Critical Lessons in Interculturality

Challenges idealised views of intercultural success, showing how failure can be a critical tool for understanding and teaching complex human interactions.

In a world obsessed with the success stories of, for example, globalisation and easy intercultural recipes, Critical Lessons in Interculturality: Failing Better dares to focus on the inevitabilities of failure. Moving beyond the neoliberal ideologies that paint intercultural encounters as simple transactions for profit and harmony or idealistic perspectives that imagine the possibility of ‘removing stereotypes’, this book adopts a critical interculturality perspective, in line with the author’s work for the past 25+ years in research and education. It argues that our current obsession with ‘success’ is not only unrealistic but also intellectually limiting, preventing us from engaging with the complex, messy and power-laden realities of human interaction. This Impact book makes thus an urgent case for a paradigm shift in how we deal with but also teach and train for interculturality. It calls for a refocusing on failure – not as an endpoint to be avoided – but as a rich and productive site for critical analysis and learning. Illustrated by a series of meaningful and thought-provoking vignettes from diverse contexts, the book provides the conceptual tools to problematise and learn from moments of breakdown and mis-/non-understanding. For students, educators and practitioners seeking a more realistic and ideologically politically aware approach to interculturality today, this book represents an essential guide to finding wisdom in the cracks and fractures of our encounters.