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

‘Cultural encounters’ has become an increasingly popular term used to conceptualise the dynamics of cultural flows as well as the interaction between groups and/or individuals across established cultural boundaries. This special issue focuses on a particular type of cultural encounter: Encounters that are organised to manage and/or transform problems perceived to originate in or include cultural differences. Organising cultural encounters, for example, peace-building programmes or interfaith dialogue initiatives, has become a popular strategy to address conflicts and other challenges related to diversity. It is also, however, a paradoxical field of practice: on the one hand, cultural encounters are seen as the root cause of various global and/or local problems, but on the other hand organising a cultural encounter is also seen as a (potential) solution to these problems. Hence, there is a move from a diagnostic level, at which cultural differences in the abstract manifest themselves as creative, conflictual or difficult when these differences come together, to a very hands-on practical level, at which encounters between particular culturally diverse people are organised, because they are expected to contribute to the diffusion of conflicts or the managing of difficulties.

‘Organised Cultural Encounters’, then, are interventions into what Mary Louise Pratt has termed ‘contact zones’ (Pratt 1991, 2007). The concept itself has been developed in connection with a Danish research project aiming to study the practices occurring within these particular social spaces. Pratt’s conceptualisation of the contact zone has been an important inspiration in the development of our thinking in relation to organised cultural encounters, and she is also an important point of reference in several of the articles included in this special issue. According to Pratt, everyday interactions as they play out under the influence of an unequal distribution of power are seen as constitutive of difference and the drawing of boundaries. Pratt stresses that the particular historical and spatial context of any contact zone frames and mediates what takes place during an encounter. This is also the case, we argue, when encounters are set up as intervention strategies.

As indicated above, the category of organised cultural encounters draws together activities and events that are not usually seen as being of the same kind; something that the contributions to this special issue also illustrate. Using encounters as intervention strategies thus spans a broad range of social arenas (from social work, the labour market and civil society to international relations) and aims to solve an equally broad range of societal problems. In accordance with this, the research project on organised cultural encounters, along with the articles in this special issue, draws inspiration from a variety of academic literature. Among these, the emerging field within cultural geography, the ‘geography of encounter’, has delivered a particularly strong contribution in recent years (see, for instance, Valentine 2008, Askins and Pain 2011, Matejskova and Leitner 2011, Wilson 2013, 2017, Mayblin et al. 2016). The articles in this special issue by Helen Wilson and Kirsten Simonsen, Lasse Koefoed and Maja de Neergaard fall within this field, but several other articles also draw inspiration from the ‘geography of encounter’ literature. Other sources of inspiration are related to contributions from cultural studies and postcolonial studies (for example, Ahmed 2000, 2012, Pratt 2007, Fortier 2010, Voyer 2011, Nowicka and Vertovec 2014), migration studies (for example, Müller 2012, Matejskova and Antonsich 2015) and anthropology (for example, Clifford 1997, Werbner 2001, Pink 2011).

The contribution of this issue lies in the development of critical perspectives on organised cultural encounters. These perspectives contribute both conceptually and analytically towards developing our knowledge about important intervention strategies into what we consider to be pressing issues in our contemporary world.

While the articles each contribute to knowledge about particular encounters – and the societal arena within which they occur – we will use the remainder of this introduction to draw attention to what we see as important contributions to the unravelling of the phenomena that we call organised cultural encounters.

Helen Wilson opens the issue, with her conceptual investigation into what is at stake when encounters are seen as (potentially) transformative. Wilson is followed by Linda Lapina’s article on immigrant space-making in relation to an urban gardening association in Copenhagen that aims to integrate Danes (born-in-Denmark) and immigrants (born-outside-Denmark) through a deliberately mixed distribution of garden lots. Kirsten Simonsen, Lasse Koefoed and Maja de Neergaard explore the annual ‘multicultural’ festival Kulturhavn in Copenhagen harbour, where the city’s inhabitants are invited to encounter but also consume ‘the Others’. In Ilaria Bessone’s article, the focus is directed towards Italy and social circus projects that aim to empower participants from a range of marginalised groups. Randi Marselis and Zachary Whyte both take up organised encounters at museums. Marselis writes on photo projects organised for teenage refugees in Berlin, while Whyte’s article is about an art project for young asylum seekers in one of Denmark’s most prestigious art museums. In Helle Bach Riis’ article, the focus on youth is continued, through her analysis of a project called the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, which organises dialogue meetings, mostly in educational settings. Finally, Lene Bull Christiansen looks into a ‘Global Citizenship’ training programme in which Danish seniors take part in a three-week course in Tanzania. While the majority of cases are from an urban and Danish context, they cover different social arenas, different kinds of organisers and participants, and different ideas about how to facilitate transformation. Despite their differences, we argue that they are not only of the same kind because of our analytical framework, but also because they share various features.

Organised cultural encounters are – to use a theatre metaphor – scripted events: time, place, roles and interactions are more or less strictly prescribed and regulated in advance of the encounter. The scripts are also tied to the particular social arena with which the encounter is associated. That is, organised cultural encounters take place within already established professional or institutional contexts, and are thus shaped in important ways by the existing norms, discourses, roles and hierarchies that govern these arenas.

The articles attend to varying degrees to the ways in which encounter practices unfold in, and are folded into, such arenas. Riis depicts how the educational setting of the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors shapes the project in specific ways: participants are a fixed group of students and teachers, they carry with them pre-given hierarchies and social positions, they have not actively chosen to participate, and cannot disengage from the exercises without disturbing the script. Furthermore, the educational setting involves a didactic script, which the students ascribe to the activities of the project. A very different set of expectations and conditions are at play in the festival setting of Simonsen, Koefoed and de Neergaard, whose case study reflects the fleeting nature of this public space, where anyone can participate and people are free to disengage from the activities at any time.

While organisers always have a script by which they intend the organised cultural encounter to unfold, it is seldom a homogeneous entity. Intersecting and competing scripts can challenge, renegotiate or overrule each other. Furthermore, participants in the encounter may have differing understandings of which script to follow, or may actively attempt to introduce competing discourses or practices into the encounter. For example, Whyte depicts how a museum arts project functions simultaneously under the logics of the art museum and the Danish asylum administration. He argues that the asylum system affected the encounter practices of the arts project in a number of ways, some of which were not transparent to the organisers. Likewise, Christiansen depicts how the Global Citizenship course was informed by the logics of cross-cultural understanding, national identity and development discourses.

An important element of cultural encounter scripts is bringing people together in close bodily proximity in order for them to experience ‘the other’ as a real physical presence beyond stereotypical representations from afar. However, bodies do carry signs with them – signs associated with cultural differences, such as religious paraphernalia, or bodily signifiers associated with race. Some of the case studies in this volume address these visible differences directly, such as the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, who always teach in teams composed of individuals of minority background who display a mixture of visible and invisible markers of difference, which are integrated into the script of their encounter exercises. In other encounter scripts, bodily signs are left deliberately unaddressed. In the Global Citizenship course, for example, racial bodily signs were a clear marker of difference, but never addressed directly, as the focus of the script was on cultural differences.

In her study of the integration gardens in Copenhagen, Lapina explicitly focuses on the multi-layered character of scripts and practices. The most obvious script is the binary layout of the allotments, where any lot occupied by a gardener born in Denmark is surrounded by lots gardened by someone born outside Denmark. Lapina refers to this space-making in terms of ‘the integration grid’. When shifting the perspective to migrant space-making, alternative social scripts emerge, referred to by Lapina in terms of ‘the web of gardening’. The latter is ‘centered around plants and gardening practices, breaching multiple (hi)stories, locations, relationships, and materialities’. The dual attention to organisers’ scripts and practices (by the human as well as non-human actors) proves to be a fruitful analytical perspective, but in addition, it also indirectly hints at the difficulty of narrowly evaluating whether an organised cultural encounter has been successful.

The articles take different approaches with respect to how they analyse transformation and the extent to which they share the hopes attached to encounters held by organisers. The question of how we may theoretically conceive the potentiality of encounters is most obviously foregrounded in Wilson’s ‘On the paradox of organised encounter’. Based on a conceptual interrogation, Wilson argues that encounters are a particular kind of meeting: On the one hand, encounters (whether organised or not) do hold a transformative potential, but on the other they are inherently risky, since their potentiality is tied in with unpredictability. Based on these theoretical considerations, the use of encounters as intervention strategies may be analysed and perhaps evaluated with respect to a set of paradoxical conditions: first, risk cannot be designed out of encounters since this will stall the transformative potential; and, second, the transformative aim of the intervention cannot be tied to strictly specified – predictable – ends (see also Wilson 2017).

Staying with the theoretical perspectives on encounters, but moving on to a less ontological and more social-practice-oriented focus, risk comes up in a slightly different way. Resonating with Pratt’s notion of the contact zone, Simonsen, Koefoed and de Neergaard theorise encounters as messy social spaces that are located in a here-and-now event of a coming together of embodied subjects. This is, however, a here-and-now that is always mediated or framed by other encounters located in other times and spaces (see also Ahmed 2007). Turning to organised encounters, we see that these are stipulated to manage or solve challenges or problems that originate in times and spaces outside the organised encounter. Whereas the organisers need to manipulate or govern the way in which these other times and spaces fold into the here-and-now, there is always a risk that the conflict, challenge or problem may be reproduced rather than transformed in the organised encounter. This is a risk that organisers need to manage and that, judging from the articles in this special issue, they are very aware of, even if they have not always foreseen how it materialises.

As pointed out by Wilson, the risk is also differentially distributed, and this is tied to the unpredictable nature of encounters and the generally unequal positions of their participants. The shocks and ruptures, as well as the creativity, of encounters may leave some participants in more vulnerable positions than others.

Given these considerations, it is not surprising that evaluations of risk run through the articles in this special issue – as analytical preoccupations, as ingredients in the scripts of organisers, and as a dimension in the interactions occurring during the encounters being explored.

In the social circus setting analysed by Bessone, risk in a very specific and embodied sense is a means of transformation. The risky everyday lives of the excluded youngsters targeted by social circus projects are translated into hands-on bodily risk within the circus space. Risk becomes the source of creativity and change, but – since performing circus tricks is an intercorporeal affair – it is continually held in suspension with trust. Trusting the other with your own bodily safety thus becomes a way of simultaneously diffusing and sustaining risk. This, Bessone argues, is the great transformative potential of the social circus. In her article, Bessone concentrates on what goes on within the circus arena. It is an arena that, with its connections to the strange, the excluded, and the magical, provides a script that readily matches the bodies targeted by social circus projects. What happens to the structures of everyday life for the participants, as well as for others who share the same conditions of exclusion, is a question that may be raised not only in relation to social circus projects but more generally to all organised cultural encounters.

Vulnerability emerges forcefully in both the museum-related studies in this issue. In Marselis’ analysis of the Bridge the Gap projects organised in Berlin for teenage refugees, she shows how the organiser used photographs taken towards the end of WW2 of ruined German cities in order to draw parallels with the current situation in Syria. This is something the participating young refugees from Syria did not pick up. However, when a German newspaper carrying front-page photos of a ruined Aleppo was circulated by the organiser, two of the participants immediately checked their cell-phones to search for news of their home. In this case, different spaces and temporalities thus folded into each other in the here-and-now of the workshop, something that was part of the organisers’ script, but at the same time left the Syrian participants in a precarious situation that had not been taken into account. Conversely, in the museum art project with asylum-seeking minors analysed by Whyte, the organisers were very aware of the fact that they had to manage the risk of triggering traumatic memories, which might cause the participating young people further pain. This was a pain that could not be adequately handled within the context of the arts project.

This type of concern was absent from the Global Citizenship training case, depicted by Christiansen, where the focus on female genital mutilation had the direct aim of creating shock, disgust and emotional engagement. The organisers, in this case, showed little regard for the risks of added trauma associated with placing a young girl, who was in the process of fleeing a forced marriage, in front of a group of strangers and asking her to relate her traumatic circumstances. As such, the case studies in this volume represent very different ways of engaging with the risks of the encounter.

Across the articles, a recurrent theme is the ways in which the bodies of participants in organised cultural encounters become sites of transformation. By definition, bringing people together involves the mobilisation of bodies. Sometimes, as depicted above, bodies are deliberately pushed into risky zones. Sometimes, they are brought together without any deliberate attention to the function of bodily proximity. In either case, the movements of bodies in proximity often produces unexpected positionalities and unexpected social outcomes, beyond those envisioned by the organisers of these encounters.

This, finally, is a core interest of the texts in this special issue: In different ways, the articles address the practice and performativity of organised cultural encounters; and in many cases this includes the way in which practices challenge the script of such encounters in multiple ways. This focus on practices and performativity, then, captures what happens in the time-space of organised cultural encounters. In doing so, it also marks the overall approach of this special issue as an alternative to purpose-oriented evaluations of intervention strategies.

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].