Chronotopes of study abroad: the cultural Other, immersion, and compartmentalized space–time

Abstract

Study abroad offers a specific configuration of encountering cultural Others: in a demarcated “abroad” space in a compartmentalized time period. Informed by Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes, this article investigates narratives of American college students who studied in Paris, France and Bilbao, Spain in June–July 2011 based on an ethnographic fieldwork of their stay. I identify two chronotopes held in tension in their narratives that reflect tenets of the discourse of immersion: of homogeneous space where every minute students spend in the host society is “local” time full of learning, which risks portraying the host society as frozen in the time of the students’ stay; and of heterogeneous space where local space–time and outsider (e.g. American students and tourists) space–time co-exist hierarchically, where students strive to show their engagement with the former. This article calls for encouraging students to examine the effects of these chronotopes on their experiences and for viewing study abroad not as an encounter of two cultures but as diverse students joining in the ongoing production of heterogeneous host society space with a compartmentalized yet expanding notion of time.

Keywords:

• chronotopes
• the cultural other
• immersion
• space
• study abroad
• time

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for those who participated in this research from Cape College and the study-abroad providers, the director of the Cape College's International Education Center that allowed me to carry out this research, Susan Hangen and Taku Suzuki for their insightful comments on the earlier draft, Jaime Taber for copyediting the drafts, and the editor, Alyson Greiner, and anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Cultural Geography for critical and constructive comments. The text's deficiencies are wholly my responsibility.

Notes

1. This discourse of immersion valorizes its outcome, “global competence”—knowledge of issues of global relevance as well as culture-specific issues, understanding toward other cultures, tolerance for ambiguity, foreign language skills, and so on (Rizvi 2000; Skelly 2009; Streitwieser 2009). However, there is no clear consensus as to its exact definition (Hunter et al. 2006). In the field of geography, moreover, research on, study abroad associates the value of immersion more with enhancement of academic goals—such as understanding the cultural context that produced a particular landscape—than with positive attitudinal change or newly gained behavioral skills (see Moline 2009; Cole and Smyth 2010). I also critique the notion of global competence elsewhere as prescriptive, imposing particular views of what is needed in the “globalizing world” with particular groups in mind (Doerr 2012a).

2. It is worth noting here that cultural Others themselves do not necessarily view all aspects of their life as equally important. Whereas study abroad students (and also the discourse of immersion, as we see later) valued the mundane daily life of the cultural Other over visiting museums and monuments that Sophie considered “touristic”, cultural Others themselves emphasized the latter for consumption by study abroad students and visitors like myself, as when Tracy's host mother suggested Tracy go on a boat ride, or when the hosting university staff gave me a ticket to a museum.