Panel 1.1 – chair Roselinde Supheert
Dutch converts to Islam in interwar Europe: Mediators of Muslim Culture and Religion
– Amr Ryad (Onderzoeksinstituut voor Filosofie en Religiewetenschap, Utrecht)
European Muslim converts to Islam played prominent trans-local, as well as transnational and transcultural roles in the development of modern Islamic thought in that era. Their new link with Islam should be seen as ingrained in the zeitgeist that inspired a few rich, mostly well-educated Europeans to adopt Islam as a new faith as a result of their search for spiritual pathways beyond their original culture and beliefs. In fact, the conversion of Dutchmen in the Dutch East Indies happened sporadically, but it occurred very rarely in the Netherlands itself. The talk will focus on the role of Charles van Beetem (1879-1938) and Dr. P.H. van der Hoog (1888–1957), two Dutch converts to Islam, in the cross-border activities that highlight significant historical aspects of connections across Dutch and Muslim religious and cultural boundaries. Their discovery of Islam conveyed a sense of “passing” and “surpassing” that resulted from their access to western power and knowledge. How did they play their roles in the indigenization of Muslim practices, thoughts, and discourses on Dutch soil?
Peer-feedback in the light of diversity: Challenges and practices based on students’ mobility at university level
– Emmanuelle Le Pichon-Vorstman, Ineke van den Berg, Olivier Sécardin, Roselinde Supheert, Luisa Meroni, Carlo Giordano, Michèle Ammouche-Kremers, Christa van Mourik (UiL-OTS / ICON, Utrecht)
Studying abroad is essential to experience foreign cultures, learn foreign languages and get better employment opportunities. At present and somewhat surprisingly, opportunities for such interactions among students when being abroad are limited and difficult. Additionally, optimal adaptation of local academic programs has proven challenging. Such adaptation should take into account language levels, academic levels, and cultural contents of the programs in order to meet the rich diversity of linguistic and cultural backgrounds that students are carrying with them.
Given these circumstances, one could argue that thus far the higher education system has not been able to provide students and staff with linguistic, cultural and methodological support to foster intercultural and interlingual communication opportunities generated by the exchange programs (Herzog-Punzenberger, Le Pichon-Vorstman & Siarova, 2017:23).
One approach towards supporting interactions between local and international students is the utilization of peer-feedback. The appeal of this program is that three goals can be achieved in parallel; 1) the language student can improve his/her foreign language level with the valuable input of a native speaker while 2) reducing the overall required teaching time of teaching staff and 3) stimulating interactions between international and local students, or, to put it differently, creating a plurilingual community of practice.
In this presentation, based on answers of students and tutors to questionnaires collected between 2012 and 2017, we will discuss the potential implication of the results of this study for the development of intercultural competence in students and tutors and their relevance to our understanding of the role of individual encounters in developing the learning of distancing with cultural schemes and ethnocentric attitudes in students and in tutors.
Language and Identity: Dutch in Indonesia
– Martin Everaert, Anne-France Pinget (UiL-OTS, Utrecht)
Last year we[1] started a project studying the Dutch acquired by Indonesian state citizens at a very early age, in a period in which Dutch was an official language in Indonesia (so, before 1945). The group is quite diverse, some could be called early bilinguals.
A substantial group of Indonesians used Dutch in the family situation. Often, the parents (themselves using Dutch as a first/second language) decided to use Dutch at home to increase the social opportunities of their children. Before the 2nd World War the language of the ‘better’ schools was Dutch, giving (Indonesian) students greater opportunities for further training in the Netherlands, or to work for the Dutch government. Outside the family ‘Bahasa Indonesia’ was the standard language; we are talking about people who have been raised bilingual. We know that immediately after the 2nd World War (1945-1949) the use of Dutch strongly decreased, especially in education. When the Netherlands recognized Indonesian independence in 1949 the use of Dutch virtually ended.
Our principle aim, for the moment, is documenting the language use of this 75+-group; the gathered material will later be used for studying language contact, language loss. But from the first interviews (around 20-30) we conducted over the past two years, we also gradually get a better picture under which conditions Dutch was used back then, how that changed during the Japanese occupation, freedom struggle after the 2nd world war, why people are still using it nowadays, how Dutch as a family language disappeared, etc. We will report on our initial findings on this point, sketching a picture how using Dutch formed part of their identity in a (post-)colonial society.
[1] The project was initiated by Martin Everaert, Anne-France Pinget, Hans Van de Velde. Other researchers so far involved: Margot van den Berg, Dorien Theuns, Maaike van Naerssen.
Panel 2.1 – chair Gandolfo Cascio
(Re)defining “diversity” for intercultural education
– Debbie Cole (UiL-OTS / ICON, Utrecht)
Our continued use of the concept of “diversity” and more recently, “super diversity” (Vertovek, in press), to refer to stereotyped group-level differences is at odds with well-articulated theories about human identity behaviors in language (Agha 2007; Abdallah-Pretceille 2006). In this talk, I compare concepts of diversity used in public discourse in English and Bahasa Indonesia to academic uses of diversity in contemporary scholarship. I argue that recent sociolinguistic and anthropological theories of identity and language use call for a diversity concept that contradicts contemporary usages in both scholarly and non-scholarly English.
Drawing from research on how ethno linguistic identity is performed and discussed in Indonesia, I propose an alternative concept of diversity based on individual practices rather than on group-level categorizations.
Participants will be invited to consider whether the continued use of our conventionalized definitions of “diversity” can adequately serve our research and teaching goals or whether a different concept should be coined and used to more accurately refer to performances of varied personae and ways of speaking within different contexts. The implications of different definitions of diversity for training students in intercultural communication studies will be central to this discussion.
Optimal Communication across languages
– Henriëtte de Swart (UiL-OTS, Utrecht)
Successful communication depends on at least three factors: knowledge of a shared code, knowledge of a shared general background against which the code is interpreted, and cooperative behaviour of speaker and hearer. A better grip on the structure and meaning of words and grammatical constructions across languages can help to understand how language mediates between mind, culture, and participants in a conversation. Words are the bearers of cultural meaning, and provide the concepts we use to organize the world. Grammar does not only glue words together in more complex conceptual structures, it also anchors these concepts to specific individuals and times. By linking concepts to who/what/when, grammar frames the way we perceive the external world. One way we can investigate the way language molds events is to study translations, for instance the translations made of discussions in the European Parliament, the subtitles of foreign movies, or internationally successful novels that appear in various languages. If the target language frames reality in a different way from the source language, the translator needs to unpack and rewrap the message. This can lead the translator to add information, to leaving things out, or to spread information over different parts of the sentence. In this talk, we will discuss a number of examples, and study their impact for strategies that speakers and hearers use to optimize communication.
Style and rhetoric in tourist communication: the case of Italy and the Netherlands
– Gandolfo Cascio (ICON, Utrecht)
During the last ten centuries, Italy has been the favorite destination of many types of visitors: firstly the pilgrims who travelled in order to reach holy sites; then the humanists and the scions who wished to complete their education; and, in our-days, the common tourist. In my talk, after a short historical overview and some statistics, I will concentrate on the contemporary age and will try to illustrate some stylistic and rhetorical aspects of the intercultural discourse between Italians and the Dutch.
Panel 3.1 – chair Olivier Sécardin
Memories, histories and different languages: oral history and intercultural communication
– Berteke Waaldijk (ICON, Utrecht)
Oral history projects cross linguistic borders. I will discuss my involvement as and advisor in three oral history projects (PhD projects) where the language of the interviews was not a language I could speak or read: Hungarian Chinese and Albanian. What are the risks, the challenges and the rewards of such intercultural and multilingual research projects? I will argue that working between different languages is not only possible, but brings results that go beyond the one-language research.
Agárdi, Izabella. On the Verge of History: Rupture and Continuity in Women’s Life Narratives from Hungary, Romania and Serbia. Diss. Utrecht University, 2013.
Huang, S. Y. Being a Mother in a Strange Land: Motherhood Practices Experiences of Chinese Migrant Women in the Netherlands. Diss. Utrecht University, 2015.
Arala Gruda, Lone mothers and welfare policies : conditions, experiences, expectations 1944-2013 Diss. Utrecht University, 2015
The Role of the Author as Intercultural Mediator: the example of the French Antilles
– Olivier Sécardin (ICON, Utrecht)
This contribution questions the role of “cultural mediator” held by several French-speaking Antillean authors including Chamoiseau, Confiant, Bernabé and Laferrière. The Caribbean provided a very specific field for the history of cultural transfer, from the days of slave trade, through the crossover experiences of “Negritude” and the “Harlem Renaissance” and up to modern-day “world literature”.
Confronting the colonial legacy in Caribbean education: How community-based sociolinguistic research can contribute to positive changes in language planning and language policy
– Ellen-Petra Kester (UiL-OTS, Utrecht)
In this paper, we give a concrete example of how sociolinguistic research utilizing a community-based approach can successfully mobilize stakeholders to commit to the formulation and implementation of major changes in language policy and planning. We will focus on the results of a year-long research project on language and education in St. Eustatius, one of the islands of the Dutch Caribbean.
Most of the students on the English-lexifier Creole-speaking island of St. Eustatius find themselves in a situation where Dutch is used as the language of instruction, even though the overwhelming majority of them almost never encounter written or spoken Dutch outside of the classroom. The use of Dutch as a language of instruction has limited the numbers of students who manage to succeed at school to a small minority. The rest of the students are left behind.
In order to help find solutions to this problem, our research group was approached by the educational authorities in both St. Eustatius and the European Netherlands. As a condition for accepting the task, we insisted on carrying out a community-based sociolinguistic study that would actively involve all of the stakeholders in the education system on the island in the process of identifying, analyzing, and finding solutions to the problem. We will present the results of this study, which were finalized, accepted, and presented to the stakeholders in January of 2014. It appears that the community-based multi-strategy approach adopted in this study has made it possible to recast the debate around language in education on the island in more scientifically grounded and less polemical terms, thereby facilitating a process of community mobilization to better meet the educational needs of Statian students.
Panel 4.1 – chair Jan ten Thije
Italy and the intercultural habitus: examples of creativity and resilience
– Philiep Bossier (ICON, Utrecht)
In many fields of cultural life in Italy, intercultural practice is considered as an evidence. It is indeed not a coincidence that most of the specific Italian models of new culture circulating in Europe ever since late Medieval and early Renaissance history are both international and intercultural: the creation of university, the foundation of humanism, the invention of the autonomous city-state. Furthermore, most of the cultural patterns immediately linked to this basic structures will contribute to the European codification of daily life: civilized behavior, fashion, garden design, love poetry and the exchange of ideas during civic conversation. As a consequence creativity is part of everyday life and considered as an essential symbol of freedom in human contact. In periods of crisis and war, this basis of enduring intercultural habitus will give people hope to restart and to express constant resilience in life.
What is the language of the euregio rhine-meuse-north?
– Daan Hovens (ITEM, Maastricht)
This presentation deals with multilingualism and cross-border integration in the Dutch-German “euregio rhine-meuse-north.”[1] By means of a survey, I explored how well prepared young people in this area are for living in an integrated Euroregion.
The survey included 60 pupils from a Dutch secondary school, and 60 pupils from a German secondary school. The distance between these two schools is a mere six kilometres. All pupils in my survey are about 15-16 years old, and all are in the final stage of their vocationally oriented secondary school education. This means that they have all already decided which language(s) they want to learn at school, and that they are all in the process of making important decisions about their future study and/or career.
Some results of my survey research are rather alarming. Neither the Dutch nor the German pupils express particularly positive attitudes towards each other’s national language and the idea of learning it. Neither of the groups tends to answer that they can imagine themselves living, working or studying on the other side of the border. And neither of the groups seems to be aware about euroregional integration processes in their border area.
As English appears to be the only language that all pupils in my survey are learning, and the only language that most pupils think of in positive terms, English as a lingua franca might turn out to be the preferred mode of cross-border communication for this generation. However, my results indicate the possibility of certain alternative scenarios as well, including the use of receptive multilingualism (involving Dutch, German and local dialects).
[1] The official name of this particular Euroregion in English is “euregio”, and it is written with small letters.
Representing the other in Dutch news media
– Emmeline Besamusca and Jan ten Thije (UiL-OTS, Utrecht)
A number of MA students of Intercultural Communication in Utrecht conducted thesis research into the representation of a particular ‘other’ in news media (e.g. Muslims in Dutch press). Some chose a diachronic comparison (e.g. how the representation of Poland in Dutch press changed between 1989 and 2014), others focused on representation in different cultural contexts (e.g. refugees in Dutch and German newspapers), or on comparing different ‘others’ within one cultural context (e.g. Israeli’s and Palestinians in Dutch news).
Research into the representation of other cultures and national characters is well established in imagology (cf. Beller & Leerssen 2007), which has its roots in comparative literature and methodologically developed from there. Yet, the thesis projects mentioned adopted a functional pragmatic analysis of a text corpus to research representations of the ‘other’. In order to bring to light the ‘knowledge structures’ (Ehlich & Rehbein 1993) in the use of language in news media, all (groups of) words attributing to particular reference words were assembled, and consequently categorized into meaningful clustered ‘knowledge structures’.
In this contribution, we will discuss this method of analysis as a means of researching hetero-images, and consider some its strengths and weaknesses.
References
- Beller, Manfred & Joep Leerssen (eds.) (2007). Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
- Ehlich, Konrad (1998). Vorurteile, Vor-Urteile, Wissenstypen, mentale und diskursive Strukturen. In: Margot Heinemann (Hrsg.), Sprachliche und soziale Stereotype. Frankfurt a.M. etc.: Peter Lang (11-24).
- Lukács, Gyöngyvér, László Marácz & Jan D. ten Thije (2013). Het Nederlandse Hongarije-beeld in de twintigste eeuw in historisch perspectief. In: Internationale Neerlandistiek 51: 2, 139-157.
- Luyendijk, Joris (2007). Het zijn net mensen. Beelden uit het Midden-Oosten. Amsterdam: Podium.
- Redder, Angelika (1995). “Stereotyp” – eine sprachwissenschaftliche Kritik. In: Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache 21 (1995), 311-329.