Cultural Encounters as Intervention Practices

Lene Bull Christiansen, Lise Paulsen Galal, Kirsten Hvenegaard-Lassen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429685040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

On the Paradox of ‘Organised’ Encounter

Helen F. Wilson

ABSTRACT

Encounters are politically and pedagogically charged. They have long been celebrated for their ability to chip away at prejudices, enact cultural destabilisations, shape subjectivities, and produce new knowledges. Yet encounters come with risk. The paper argues that encounters should be taken as very specific genres of contact and offers a conceptual interrogation of the notion of encounter, and its (dis)organisation, as a way of reflecting on the paradox of ‘organised encounter’. In particular, the paper suggests that the promise and hope of organised encounter stands in tension with the recognition that encounters are inherently unpredictable –that they are about rupture and surprise. Taking this tension forward, the paper asks what possibilities remain for forms of planned encounter in intercultural contexts and focuses on two concerns. First, a concern with what happens when something that is inherently unpredictable becomes a site of intervention and secondly, a concern with the risks of encounter, and for whom the risks are most acutely felt. It finishes by reflecting on what it might mean to keep hold of the unpredictability of encounter in organised settings and what it means for questions of difference, power, and privilege.

Much research across the social sciences is underlined by the assumption that being-together, co-presence, dialogue, and intermingling can, under the right conditions, educate, create familiarity, inspire social transformation, and play a significant role in the development of democratic values (Carter 2013; Darling and Wilson 2016). These assumptions can be seen in a range of work that has considered the value of meeting and encounter in a number of different contexts and spaces – both planned and unplanned. Spaces of propinquity and routine have long been a site of interest for those wishing to understand how encounters with unknown others shift attitudes and build relations, leading to a significant body of work that has spanned a variety of sites. These include public transportation, school playgrounds, streets, classrooms, libraries, cafés, sports stadiums, religious institutions, and homes, to name just some of the spaces that have garnered interest (Lepp, forthcoming; Wilson 2011, 2013a; Lobo 2014; Schuermans 2016; Wessendorf 2016). Whilst these spaces are largely characterised by unplanned forms of contact, an interest in the possibilities of encounter has unsurprisingly coincided with an interest in the virtues of ‘organised’ encounter. Here, the examples are wide-ranging and varied; art projects that seek to bring communities together (Pikner 2016; McNally 2017); workshops that aim to transform behaviour (Wilson 2013b; 2017a); drop-in centres that build support and learning (Darling 2010; 2011); public spaces that are designed to develop conviviality (Wood and Landry 2008; Wise 2016); and different forms of tourism that claim to educate and enact new kinds of citizenship and responsibility (Dürr 2012a; Ince 2015).

Whilst each example evidences a different understanding about when, how, and for whom encounter comes to matter, they all share an investment in the potentials of encounter for effecting change. This raises questions about how and why encounters effect transformation, what this transformation looks like, and what implications there might be for how we understand the scale at which social change occurs. To address some of these issues and offer an intervention, the paper focuses on sites of encounter that are in some way considered ‘organised’, and develops a conceptual interrogation of ‘encounter’ to outline how it might be characterised as a very particular genre of contact. In so doing, the paper demonstrates what is at stake when encounters become a site of organisation and hones in on questions of power, privilege, and risk, to argue that the promise of encounter necessarily stands in tension with the recognition that encounters are inherently unpredictable and often shaped by inequality (Wilson 2017b).

To develop these points, the paper starts with the ‘allure’ of encounter to consider how encounters have come to occupy a central position in projects of political and pedagogical transformation. By attending to the etymology of encounter, I underline the forms of antagonism, opposition, and surprise that often characterise it as a particular form of contact, and ask what implications this has for efforts that try to organise it. Taking these points forward, and following a number of examples, I draw out two chief concerns. First, a concern with what happens when something that is inherently unpredictable becomes a site of intervention and second, a concern with the risks of encounter and the demand for knowability. With these concerns in mind, the paper then reflects on what it might mean to embrace the unpredictability of encounter through calls to cultivate dispositions that are better able to respond to the ‘surprise’ of other selves (Bennett 2001). It thus considers what is at stake when encounters are actively sought out as part of an ethical project of self-transformation. By drawing out some of the paradoxes that shape projects of organised encounter, I do not intend to discredit or devalue such projects. Instead, I argue that grappling with the characteristics of encounter, and the (im)possibilities of organising it, are central to keeping the hierarchies, privilege, and assumptions of such organisation in view.

The Allure of Encounter

The draw of cultural encounters is their supposedly inventive potential. Through encounter all kinds of transformation can happen; shifts in affective experience or thought (Stevens 2007; Anderson 2014); the destabilisation of hierarchies (Farías 2016); or modifications in ways of relating (Todd 2003; Barnett 2005; Harrison 2008). This positive investment in encounter has a long and wide-ranging history. For example, it can be seen in an extensive lineage of urban writing that has celebrated the opportunities presented by spaces of ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey 2005; Wilson 2016a) – where different, unrelated trajectories and people come together (Amin and Thrift 2002; Wilson and Darling 2016). For Jacobs (1961), ‘incidental encounter’ was significant to the development of trust, respect, and the organisation of public life, a sentiment echoed by others who have noted the potential of encounter to foster conviviality, vibrancy, and improvisation (Watson 2006; Stevens 2007; Amin 2008; Young 2011 [1990]). Whilst drawing on a different lineage of thought (for example, Lefebvre 1996), recent work on urban politics has used the concept of encounter to consider how the negotiation of boundaries in the minutiae of contact between diverse people can enable the formation of new social relations that ‘sit in opposition to capitalist society’ (Halvorsen 2015: 320; see also Merrifield 2013). Attending to the politics of encounter in this context is thus about tracing the possibilities for forging new forms of organisation and resonance that enable articulations of power that are less hierarchical and more solidaristic, even whilst they can never be without conflict (Oosterlynck et al. 2017; Chatterton 2006).

In a different example of what happens when people are thrown together, we might consider the inventive potential identified in Pratt’s (2007 [1992]) much cited notion of the ‘contact zone’, which was originally used to examine the complex processes of meaning-making that happened on the imperial frontiers of Europe. For Pratt (2007 [1992]: 7), the contact zone was ‘an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporary copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures’. Pratt deliberately placed the interactive and improvisational nature of encounters at the heart of analysis to emphasise how the coloniser and colonised were co-constituted through relational events (Stoler 2006; Sundberg 2006). Pratt’s use of the contact zone honed in on the transformative potential of encounter as a site of ‘new wisdom’ and contested power (Pratt 2007 [1992]: 39), which is most notable in her seminal text on the ‘arts of the contact zone’ in which she describes the literary arts that continue to emerge out of spaces of encounter – ‘autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue [and] vernacular expression’ (1991: 37). In short, whilst fraught with ambiguity and tension, in Pratt’s description the contact zone is full of creative possibility.

Whilst these accounts are certainly not free from contestation and demonstrate how encounters fold in inequalities, violence, and contested forms of power (Ahmed 2000), there have been notable concerns about the danger of romanticising the potentials of encounter (Valentine 2008). Further still, there have been demands for more clarity on how, and under what conditions, encounters might produce the familiarity, respect, or vitality that they are often said to promote. For instance, some writers have returned to Gordon Allport’s (1979 [1954]]) contact hypothesis to demand a more explicit focus on the role that contact plays in tackling prejudice, arguing that forms of fleeting encounter rarely change attitudes at any meaningful level (Valentine 2008; Matejskova and Leitner 2011).

Importantly, whilst arguments for encounter are well trodden, what is less addressed is why encounter, as a very particular form of contact, has gained such currency. What separates some of the above examples from the rich body of psychological work on the contact hypothesis is their explicit use of ‘encounter’ rather than the generic ‘contact’. Yet whilst it is rarely questioned, the ubiquitous use of ‘encounter’ to describe cross-cultural contact does considerable work. As Berlant argues, ‘any encounter (with the world, with another, or even oneself) discloses a nest of differences that [have been] called “the surprise of otherness”’ (in Berlant and Edelman 2013). What is key here is the emphasis on difference and surprise. I have argued elsewhere that the etymology of encounter is important (Wilson 2017b). Arising from the late Latin contrāre, it is a meeting that is historically coded as one that occurs between adversaries or opposing forces, making it akin to a ‘duel’ or a ‘skirmish’ (452). We see this coming together of opposites most vividly in colonial narratives and Pratt’s ‘contact zone’, which identifies a space of co-presence that is characterised by conditions of inequality, coercion, and ‘intractable conflict’ (2007 [1992]: 6). Furthermore, such a meeting of opposites can be seen in the grammars of difference that are regularly deployed in descriptions of cultural encounter, which have a tendency to draw on ‘border imaginaries’ that set up oppositional logics of ‘us versus them’, which distinguish friend from foe, inside from outside (Rovisco 2010: 1015; see also Ahmed 2000). Encounters are, therefore, particular genres of contact that imply a set of characteristics even if these characteristics are not explicitly named. For this reason, encounter, and the descriptive use of encounter, says a lot about conflict and difference, and can shape our thinking about the lived experience of power and how it registers in momentary and fragmentary ways (Wilson 2017b).

Of significance to the argument in this paper is how the encounter – as a relational event – allows us to approach the question of difference. Whilst descriptions of cultural encounters are replete with border imaginaries that reference categories of social identity, colonial taxonomies, and species classifications, encounters are not simply about the meeting of differences that are already defined (Ahmed 2000). Encounters also make difference; we are constituted in and by our encounters with others (Haraway 2008). Throughout descriptions of encounter, it is possible to trace a shared terminology. Encounters are about disturbances (Stewart 2007): about ‘rupture’, ‘surprise’, and ‘shock’ (see for example Ahmed 2000; Lapworth 2015). The implicit understanding that encounters are experienced as relational events that disturb us is central to their framing as sites of transformation for it evokes instances in which something is ‘unexpectedly broken open’ or destabilised (Wilson 2017b: 456). Shock, when experienced as discontinuity or the disruption of expectations, can be ‘radically traumatising’ (Edelman in Berlant and Edelman 2013: 8), but it can also be experienced as no more than a ‘barely recognised fluctuation’ (Stewart 2007; Anderson 2016: 9). However experienced, such a ‘breaking open’ is central to the troubling of authority and power, to rethinking bodily thresholds and capacities, and to rendering encounters inherently unpredictable. It is for this reason that a sense of rupture has long been central to discussions of proximity and ethical relations (see Barnett 2005 on Levinas and Derrida; Todd 2003; Harrison 2008).

The transformational capacities of encounter, whilst filled with promise, should not necessarily be read as positive. If encounters have the capacity to destabilise then they also come with risk and vulnerability; they can be as violent as they can be nurturing. If we take these points seriously, and hold onto the unpredictable nature of encounter, it is pertinent to consider the implications for programmes that seek to ‘organise’ encounter in some way. In the next section, I begin by overviewing examples of such attempts to organise.

Organised Encounter

Perhaps the most obvious or urgent forms of organised encounter are those that explicitly focus on the transformative potentials of encounter in the context of conflict, segregation, or mistrust (Askins and Pain 2011; Matejskova and Leitner 2011; Wilson 2013b; 2014; Hvenegård-Lassen and Staunæs 2015). Sports activities, dialogue exercises, and arts practice are variously deployed with different tactics for bringing people together (Amin 2002), and often require careful facilitation and management by trained social workers and facilitators who are attentive to the differences involved (Sarkissian and Bunjamin-Mau 2009; Janzen et al. 2015; Mayblin et al. 2016). For instance, Askins and Pain (2011) draw on Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ as a way of approaching the transformative spaces of a community art project that facilitated encounters between young people of African and British heritage in the context of segregation in the North East of England. Encounters between the young people were facilitated through the pragmatic negotiation of art objects and the communication that it required, demonstrating the value of the ‘epistemological deployment of materials’ (804) as conversations emerged whilst sticky tape was negotiated and pens and paints were shared. In another example, Wise (2016) has outlined the value of addressing community tensions through planned programmes that are built around notions of ‘welcome’. Discussing the case of Ashfield in Sydney, Wise details how encounters were ‘staged’ between Chinese shopkeepers and local residents through a council-funded open day. This saw interpreters facilitate conversations between shopkeepers and residents, Chinese restaurants put on lunch events for non-Chinese senior citizens, and booklets and exhibitions that showcased the life histories of a variety of local residents, all in a bid to facilitate encounters in a community shaped by distrust, language barriers, and white nostalgia for a homogenous past. In contrast to such large-scale programmes, we might also consider forms of conflict management where encounters are micromanaged as an example of organisation that focuses on the minutiae of contact. My own work with an anti-violence charity in the US has detailed the careful facilitation t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters: Interculturality and Transformative Practices
• 1 On the Paradox of 'Organised' Encounter
• 2 'Cultivating Integration'? Migrant Space-making in Urban Gardens
• 3 Festival as Embodied Encounters: On Kulturhavn in Copenhagen
• 4 Social Circus as an Organised Cultural Encounter Embodied Knowledge, Trust and Creativity at Play
• 5 Bridge the Gap: Multidirectional Memory in Photography Projects for Refugee Youths
• 6 Meetings of the Art: Cultural Encounters and Contact Zones in an Art Project for Asylum-seeking Minors in Denmark
• 7 It Doesn't Matter if You're Black or White: Negotiating Identity and Danishness in Intercultural Dialogue Meetings
• 8 'Are you Married to a Maasai?' Gendered Cultural Encounters Between Tanzanians and Danes in 'Global Citizenship' Training
• Index