposing almost everything at this point would help my works being read, shared and used. I rather have my works speak for me now, but I would certainly share more about identities later on. I am not confident that my ideas and works are ‘legitimate’ enough in the eyes of others to the extent that discussing my political vision and religious beliefs would

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not be counterproductive. Fred asked me on Weixin what I think about the practice of revealing one’s political and religious ideas in interculturality research and whether it is desirable or necessary. I am not going to pretend that it is simple to answer such a question since it interweaves the personal, the political and the academic in a very muddy context in which identities may orient readers’ perspectives of our works. I think revealing these specific details can be used against one’s intellectual labour. Some may claim that Fred and I argue for a certain conception or framework and project particular critiques because we are politically or religiously X. Besides the fact that these details may not be relevant in certain cases, why would I grant readers and other scholars such power over me and the legitimacy to ascribe the nature of my ideas to an aspect of my identities? I think that, by sharing these details, we would allow for some sort of personalizing of knowledge that may ostensibly look grounded in one’s vision of how the world should be governed or how the world has come to existence. Again, I fully understand that these details could be useful in interculturality research because it specifies our positionality which could be used as an explanatory lens to fathom our ideas and how they originated. I believe when dealing with intersubjectivity and communication, these details may not be necessary to be taken into account. However, when discussing sociocultural and sociopolitical issues and the Global North and Global South divide, then it may be helpful to get some insights into the authors’ ideologies, backgrounds and identities. In fact, I do not know but I am hesitant to assume that these details are innocuous unless they genuinely help to ground my works and allow the readers to better comprehend the nuance, specificities and depth of my logics. Also, these details may be used as a standard to decide who can discuss what. For instance, some may ask what does Fred know about Morocco to talk about it? What does Hamza know about Finland?; or some judgements such as Hamza is from Morocco and, thus, he is Muslim, which may explain his intellectual hostility towards Westerners and his hypercriticality of the Western cognitive empire or Fred is a White Finn who believes in neoliberalism and liberty and who may not really trust that non-Westerners can actually think and, thus, he would be more likely to downgrade the epistemic rigour of people from contexts characterized by restrictions on one’s freedom to think and speak. These assumptions may sound far-fetched and unlikely to be voiced but I do not see how the benefits of revealing one’s political and religious affiliations outweigh the drawbacks.

6.5 Reorganizing the  Table Fred: When you are writing, who are you speaking to? Who is/are your target audiences? Do you picture them when you start writing?

I do not think much about the target audiences when I am writing. I cannot say that there is a reason for that; I mainly write what makes sense to me first

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and then I try to present that in a way that opens up possibilities for some sort of epistemic performance on the readers’ part. What I mean is that I do not tailor what I write for a specific audience. If I am writing in a way that they are used to or prefer, then why would I be writing when they could write that for themselves? We write to make an impact and to shake readers. So why should we make them feel comfortable reading us? I am referring here to ideas not to the style of writing because academia is not literature and I believe that it should remain so. In fact, my writing depends on what I am writing and in what format and the level of scrutiny and expectations made by the gatekeepers. I usually write book chapters with more freedom and experimenting with words, expressions and ideas. For journal articles, it is more systematic, rigid and direct. But this is certainly a good question, and I think that we do not always choose our audiences; maybe the audiences choose us. Another dimension to consider is that our works have usually been through rounds of revisions, meaning that they do not look like how we initially wrote them or how we wanted them to be. In the final versions, there are not only us but also others who have commented and suggested to include/write particular things in certain ways. I think the rhythm and characteristic expressions may be still there, but overall our work ends up being more of a mosaic than entirely the product of our epistemic labour. Again, I am not sure that we should give readers that much power over us in a way that we try to write what appeals to them. I do not necessarily believe that we need to take our audiences into account while writing because our audiences do not read for pleasure or simply to have some intellectual external validation of their perspectives; we need to orient their preferences and offer clear responses why they should read us and not others. Academia does not always deliver that sense of enjoyment because it is regimented and it does not always allow room for playfulness and creativity. That being said, I can say that I do consider my audience in the sense that I make sure that I do not write in a way that may antagonize people. I am quite careful about how I say things without exuding any feeling of judgement and/or moral and intellectual superiority. Maybe I think in Moroccan and write in English, but I doubt so since I would have already been told by now. Fred: How to develop a new critical language for interculturality in English that represents a break from ‘Western’ critical discourses? Can we be liberated from them? Is it possible/desirable?

I am not sure about the width of the available scope upon which we can found a new critical language for interculturality. The difficulty is that our rhetorics are informed by previous research in which certain notions have been formulated/ reformulated, centred in our discourses and used to pave the way for shared meanings. I am in favour of using alternative languaging rather than language as a first step; I think it may be more feasible to focus on how language is used at this point before we seek to develop a completely new critical language for interculturality in English that represents a break from ‘Western’ critical discourses. Fred’s rhetoric and languaging have already provided a genuine example of alternative ways

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of expressing knowledge through his use of linguistic-epistemic experimenting and the adoption of certain expressions from other languages. I think that Fred has been groundbreaking in illustrating how language is used to generate knowledge and how certain concepts imprison our logics and reasonings. I am not sure if there is a concept for this dynamic, that is why I would like to suggest developing a notion that terms this particular practice of manipulating concepts and expressions to construct alternative meanings and knowledges. Building on these insights, I think that alternative critical languaging for interculturality in English is not only possible, but it is already there. Again, I am asking whether these attempts can really disrupt the ascendency of the Western cognitive empire. They can undermine hegemonic linguistic representations but only if they are supported by a large adoption by other scholars. This is a topic that I would like to discuss later again with Fred either in this book or future works. The problematic here is whether we mean what we think we mean. [After suggesting the development of a concept that designates the practice of alternative languaging to theorize interculturality, I was reminded by Fred that he has introduced the concept of ‘Critical and reflexive languaging in the construction of interculturality as an object of research and practice’ which he discussed in Dervin and Jacobsson (2021) and in a talk in the Digital series of talks on plurilingualism and interculturality organized by University of Copenhagen]. Finally, I believe that there is a need for a real revolution to change this epistemically unjust world of interculturality research and education. What are your views on this (extreme) view? What would a revolution in non-revolutionary capitalist-neoliberal times be like for knowledge production and dissemination?

I would agree that we need a real revolution but not a destructive one. Politically speaking, some revolutions have done more harm than good, aggravating the already-deteriorating living conditions. I am more inclined to use the word ‘balancing’ or ‘restructuring’ rather than revolution which may imply a forcible overthrow; my ulterior motif here is that I do not want to sound that I am instigating some sort of insurrection. I have noted ‘balancing’ without the prefix ‘re’ in order not to denote the understanding that things were balanced at a certain point and what we are calling for is a postmodern version of some previous halcyon days. If we imagine interculturality research as a table, then the Anglo-sphere is presiding and steering the activities, ideas and calls of those around the table. Some chairs are firmly cemented and unmovable while others have folding chairs in the sense that they are sometimes invited to speak but expected to leave later. I think the table itself is rectangular with certain voices placed at the heads looking over the others with paper tags along the table dictating where each one should sit. Southern scholars are sometimes invited to complement the decoration of diversity to deliver the impression that ‘what we do is what others want to do as well and we have all agreed on that without any pressure’; all decisions and policies seem to be decided upon unanimously; this reality makes me question whether all votes equal one, or some votes equal two. The table needs to be round with the chairs randomly organized. No one sits on the same chair every time, and everyone gets

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the chance to sit on each chair once. Every vote is treated as ‘one’ and no one’s vote counts for two. In other words, it is not about who are at the table; it is about what the table is like, how the chairs are organized, who decides on the matters discussed around the table, and whose vote equals one and whose vote equals two. The table has been disadvantageous to certain voices, perspectives and knowledges. I hope that everyone would not fail to act or protest as a result of nonchalance or indolence; I hope that we all do not remain supine in the face of skewed geopolitics of knowledge.

6.6 Other Languages to Speak: A Different Taste of Interculturality? I had some lengthy discussions with Fred on how devenir-langue/languaging affects our production of knowledge since the concepts we draw on encircle our understandings. We may be using certain concepts for which we do not fully comprehend their underlying meaning(s) or implications for what we say. Languaging may prove in some instances to be more influential in generating knowledge than the ideas being laid out; language shapes ideas and not vice versa. Our rhetorics are immensely telling of our knowledges, perspectives and even of our enunciative aggressiveness in a sense. I am not referring to the tone here, but to the very languaging used to describe a certain phenomenon; we may be inclined to use euphemisms, dysphemisms or take a risk by saying things as they are. If languaging carries such a great significance, then what about the specific language we use to express ourselves and our ideas? I am wondering how my work would have been if I had been using Arabic, for instance. Arabic is my mother tongue and it is a language that ‘I feel’. It is a language enmeshed in some logic that I understand to a great extent. I believe that Arabic would have provided me with a totally different performative and enunciative capacity by which I could be more accurate in translating into words what I have in mind. I think that I do have this ability in English, but Arabic would have certainly been an empowering dimension. I have not tried this myself, but Fred has had some substantial experiences in using different languages to theorize and discuss interculturality. I would like to ask Fred if he senses that he is a different scholar with maybe different perspectives and sharpness of ideas and tone when he is writing in other languages than English. I am discussing this particular dimension because I see that native speakers already have an advantage over those who have learned English as a second or foreign language. Language is power and I think some scholars and writers have been able to produce remarkable works thanks to the epistemological depth of the language they were using and the type of rhetorics it allows. Then, I may ask whether some languages are characterized by more epistemological depth than others. I cannot really answer this question because this is something which would require a lot of research, and the findings would not be really conclusive. Some languages are certainly unique in the way they frame meanings and present them.

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Fred has been sharing some concepts in Chinese that he finds mesmerizing especially with regard to their epistemological baggage compared to their equivalents in other languages. I am sure Arabic has this capacity as well and I will be digging deeper to unearth some concepts that would be useful in furthering our discussion of interculturality. For instance, culture in Arabic is ‘‫ ’ةفاقثلا‬which is an original concept and not derived from other languages as may be the case in some widely used languages in today’s world. The meaning of ‘‫ ’ةفاقثلا‬has evolved over time due to the influence of other languages and the increasing work within cultural studies which made some scholars use ‘‫ ’ةفاقثلا‬to denote the contemporary meaning of culture. ‘‫ ’ةفاقثلا‬means different things depending on the context; it may mean education, discipline and knowledge. Therefore, ‘‫ ’ةفاقثلا‬has arrived at a state of ambiguity and confusion. In Lisan al-Arab, a widely endorsed Arabic dictionary, ‘‫ ’ةفاقثلا‬refers to becoming clever, which is one meaning out of others that are not relevant here. This is actually a practice that can contribute to decentring Western logics in interculturality research and foreground alternative understandings that are anchored in local epistemologies, ecologies and ontologies. I also feel motivated to use some concepts from Moroccan or Classical Arabic in my future works. I think we seriously need to move on from critique to actual actions that seek to disrupt the ascendency of the Western cognitive empire. The use of words from other languages to construct complex understandings of interculturality would make a case for the possibility of incorporating non-popular knowledge in foundational literature on interculturality. My discussions with Fred have allowed me to see how language is epistemology, knowledge and ontology. It is such a profound and liberating practice to probe into different layers of our knowledges and rhetorics and to interrogate what we think is normal, usual and taken-for-granted. We need to go deeper to move forward. We need to seek alternative languagings to produce alternative knowledges and introduce readers to certain perspectives that they did not know about.

6.7 ‘Disobedience’ in Interculturality Early-Careers’ Epistemologies First, I would like to tell Fred that as much as unearthing ideologies of (‘critical’) interculturality has earned him a few more ‘enemies’, it has also earned a few more friends (although I am not sure if you like this word, it seems to fit the narrative here). I endorse what he said about anger and frustration and how they pushed us to think and write further; I believe that these feelings have been the cornerstone of most remarkable works. Anger and frustration take us places we would never be able to walk to when we are happy or just normal. What has particularly caught my attention amongst the research topics that Fred would like to work on is power relations in producing research on interculturality with others; I feel that what we are doing now in this book is actually good material for analysis within the logics of this research topic. I wonder if there are actually several cases of this

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intercultural intellectual labour in theorizing interculturality. I think most incidents of this practice would probably be of students and professors, mainly Chinese or southern students pursuing their graduate studies in the Global North. I see a lot of Algerian students in British universities researching interculturality, and that is something I see a lot of value in. I hope that these cases of intercultural intellectual labour about interculturality are reciprocal rather than simply repeating what has been already said there. This is actually meant to be heard by students because while supervisors may encourage independent production of knowledge, students at their Ph.D. phase may conveniently opt for safer research topics and understandings. I do embolden students to build on the available literature and then to think for themselves. Chanting others’ anthems may make one look good in the others’ eyes but it does not take one anywhere and would not help in making one a genuine thinker and intellectual. While some may praise you, I can guarantee that a lot of other scholars know that what you are saying has already been said before and you are reproducing the same narratives. I hope that the next generation of scholars will develop this tendency to challenge, critique and question not only endorse the widely acknowledged and taken-for-granted discourses. I am not a ‘sheep’ and I hope other early-career scholars of interculturality see value in this phrase as well. I have this firm belief that critique would always get you somewhere; it may get you some enemies, but at least it proves that you are doing something. I think the Global South has a lot to offer on interculturality; to theorize and treat it within our experiences and challenges. I honestly do not think that there is any supervisor or scholar who would not appreciate their students engaging critically with their works, building on it and moving forward. Some people are afraid of something that does not exist and will not happen. If we continue to declare our fervent approval of what has been said by those who are in charge in an attempt to make them appreciate our existence, then we are going in circles and not moving forward. I hope that early-career scholars can see value in what I say. Critically examining others’ perspectives is a true act of interculturality, influential interculturality in the form of active inter-epistemic dialogue; something that reflects a genuine image of the South-North flow of ideas and perspectives, at least in our minds. Scholars are thinkers, not saints to be worshipped. This is a call for young scholars to consider what their objectives are in researching interculturality. Are they trying to produce novel knowledge or simply reinvent the wheel?

6.8 Moving Forward Not Moving On Fred noted that he continues writing about interculturality because he feels indignant at the amount of violence, inequalities and injustice inflicted on some people in various contexts in the world. I agree but I remain wary of the comprehensiveness of what we say and its effectiveness in reducing imbalances. I am always wondering whether what we are doing is merely describing or actually doing

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something that may alter reality. I often ask myself whether I am genuinely writing about linguistic, cultural and epistemic hierarchies because I care about them or only because I feel that these issues fit the narratives and that I can talk about them with nuance. I am also asking whether I may stop talking about these matters when I am privileged enough not to ask for more or seek more. Am I writing so I can reaffirm my epistemic capacity and be ultimately admired by others? I am not sure since it could be all of these but this academic vanity does not allow room for such self-doubting realizations. Again, all these ideas relate to our objectives. Fred indicated that it is all about moving forward not moving on. I wonder what could be seen as forward; to say more, to do more or simply write more. I think Fred can further unpack this idea and allow us to better understand how he sees moving forward. Maybe moving forward is everybody’s objective since it may entail becoming healthier, richer and more important. For me, interculturality has left me in a quagmire where I am stuck trying to draw some clear lines between who I am, what I say and where I want to go. After reading Fred’s answer, I feel that my objective is actually to move forward as well, but I will elaborate how moving forward would be on my own terms. I am writing about interculturality as a means of producing valuable knowledge about the matters I care about and simultaneously improving several aspects of my reality. I think answering this question about objectives needs a lot of thinking and consideration; I believe there are certain objectives but they may be unclear or not yet crystallized enough to emerge. I would like to try making sense of myself by pretending that I have the academic and social capitals that Fred has and, then, reflect on what my objectives may be. I think my objectives then would be to transcend myself and to reach what Nietzsche referred to as ‘Übermensch’ (translated as ‘overhuman’ or ‘superman’) by squeezing my epistemic limits through critiquing and revamping endlessly. This continuous process of questioning, reformulating and then producing would keep removing blotches. Critiquing is about finding these blotches and then making a case that these blotches are not necessarily a defining characteristic of reality; in other words, we can convince others that we do not have to think of interculturality as an only a frame of reference through which human communication is understood but also how human communication and realities can be altered by casting aspersions on what we consider to be ‘normal’ and take for granted. We are probably the most interculturally moral and advanced human beings compared to the previous generations, so we need to imagine how the next generations of humans can be interculturally more superior. I would like to invite Fred to try this intercultural-metamorphosis exercise to have himself pretending to have what I have now and imagine what his objectives would be. I would like to call this practice an intercultural-ontological-metamorphosis exercise in which our positionality and intersectionalities are imagined in terms of how they would be performed in other contexts and conditions. Why don’t we take a step further and engage in a deeper form of interculturality and then try to understand, by means of this exercise, ourselves and others more deeply in intercultural-ontological analysis. Let me ask whether this exercise is really doable for

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everybody? Can we temporarily switch our ontologies and perspectives? If yes, then we all have some of the others in us. Yet, I do not think we can move beyond how our minds are framed to process certain realities. We may engage in this exercise but it may be virtually impossible to take distance from ourselves in an attempt to embrace the ontologies of others. I am hoping that we can take interculturality further and think of it as a possibility for imagining another world/a world otherwise. This exercise is interculturally useful in the sense that we look for ourselves in the other or find the other in ourselves. Some may argue that the conditions, circumstances and geopolitical locations are not the people; I venture to say that digging deeply may allow us to see how the only difference between the ‘burglar’ and the ‘priest’ may be circumstances, nothing inherent. I hope that we do not only present theory as the transformation of reality into an intellectual image; I hope we can have our theories converted into physical pictures by inducing more imagination of other possibilities of doing interculturality. Let’s imagine together living the lives of others; for instance, what lenses do we have to process reality? Through our lenses or the others’ lenses? Is there a mismatch? Can we have our minds imagine what has been unimaginable? Can we transcend ourselves and engage in interculturality with others without conditions, boundaries and terms? Who are we then? I think that interculturality entails seeking ways to expose ourselves; if usual ways are already tested, then why not try the unusual? I am not sure to what extent I am making sense here but I hope we can help each other make sense of ourselves and the others; let’s experiment with interculturality and expand its embedded significance to include these unusual forms of human communication in which our perspectives, ontologies and identities are reformulated and in which we take a bit of me, you and others and then try to make sense of everything giving birth to a form of pluri-perspectivality (R’boul, 2021). Finally, writing this book and its questions have made me see things I have not taken notice of before and think of interculturality otherwise. The questions made me realize and see value in not sticking to the usual; interculturality is not static, fixed and/or rigid. Why should we then be that way in making sense of it? *** [The way Hamza reflects on why it is that we do what we do is praiseworthy in the honesty that it reveals. Do we write what we write to get noticed, get ‘points’ or please global readers? Do we really care about what we do? In other words: are we opportunists? Hamza also wonders if he might stop ‘caring’ once he gets, e.g. a name in the field. These are vital questions to ask oneself. Why do I do what I do? Am I doing my work as a scholar, an intellectual or as an administrator, a decision-maker, who knows what to do, to whom and where? While I am writing this, I am bombarded by recordings of ‘commencement ceremonies’ from China on my phone. I have attended a couple of graduations in China and Finland but I usually shun them. Not that I think that graduation is meaningless but because of the religious-like tone and, in, e.g. China, the (fantasized) Americanization of it all— including Coca-Cola bottles saying Happy graduation in English! But I do read some of the speeches, especially from colleagues I know. Graduation speeches are interesting academic paratexts, they tell us a lot about the zeitgeist but also about

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the ideologies, imaginaries and fantasies of the ones who wrote the speeches (if they have written them themselves, that is). What I often note is a moralizing tone, with (indirect) self-aggrandizing and not always honest advice (with the cliché of the end of the ‘journey’ nearly systematically included). For instance, a scholar whom I know, whose personal ethics appears to me very questionable (e.g. uses students and colleagues to write their own papers), ‘ordered’ students to not be opportunistic, self-interested and to never do anything unscrupulous. Looking into such paratexts, in comparison to other scientific productions as well as (lack of) professionalism, can be telling of the potential double-face that Hamza was problematizing. My rule has been clear from the beginning: I must apply what I write about in both my professional and personal life, accept defeat, reflect on my mistakes and try to change ad infinitum. For example, I have refrained from telling people what to do about interculturality for several years now. In my 2016 book, I wrote about the 10 commandments of interculturality. I think this was part of my process of ‘growing up’ in intercultural scholarship. I don’t regret this but it is obviously too ideological, arrogant and intolerant of other ways of thinking about interculturality. Now I feel that I cannot talk and tell people how to meet others. I cannot provide them with recipes, taking on this position of the one who knows, the one who can manage interculturality. It is not my business after all. I cannot take on this responsibility; I have no right to do so. What I care about today is helping us notice how we are forced to think about interculturality in very limited ways, how much this has (often) a negative influence on how we are/become with others, how it creates epistemic and emotional injustices, how it silences millions of voices who experience all kinds of interculturality on a daily basis but who are not listened to. I genuinely believe that we can make a difference as intellectuals, and although very few people read our work, considering the billions of people in this world, when I work with just one student and feel that we transform and stimulate each other, I take it as a small temporary victory [knowing that this is just a drop in this big ocean of reflecting on ‘doing’ interculturality]. I am a provocateur but I believe in what I am doing at moments x, y and z. I do not accept empty discourses. I reject single sets of orders. I know that the realities of what we do and think are much more complicated than the restricted views that we are ‘brainwashed with’. I do not care about fame, citations and, e.g. invites to conferences. I know that my work is lifelong and that it will have to mature until the day I die. That is why I do not celebrate illusionary victories, have no interest in prizes and awards and run away from compliments. Many readers will find this vision to be negative in times obsessed with happiness and positivity. But, looking at the state of the world today (the mess we are creating), I don’t feel I have the right to rest. The way Hamza describes me in the text above is amazingly accurate in this sense: I don’t have a ‘liberator fetish’, I don’t (want to) pretend to be a ‘good Samaritan’.] [Moving forward versus moving on. Let me say more about the choice of these verbs. Move on, to me, is about proceeding from a particular place to another, sometimes away from what is not our ‘business’ (‘Move on, there is nothing to see here’); it can also be used as a synonym of seducing someone. I am not too fond of

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both the idea of moving from a place to another ‘robot-like’ and to entice others. Move forward is both about place and time (as in moving an appointment forward to some point later), it is about advancing in position or progress. Reflecting on the latter, I am not convinced that it is the right verb to give an idea of what I would want to achieve through my research. The way forward is the only option that we have in our career. But forward does not necessarily mean better, improved or successful. Research is too uncertain; interculturality is too fragmentary and unstable to ensure that we can achieve these characteristics–and we are ourselves unpredictable. Zigzagging or going to and fro might be more fitting here: I am moving forward because I have no choice but, at the same time, I step back, and move forward, back and forward, to the sides, ad infinitum. The process should be in that sense palindromic. A palindrome is a word that looks the same both forward and backward. For example: solos, deified, racecar. Researching and educating for interculturality should/could adopt a palindromic form. I move forward and backward at the same time, re-interrogating, re-investing in, re-visiting, re-negotiating what I have done and said. This to and fro movement is necessary to keep a broad eye-view of my take on interculturality and to be ‘in control’ of my ideologies, positions and criticality of criticality.] [The idea of ‘double-peripheralization’ is a powerful one. It made me reflect on the proposal I wrote in the previous chapter about empowering the Global South to be listened to. I modified it in a later version since I felt that what I was proposing was a complete impasse (the new version reflects this). For Hamza, ‘double-peripheralization’ represents ‘the act of presenting those who are peripheral to be responsible for their own peripheralization’. Under no circumstance was I trying to suggest that in my original text but I understand that it could have been interpreted as such. My original idea was to create a space of dialogue amongst peers from the Global South to renegotiate ways of engaging with research beyond the Global North, not for them to take the responsibility for their potential peripheralization [I put ‘potential’ because most of them may not accept being labelled as peripheralized, especially by a Global Northerner]. The problem lies in these ‘big’ categories of the Global South/North: who labels who? Who accepts/rejects these labels? Where are the multidimensional borders between these two somewhat imagined labels—just like East vs. West? Who is included and excluded? Are the borders about ‘geography’, nationality, race, ethnicity, political affiliations, economic statuses…? Are Global Northerners always privileged? Are Global Southerners always discriminated against? Are we scholars creating further divisions, resentment and discrimination by sticking up to these ‘big’ labels? The impasse I encountered in the previous chapter has to do with all these questions. What epistemic justice [or fairness, I use the word as a mere synonym, being somewhat tired of seeing the word justice being chanted everywhere while injustice keeps growing] means and from whose perspective also has to do with the questions I listed above. From whose viewpoint is an idea or a concept epistemically just? Who can decide? Who can impose reversing or modifying the content of the idea or the concept? Who knows what it should contain and how to speak it otherwise? I have noticed that in Chinese academia today, there is a strong push

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towards ‘Chinese theories’, ‘Chinese thoughts’, ‘Research with Chinese characteristics’ and to spread the ‘Chinese voice’. These are very important initiatives but who decides what theories and thoughts are Chinese in a scientific world which has been dominated by the West for a couple of centuries? And who will listen to these theories and thoughts? In what language(s)? The very words theories and thoughts need to be interrogated first, I think, especially if they are still embedded within Western narratives of what research should be. Interrogating the ways we use language(s) to present, problematize and negotiate them is central here because language will systematically lead to ‘flavouring’ ideas and concepts in ways that do not always reflect their complexities. Although I failed at reflecting convincingly on a way to reshuffle academic Southern–Northern relations Hamza’s metaphor of the table works well, I think. I like the foldable and ‘solid’ chairs and the movements in occupying the chairs. Maybe I would mix this metaphor with a Table Metaphor that I have used in Dervin et al. (2022) after seeing a tea-table in China that was two-sided, with one flat and one (3D) sinusoidal sides. The flat side is for straightening things: this is where we start from, these are the current (limited) ideas, concepts and ideologies that are available. When we move to the sinusoidal side of the table (which looks like a range of small hills and mountains), we start complexifying the whole thing, going up and down the hills and mountains, exploring every corner, every top. In a Weixin conversation that Hamza and I had, I suggested that instead of using the dichotomy of the North and South, we could coin a new word: Sorth (So/uth-No/ rth). When the people sitting at the table navigate through the sinusoidal side, Sorth can happen.] [I was delighted to read about Hamza’s literary interests and I smiled when I saw the sentence: ‘I was a bit irresolute about discussing the key literary figures in my previous account because I thought that readers may end up doubting the scientificity of what I say’. Hamza hit the nail on the head. I was also very pleased to see that he likes Emil Cioran, a Romanian writer who lived in France in the twentieth century. I have used some of his ideas in my work before and I have never met a single scholar who knew Cioran (who also wrote in a fragmentary style). As I said before, I wish we allowed ourselves to read these important figures more and to include them systematically in our writing. When Hamza spoke of Mahmoud, he said that he realized through his writing that ‘yes, Arabs can think’ [meaning himself included]. What a strong and concrete way of expressing the epistemic injustice discussed earlier! As a European, have I ever said or thought of ‘us’ as ‘non-thinkers’? I am reminded here of Anne Cheng’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 2007 for which she had titled her lecture: Can China Think? (in reference to Spivak, see Cheng, 2007). Can China think? This question, which sounds a priori as absurd as Hamza confirming to himself that ‘his’ people can think, is unfortunately often found in the ‘underground’ of many political, media, educational and even academic assertions about certain groups of people. Discussions of critical thinking, reflexivity and even democracy tend to put the other down—who also in the same process puts themselves down as in ‘Chinese students are not very critical’ (often heard in the

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mouths of Chinese teachers). Assuming that others cannot think or be critical or be reflexive is a sign of oneself lacking these dimensions]. [Let’s go back to language again (and again!). In the first chapter I introduced some of the languages that I know—meaning: I speak some better than others, write some better than others, understand some better than others, read some better than others, depending on the context, my level of anxiety, interlocutors, etc. Hamza asks me a question which I have been subjected to hundreds of times: ‘I would like to ask Fred if he senses that he is a different scholar with maybe different perspectives and sharpness of ideas and tone when he is writing in other languages from English’. In a sense, this question usually seems to assume that one language = one identity = one way of being = one way of thinking = one way of relating to others. In all the languages that I use I try to be coherent with my belief in criticality of criticality. I try to stick to my principles [often failing] and to admit my mistakes when I note them. For me, languages (especially the ones I use) are a magma of resources and ideas in which I can ‘dig’. Although I divide them neatly in specific contexts and when speaking or writing to specific individuals, when I am by myself the borders dissolve by themselves—a bit like in dreams where, from what I remember, I dream in mixed forms of languages and in languages that I don’t even know. Again here, I am somewhat privileged because the languages that I know are usually connoted positively. If I were a multilingual from the Global South, I might be told (as some of my friends have) that I should learn ‘proper English to teach well’ or that I should focus on one of my languages to ‘avoid speaking a mish-mash of languages’. Hamza did mention the fact that English native speakers are privileged in today’s academia. I take his point. However, I believe that there is always a negative side to privilege: accessing the complexities of the world in just one global (and yet complex) language can be detrimental. How many ideas, word flavours, ideological connotations and opportunities to see our world differently do we miss if we only speak English? However, I refuse to fight against English. It makes no sense. English, like any other dominating languages in history, is just a language—not a person, not an enemy. English allows billions of people to meet and to talk to each other. One does not need to learn 10 different languages to be a ‘better person’ [whatever that means]. One can be multilingual in one language if one is curious of the polysemy and flavours of words, if one is interested in talking to others about languages. Nathalie Auger at the University of Montpellier has done a great job in promoting an approach to this issue, beyond naivety and good intentions (see, e.g. Auger & Le Pichon-Vorstmann, 2021). Hamza also asks the important question of the alternatives that we have to ‘language as a prison of the mind’. Yes, language can be a prison or a cage if we do not use language to reflect on language ad infinitum. In my daily life, I try to balance the power of language (as words) with the power of art as language. I usually spend my days writing and reading and, at night, I take my brushes and paints and create art pieces (usually of faces). As a scholar, I found this to be rewarding and enriching. What I cannot say in words, I can express in painting. I can silence my

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words for a while and use another medium to express my thoughts. I know that both activities are feeding on each other. I get ideas from my writing for a painting and vice versa. Although they consist in processes that are very different (e.g. one can easily modify writing, it is harder for painting), they both confront the mind with similar challenges: How do I represent self and other? What is my message? How do I communicate my thoughts? And more importantly: How do I create? In an interview where he was being asked to talk about a new piece he had composed, Pierre Boulez (2005) refused to oblige, arguing that he composed the piece because he could not talk about it; the piece itself was the ‘words’. For me, art, research, philosophy, fiction, music, life, relations (with, e.g. our readers and students), things, are all part of the puzzle of interculturality. While some rely exclusively on words, others can help us experience, express and test ideas in other ways. We should recognize the (changing) importance, influence and inspiration of these pieces of the puzzle in our work to let ourselves out of the prison that Hamza mentioned. Going back to the figure of the reader, I do believe that we need to create bonds with them, to take them into account, not to ‘entice’ or ‘please’ them but to encourage them to think with us, to disagree with us, to move to and fro with us. In a sense one could say that the ‘imagined’ reader that we have in our head while writing does contribute to writing through the (unconscious/imagined) dialogues that we ‘do’ together. Most academic writing is monological in that sense— although it is always full of (a limited amount of) voices. [I just remembered that one of my first ever co-writers—a ‘guru’ in the field of interculturality—censored the use of the word our reader in our joint book introduction, arguing that it was not good practice in academia. But who has the right to say what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practice when you send the signal to another subjectivity that you know that they are there, especially when the book has to do with intercultural communication? That was a mere ideological order]. I do believe that reading and writing are processes of change. In writing, this process of change must be shared and discussed (one way or another) with the reader by creating spaces of dialogue in, e.g. a book.] [Time for the intercultural-ontological-metamorphosis exercise proposed by Hamza. This is a superb proposal which should be tried by all of us interculturalists—to try to put oneself in another interculturalist’s shoes, in our own context and/or elsewhere. I can imagine the benefits of practicing such metamorphoses in relation to the scholars with whom we disagree or whose ideologies are far away from ours. Let me try to metamorphose into Hamza for a while. After having worked with him on this book for a couple of months, co-writing and communicating via Weixin and reading his work, I would borrow the imagine of the porcupine from Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). In Parerga and Polipomena, the philosopher writes about the ‘porcupine dilemna’ to describe human relations (1974: 651–652): One cold winter’s day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when

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6  Looking-Inward, Moving Forward and Destabilizing Our Rhetorics the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another.

This is meant to be used to describe the distance-proximity that social beings experience all the time. They try to get closer to get warm and soon their respective ‘quills’ push them apart. This is the difficult art of (counter-)balancing, of the medium that all of us have to experience with others. Somehow, I feel that Hamza is very much aware of this porcupine dilemma. He has clear goals as far as interculturality is concerned and his ambition will lead him to the top. In his writing, he does not mince his words, doing it in what I perceive as ‘good’ diplomacy. Hamza also appears to be against too extreme positions and actions [Although his work calls for a ‘revolution’ in/directly, but a soft one]. He seems to be genuinely interested in dialoguing with others and in co-learning about other places, languages and people. At the same time, Hamza is very much aware of his position as a young scholar writing from Morocco, the Global South. He knows that he needs to be careful about what he writes and how he formulates things. For example, he is not so willing to reveal too much about himself in order to decrease the possibilities of being mis-labelled (and thus mistreated), preferring to let interculturality talk for itself. He practices criticality of criticality in what appears to be an honest and modest way, thus dialoguing indirectly with his potential contradictors and critiques. Finally, he is very much aware of the somewhat restricted tolerance and generosity that he faces in the West and on the international stage. His position as someone actively writing from a small town in Morocco, with many excellent international publications but few other academic capitals, probably urges him to not push too much towards other scholars’ quills yet. At the moment, I would say that Hamza is preparing for deeper, warmer but also painful at times, encounters between his quills and the others’ (especially for those located in the Global North). This balancing act, which like all scholars I had to learn to operate too [I am still learning], is probably more difficult for Hamza because of certain aspects of his identity which might restrict indirectly access and entry [I am thinking for example of the simple act of obtaining a visa for a conference in Europe—something I have never had to worry about. When Finland closed down because of COVID in March 2020, I remember feeling extremely ‘empty’ for the months to come and thinking about the millions of people in this world who cannot and will probably never be able to step outside their own national borders]. I do hope that the porcupine metaphor is neither offensive nor inappropriate for Hamza. After months of interaction, I believe that it is a fitting one. It appears that few scholars from different continents have written together what it means to work interculturally on interculturality (exception but in less reflexive or direct ways: Piller et al., 2022). The intercultural-ontological-metamorphosis exercise represents a stimulating proposal to deepen cooperation and co-understanding by developing empathy and realistic expectations of others.]

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[Conversation with readers] • Hamza defines the intellectual as follows: ‘being an intellectual is about being free and thinking without boundaries, presuppositions and objectives and it is also about contributing to the making of a better reality for oneself and others’. What are your takes on this description of the intellectual? If you go back to Fred’s take on this figure in an earlier chapter, how different and similar is Hamza’s definition? • Like Hamza, do you feel uncomfortable about the idea of having others define who you are as a person and as a scholar? • How do you position yourself in relation to the ‘admiration debate’ between us? Consider all the scholars whom you (have) admire(d) and try to reflect on why and what they have done to your thinking? • Hamza confesses in this chapter that he was not too eager to discuss his taste in literature for fear ‘that readers may end up doubting the scientificity of what I say’. What are your reactions to Hamza’s assumptions [Fred added that he felt that Hamza had ‘hit the nail on the head’ with this remark]? • Reflect further on literature and philosophy and on how they might have influenced you in/directly. • Look into the work of Mustafa Mahmoud (1921–2009) and Mohamed Choukri (1953–2003) and reflect on insights into interculturality that you might get from them. • How do you understand the idea of subalternity? How often have you come across it? Is this something you feel you have experienced as a scholar or an educator? • If you are from the Global South, how often have you been made to think in-/ directly that you ‘cannot think’? Try to remember these instances and reflect on your own reactions. What could be done when this occurs? • How do you understand the idea of the ‘liberator fetish’? Can you think of examples of this fetish based on your encounters with ideas and people in the field of interculturality? • What might writing in English about interculturality do to both the ideas we transmit and our own identity as scholars and thinkers? • Hamza writes: ‘I am interested in writing in Arabic, but I cannot afford that at the moment’. How do you interpret his use of ‘afford’ here? • Hamza goes back to the idea of languaging, devenir-langue several times in this chapter. He writes: ‘The use of words from other languages to construct complex understandings of interculturality would make a case for the possibility of incorporating non-popular knowledges in foundational literature on interculturality’. As we are closing the book, have your views on this important issue changed? What are you ready to do now to systematize languaging, devenir-langue in your own work? • Do these connote differently to you in English and other languages: ‘epistemic fairness’ and ‘epistemic justice’?

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• Do you think that gaining privileges might change our rhetorics of interculturality? Do we need to modify (consciously) our rhetorics to become privileged? Can we resist the pressure to, e.g. tone down our critiques to fit into the ‘mould’ of agreed-upon ideologies of interculturality? • Should scholars tell others how to do interculturality when their own experiences and visions are but from a small corner of the world (e.g. democracy-talk from Europe)? Is one role of research on intercultural scholarship to disrupt this tendency? • What do you make of Hamza’s Table Metaphor? What advantages and drawbacks in your own context? • Try the intercultural-ontological-metamorphosis exercise with your close colleagues or with figures from the field of interculturality. How easy/difficult is it? What did you learn about yourself in the process? • Moving towards the end of the book, do you feel that you know more about the authors, about their interests, their experiences, their ideas, their struggles, their dis-agreements? • Finally: moving forward, moving on and/or moving to and fro in scholarship and education on interculturality? What do these mean to you?

References Auger, N., & Le Pichon-Vorstmann, E. (2021). Défis et Richesses des Classes Multilingues: Construire des Ponts entre les Cultures. ESF Sciences Humaines. Boulez, P. (2005, November 8). Tout Arrive Spécial Pierre Boulez. France Culture. Cheng, A. (2007). Can China think? Collège de France. Dervin, F., & Jacobsson, A. (2021). Teacher education for critical and reflexive interculturality. Palgrave Macmillan. Dervin, F., & Simpson, A. (2021). Interculturality and the political within education (1st ed.). Routledge. Dervin, F., Sude, S., Yuan, M., & Chen, N. (2022). Interculturality East and West: Unthink, dialogue, rethink. Springer. Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2022). Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: A positive case study. Multilingua. https://doi. org/10.1515/multi-2022-0034 R’boul, H. (2021). North/South imbalances in intercultural communication education. Language and Intercultural Communication, 21(2), 144–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1 866593. Schopenhauer, A. (1974). Parerga and Polipomena (Vol. 2). Oxford University Press.

Chapter 7

Zone

Abstract  This chapter ‘buckles’ the book but without tying the belt. In this Zone (in reference to the Greek word for a belt), the authors summarize what they have learnt and experienced in co-authoring the book. They start by discussing fantasised dialogues that they would want to have in the future. They then reflect on the challenges they have encountered in writing the book, on what they have learnt about and with each other and on the dissonances that they have faced engaging with each other’s ideas. They conclude by repositioning interculturality, presenting concepts worth taking away from the book and summarize their main messages for the reader. Multifaceted proposals to contribute to revise current imbalanced relations between the Global South/Global North in intercultural scholarship close Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality. Keywords  Global South  ·  Global North  · Inequalities · Dialogues ·  Dissonance  · Repositioning The word zone in English comes from Greek zōnē for a belt, a girdle worn at the hips and from zōnnynai for to gird (i.e. to put a belt, girdle around). This chapter serves as a zone in the book: We start forming a girdle around our dialogues, without tying the belt… Ceci n’est pas une conclusion.

7.1 Fantasized Dialogues I have had a terrible and agonizing experience throughout the process of applying for a student visa. It was rejected multiple times and I started wondering about my merit and whether my whole existence makes any sense to the others. The consulate was in Morocco and most of the undertakings and steps of applying were © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 F. Dervin and H. R'boul, Through the Looking-glass of Interculturality, Encounters between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6672-9_7

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handled by Moroccans working in the foreign country’s consulate; of course, they were acting according to the orders of foreigners. It was my first time realizing what racism felt and looked like. I was mistreated, racialized and subalternized by my own people who are seeking to look good in the eyes of others who would probably marginalize them at some point. Going there and gazing at the number of people waiting at the gate of the consulate, I realized how little we mean to others. I was a PhD student, meaning that I can contribute something to the country in question but, still, that meant nothing. I had to shave my hair and beard and wear certain clothes in order to look more Western and central in a way that appeals to their logic. I would like to dialogue with these people around interculturality; my own people working there and the foreigners. I have simple questions: WHY? and does oppressing the others further affirm your VALUE and LEGITIMACY as a HUMAN BEING? *** [After reading Hamza’s text, I felt that my fantasized dialogues are somewhat futile]. In order to move to and fro with interculturality I would wish to dialogue with someone whom I disagree with entirely and someone from a field other than interculturality. Both would stimulate my thinking, unthinking and rethinking in their own ways. Unfortunately, the two people I would wish to meet are both passed away: Geert Hofstede (1928–2020) and Pierre Boulez (1925–2016). In fact, both share similarities: they were both men, from Europe (Hofstede: the Netherlands; Boulez: France) and they were born and died more or less at the same time, so they experienced the Second World War and post-war globalization. I think this is probably where the similarities end. Hofstede, as our readers probably know, is a big name in (business) intercultural communication, who is polarized, between admiration [first I wrote blind admiration, but removed blind, realizing that I was judging] and demonization [most self-claimed critical interculturalists attack his work—myself included]. I have read Hofstede at the beginning of my career but I must admit that most of my knowledge about him is based on the critiques I have read of his work [like most of those who criticize him, turning him into the ‘baddie’ of interculturality]. If I could have a dialogue with him, I would want to know more about his own life experiences and how they might have influenced his work; what his political and, e.g. religious views might be; what he thinks he has contributed to global research and what failures he would admit to; what critiques of his work he would agree to, behind the stage [in private conversations I have had with some interculturalists, they often let go and agree to things they seem reluctant to confess in their writing]; what he thinks of today’s politics of interculturality in research. I would also like to try the intercultural-ontological-metamorphosis exercise that Hamza has proposed with him to try to get a better sense of his worldview, his context and his way of speaking. Finally, I would choose some of the concepts that I have coined (e.g. differilitude, the tautology interculturality-as-change, intercultucentrism) to ‘confront’ him with some of my ideas

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as a way of dialoguing—crossing a bridge over to each other, finding similarities and differences in the way we see interculturality at moment X. The second person I would wish to dialogue with, Pierre Boulez, was a composer, a conductor and a theoretician of music. A strong character, Boulez put pressure on the classical music world from the 1970s onwards, working in Germany, the US, the UK and France. Often described wrongly as a ‘tyrant’, Boulez was genuinely interested in making a difference for (‘European’) classical music, opening it up, e.g. to new forms inspired by other musical traditions from outside the West. In his own music, he included elements from Balinese and Japanese musics. I have always found his writing on composing and conducting (he was Professor at Collège de France between 1976 and 1995, see Boulez, 2018) to be an inspiration for working on interculturality. Boulez has worked with top musicians in the world but also with artists and scholars. He has often tried to link the music world with intellectual spheres. At Collège de France, he has organized seminars with thinkers like Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, to pick their brains about how they see music. His critiques of, e.g. music education and composing resonate with my own critiques of intercultural research [and the critiques of many other scholars around the world]. If I could enter into a dialogue with Boulez I would focus on issues of politics in education (e.g. how to give a voice to alternatives in how curricula are determined?); I would want us to compare the processes of composing, playing music and doing interculturality; I would ask him questions about his interest in otherness in composing and conducting (a topic he has written extensively about, Boulez, 2005); I would ask him questions about the very specific and interesting metaphors that he has used to discuss his work (e.g. soft/striated muscles, a metaphor used by Deleuze too). Although I am very much knowledgeable about contemporary classical music, I am not really a musician myself, so our conversation would probably not dig too much into musical details. My main interest would be about shifting my mind to composing and conducting for a while with Boulez to and fro, in order to return to interculturality with potential new ‘meta’ ideas about it, to undo and redo my own theoretical and conceptual engagement with the notion. [A note about having chosen two European male persons (again!): Should I be surprised that most of the intellectuals whom I am interested in or disregard are from my own province of the world, White and men? From a gender perspective, I could have chosen, for instance, a dialogue with Darla Deardorff from Duke University (US) or with Susanna Mälkki (a famous conductor from Finland who took over Boulez’s job at Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris). From a Global South perspective, I could have chosen Song Li from China for the intercultural and Rodrigo Baggio from Brazil for composing and conducting. Has my lack of curiosity and intellectual wanderings prevented me from looking deep into other sources? Should I blame my lack of language skills, my sensitivity, my own ethnocentrism and my laziness?]

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7.2 Challenges in Writing the Book Some of the questions that we asked each other I had answered before but they allowed me to revisit my previous answers and to strengthen them—in preparation for answering them again for and with other people and for other purposes in the future. Hamza added many (challenging) questions as we proceeded through the book, which urged me to think against myself. As such, they were not ‘hard’ but they required for me to unthink and rethink what I had written—and change. All in all, I would say that two questions were and still remain difficult: • What may/are you allowed to hope for interculturality? (based on Kant) • Why is it that we are attracted to certain scholars, thinkers, writers and not to others? How have we been introduced to them? And finally, are we blinded by our choices? For the first question, I remain convinced that hoping for is a changeable process that depends on changing career, life and epistemological conditions. I don’t think that before 2020 I was consciously interested in hoping for anything. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the despair it brought in me, because of the lies, manipulations, multifaceted discrimination, terrible injustice, centrisms, coming from everywhere, I started to worry and care. Maybe even worse than the COVID-19 period is the hypocrisy of ‘this is all over, let’s go back to “normal”’ that we are currently experiencing that disgusts me. Let’s talk the same talk [while pretending to renew, refresh, ‘postpandemicize’]; let’s brainwash people even more with the same faulty frameworks [like Biden, make people believe in ‘our’ democratic cultures]; let’s travel around the planet for ‘meeting’ each other for a couple of days [although we don’t really meet, the illusion of face-to-face!] [while pretending to care about the environment]; let’s continue to believe that we are the best and only alternative [the ‘West’ vs. the ‘rest’ again!]; etc. I thought wrongly that the pandemic would make a big difference in this regard. Again, I seem to have been wrong(ed). I cannot find the strength to hope for anything at the moment. The second question would deserve lifelong reflection. I always insist on saying read, read, read, read, read everything to my students [a principle I sincerely believe in and apply in my life and career. It would be actually interesting to peep in on intercultural scholars’ (e-)libraries to get a sense of what they read.] However, read read read read should be accompanied with: why am I reading this writer, this book? How did I find it? How does the author, the book influence me? What other options could I have instead of this author, this book? Why am I not reading them? Hamza wrote about the limits we set ourselves in reading (or limits imposed onto us), which reminded me of what Canetti had suggested (1989): don’t just read what comforts your own ideas but what also disrupts them. *** What are our three favourite words in any language to discuss interculturality today? What are the three ones we dislike? Why?

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This particular question was a bit hard to answer because I have never thought about it. That is why my answer was not direct; I discussed three words from Darija that I thought would bring new insights into interculturality. We tend to overlook the power of word choice and how we opt for a certain understanding when we specifically vocalize our thoughts through linguistic channels that do not only impart a meaning but also shape it. I realized that words and concepts are never innocent and that our use of them is not innocent either, by any stretch of the imagination. Kant suggests that the question ‘What am I allowed to hope for?’ is essential to social beings. How do we see it in relation to interculturality? What do we think we are allowed to hope for interculturality?’ The difficulty of answering this question resides in the adjective ‘allowed’. Upon reading this question, I thought that it is painfully personal and profound since it asks about what I am permitted to hope for within my situated possibilities and positionalities. I was wondering whether I was supposed to hope less or more compared to Fred. Are we entitled to equal rights for reimagining interculturality? Are our hopes equally legitimate? Is what I hope meaningful and relevant to others? Do I have to hope for what is universally pertinent or is it okay to foreground my own needs and aspirations? Are different people allowed to have different hopes depending on their level of privilege and/or subordination? Are some hopes more important than others? Is the importance of these hopes determined by their urgency or by the source of enunciation?

7.3 Learning About Each Other The multiple dialogues with Hamza in this book and in our paratexts (Weixin) have opened up my eyes on two important issues, which relate to learning more about Hamza. When one reads his articles, it is easy to see the influence of these two elements on his work. As a somewhat privileged scholar myself who did not have to struggle too much to get a permanent position in Finland, Hamza’s story reminded me that I should never imagine that my situation applies to other scholars around the world. Obviously, I have worked really hard to be where I am too and, in our discussions, Hamza reminded us not to be too one-sided in ‘blaming’ our privilege. I see in Hamza the same enthusiasm, hard work and work ethics which have guided me since I started working in the field 20 years ago. He writes all the time, reads a lot and submits papers to top international journals, which get accepted. I will say it again: his list of publications is impressive considering the stage he is at. However, while this hard work often pays immediately in my part of the world—or in China—Hamza has been struggling for a couple of months to get a position in universities abroad, where he would want to get some experience and see how it works ‘on the other side’. In Finland, I have seen many Finnish PhD students with a couple of (not so good) publications getting a position as, e.g. assistant professor straight after graduation—sometimes being

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selected over stronger candidates from other countries. Hamza also told me that many young scholars from Morocco have to leave their families behind when they managed to get a position in the ‘West’, because of visa issues. He also shared with me his struggles with obtaining a visa to go to Spain when he was doing his PhD at Navarre. As a holder of European passports, I have never faced any issue with visas and entering other spaces. If I had a family, I am sure that everyone could happily travel with me and/or would be allowed to stay in another country of residence. These practices simply shocked me and I started wondering how one can work hard and succeed in global academia when the ‘personal’ cannot follow the ‘professional’. I must have been very naïve, thinking that these would not be issues for scholars from the Global South. This was the most surprising aspect of our dialogues and I cannot help thinking about the mental hurdle that these must represent. The second thing that I learnt about Hamza relates to the previous one. In the exercise that Hamza had proposed in the last chapter whereby we would try to put ourselves in each other’s shoes, I referred to him as being very much aware of the ‘porcupine dilemna’ in global academia. Schopenhauer (1974) used this metaphor to describe social relations. I find Hamza’s attitude in his writing to be so calm, so diplomatic and so positive. In that sense, we are very different. I get irritated easily and cannot hide my feelings. I cannot pretend to be fine in front of injustices. I am not saying here that Hamza ‘pretends’. He is just so relaxed when he describes epistemic injustice, when he talks about the dominance of people like me. I must confess that I admire his attitude and I find it refreshing. I do believe in the power of anger and disappointment in pushing us to move to and fro, however, and maybe this relates to Hamza’s precarious position, maybe the attempt to rebel and to ‘destroy’ ideologies, concepts, theories, models, ‘gurus’ in the process, can be done in subtler and rewarding ways. Of course, different ways can lead to the same results and it is important to try out different methods to get one’s message across. Here again, one might see the influence of the perception of one’s (lack of) privilege on the way one writes, builds an argument, proposes alternatives and dialogues with others. *** First, I have learned that Fred is intensively aware of his privilege and the overlapping systems of superiority/subordination that might have contributed to the loudness of his voice. If he understands his privilege, then he understands other people’s subalternity; although we may doubt the epistemological soundness of this a priori, I am more interested in helping readers understand how the ideological underpinnings of interculturality research and power imbalances in academia are not always critiqued simply to maintain the continuity of some systems and safeguard some individuals’ comfort; it is a misleading comfort that implies our selfishness in the sense that ‘what does not concern me, then is not my business’. This assumption is even more relevant and echoes quite loudly in interculturality since it is the field that is supposed to dismantle intersectionalities of marginality. Second, I did not have a particular imagination of Fred that he may be as self-centred as, for example, Nietzsche may have been. I am not particularly

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discussing Fred’s modesty as a person outside academia here because that is no one’s business. I am referring to how intellectually humble Fred is. I think a lot of people re-enact the type of discourses that they claim to oppose by generating a ready-made conclusion about someone based on the way they reply to their email and how they handle their manuscript. I realized that Fred is more epistemologically unassuming and unpretentious than I thought. An interesting remake here is that arrogance is relative as much as morals are. Is that person arrogant because they are so or because I would like to present them that way since that would ensure some mental serenity that their arrogance ostensibly dismisses their brilliance and nuance?

7.4 Learning with Each Other What I learned is that I have unlearned two assumptions that I have long had about our languaging. I am feeling more uneasy about the type of writings I have produced so far about interculturality in the sense that they may have implicated me in what I am not seeking to claim. I learned that I need to be careful with words, but still I am feeling troubled because I am not sure whether this realization is disenthralling or actually fettering and/or generally problematizing. Second, the concepts we draw on may shape our stated knowledge which may not always align with our underlying understandings. However, we also tamper with the words and concepts dragging them into a state of complicity. We make certain words corruptible by forcibly expanding and/or reducing their epistemological depth in order to make them fit our narratives. I am not sure whether it is always a reciprocal process that we shape words and they shape us in return, but what remains debatable is whether the ability to play with ‘words’ is an act of ingenuity or cunningness. I am a bit concerned about how this continuous process of teetering for the sake of epistemologically transcending may be exhausting. We need to exercise this linguistic exploration and/or expurgation in a way that serves our epistemological quest, not language per se. *** Built in a spiral-like format, the book has led us to move to and fro, backwards, forwards and to the sides of our (un-)(re-)thinking. What our dialogues have urged me to revisit is the criticality of criticality approach that I have been trying to implement in my work. Our discussions have reminded me that one never does enough to be critical of criticality when it comes to interculturality and that we need to ‘push it’ constantly. While rereading what Hamza had written on many occasions, I had to rethink my arguments and views, often being reminded to ‘come down back to earth’. For example, I had used the verb to rebalance in a question about power imbalances in knowledge co-creation and production between the Global South and Global North (how to rebalance them?). When

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Hamza wrote about this topic, he maintained: ‘I have noted ‘balancing’ without the prefix ‘re’ in order not to denote the understanding that things were balanced at a certain point and what we are calling for is postmodern version of some previous halcyon days’. In other words, what Hamza asserts [rightly!] is that there was hardly ever any balance in knowledge production. This made me reflect on my use of the original verb: Did I believe that there is [already] balance to be rebalanced? I have been writing about the disequilibrium in knowledge about interculturality for a couple of years now so I am well aware of the imbalance [I am not even convinced that there is even disequilibrium; I could go as far as writing that there is maybe even an absence of contact, dialogue around these issues]. I think that I used rebalance as an inclusive and cooperative term: it is not about ‘us’ the ‘West’ reorganizing knowledge but about ‘us’ all together coming together to reconsider this injustice, to distribute the power to speak and be listened to [distribute still indicates that someone makes the decision to, e.g. provide equal opportunities]. Maybe, instead of rebalance, I could suggest disrupt, unsettle, shake and even confuse current knowledge production mechanisms [one can feel my tendency to push things through in the use of these verbs]. Throughout our dialogues, Hamza’s remarks and use of words made me reflect on what I had uttered in the book, and these were reminders of the importance of language in attempting criticality of criticality. I wonder if and how Hamza has experienced this important aspect of co-constructing knowledge about interculturality while co-writing the book. The second element that I feel we have learnt with each other is to accept looking outside academia to look for inspiration for research on interculturality. We have discussed on many occasions the influence of literature and philosophy on our personalities. I think that Hamza felt ‘freer’ towards the end of the book in letting himself discuss this topic. I do believe that taking fiction, music, art, philosophy … into account in our to and froing through interculturality should be a priority for the future of the field. Too often, I feel that we get imprisoned in research discourses and ideologies that we tend to rehearse and recite without adding any new thinking or challenges. Interculturality is in all things and thus we need to be genuinely curious of what, e.g. writers, painters, composers, actors and philosophers could teach us about the notion to strengthen our thoughts and research initiatives.

7.5 Dissonance Fred and I disagree about the essence of ‘agreeing’ and ‘disagreeing’. Fred appreciates the performative capacity of ‘disagree’ in shocking oneself and others. For me, I am more inclined to perceive ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’ to be rudimentary since they are often reactions, not performative actions that convey our abilities to resist and speak back. Maybe, Fred would further elaborate on his stance regarding these notions because I am not certain that I have included sufficient clarification of what he thinks about that. I am not particularly interested in making clear whether

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I ‘disagree’ and ‘agree’ [mentioning ‘disagree’ before ‘agree’ is meaningful here]; I am more interested in how I can build on other’ ideas to move forward. I venture to say that Fred and I have never used these verbs throughout our long discussions on Weixin; it is one thing leading to the other in a process of co-negotiating and co-constructing meaning. Also, Fred and I disagree about the importance of ‘admiration’ which is certainly quite unusual in our narratives within academia. We tend to ‘admire’ a singer, actor or composer but not scholars; we rather appellate that kind of perception of scholars as ‘respect’ or ‘find their work very interesting’. Fred believes that ‘admiration’ cripples our enunciative capacity to speak for ourselves and to think otherwise as it delineates our intellectual possibilities against that admiration’s rationalities; I think Fred would like to state that ‘we do not transcend what we admire’. I have been open about how Fred has substantially influenced my perspective of interculturality [I do not mind sharing that since it is liberatory for me that I am not embarrassed to disclose who I admire but not afraid to engage, question and critique when I am intellectually able to; I understand my positionality and I do not intend to prematurely move to certain undertakings that I have not established my legitimacy for yet; it is a process]. Admiration is about setting a higher standard. It is about climbing a higher mountain from which you could have a wider view of the world and then jump off roaming higher [the higher the wider, the greater our roaming is. If it is one’s aspiration to roam as high as possible, then it is better to have the eagle as one’s admiration rather than a pigeon]. Admiration is not an end in itself; it is an incentive which would prompt our ambitions to be more daring. *** Our motivation in writing this book was to confront our ideas and views in the field of interculturality, privileges and identities. The book was not meant for us to ‘become each other’ or to come to an agreement on all the points that we discussed. Disagreements are healthy and they should be part of academic work. Unfortunately, I often feel that scholars do not wish to disagree and this leads to either avoiding conflicts (not engaging with dissonance) or silencing their (real) opinions. If we all (pretend to) agree, it is hard to imagine how we can move forward in the field and, especially, how we could have a real impact on our societies. Considering the terrible state of intercultural encounters today (from a macro-perspective, the micro- is more nuanced), there is urgency. While writing the book, I think that Hamza and I came to terms with some of the disagreements that we identified in the spiral, without necessarily changing one’s take on the issues [which is absolutely fine and necessary!]. For me there are two issues that we don’t seem to agree on. The first one has to do with the position of the reader in one’s work and the (incomplete) transparency about ourselves in our writing. I do believe that these two go hand in hand. For me, the reader needs to be taken more systematically into account, sharing with them our doubts, our (awareness of our) contradictions, uncertainties; asking them questions without providing answers and giving them space in our writing for reflecting (with us); letting them

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(mis-)identify with what we write; letting them disagree with us. As we discussed in the book, we can never be sure who it is that reads us and the ‘feedback’ we get is often limited although we might have more influence on the reader than we think. Besides, a book is monological in the way it is used. This form of imbalance and hierarchy between the writer and the reader also needs to be destabilized. Let’s talk to you the reader more! Let’s ask questions and try to answer them together! Let us show you that we don’t and cannot know it all! Let’s give you a chance to be part of the process of producing knowledge! The second point of disagreement that seems to exist between Hamza and I relates to the reader too: How much should we reveal of ourselves in our writing, or should we simply silence this aspect? As a young scholar from the Global South, Hamza seems to say that he does not feel we should talk about who we are, that it is irrelevant to research [an argument which I understand, considering his own precarious position]. However, throughout the book, we have learnt a lot about both Hamza and I: our interests beyond research, our struggles, our relation to words and languages and our contexts. These are important elements for both the reader and ourselves. I argue that they help us understand our views, theories, ideologies and interests in interculturality. These do not appear out of the blue but do relate to what is in us, in-between us and others, languages and ecologies. I do understand that there are stifling academic norms that prevent many of us from including aspects of self in our work. As an object of research that deals with identity and power relations (amongst other), interculturality cannot do away with these for the one who is writing about it in research—as much as in fiction, art, the cinema, etc. Removing self from intercultural scholarship is like reading a book written by a robot…

7.6 Repositioning Interculturality? As has been discussed in the book, the notion of interculturality is abused and misused globally and is often used as a substitute for another term. Repositioning the notion by redefining and renaming it would not necessarily make it ‘better’ or more ‘useful’ since this process cannot but rely on specific ideologies with which not everyone will agree. As such redefining and renaming things is a political act since it has to do with specific takes on self, other, groups, society, the economy …. Redefining and renaming things in one language poses problems in other languages [but also within one language, one can never assume that things are transparent when one uses just one language], which may not have the means to ‘translate’ or ‘adopt’ the new proposal as it is intended. Amongst the uncountable number of potential definitions of interculturality that one could identify in research, education, daily life and decision-making, I would suggest the following two (changeable) definitions: 1. interculturality occurs when we experience the simplex [simple + complex] influences, negotiations and transformations that happen to us as soon as we interact with people, ideas, things, from another national, regional, linguistic, and individual context [in that sense, interculturality could be

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a mere synonym for humanity, bearing in mind other living and non-living elements]; 2. interculturality does not need to be defined since it is not discussed, examined and problematised the same way by the billions of people who compose our planet. Interculturality might just be ‘vital energy’ that is always there in diverse forms but that we do not notice. If I had to rename interculturality, I would propose: Pantonality and Paradoxa. Pantonality is a term used in music to refer to the use of many keys or tonalities, which are treated equality. For example, if one uses 12 tones each tone has to be introduced before one can reuse a tone. Pantonality aims to question the recurrence of specific tones in music, as used to be the case in Western classical music until the early twentieth century. Interculturality as an object of research and education should aim for the same treatment of tones—i.e. differing voices about the notion. The number of tones for interculturality is uncountable and hyperdiverse and we must endeavour to identify as many as we can, let them talk and include them in our takes on interculturality. The second term I would want to suggest is paradoxa, based on the Greek paradoxos for contrary to expectation, incredible from para (contrary to) and doxa (opinion). The paradoxa goes beyond accepted opinion, idea. To me, this is how we should consider interculturality: we go against dominating thinking, against our own thoughts. Interculturality is unstable, moving to and fro and full of uncertainties. Approaching self and other contrary to doxa appears to be a good way of dealing with the spiral of interculturality. *** I may define interculturality as the problematization of the Self-Other topology through profound engagements with various layers of identity construction including language, ‘culture’, knowledge and politics, etc. Interculturality is an interesting field of inquiry where researchers can draw on various analytical tools from a myriad of disciplines. It is deliquescent and relates to almost everything and anything. My second definition would be that interculturality refers to the range of analyses that examine how the process of communicating ideas, knowledges and creativities is co-negotiated, co-constructed and co-shaped at the level of the individual, societal and global. What is interesting is that I did not emphasize culture because I feel that interculturality has transcended culture since it is not anymore operationalized as core a priori for its analyses. I think interculturality research has constructed the possibility for the undoing of identity coherence. It has gainsaid the misleading simplicity in characterizing intercultural communication as being defined by a set of variables. ‘Culture’ is there but not anymore central; interculturality is about more than the communication amongst people from different backgrounds. I think focussing mainly on ‘culture’ may supply a dilettante approach in dealing with human communication; again, it is only human or there are other pertinent elements such as objects and how they influence interculturality. That’s why I wonder if Fred thinks it would be necessary at some point to drop ‘culture’ and ‘intercultural’. Maybe, ‘culture’ is still there and its significance has evolved in our minds to include language,

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knowledge, politics, etc. I am not sure about all these assumptions and they certainly need more unpacking. Overall, these definitions are still in embryo and, again, interculturality is probably about what it means to you and how to fathom its premises. I am reminding the readers that the types of understandings I tend to embrace are usually situated within the discourses around epistemology and interculturality. The first word we could use instead of interculturality is ‘selther’ which is the combination of ‘self’ and ‘other’, but I am afraid it may symbolically dismiss the relevance of the broader systems and structures such as coloniality, modernity and globalization which interculturality manages to encompass. Fred has produced substantial scholarship on these discursive elements including ‘otherisation’ and ‘anti-essentialism’, etc. I feel that interculturality does not always revolve around culture which is supposedly a constitutive dimension of intercultural communication. I am wondering whether we should continue to use the notion of ‘intercultural’ in all our narratives and works [this would be a topic that is worth discussing in future works]. The second word would be ‘interknowledging’ since knowledge is inclusive of language, subjectivity, ontology and culture. Thanks to this particular question, I am quite interested in unpacking this concept and the type of implications it may have for conceptualizing and doing interculturality. I wonder how Fred sees the functioning of ‘knowledge’ within interculturality. I am asking Fred if he sees foregrounding knowledge in our theorizations of interculturality would contribute to the field moving forward.

7.7 Concepts to  Take Away Fred has introduced several captivating concepts that capture profound perceptions, but I am more interested in ‘criticality of criticality’ (Dervin, 2022). It is the critique of the critique that pushes forward without any reservations. ‘Critical’ has been a buzzword used to denote different things and is often presented as being objective. ‘Criticality of criticality’ reminds us that we are not there yet and subjectivities are not denied. What ‘critical’ means to me, does not necessarily conform with other people’s perspective of criticality. It is more of doing criticality in interculturality as individuals; this understanding problematizes how we do criticality and whether we are only critical in what is convenient and appeals to our logic. ‘Criticality of criticality’ is the next step forward. Double-Peripheralization is a concept that I have introduced for the first time in this book and I think I would use it to further elaborate on how I centre decoloniality within my perception of interculturality. The more decolonial the more intercultural in the sense that disrupting power imbalances means we are more able to exercise interculturality, but again is there any interculturality without inequalities? Do we care about how Europeans are interculturalizing or is it more about

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the Global North and the Global South divide especially when it comes to ‘critical’ theories of interculturality? *** As the reader engages with the chapters of the book, they will identify many concepts that we use from others, from our previous work and/or that we are proposing in the book, stimulated by our dialogues. Reading through the book again I collected tens of concepts that we have introduced and decided to retain two that summarize well what we have done in the book. These are also proposals for working on interculturality. The first concept has to do with our working method in the book: the spiral. Working through the chapters we engaged with topics that came back again and again. Each time we unthought and rethought what we had thought before and added up new knowledge. The spiral is a good metaphor for interculturality too. The to and froing of building up relationships, identities, knowledge and imaginaries in interculturality corresponds to a spiral-like never-ending process. Co-writing the book had us experience all these elements in the pages that we wrote and read several times. The metaphor of the spiral also urges us to stop thinking about academic knowledge production as something taking place in a straight line [an illusion that one often gets when engaging with research]. The second concept, which summarizes many other concepts identified in the book, is the continuum of invisibility–visibility. In most of the discussions about ourselves, our scholarship, our engagement with others’ work, our languages and our discussions of Global South-Global North, this continuum is omnipresent, sometimes in the ‘underground’ of our discourses. The invisibility-visibility concept is also central in the aforementioned spiral and should be both born in mind and ‘dug in’ as often as one can. It applies to knowledge, identities, words, influences, etc.

7.8 Summarizing Our Main Messages These are two of my favourite quotes by Fred in this book: ‘Some colleagues from, e.g. the Global South have not dared to question my ideologies at first, thinking they were the ‘right’ ones, coming from the North’ and ‘What am I allowed to hope for as a White European scholar with some symbolic power? I would hope that everybody allows themselves to question people like me’. These are accurate characterizations of (a) how power imbalances and skewed geopolitics of knowledge operate and (b) the type of intellectual activism that Fred encourages. It is even more interesting coming from a scholar situated within the Global North. Lingering colonial structures have been quite influential that this state of inequality has been normalized and accepted as an inevitable reality by some in the Global South.

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I think I now appreciate the metaphor of the table. I felt that I was able, to some extent, to capture the nuances and intricacies of the geopolitics of knowledge in research traditions and practices. We have a seat but lack influence, which is quite illustrative of Fred’s idea of the tokenistic approach. In a sense, the Global South has to be grateful for even having a seat at the table, because they did not manufacture the table; they are outsiders, immigrants and they are not qualified yet to lead. I hope that the seats of the table have not been fixed and that carpenters are still able to rearrange everything so we can all have equal chairs in terms of proximity to the head and in making decisions on matters that concern all those at the table and beyond. *** Rereading the book several times, I have jotted down many quotes from Hamza, which express well some of the powerful ideas that we are presenting. I have chosen to include two in what follows. The first one defines well the type of activity that we have achieved through the book, which Hamza calls meta-interculturality [which is probably as important as researching interculturality itself]. The second quote goes back to the issue of language. Hamza shares with us his argument concerning the use of English in his work. The quote is a good reminder of the continuum of invisibility-visibility and of the different struggles that scholars and educators of interculturality might face. Quote 1: ‘I would like to draw the readers’ attention to the fact that Fred and I are writing a book about interculturality which is itself an intercultural process and encounter in which we share our perspectives. It is more of an act of meta-interculturality; exercising interculturality in/while theorizing interculturality. It is an act of doing interculturality to speak of interculturality’. Quote 2: ‘I am often asked to supply a ‘convincing’ answer to why I write in English although I critique the dominance of English as an academic lingua franca and its potential contribution to the ascendency of the Western cognitive empire. I am tempted to answer that ‘I doubt that you would know who I am if I were writing in a language other than English’; this is a witty answer but it does not take us forward. My answer is that, although I recognize this dichotomy which I have no power to challenge, I am left with the aspiration that I could use English to speak back and cast off any potential colonial connotation it may have on my logics and writings. My critique and my endeavour to foreground alternative knowledges would be meaningless if I did not write in English. The wider objective is not only to “visibilize” our ways of knowing in my respective context but to affirm the legitimacy of non-popular ways of knowing in other contexts, especially the Global North because that is the place from where my people derive their perception of what knowledge is valuable or not. Maybe, I would look good in the eyes of some people if I wrote in Arabic, but I guess that is not helping anyone because that would restrict the internationality and the accessibility of what I say. I have no intention to take risks that I cannot afford’.

As complements to our main contributions, let us share a few further ideas related to interculturality from others. Fred has chosen to share two quotes that he feels summarize well his own take on knowledging around interculturality. The quotes are from composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977, famous for his novel entitled Lolita):

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‘We must become conscious that there are puzzles around us. And we must find the courage to look these puzzles in the eye without timidly asking about the ‘solution’. It is important that our creation of such puzzles mirror the puzzles with which we are surrounded, so that our soul may endeavor—not to solve them—but to decipher them’. Schoenberg (in Auner, 2003: 114) ‘The great thing, which can, I suppose be taught, is to avoid the cliché of one’s time. At all cost, never, never use, for example, the word ‘dialogue,’ absolutely never’. Nabokov (2019: 399)

Both quotes strongly relate to the ideas that 1. One needs to identify important questions about interculturality and to ask questions about them (without necessarily ‘solving’ them as Schoenberg puts it) and 2. One needs to move to and fro and never be satisfied with the words and knowledge that we produce. Interculturality is a process; scholarship is also a never-ending process. *** ‘To be is to be perceived’ (‘Esse est percipi’)—Bishop George Berkeley (1948–1957) I do appreciate these succinct powerful enunciations; if a scholar interested in interculturality writes in a language other than English and enunciates from Africa and within Africa, then do they exist? Do their words have a perceived shape and sound? Are they seen as legitimate epistemic subjects with regard to their language and nationality? Will they always be required to reaffirm their epistemic capacity? Will they always be required to reaffirm the originality and authenticity of their enunciations? Playing with René Descartes’s ‘cogito, ergo sum’ [je pense, donc je suis] (Descartes, 1637), I am tempted to theorize ‘I write in English, therefore I exist’, ‘I sound and look Western, therefore I exist’, ‘I work in a prestigious Western institution, therefore I exist’ and ‘I publish in prominent journals, therefore I speak and I exist’. However, I prefer ‘dubito, ergo sum’: ‘I doubt, therefore I am’ (Descartes, 1684 in Verbeek & Bos, 2015) for obvious reasons that we have detailed throughout this book. If the other is not perceived, then interculturality does not exist; it is an illusion. ‘To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else's’.—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment(1866; translated 2001) I tend to imagine interculturality as a window that allows one to look out and then look inward to move forward. I rather have myself wrong in pursuit of actualizing myself than singing others’ hymns for the sake of sounding good in their ears, not mine. If we continue to see ourselves in others’ eyes then we do not actually exist; we are merely a reflection/a perception of their senses and how they are framed to distinguish between the valuable and the invaluable. Interculturality is about critique, questioning and speaking back. Interculturality is having oneself first seen as a legitimate ‘other’, as a sine qua non, only then can we consider subsequent imaginations. What remains of interculturality if it is only about Self but not the Other?

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7.9 Proposals for Research Practices The first proposal is to rearrange the seats at the table, particularly at the institutional level. I think it is essential and effective to have scholars based in the Global South as editors and members of committees at professional societies and associations including the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), International Association for Intercultural Education (IAIE), International Association of Intercultural Studies (IAICS) and Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR). I think that could have some manifestations of institutional diversity that actually have a say in organizing and managing relations within knowledge and power. The second proposal would be to have publishers and journals commit to publishing works that originated in the Global South. Journals can have the policy to publish at least 3 or 4 papers a year although I also recognize that journals need to receive submissions first before they consider publishing. Recently, some book series has been launched to promote the visibility of alternative perspectives of interculturality in research and education such as Encounters between East and West Intercultural Perspectives by Springer (edited by Fred Dervin) and New Perspectives on Teaching Interculturality by Routledge (edited by Fred Dervin and Mei Yuan). These endeavours can genuinely contribute to disrupting the skewed geopolitics of knowledge within interculturality. Writing this book has intensified my momentum for deconstructing and critiquing what I do not consider to be ‘intercultural’ enough despite its advertised slogans. As a first step, I will continue alerting the Global South to its complicity in its own subalternity. A major factor in the ascendency of the Western cognitive empire is that Southern peoples are kneeling and have put others on a pedestal that they cannot see them anymore. The Global South has to speak back in ways that primarily make sense to them. However, I understand that the Global South is not homogeneous and not a geographical location, that is why I will be seeking to explore other alternative ways of knowing within the periphery. For the second step I would be aiming to generate a more nuanced characterization of power imbalances as I am aware that the binary of South/North is not always reflective of how the world works. We suggested the concept of ‘Sorth’ which would help construct an understanding of in-between oscillating between the two. I feel that we need to take the initiative to probe into these dynamics even more so that we may examine the North in the South and the South in the North. We have established our rationale and critique; now, it is time to move forward. For Global Southerners: please consider ceasing the acquiescence; it does not work and they know you are doing it for more social and economic capitals; they know what you want and how they can twist your arm to exert more control. We can critique while toning down in order not to risk but at least we need to push, engage and question. We do not have to compromise everything; it is always possible to make progress, maybe slowly but steadily. The discussion on decoloniality

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is acquiring more legitimacy as even Northern scholars are theorizing through (de?)colonial lenses. Let’s not reluctantly accept things without protest; let’s push. For Global Northerners: Am I allowed to advise the Global North? Are they advisable? Will they listen? Am I qualified to advise in their eyes? I will not pretend that I know what to say; whatever I say is more of a plea than advice. I am not sure whether I am writing for the Global North and whether they care about what I have to say. That is not the point actually; what matters is moving forward (referring to Fred here) but in equitable terms. I am left with more questions that I would like to address with more rigour in future works. *** Following the principles of the spiral and of the invisibility-visibility continuum, I would like to make the following recommendations—two for scholars and educators in general, one for Global Northerners and one for Global Southerners, as well as two for myself as guidelines for being further involved in Global SouthGlobal South interactions. My two recommendations for us all are: • Include systematically scholars located in the Global South or from the Global South working in the Global North with precarious positions [I have been on many committees in different parts of the West where only White people located in prestigious Western universities played a central role in decision-making regardless of the presence of Global South colleagues], asking them to be part of PhD review and/or recruitment committees, seeking their participation in publications and for project applications and inviting them to be keynote speakers. About the latter, I was shocked to see that the practice still tends to let a vast majority of White people located in top Western universities speak as keynotes at international conferences. Including here does not mean looking for ‘tokens’ or mentioning ‘tokens’ but giving them an important space to flourish and share their knowledges, skills and thoughts—and to disagree with the dominating voices. In a same vein, scholars located in the Global South might want to revise the practice of letting ‘their’ people located in the prestigious North to dominate scholarship within their own space, especially if they only parrot Western voices. I see this trend in China, whereby scholars who were born in China, but who became citizens of ‘Western’ countries like the US and UK, are systematically invited to give talks. When one listens to them, one does not feel special additions to the field but often regurgitated ‘research’ ideologies. This kind of illusionary inclusion is very problematic and does not necessarily send the right message to local scholars who struggle to get published. • ‘Internationalization’ leads to division: Institutions tend to associate with institutions that contribute to their own privilege or reputation, which can bring more ‘points’ to them. The repercussions on individual academics are immense—although many manage to bypass such restrictions. We need to interrogate the politics of internationalization related to the Global south/Global north and to put an end to perspectives that place the Global south almost

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systematically in a position of being dominated, guided and ‘ordered’. Global north scholars need to reflect systematically on their own biases and sense of trust to see, e.g. how much they guide their discourses and practices. At a recent cooperation meeting, a Finnish professor informed us that he had hired a lawyer to work with a Chinese team. When asked if he does the same for his cooperation Finland–USA he claimed that it was not needed because ‘Americans respect agreements and they can be trusted’—which I interpreted as meaning that the Chinese do not respect agreements and cannot be trusted… In what follows I present one piece of advice for Global Southerners and Global Northerners each: • For colleagues located in the Global South, my recommendation is to interrogate systematically ideas, ideologies, use of words in what you ‘borrow’ from ‘Western’ scholars [and this could apply to any scholar who influences us]. If you are working on your own context, make sure that what you use from ‘global’ research makes sense and is compatible with glocal ideologies. Again: Interculturality is always embedded in the economic-political and combining and/or erasing glocalities through the use of specific concepts and notions may negate, contribute to ‘ridicule’ your context and lead to misunderstandings, giving more power to others to look down upon it and/or treat it as an inferior. • For colleagues located in the Global North, always ask yourself about your positions of power in contact with colleagues from the Global South. What makes your concrete encounters and cooperation unequal? How could you balance [not rebalance; although rebalancing can be part of the process after first encounters] them, bearing in mind that you will probably have more say economically, academically and in terms of reputation [or have the illusion that you might have]? How could you make each other feel more comfortable and equal? I find that honesty and putting all the cards on the table as we start knowing each other to be good strategies. Discussing issues of dominance is not an easy task but, based on my experiences, I think that it can make a difference and lead to closer relations and more balanced knowledge production. After working with Hamza on this book here are two concrete actions that I will take in my own research and in relation to others: • In terms of engagement with knowledge, I endeavour to continue ‘sleepwalking’ through all kinds of writing from the Global South, even in languages that I do not know, using, e.g. AI translators as support. Sleepwalking here is meant to refer to this unguided way of exploring different ideas, ideologies and takes on diversity that, I believe, can open doors to new knowledges. The work I did on Minzu education was a good start and I have noticed that some scholars listened to what we had to say—although some argued that we were hiding the more political aspects of it, forgetting that in their own work the political, which is always there, is very much disguised… New knowledges are beneficial to look at oneself in the mirror and to become fully aware of our own ideologies, biases, contradictions,…

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• The second reminder to myself has to do with not letting ‘my’ people give (ideological) lessons to the Global South about interculturality. As soon as I will feel that a piece of research looks down upon the ‘other side’ by judging them through, e.g. specific Eurocentric ideologies, I will counterattack in my work, deconstructing the unfairness of using specific frameworks to talk about the other.

7.10 Moving to and fro… Working together has opened many new doors, and throughout the book, we have suggested im-/explicitly new ideas and research topics. We are already working on new projects which will materialize in the near future. However, we wish to leave our readers with research ideas that we feel should be prioritized: • The power of money in epistemic injustice in intercultural scholarship. There is a need to look deeper into this important element which has been systematically ignored. How does it create the disequilibrium discussed in the book? We argue that by having more concrete knowledge about this aspect one could make ‘balancing’ more concrete and based on more honest and transparent grounds. • The power imbalance is multifaceted and although we have often focussed on Global South/Global North hierarchies, within these two spheres, there are also scholars and educators struggling to survive. In the ‘West’ itself, not everybody is treated the same way and has the same power to speak and be listened to (compare scholars located in ‘humble’ institutions in peripherical countries in Europe and their peers in ‘prestigious’ locations on the same continent). There is a need to explore these injustices within these different spaces too to get a fuller picture of how mechanisms of imbalance function both across the Global South and Global North and within these spaces as far as intercultural scholarship is concerned. Unity amongst those in ‘underprivileged’ positions across these spaces might lead to their voices being heard further. • I am hoping that Fred and I further probe into interculturality and its concomitant philosophies, ontologies and understandings. Thanks to the epistemological diversity underlying the field, we have been able to discuss quite a lot of topics and address several questions while maintaining strong ties to the intercultural. My ideas for other publications are about implementing alternative ways of knowing about interculturality. I believe it is essential that we exercise interculturality while generating knowledge about interculturality. A number of questions have been reserved for future works due to the word limit and we have indeed discussed how they would be used later. My first idea (which was complemented by Fred’s suggestion on how it could be done based on his own introduction of the fragment genre in the literature on interculturality, see Dervin, 2022, 2023) is to write fragments over the course of the next six months and then work on compiling them into a book. My second idea is to

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deconstruct, shatter and remould the epistemological import of 30 concepts that are commonly used in our debates and narratives about interculturality. I would like to dig deeper into how the various concepts we use are neither innocent nor innocuous. They are in fact symptoms of ideologies and they implicate us in certain discourses that we do not support and/or explicitly propagate. I hope to interrogate what we take for granted in our devenir-langue/languaging of interculturality. [‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ (Carroll, 1865) To be continued]

References Auner, J. (2003). A Schoenberg reader. Yale University Press. Berkeley, G. (1948–1957). In A. A. Luce, & T. E. Jessop (Eds.), The works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (9 vols.). Thomas Nelson and Sons. Boulez, P. (2005). Regards Sur Autrui. Bourgois. Boulez, P. (2018). Music lessons. The Collège de France lectures. Faber & Faber. Canetti, E. (1989). The secret heart of the clock. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Carroll, L. (1865). Alice’s adventures in wonderland. Macmillan. Dervin, F. (2022). Interculturality in fragments: A reflexive approach. Springer Dervin, F. (2023). The paradoxes of interculturality. Epistemological questions for intercultural communication education. Routledge. Descartes, R. (1637/1986). Discourse on method. Macmillan, Collier Macmillan. Dostoyevsky, F. (1866/2001). Crime and punishment. Signet Classics. Nabokov, V. (2019). Think, write, speak. Penguin Modern Classics. Schopenhauer, A. (1974). Parerga and Polipomena (Vol. 2). Oxford University Press. Verbeek, T., & Bos, E. (2015). Search for truth by the natural light. In L. Nolan (Ed.), The Cambridge Descartes lexicon (pp. 672–673). Cambridge University Press.