Flexing Interculturality

This book continues the two scholars’ endeavours for opening up more spaces for alternative perspectives, analyses and praxis in interculturality.

The main text features fragments that bear relevance to a wide range of topics including education, politics, personal experiences, social realities, hierarchies, self-critique, language and locus of enunciation. The book takes a step forward by using fragments as an alternative way of doing research and writing scholarship. The premise here is that fragments are human and they reflect our fleeting, inconsistent and unsystematic production of knowledge that today’s scholarship has presented to be linear, structured and aligned. The authors draw on fragments to make their points as forcefully as possible by constructing sentences that destabilize themselves and readers to consider other paths and perspectives. That is, writing otherwise may propel thinking otherwise since the very bases, upon which we push our insights to mould through and by, are shaken and ultimately transcended. The chapters include questions with (temporary) answers as an attempt to induce readers to think for themselves and to move beyond what this book has to offer.

This book will be a great read to scholars and students in the field of interculturality, education and sociology. The authors hope that this book will be seen as a genuine example of de-linking from mainstream writing and thinking conventions about interculturality in communication and education without compromising epistemic depth and nuance.

Hamza R'boul is a research assistant professor in the Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. His research interests include intercultural education, (higher) education in the Global South, decolonial endeavours in education, cultural politics of language teaching and postcoloniality. His books include Intercultural Communication Education and Research: Reenvisioning Fundamental Notions (Routledge, 2023, with Dervin), and Postcolonial Challenges to Theory and Practice in ELT and TESOL: Geopolitics of Knowledge and Epistemologies of the South (Routledge, 2023).

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. Exploring the politics of interculturality within and beyond the 'canon' of intercultural communication education research has been one of Dervin's idées fixes in his work over the past 20 years. He has widely published over 170 articles and 80 books in different languages on identity, interculturality and mobility/migration. His latest books published with Routledge also include The Paradoxes of Interculturality and Communicating around Interculturality in Research and Education.