Positionality and reflexive interaction: a critical internationalist cultural studies approach to intercultural collaboration

Abstract

Research was conducted with fashion media students exploring the place of formal curriculum in structuring interaction in collaborative group work, and in furnishing possibilities for mediative intervention as curriculum internationalisation. Using observations, interviews, questionnaires and a Frierean intervention, it drew on critical internationalist cultural studies perspectives to help students form a contextualised and critically positioned understanding of intercultural competences as a means to attain reflexive control over interaction patterns for inclusivity. Students identified both intellectual stimulation and intercultural communicative development from engaging in the joint project of identifying and negotiating the very different responsibilities and possibilities accompanying their various positions relatively to locally dominant norms within subject area – including the responsibility to learn critically to question those norms themselves. Intercultural competences for a critical, globally oriented citizenship were found to be best approached not, as is typical, as abstract universals, but as concretely contextualised, discipline specific and position dependent.

Keywords:

• Internationalisation of the curriculum
• intercultural competences
• global citizenship
• cultural studies
• fashion media
• critical pedagogy
• positionality