Organised Cultural Encounters: Interculturality and Transformative Practices

ABSTRACT

The article introduces the special issue by presenting the concept of organised cultural encounters that are encounters organised to manage and/or transform problems perceived to originate in or include cultural differences. Inspired by Pratt’s conceptualisation of the contact zone, a critical perspective on the particular historical and spatial context of any encounter and how this context frames and mediates what takes place during an encounter is applied. While the articles of the issue present different varieties of organised cultural encounters, it is argued that they are not only of the same kind because of our analytical framework, but also because they share various features. They are scripted events tied to the particular social arena with which the encounter is associated and thus shaped in important ways by the existing norms, discourses, roles and hierarchies that govern these arenas. Furthermore, they also share the idea that the transformative potential of the encounter is inherently risky, since their potentiality is tied in with unpredictability, while risk cannot be left out because it at the same time is a precondition for transformation. The articles of the issue illustrate how script and risk come up in a different way.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural encounter
• cultural encounter
• contact
• intercultural contact
• contact zones
• cultural geography
• intercultural dialogue

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Lene Bull Christiansen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University, Denmark. She is a senior researcher in the collaborative Organised Cultural Encounters project. She holds a PhD in International Development Studies. Her research has explored the diverse fields of gender and nationalism in Zimbabwe; Danish celebrity involvement in development aid campaigning; and organised cultural encounters in volunteer tourism and music festivals.

Dr Lise Paulsen Galal is an Associate Professor in Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University, Denmark. She is the Project Leader of the collaborative project on Organised Cultural Encounters. Her research focus is interfaith dialogue, Christian-Muslim relations (in Egypt and Denmark), migration and transnationality, and religious minorities. Her work is cross-disciplinary, drawing on perspectives from anthropology, religious studies, cultural studies and sociological approaches to migration studies.

Dr Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen is an Associate Professor in Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University, Denmark. She is a senior researcher in the collaborative Organised Cultural Encounters project. She has affiliated with the recently finalised European research project Arctic Encounters (ENCARC). Her research focuses on in- and exclusion processes related to (intersections of) race, ethnicity and gender in the Nordic countries. Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on perspectives from postcolonial-, gender- and feminist studies as well as cultural studies, political theory and sociology.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Danish Council for Independent Research [DFF-1319-00093].