Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich

Cultural Transfer in University Teaching: Academic Migrant Perspectives from Aotearoa/New Zealand

Although the Higher Education market is a global one, there are marked differences in the quality and challenges of migration. Being a global scholar but remaining inside the global English speaking tertiary education system can be challenging but it seems even more difficult when changing countries and Universities also means teaching and publishing in a different language. This chapter will explore such challenges by looking at the different perceptions (Continental European versus British influenced education system) of what University is and should be. The shift towards seeing higher education as a tradable commodity is an international phenomena, but the actual processes of re-structuring are going on at very different paces. Therefore academic migrants will almost certainly not just change countries and campuses but also enter a new version of the ‘modern’ University. Accordingly I will discuss issues around questions migrants and Universities should have in mind but often do not. Examples of such questions are the notions to which degree students are seen as clients, the tension between the locality of campus life and the multinational academic faculty, the variations in the concept of research-lead teaching, different national school systems, different ways of learning. Most examples will be drawn from migrant academics working at New Zealand Universities; New Zealand has one of the highest percentages of multinational faculty in the world.

Writing the ethnographic story: Constructing narrative out of narratives

My first childhood memories circle around listening to stories, being intensely interested in people and their storytelling. Having grown up in a German-Silesian refugee family network meant that storytelling was part of the daily life, especially weekends. The old Heimat, now in Poland, behind the iron curtain, was constantly invoked when members of our Silesian family would visit each other for Sunday afternoon coffee and cake sessions. I used to sit on a footstool listening to stories about the town we all came from, stories about the war, grief, hunger, angst, violence. But also just stories about the family, the ones who died, where relatives and friends had ended up after the war, how difficult and humiliating it was to be the unwelcome stranger in the West German town in which I was born. I like stories, I am used to listening and, as a child, I grew into a listener who sat at the margins; a position I am still comfortable with and hence I have a certain feeling of unease with conventional interview situations.

National Socialism in Oceania: critical evaluations of its effect and aftermath. Edited by Emily Turner-Graham and Christine Winter

reliable, and persuasive’ (p. ix). Iguchi returns the compliment in the ‘Preface to the English Edition’, thanking Iriye for ‘invaluable guidance’ (p. xiii). In the text, Iguchi singles out Iriye’s work for favorable comment (pp. 62–63). Such generosity contrasts with treatment accorded others. Iguchi dismisses not only the controversial books, but also serious memoirs by fellow diplomats Togo Fumihiko and Kase Toshikazu (p. 61). He refrains from acknowledging a debt to the eminent historian of Japanese–American relations Robert Butow. Butow discovered in the Foreign Ministry Archives a document that casts new light on the final memorandum. Despite the manifest significance of this find, Butow’s name appears nowhere in text of Pearl Harbor Demystified. Butow’s discovery is unobtrusively noted and discreetly diminished in a footnote (p. 306 n. 15). Pearl Harbor Demystified is generally reliable, though at times it indulges in snap judgments, commits factual errors, and selectively exaggerates wartime travails. Franklin Roosevelt is a ‘crafty domestic politician’ (p. 118). State Department leaders evince an ‘overly sympathetic attitude toward the territorial integrity of China’ (p. 86). It reverses the chronology two major milestones of World War II. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR is dated 1940 (p. 93), a year before it was launched; his planned invasion of England is dated 1941 (p. 50) the year after it was abandoned. West Coast evacuees who opted for repatriation to Japan had ‘their possessions reduced to the clothes on their backs’ (p. 19). A photograph of well-dressed Iguchi family members leaving an elegant Washington residence to board a bus for the Homestead, a well-appointed resort in Hot Springs, West Virginia, ‘made us look rather like Jews headed for a Nazi concentration camp’ (p. 9). Pearl Harbor Demystified at times reads like an exculpatory brief motivated by filial loyalty. The author bristles at any suggestion that his father might share responsibility for the memorandum’s delayed delivery and that the embassy’s first secretary might have been playing golf on the morning of 7 December: ‘Even now these distortions fill me with indignation’ (p. 5). Conversely, he excoriates Foreign Ministry officials who, in his view, surreptitiously accommodated the military, betrayed colleagues at the embassy in Washington, penned ‘self-serving’ memoirs (p. 60), and went ‘to their graves without speaking the truth’ (p. 271). Pearl Harbor Demystified does not ‘finally bring an end to the myth surrounding Pearl Harbor’ (p. 272), but it manages to turn diplomatic history into grist for courtroom drama.

Reiseberichte als Quelle der ErzählforschungAm Beispiel schlesischer Quellen

„Von dort hatten schon dem Kinde Rübezahls Mährchen geklungen, in jenen Fernen webte eine ahnungsreiche Fabelwelt, von dort strahlten die Naturwunder in die C a m e r a O b s c u r a der Phantasie, von dort ertönten wundersame Weisen, schimmerten bunte Trachten. Es waren für mich die ungekannten Gletscher, nach denen ich verlangte mit heisserer Sehnsucht, als der Schweizer nach seinen Gekannten. [...] Und wenn ich dahin wandelte durch die Nacht des Föhrenwaldes, am brausenden, singenden Waldstrom, dann flüsterte mir der Gott des Berges holde Mährchen, ernst und heiter, zu [...] *.