Neriko Musha Doerr

Do ‘global citizens’ need the parochial cultural other? Discourse of immersion in study abroad and learning-by-doing

The discourse of immersion is prevalent but little analysed in the field of study abroad. Linked generally to learning-by-doing, this discourse has significance for ‘intercultural education’. Based on text analyses of three guidebooks on study abroad, this article suggests four effects of the discourse of immersion: It justifies study abroad as different from, if not better than, classroom learning and tourism. It emphasises the difference between students’ home and host cultures and constructs each society as internally homogeneous. It constructs study-abroad students’ home societies as globalised and their host societies as immobile and parochial, creating a hierarchy when globalisation is valorized. Finally, it exoticises the learning-by-doing ‘teachers’ – the host people – by portraying them as parochial ‘cultural others’. This article suggests an uneven process where the call for production of ‘global citizens’ through study abroad constructs host societies as parochial and risks reproducing a colonialist hierarchy of exoticism through intercultural learning-by-doing.

Study abroad as ‘adventure’: globalist construction of host–home hierarchy and governed adventurer subjects

This article examines how the discourse of adventure, prevalent in study-abroad advertisements, constructs hierarchical relations between the study-abroad students host and home societies and interpellates the students as subjects. Through text analysis of two US-based guidebooks on study abroad, this article shows how the discourse of adventure constructs the host society as isolated, unknown, and behind the times, with an unsound educational system, and the students home society as always accessible and up to date, with a sound education system. Through its intersection with valorization of immersion and ideologies of outcome-based education, the discourse also interpellates the students as ‘adventurers’ and governs their desires regarding how to learn (through exploration) and what to gain (‘global competence’). This article offers critical analyses of the little-examined globalizing project of study abroad and its effects that go beyond mere reproduction of imperial travels.

Themed section: “Time and the Other: politics of cultural Others, study abroad/away, and going home (eventually)”

We sometimes seek to encounter cultural Others by traveling to another space for a period of time, as in study abroad, tourist travel, and ethnographic fieldwork. Knowing that our stay with the cultural Others is limited, we arrange and manage time in particular ways. This time is also mapped onto space, creating and articulating the notion of cultural Otherness in specific ways. This themed section examines a type of encounter with cultural Others that has an expiration date--study abroad/away (1)--and asks how space and time, as well as notions of experience and learning, are constructed in the process. Study abroad is an increasingly common globalist project that invites students to learn about cultural Others and experience life with them through immersion in a compartmentalized time period while abroad. The articles in this themed section investigate: (1) the ways that this compartmentalized time shapes how we imagine and relate to both cultural Others and abroad space; (2) the ways particular notions of time get mapped onto the spaces of host and home societies; and (3) emerging configurations of the relationships between notions of experience, learning, space, time, and cultural Others. More specifically, we ask: What notions of space and time coexist during study-abroad stays, and how do their contradictions, tensions, or mutual reinforcement shape our encounters with, and perceptions of, the cultural Other? What do they tell us about our views of the specific cultural Other? What types of coevalness (Fabian 1978) with cultural Others emerge through these compartmentalized encounters? If host and home societies are symbolically linked to different time periods, how does the actual encounter in study abroad bridge that gap? Is there a specific study-abroad time, that is, a particular way of experiencing time, as in epic time and novel time (Bakhtin 1981)? If so, what does it look like and what does it reveal about the notions of learning, abroad, and cultural difference? Articles in this themed section address these questions based on ethnographic research on study abroad in various settings. This introduction will next describe research on study abroad, both in general and in the field of geography, in order to situate this themed section within the existing research. It will then briefly introduce each of the articles. Study abroad and its research Globalist discourses celebrate movements of people across the globe and encounters with difference. However regimes of mobility valorize the movement of only certain, often privileged, people while restricting and rendering illicit the movement of others, often already marginalized people (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). Study abroad is a particular type of the global movement of people encouraged by many governments and directed toward educated and often privileged young adults (Barnick 2010). Study-abroad programs take various forms in terms of their aims (e.g. intercultural experience or acquisition of a foreign language, credentials or degrees) and age groups (e.g. secondary school, tertiary school, graduate school), with diverse effects. The student mobility it entails can be classed as credit mobility, which often involves short-term (i.e. several weeks to a semester) attendance of programs designed to provide academic credit that is transferable to the home program, and degree mobility, which is usually long-term (i.e. three to four years) and concerns pursuit of a degree from a university the student attends abroad (King and Findlay 2010). Study abroad is expanding with support from international organizations (e.g. the Council of Europe, which encourages recognition of qualifications across national borders; Murphy-Lejeune 2002; Wit 2009), governments (e.g. the Senator Paul Simon Study-Abroad Foundation Act of 2007 in the U.S.A., which proposed an increase in study-abroad participation), higher education institutions (e. …

Chronotopes of study abroad: the cultural Other, immersion, and compartmentalized space–time

Study abroad offers a specific configuration of encountering cultural Others: in a demarcated “abroad” space in a compartmentalized time period. Informed by Bakhtins notion of chronotopes, this article investigates narratives of American college students who studied in Paris, France and Bilbao, Spain in June–July 2011 based on an ethnographic fieldwork of their stay. I identify two chronotopes held in tension in their narratives that reflect tenets of the discourse of immersion: of homogeneous space where every minute students spend in the host society is “local” time full of learning, which risks portraying the host society as frozen in the time of the students’ stay; and of heterogeneous space where local space–time and outsider (e.g. American students and tourists) space–time co-exist hierarchically, where students strive to show their engagement with the former. This article calls for encouraging students to examine the effects of these chronotopes on their experiences and for viewing study abroad not as an encounter of two cultures but as diverse students joining in the ongoing production of heterogeneous host society space with a compartmentalized yet expanding notion of time.

‘Drop-outs’ or ‘heritage learners’? Competing mentalities of governmentality and invested meanings at a weekend Japanese language school in the USA

Based on fieldwork at a weekend Japanese language school in the USA in 2007–2009, this article illustrates the ways in which different regimes of government arise from an activity depending on meanings individuals invest in it. We examine how two students in the same classroom experienced two different regimes of government: one of a low-track class for ‘native speakers’ and the other of a heritage language class for bilingual speakers. Building on Mitchell Deans reworking of Foucault, we suggest a new approach to ethnographically studying governmentality which focuses on invested meanings.

Learner subjects in study abroad: discourse of immersion, hierarchy of experience and their subversion through situated learning

This article investigates different kinds of learner subjects that study-abroad programs produce. It is based on discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork in May–September 2011, involving three students from a US college studying abroad short term in Europe. The discourse of immersion in study abroad valorizes a learning-by-doing, individual, reflective learner subject who learns alone by gaining everyday experience outside the classroom and by reflecting on it. Some students subverted this discourse and became group and classroom-based learner subjects; nonetheless, they all became reflective learner subjects. This article proposes critical analysis of the discourse and links that reflectivity to critical pedagogy.

Race in Conflict With Heritage: “Black” Heritage Language Speaker of Japanese

Heritage language speaker is a relatively new term to denote minority language speakers who grew up in a household where the language was used or those who have a family, ancestral, or racial connection to the minority language. In research on heritage language speakers, overlap between these 2 definitions is often assumed—that is, there has been little research on the situation in which a heritage language speaker’s perceived race does not match the language often associated with the race. This article analyzes such a case by focusing on the reception in Japan of Jero, an “African American” male singer who sings Japanese songs and speaks fluent Japanese. Although his grandmother was Japanese and, thus, he is “a quarter Japanese,” he has been described as a “Black (kokujin) singer” in the Japanese media, and received much attention about his ability to sing in and speak Japanese. By analyzing the comments left on YouTube clips regarding Jero’s TV appearances, the authors urge researchers to be aware of the effects of perceived race that may overwhelm, even challenge, one’s association with the heritage language. The authors call for developing a theoretical approach, as well as pedagogies, for such situations.

Modes of Governmentality in an Online Space: A Case Study of Blog Activities in an Advanced Level Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language Classroom

This article discusses the validity of the incorporation of online communication in language education classes as a practice free of power politics. By examining blog activities in an advanced‐level Japanese‐as‐a‐Foreign‐Language classroom at a university in the USA, we show that the blog’s postings and readers’ comments evoke certain modes of governmentality – practices that shape one’s conduct – and define the space of a particular blog. This article illustrates two kinds of space created in blogs: that of language education in which ‘native speakers’ dominate ‘non‐native speakers’; and that of information exchange with less fixed relations of dominance, although participants’ behavior is regulated nonetheless. We suggest involving students in analyzing blog comments so that they can understand, and respond to, how the mode of governmentality works outside the classroom and how to transform relations of dominance that manifest themselves in online spaces.

‘Rude speech’ and ‘ignorant audience’: power of ignorance and language politics at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school

In studies of minority language education, researchers tend to base their arguments on the assumption that knowledge empowers and ignorance disempowers. In this article, however, I show two alternative dynamics of knowledge and relations of dominance by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork at a secondary school in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1997–8. First, by analyzing the ways some Pākehā (white) parents complained about Māori speeches at school by saying ‘not everyone understands it’, I argue that relations of dominance can create the legitimacy even in ignorance and work to marginalize an already repressed minority language. Second, by showing how other Pākehā accepted the speeches even though they did not understand them, I argue that an acknowledgement of ignorance can be an act of embracing the unknowable cultural others by abandoning a sense of entitlement to know. From these observations, this paper suggests a reformulation of the understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power and calls for investigating various contours of ignorance situated in specific relations of dominance.

Introduction to the Special Issue, Commitment to Alterity and Its Disavowal: The Politics of Display of Belonging

ABSTRACT As multiple ethnic/race affiliation is highlighted more and more, we lack analytical frameworks to examine diverse ways individuals navigate through them as they balance aspirations, fears, desires, pride, responsibility, and pragmatic necessities. Existing studies of identification practices offer little examination of practices of those who disavow identifying with certain ethnic/race categories except for the ones focused on a narrow field of social relations, such as the academic achievement and career success in ‘acting White.’ This introductory piece introduces the main theoretical ideas in the special issue, commitment to alterity and its disavowal, which expands the scope of analysis to a wider range of identification practices and fields of social relations. This piece also briefly describes each contributing article, which further develops these notions to analyse various contours and degrees of belonging and links to wider cultural politics and power relations.