About Intercultural Extraneity
This page addresses:- Site description
- Course objectives
- Syllabus
- Course material and assignments
- Forum link
- Weekly video/conference link
This site is titled “intercultural extraneity” to take issue with the claim that intercultural “competence” is something to be possessed once and for all, or simply downloaded. The “extraneous” is the extra work we need to do to try to comprehend a (continually changing) situation. Hans-Georg Gadamer explains this as the effort that goes into understanding something apart from ourselves (2004: 371) and Clifford Geertz observes that “Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete … to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right” (1973: 322). As the culture of today is intercultural: characterized by the interaction of multiple cultures, both global and epistemic, how we think we understand everything will reveal whether we have understood anything (Suzuki 1970).
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- Critically analyze, evaluate, relate, and synthesize the sometimes competing views and expressions of American, global, and digital culture and where they intersect;
- Cultivate digital literacy;
- Develop contextual and historical awareness;
- Demonstrate enough knowledge of the subject matter to raise meaningful questions effectively;
- Gather and evaluate relevant and credible sources;
- Engender good intercultural communication skills in various projects and across networks;
- Understand the role of rhetoric and its influence in promoting stereotypes;
- Demonstrate an understanding of the definition and consequences of plagiarism and uphold academic honesty;
- Improve self-knowledge and self-direction through working with others in a networked, intercultural setting.
Syllabus:
The syllabus draft for discussion is as follows:
Forum posts (9; note the new rules) – 30%
Group project – 30 % Begins 16 March
Individual project – 40%
Students who do not complete the course work are required to take a prerequisite and final exam during the exam periods. Student will be responsible for familiarity with the additional reading materials for weeks when there is no assigned reading to make up for missed project weeks.
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Course material and assignments:
Please note that you are responsible for downloading course material when the course is in session. Materials may no longer be available once the semester has ended due to site maintenance.- Revision: digital culture/21st century skills
- Immigration/cultural receptivity
- National/individualist identity
- TAPP: Week of 16 March
- TAPP: Weeks of 23 March/30 March
- TAPP; “Creative coordination”, religion, morals: Weeks of March 6-20
- Invention, enterprise, market
- Nature/place, space ecologies
- (Evolution of) art/media, journalistic integrity
Revision: digital culture/21st century skills
Welcome back. This week, we will revise what we covered last semester and become reacquainted with the forum and its new rules. Homework is to answer three questions on the forum. Students wishing for reading material are invited to begin Michael Pupin’s From Immigrant to Inventor, which is the source of the weekly topical focus this semester.
Thank you to those students who were able to attend this week’s video conference. Please remember to share any comments and input on the syllabus and whether you prefer videos to video conferences on the forum or via email.
If you wish to change groups, you may do so, but are asked to send email requests no later than Friday morning.
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Immigration/cultural receptivity
Important sections of all of this week’s reading material have been highlighted in the PDF of this week’s video lecture slides (at the link above). Thank you for the excellent work you did on the forum last week.
This week’s class exercise is to share on the forum a point or question from this week’s readings on Adamic/Pupin or intercultural communication/personal epistemology that stood out to you – with a brief reflection on why it caught your attention.
Reading:
- Adamic, L. (1932). Extract from ‘The jungle’, Laughing in the jungle. New York, London: Harper & Brothers. Available with the slide PDF, above.
- Piller, I. (2017). The banal nationalism of intercultural communication advice. Online article.
- N.A. (2016). ‘8.4 Intercultural communication competence‘, Communication in the real world. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. Online chapter.
- Berry, W. (2005). The Way of Ignorance. Berkeley: Counterpoint, p. 122. No link.
- Enyeart, J. (2019). Death to fascism: Louis Adamic’s fight for democracy. No link.
- Godin, S. (2013). People like us do things like this. Online blog post.
- Hammer, D. and Elby, A. (2002). On the form of a personal epistemology. In B. K. Hofer and P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Personal epistemology: The psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 169-190. No link.
- Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Ch. 5 Nation and Culture. No link.
- Pupin, M. (1949 [1923]). Chs. I-IV. “From immigrant to inventor. New York, London: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Online book.
- Zeitz, J. (2017).The real history of American immigration, Politico. Online article.
- Арчибалд Рајс-Дела, Wikipedia entry. An inverse example of an immigrant whose written work is broadly recognized by natives.
Nationalist/individualist identity
Exercise: Fill in the pre-learning report, above: do this individually, and choose the best answers as a group to be posted as a group post to this site, to the Intercultural Communication category. Also, do the ideation exercise (note there are already many good ideas on the forum): What do you value of American culture and your own culture? What do you think you know, what perspective do you have that could be of value to American media exchange? Through this project, you will be entering the stream of media we critiqued last semester. What value do you want to bring to it, through the educative potential of intercultural communication to bring out the best in all involved? (This could be as simple as, e.g., a retelling of what you enjoyed in a course reading assignment and why.) If you are stuck or want to work some ideas out aloud, you can post them to the forum.
Note: if your group wants to get a head start on governance, you can read the project guidelines provided by Dr. Hinson (see the downloads above) for the classes you are being paired with.
Reading:
- Gerstle, G. (2011). ‘Introduction’, American crucible. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Garreau’s The nine nations of north America, online wikipedia article.
- Warden’s How to split up America, online blog post.
- Woodard’s regional cultures of North America, online wikipedia article, also see a Washington Post article on the same.
- Boorstin, D. (1959), We, the people, in quest of ourselves, NYT. Online article.
- Bourdain, A. (2018). West Virginia. Parts unknown. TV series web page.
- Levy. R. (1962-71). The Beverly Hillbillies. TV series hosted on archive.org.
- Neuliep, J. (2017). Intercultural communication: A contextual approach. Sage Publications Inc., pp. 32-37. Online chapter.
- Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 6.2 National Cultural Values. No link.
TAPP Week of 16 March: Democracy/education
Exercise: Come up with a topic pitch that answers last week’s prompt, rephrased in the Slide PDFs, and post it to the forum, following the suggestions in the sample. Please be sure to vote by 15:00 in the forum thread. You do not want to be stuck working on a project you are not interested in.
There is no reading, apart from the guiding quotation that your projects are to try to reference in some way, to give you time to do your own exploring, as suggested in the lecture video (around the ten minute mark). Please begin your action cards this week, and update them every week of the TAPP project.
Guiding quotation: Excerpted from John Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” Problems of men, Philosophical Library: New York, 1946, 61.
I have emphasized in what precedes the importance of the effective release of intelligence in connection with personal experience in the democratic way of living. I have done so purposely because democracy is so often and so naturally associated in our minds with freedom of action, forgetting the importance of freed intelligence which is necessary to direct and to warrant freedom of action. Unless freedom of individual action has intelligence and informed conviction back of it, its manifestation is almost sure to result in confusion and disorder. The democratic idea of freedom is not the right of each individual to do as he pleases/ even if it be qualified by adding “provided he does not interfere with the same freedom on the part of others.” While the idea is not always, not often enough, expressed in words, the basic freedom is that of freedom of mind and of whatever degree of freedom of action and experience is necessary to produce freedom of intelligence. The modes of freedom guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are all of this nature: Freedom of belief and conscience, of expression of opinion, of assembly for discussion and conference, of the press as an organ of communication. They are guaranteed because without them individuals are not free to develop and society is deprived of what they might contribute.
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TAPP Weeks of 23 March/30 March
Week of 30 March download:
Exercise: Come up with a project pitch, consulting with the partner university and topic group. Use the prompt PDF and the Week 3 Slides PDF (above) for guidance in this. By 6 March at 20:00, the project pitch – answering each of the questions indicated in the PDF – should be posted to the site by one of the groups, as an Intercultural Communication article. You are expected to be in touch with your US peers during this time, remembering that this written correspondence counts as proof of work, as explained in the video conference. Remember that in this project, you are the ‘client’ and need to be specific with your project request: e.g., as per the storyboard, first scene, a picture of X our partners will find and this specific question; second scene, this interview [transcript] we are sending our partners; etc. You are also required to reference to the Dewey quote.
Reading: There is no required reading for students following the course. But please do your action cards.
Additional liberty/governance resources:
- Students not following the course will be required to read this.
- Berlin, I. (1958). The two concepts of liberty. PDF of inaugural lecture, University of Oxford.
- Bourdain, A. (2018). West Virginia. Parts unknown. TV series web page – example video.
- Carroll, B. Writing and editing for digital media. New York : Routledge, 2014. Book resource from Prof. Hinson’s class.
- Deresiewicz, W. (2020). The death of the artist: How creators are struggling to survive in the age of billionaires and big tech. New York: Macmillan. No link.
- Franklin, B. (1737). On the freedom of the press. Online poem. Also see Franklin and the free press, Heritage Foundation. Online article.
- Graham, P. (2020). Orthodox privilege. Online post.
- Hankins, J. (2020). Offshore core, Law & Liberty. Online article.
- Lilla, M. (2018). On identity politics and the left in decline, iaiNews. Online artcle.
- McBain, S. (2018). The costs of ‘free speech’, The New Statesman. Online article.
- MIT’s Big Picture Session on The World We Build with relevant segments. Example video.
- MIT’s old but still useful guide to video production.
- Middle Ground, reviewed here. Example video.
- Roose, K. (2020). Futureproof. New York: Random House. Reviewed by Random House (online post), and Kevin Roose’s online column on Medium.
- Weiss, B. (2020). Resignation letter. Online post.
- Wieseltier, L. (2020). The radical liberal, White Rose Magazine. Online article.
- Willinck, J. (2017). Discipline equals freedom. New York: St. Martin’s Press. No link.
TAPP; “Creative coordination”, religion, morals: Weeks of March 6-20
- Resources:
Week of 6 April exercise: Write a new Action Card that includes details of correspondence with your US peers (excerpts) regarding editing if you are contacted by them this week and your responses to the Good Work Good Collaboration questions in the Readings PDF for this section, above. You are encouraged to include any overall reflections at this juncture of the project.
Optional 6 April links: Explore Steven Pressfield’s work on The War of Art and his idea of resistance; consider the difference between helpful and unhelpful thoughts.
13 April: Thank you to those students who attended the slide/video conference. There is a low-res summary video below. The slide PDF for this week is at the top of this post. It contains instructions for the optional forum exercise and reading. TAPP video projects will be due 16 April: please continue to help your video producers edit the video, and begin to assess the project as of the 16th.
22 April at 20:40: We will hold a post-learning video conference with your project partners (13:40 CT), using the post-learning report questions as conversation starters, if needed. Students unable to attend will be required to post a post-learning report (questions are posted above) answering the prompts, being sure that their last week of Action Cards include project video assessment.
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Invention, enterprise, market
The relevant course material will be posted here.
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Nature/place, space ecologies
The relevant course material will be posted here.
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(Evolution of) art/media, journalistic integrity
The relevant course material will be posted here.
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Link to the course forum:
The course forum may be found at:
http://interculturalextraneity.com/forum
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Weekly video/conference link:
This week’s video conference link will be posted here.
Disclaimer:
As a focus of this course is on trust, values, ethics, and the community it strives to cultivate, please model the course ethos in your use of the course resources and respect the terms of use. Video content is made for the context of a specific course under specific conditions.