I was recently unlucky enough to spend a night and almost two days in hospital accident & emergency and outpatients departments. Suffice it to say that the health traumas that took me there had by then subsided; and I was well enough to look around and observe the remarkable interactions …
I recently spent a week in a German town, going to work every day to the university. Despite my huge experience of travel, I had difficulty dealing with particular unfamiliar cultural practices. There were cycle lanes on the pavements and at pedestrian crossings; whereas in Britain they’re in the road. …
The small culture diagram from the last blog can be used again and again. In my small cultures paper I compare the blue bounded part to the slice of biological life, often termed ‘a culture’, one might look at down a microscope. However, in social research, the bounded part is …
Every so often we can come up with an idea that helps us to understand other ideas that we’ve been struggling with. This is a fragment of the diagram from my small cultures paper in 1999, and then used again on page 42 in my qualitative research book. The orange …
It is easy to think that the increased attention to decolonisation is a bandwagon which feeds a neoliberal tick-box activity, and that anyway I’ve already been addressing it under the heading of deCentring. However, focusing on the concept does lead to a renewed sorting out of thinking. Then I heard …
Whenever we research or involve others in researching the intercultural it is an immense resource if we can connect with everyday experience. The intercultural is not a distant place to do with foreign lands and international travel. It is all around us all the time. Also, researching the intercultural begins …
Watching intercultural life while sitting and writing in a café. I take out my earphones to listen. At one table is an older woman waiting for two other older women queuing to get coffee. At a second table is an older man with a younger woman, perhaps his daughter. The …
Is a small culture an actual place with boundaries, or is it a shifting, transient, ‘on the go’ collection of practices and values which has just enough permanence to be recognisable? Let’s consider a small shop in the high street. Its natural boundaries might seem clear – the definable space …
There is something culturally different but familiar about the people at the next table in the café. I theorise about their background from how they dress, stand, their features and so on. Then I get a better clue when I recognise the language they are speaking and can even understand …
As I get to the last two weeks before submitting my manuscript I am back again to the first chapter. Finding it impossible to write, I decided instead to edit through all the other chapters and get them word-perfect as much as is possible. Doing this quickly enabled me to …