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Teaching about the Holocaust presents one of the most formidable challenges teachers face. Meaningful Encounters is Paula Ressler and Becca Chase’s contribution to the efforts of those educators who wish to meet this challenge more knowledgeably and effectively. It tells the story of a unique, inquiry-based English teacher education course focused on Holocaust literature from several genres that integrated literacy pedagogies and literary criticism with historical, philosophical, psychological, and political theories and contexts. The book involves the reader in the complicated tangle of Holocaust education, critically illuminating how difficult this work is, but also demonstrating how teachers can introduce their students responsibly and ethically to this perennially relevant body of literature. The authors offer no facile solutions to the obstacles and pitfalls inherent in teaching this literature. They raise questions, pose problems, consider and analyze how participants responded to issues that emerged, and suggest alternative approaches. The authors recount the students’ and teacher’s unsettling and enlightening experiences, failures, and successes. By following along, preservice educators will be able to conceptualize, discuss, and practice, and inservice teachers and teacher educators rethink, how to teach Holocaust and other literatures about genocide and mass atrocities in culturally relevant and meaningful ways today.
Acts of cross-cultural reading have ethical consequences. In Haunting Encounters, Joanne Lipson Freed traces the narrative strategies through which certain works of fiction forge connections with their readers across boundaries of difference. Freed uses the idea of haunting—an intense, temporary, and transformative encounter that defies rational understanding—as a metaphor for the kinds of ethical relationships that such works cultivate with their readers across boundaries of difference. Freed points out how such works as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things strike a delicate balance between empathy and alterity. Their engaging narratives, Freed argues, bring unfamiliar characters and distant settings to life for readers who encounter them as "other," but they also highlight the limits of fiction, holding in check the impulse to colonize another's experience with one's own. Haunting Encounters is a sensitive and perceptive application of theory to real-world concerns. It draws together the fields of postcolonial fiction and narrative ethics and suggests original modes of engagement between readers and books that promise new ways of looking at the world.
Setting up cultural encounters is a widespread intervention strategy employed to diffuse conflicts and manage difficulties related to diversity. These organised cultural encounters bring together people of different backgrounds in order to promote peaceful coexistence and inclusion. These transformative aims relate to the participants but are often also expected to spill over into the society, community or context addressed by the encounter. As a category, ‘Organised Cultural Encounters’ draws together a variety of activities and events such as multicultural festivals, dialogue initiatives, diversity training and inclusion projects – activities that are generally not considered to be of the same kind. Most of the existing literature on these types of encounters is instrumental and has an overall emphasis on evaluations in terms of outcome or success rate. This book goes beyond evaluations, and the contributors pose and debate theoretical and methodological questions and analyse the practices and performativities of particular encounters. Taken together, it makes an important contribution to the theorisation and analysis of intercultural relations and negotiations. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.
This book explores a particular genre of intervention into cultural difference, used across the globe. Organised cultural encounters is an umbrella concept referring to face-to-face encounters that are organised across a wide variety of social arenas in order to manage and/or transform problems perceived to stem from cultural difference. The authors base their focus on empirical contexts either located in Denmark or related to a Danish organisation, investigating interfaith work, training sessions in diversity management, volunteer tourism, a youth diversity project called the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, and a community dance project. Through different theoretical approaches, and careful analyses of the micro-level practices occurring within the time-space of specific encounters, Galal and Hvenegård-Lassen demonstrate how both the interactions and their outcomes are considerably more complex – and contradictory – than evaluative and instrumental accounts of success or failure may capture. This book will provide a valuable resource for practitioners and scholars of intercultural relations working in the fields of cultural geography, anthropology, cultural studies, and migration studies.
Whether as excavators and re-enactors, or co-organising research campaigns and outreach activities, the participation of the general public in archaeology has become a well-represented practice, but the impact remains underexplored. Evaluating participation can influence fieldwork practice and enrich the academic discussion on public archaeology.
A Century of Encounters analyzes Arab, American, and European literary depictions of self and other as they interact with each other in Arab North Africa throughout the twentieth century and introduces the trope of the encounter as a lens through which to read contemporary world literature comparatively. A focus on the transnational encounter allows for the in-depth study of constructions of gender, race, and national identities both for the self and the other in order to answer the seemingly simple questions: What makes up different encounters in the twentieth century, and how can we facilitate a productive and positive encounter between these groups? This book illustrates connections between literary texts that have hitherto been overlooked and establishes an intertextual genealogy of transcultural encounters throughout the twentieth century that coalesce around the themes of desire, family, and travel. In its literary analysis, A Century of Encounters aims to facilitate a better understanding of other cultures in general and contribute to constructive cross-cultural interactions between the United States, Europe, and Arab North Africa in particular.
Festivals and events are of enormous significance to many communities around the world. They can have historic, religious, cultural and traditional significance, and they are also important parts of community building. This book focuses on these small-scale, non-metropolitan events (i.e. rural, regional and peri-urban) to explore the complex relationships between place, community and identity and the ways in which festival events bring these into being. By drawing on the notion of ‘encounter’, this book examines how festivals and events can be seen primarily as spaces where different people meet. This notion of encounter helps us to understand how conviviality and social relations are developed, and what this then means in terms of social cohesion and social justice. It also draws on current theoretical and methodological approaches that can tell us about the role of festivals in contemporary life, and it includes the sensual approach, the geographies of affect and emotion, the notion of the right to the city and nonrepresentation theory. The book brings together these perspectives and examines their relevance in the community events context, identifying and discussing theoretical frameworks drawn from (including but not limited to) human geography, sociology, anthropology, leisure studies and urban planning, as well as tourism and event studies. For these reasons, Festival Encounters will be a valuable read for students and academics working on a wide range of disciplines.
A revolution is underway. For the first time in human history, we are at the cusp of experiencing contact with nonhuman life-forms of all kinds due to technological innovations and research into the experiences of people at the forefront of this development. In Encounters, author D.W. Pasulka takes readers to the forefront of this revolution, sharing the work of experts across a spectrum of fields who are working to connect humanity with unknown life-forms. Most of us have visions of nonhuman encounters that are shaped far more by Hollywood than they are informed by the current research. Encounters rewrites our visions of nonhuman species by featuring the work and stories of contemporary innovators who are rethinking our most basic assumptions about life and its manifestations beyond our experience. The author of American Cosmic, D.W. Pasulka is a professor of religion at UNC, Wilmington; her work as a scholar has given her the tools to systematically examine data that exceeds rational categories—exactly the skillset needed to parse the world of UFOs, angels, AI, dreams, and other dimensions, which exist at the edges of human understanding. Encounters is a riveting exploration of the leading science of nonhuman life and a bold glimpse of the future of humanity in a universe where we are far from alone.
The pursuit of excellent compassionate care should be at the heart of all practice. However, it can be challenging for practitioners to deliver this day after day in a context of tight budgets and targets, which can erode the passion with which they entered their professions. Supporting Compassionate Healthcare Practice encourages healthcare professionals to look after themselves in order to maintain and develop their compassionate practice. This book considers how stress management, resilience, wellbeing and positivity can help all health professionals remain close to the values, attitudes and attributes that brought them into the caring professions. It presents and critiques the evidence base for these key concepts, bringing them to life with numerous case studies and examples, and develops a framework - RESPECT - for practice. This innovative volume is essential reading for all healthcare students, academics and professionals interested in improving both the quality of care and the wellbeing of patients and practitioners alike.
Every day we share encounters with others as we inhabit the space around us. In offering insights and knowledge on this increasingly important topic, this book introduces a range of empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of shared encounters. It highlights the multifaceted nature of collective experience and provides a deeper understanding of the nature and value of shared encounters in everyday life. Divided into four sections, each section comprises a set of chapters on a different topic and is introduced by a key author in the field who provides an overview of the content. The book itself is introduced by Paul Dourish, who sets the theme of shared encounters in the context of technological and social change over the last fifteen years. The four sections that follow consider the characteristics of shared encounters and describe how they can be supported in different settings: the first section, introduced by Barry Brown, looks at shared experiences. George Roussos, in the second section, presents playful encounters. Malcolm McCulloch introduces the section on spatial settings and – last but not least – Elizabeth Churchill previews the topic of social glue. The individual chapters that accompany each part offer particular perspectives on the main topic and provide detailed insights from the author’s own research background. A valuable reference for anyone designing ubiquitous media, mobile social software and LBS applications, this volume will also be useful to researchers, students and practitioners in fields ranging from computer science to urban studies.