‘I already have a culture.’ Negotiating competing grand and personal narratives in interview conversations with new study abroad arrivals

ABSTRACT

In an interview with a postgraduate student about her intercultural experience of recently arriving for study abroad, it was found that the two researchers and the student were engaged in a mutual exploration of cultural identity. The interview events became conversational and took the form of small culture formation on the go in which each participant employed diverse narratives to project, make sense of and negotiate expression of cultural identity. The student shifted between personal narratives drawn from her particular cultural trajectories and splintered from grand narratives of nation and global positioning, between non-essentialist threads and essentialist blocks. The researchers learned from her and intervened to facilitate shifts to non-essentialist threads, drawing on narratives from their own personal cultural trajectories, but sometimes also falling into essentialist blocks splintered from grand narratives. The roles of ideology and competing essentialist and non-essentialist discourses of culture were implicit in these negotiations, as were the personal agency of the student as she responded to the constraining conflicts, structures and hierarchies encountered through the events she spoke about. Rather than providing a picture of intercultural assimilation and integration, interculturality is revealed as a hesitant and searching negotiation, sometimes of vulnerability, wrong-footedness and occasional assault on identity.

In un’intervista con una studentessa laureata, sulla sua esperienza interculturale di studio all’estero, è possibile osservare il coinvolgimento dei due ricercatori, così come dell’intervistata, in una mutua esplorazione dell’identità culturale. L’evento dell’intervista assume un tratto conversazionale, promuovendo la formazione di una small culture in movimento nella quale ogni partecipante impiega differenti narrazioni per proiettare, dare senso e negoziare espressioni di identità culturale. La studentessa si muove tra narrazioni personali modellate sulla base delle sue specifiche traiettorie culturali e scheggiate dalle grandi narrazioni relative alla nazione e al posizionamento globale, tra fili non essenzialisti e blocchi essenzialisti. I ricercatori apprendono da lei e intervengono per facilitare gli spostamenti verso fili non-essenzialisti, utilizzando a loro volta narrazioni provenienti dalle loro personali traiettorie culturali, ma cadendo talvolta loro stessi in blocchi essenzialisti che hanno la loro origine nelle grandi narrazioni. I ruoli dell’ideologia e dei discorsi essenzialista e non essenzialista relativi alla cultura, in conflitto tra loro, sono impliciti in queste negoziazioni, così come l’agency personale della studentessa che risponde attraverso gli eventi che racconta a elementi vincolanti quali conflitti, strutture e gerarchie. Invece di presentare una fotografia di assimilazione e integrazione interculturale, il presente articolo propone un’idea di intercultura come negoziazione esitante e minuziosa, talvolta caratterizzata da vulnerabilità, passi falsi e occasionali assalti identitari.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural communication
• narratives
• interviews
• discourse
• negotiation
• cultural identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Canterbury Christ Church University, where he supervises doctoral research in the critical sociology of language education and intercultural communication. The first half of his career was spent in Iran, Syria and Egypt as a curriculum developer.

Sara Amadasi received her doctorate in Social Sciences at the University of Padova. She conducted research on the topic of transnational migrations in Sénégal for her Master degree and she had wide experience in the teaching of Italian as second language for children with migration background. Her research interests include intercultural communication and the study of children involved in transnational journeys.

Notes

1 Essentialism represents ‘people's individual behaviour as entirely defined and constrained by the cultures in which they live so that the stereotype becomes the essence of who they are’ (Holliday, 2011, p. 4).

2 ‘Host mother’ or ‘father’ are the common terms used by students, usually from other countries, for the female and male proprietors of ‘host family’ homes in which they are lodging.

3 For the purpose of anonymity, throughout the transcript extracts, we have replaced the names of the two ethnic groups to which S refers with X and Y.