Susan Trevaskes

Developing intercultural communication skills through intergroup interaction

The call to internationalise the curriculum has become firmly ensconced in Australian educational discourse and university mission statements. Yet, scholars in this area agree that there are few concrete examples of how educators actually set about internationalising the curriculum in a tangible and easily replicable way. This paper adopts a definition of internationalisation of the curriculum which takes into account the experiential aspects of the process of becoming an intercultural communicator. The goal of internationalising the curriculum responds to the recognition that students need to develop a degree of intercultural competence in order to function efficiently in an increasingly globalised environment. Both international and local students need to be partners in this process, and the cultural diversity of contemporary universities in the west is an ideal setting to foster the ability to mediate across cultures. In this paper, we explore some practical ways in which key issues in intercultural communication can be implemented into university curricula through programmes that promote interaction across groups. La llamada a internacionalizar el currículo se encuentra firmemente afianzada en el discurso académico y en las declaraciones de las universidades australianas. Sin embargo, estudios en esta área convienen que hay pocos ejemplos concretos que indiquen cómo los educadores pueden internacionalizar el currículo de una manera tangible y fácilmente replicable. Este artículo adopta una definición de la internacionalización del currículo que considera los aspectos experienciales en el desarrollo del proceso de comunicación intercultural. La meta de internacionalizar el currículo responde al reconocimiento de que los estudiantes necesitan desarrollar un grado de capacidad intercultural para desempeñarse eficientemente en un ambiente cada vez más global. Tanto los estudiantes internacionales como los locales necesitan colaborar en este proceso. La diversidad cultural que caracteriza a las universidades contemporáneas en occidente hace de éstas un ámbito ideal para fomentar la capacidad de mediar entre culturas. En este artículo exploramos algunos programas prácticos que pueden ser implementados en currículos universitarios para promover la interacción entre grupos.

The Shifting Sands of Punishment in China in the Era of 'Harmonious Society'

This article about the politics of punishment in China today follows some of the political machinations involved in the development of a new policy called “Balancing Leniency and Severity.” It treats this new policy as an exemplar of how politics works in the Hu Jintao era to change the way crimes are addressed in judicial decision making. This paper underscores the important ways in which political ideology informs criminal justice policy and practice in China. It examines a number of stages of development within the last decade during which Balancing Leniency and Severity has emerged as a foundational criminal justice policy.

Yanda 2001: Form and Strategy in a Chinese Anti-crime Campaign

Abstract This paper is about an anti-crime campaign in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) which began in April 2001. It seeks to address the “what, when, where, how and why ” of the first months of Chinas latest “Strike Hard ” (Yanda) anti-crime campaign by examining four strategies of Yanda 2001 in relation to their precedents in Chinas first and bloodiest Yanda Campaign in 1983. This paper finds that although operations are more sophisticated and specialised, the broad strategies of the first months of Yanda 2001 do not differ significantly in approach from those employed in the first campaign 20 years ago. This is despite the increasing expectations of professionalism placed on the police, prosecuting bodies and courts in China over the last decade.

Policing Serious Crime in China : From 'Strike Hard' to 'Kill Fewer'

1. The Rise of Campaign Justice 2. The Campaign Template 3. Striking Hard in the New Millennium 4. Cracks in the Campaign Armour 5. The Peoples War on Drugs 6. Fighting the Collective: The Rise of Organized Crime 7. The End of Campaign Justice?

Political Ideology, the Party, and Politicking: Justice System Reform in China

In November 2008, the Politburo issued a new justice system reform plan that it hailed as emblematic of China’s new approach to harmonious society building. This reform plan is an exemplar of how politics works in the Hu Jintao era. It represents an attempt—using ideology, party leadership, and “politicking”—to change the way both social and organizational problems are handled. Looking at one facet of justice administration—criminal justice— reveals how these three political aspects intertwine to produce a path to reform that relies on a strong authoritarian hand. A new emphasis on balance, heralded as a key to the reform, provides a way of navigating the problem of how to achieve social stability in China within the broad state objective of building a harmonious society. The approach in the 2008 plan uses the discourse of harmonious society to attempt to maneuver out of some longstanding stalemates in both institutional management and the punitive culture of justice administration. This new reform path has less to do with creating the conditions for judicial independence and more to do with generating the conditions for greater uniformity in judicial practice across the nation.

Teaching intercultural communication in the university setting: an Australian perspective

Part of the tasks of internationalizing the university curriculum involves developing into courses and academic programs generally, activities and assessment practices that provide opportunities for linguistic and cultural input through interaction between local and international students. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and pitfalls of internationalizing the curriculum through the description of an innovative course that we developed to teach Intercultural Communication to languages and linguistics students. The programs innovation lies in the way in which teaching and learning strategies from disparate areas of academia are brought together under the rubric of teaching culture within a university culture. We conceptualize culture broadly in this course as the experiences of everyday living and we argue that students best appreciate the connection between communication, language and culture through the immediate micro-level of everyday living with and in culture.

Public sentencing rallies in China: The symbolizing of punishment and justice in a socialist state

This article explores the functions and format of the public sentencing rallyin China. The public sentencing rally is a judicial event in which the verdictand sentence of a criminal case already decided in court is announced publicly,in a venue such as a stadium or auditorium. Sentencing rallies provide an important organizational and operational avenue through which communicativeactions of blaming and shaming are constituted and relayed to their socialaudience. They can be convened for one individual or for a group of convictedcriminals, usually those convicted of serious crimes, crimes that attract somepublic attention or crimes that are targeted during anti-crime campaigns. Theirfunction is to educate and deter through a process of ritual and representation.They are a format in which the emotive representations of public shaming and gestures of moral indignation can be acted out. Rallies also represent to theirsocial audience, a conceptual framework through which to interpret thecharacteristics of judicial authority in post-1978 China. This aspect ofrepresentation involves two types of authority, the moral authority of thecourt to mete out popular justice and the institutional authority of the courtrepresented in the aspirational claims of institutional reform – proceduralpropriety, professionalism and the strict adherence to the law.

The Politics of Law and Stability in China

CONTENTS Preface 1. A Short History of the Arbitral Settlement of Interstate Disputes till the Establishment of the PCIJ 2. The Legislative History of the Optional Clause and its Conception 3. Declarations Accepting the Compulsory Jurisdiction of the Court 4. Admissibility of Reservations to Declarations of Acceptence 5. The Legal Character of the Optional Clause System 6. Reciprocity and the System of Optional Clause Declarations 7. Generally Accepted Reservations to Declarations of Acceptance 8. Destructive Reservations 9. Termination and Amendment of Declarations of Acceptance 10. Objecting to the Courts Jurisdiction 11. Reconsidering the Optional Clause System

Lenient Death Sentencing and the "Cash for Clemency" Debate

This article examines how financial compensation has been drawn into death sentencing practice and debate in China. The Supreme People’s Court is nowadays encouraging judges to mediate between defendants and the families of homicide victims to secure a financial agreement between the two parties that will allow courts to sentence defendants to a two-year “suspended” death sentence which is commuted to a life sentence after the probation period. The SPC has promoted a series of “standard cases” that exemplify this practice. The controversial practice, dubbed “cash for clemency”, complicates the death penalty debate: critics say that it undermines the law and encourages “bargaining” for a life on the part of those who can afford to do so. Others, however, are sympathetic to any practice that can reduce execution rates. This controversy is part of a larger debate on state killing in the world’s largest killing state.

Intercultural Competence: Examples of Internationalizing the Curriculum through Students’ Interactions

In our increasingly globalized societies, there is a growing need for us, as educators, to perceive ourselves as ‘citizens of the world who are comfortable with diverse peoples’ (Harrigan & Vicenti, 2004, p. 119). Thus the development of intercultural communication is recognized as one of the key competences required of future graduates, and has become enshrined in all Australian Universities’ Mission Statements. Despite this recognition, there has been no comprehensive blueprint to explain how this imperative translates into the classroom situation. If universities are to prepare graduates that can communicate appropriately in a number of contexts and settings, then it may be more efficient to create situations where students can develop this competence through meaningful interactions. This chapter discusses three such approaches that use the international student population and the local migrant community to introduce, practice and negotiate cultural understandings in the target language.