1st Edition
Material Interculturality Making Sense with Everyday Objects
This book shows how objects can create new linguistic and cultural orders, spotlighting the ways in which everyday collections help make the world anew by rearranging its materiality and multilingual speakers make meanings without words.
Adopting an innovative approach to intercultural research drawing on work from visual and multisensorial ethnography, Ros i Solé critically reflects on what we know as interculturality by going beyond the verbal and the more-than-human to understand languages and cultures. This book expands the meaning of interculturality by seeing it as the result of the relations between people, places, and materiality. Using everyday multilingual artefacts such as clothes, cookie-cutters, LPs, books, and pens, it presents a new semiotic multilingual landscape where the intercultural is closely connected to the ground, and it is felt, rehearsed, and re-enacted through the stories and the memories contained in multilingual objects.
This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, multilingualism, language education, and applied linguistics.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Living Interculturality with Objects
Chapter 2: The Vibrancy of Language
Chapter 3: Material Semiotic Repertoires
Chapter 4: Intercultural Orders
Chapter 5: Sensing The Intercultural
Chapter 6: A Doing of Language Without Words
Chapter 7: Thinking Culture Through Affect
Chapter 8: Travelling Memories
Chapter 9: Where Is the Intercultural?
Index
Biography
Cristina Ros i Solé is Lecturer in Language, Culture and Learning in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
“By radically beginning from the inside out and the detail of the everyday and the small, Cristina Ros i Solé manages to subvert and overturn the established paradigm of language and the intercultural. Her text is relentless in making us look at everything differently as it re-interprets theory against the powerful evidence of the ordinary objects that surround us. It is timely in challenging the common discourses of difference that underpin so much of current world conflict.”
- Adrian Holliday, Professor of Applied Linguistics & Intercultural Education, Canterbury Christ Church University.“Every now and then, in a rare moment of intellectual delight, a book comes along which is dripping with abundant avenues for future exploration, which departs from the well-trodden paths and makes sense in fresh ways. I simply loved reading this book for its elegance and for the way it made my heart-race with excitement at the potential for teaching and research through embodied world-making. Whilst the UNESCO Chair has long explored and devised such work, this is a book I wish I’d written myself, a wonderful adventure and one I am delighted to read, recommend, and to treasure what I know will become a well-loved copy.”
- Alison Phipps, Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies, UNESCO Chair: Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts, University of Glasgow.
“Material Interculturality is a mature piece of work that breaks new ground in intercultural studies, both conceptually and methodologically, ending with Ros i Solé’s call for intercultural research that listens to and hears the historical, the sensory and the affective in material objects. It is a ground-breaking and paradigm-setting monograph of interest to scholars carrying out research at the crossroads of language, communication and culture.”
- David Block, Honorary Professor of Sociolinguistics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
