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 …
I have to submit my book to the publisher at the end of June. So now I need to edit it through to make it ready to be read. The huge task is not to waste this opportunity, having done all this work, to make sure that it really says …