Huang Zhuo Min (Min) 24th Nov. 2016 Arts-mediated sense-making: the transcreation of intercultural personhood Huang Zhuo Min (Min) 24th Nov. 2016

Content What can happen when use creative-visual-arts for students to make sense of their intercultural experience? The kind of space arts could enable for knowledge and knowledging ‘Transcreation’ of intercultural personhood

Create a Portrait of yourself (‘who I am’) in Intercultural Communication

Background Context: An internationalised university (i.e. The University of Manchester) located in a multicultural urban setting (i.e. Manchester) Focus: Sense-making of intercultural experience and ‘intercultural personhood’ Methods: Multiple creative-visual-arts

Intercultural Personhood An individual’s perspective on ‘who I am’ in an intercultural context (Kim, 2008/2015) Personhood: a developmental and individualised sense (Glas, 2006; Splitter, 2015) Intercultural: the hybridity of this developmental process (Efrat and Rob, 2015)  (kwang-Ho Shin, 2013)

Ana’s Intercultural ‘Bubble’ Ana’s introduction: ‘These two people are from two nationalities, different cultures. You can tell from the way they dress up… ‘ ‘I think people of different nationalities - I mean every one of us has our own ‘bubbles’… in your bubble, there is your culture, experience, language, and your interpretation or perspectives of things…’ ‘In order to be able to communicate… somehow you need to break the bubbles to an extent…’

Ana’s sense-making Layers: ‘There are layers of bubbles. So maybe the first layer is about knowing names… After knowing the name, so Prshhhh. one layer is gone. Then, talking about the way you eat... Bonghh, the second bubble is gone... as your friendship or as your understanding between each other get deeper… So we don’t know what's underneath actually until you are really close to that person.’

Ana’s sense-making Thickness: ‘It depends on your personality as well. Maybe with someone, it’s easier to break until the fifth layer. But for some other people, I haven’t broken the surface layer of the bubble yet, because there are so many things that I don’t know about them. Given more time, maybe I will be able to do so.’

Ana’s sense-making Inside: How you have been brought up Outside: The information you have from the outside world ‘…When she goes to another country, then... it's like the content within the bubble is trying to negotiate with the exposure that she is getting from. So whether she chose to stay like this, or whether she tries to adapt like me?’ Air Outside Air Inside

Arts-mediated Transcreation: Ana’s evolving sense of intercultural experience Mobile & social materials Flexible & Breakable Colours & Reflections Non-static Extending from the visible to the invisible: imagined vision(e.g. hope, criticality, and aspirations) of ‘what should be?’, ‘what might be?’ and ‘what could be?’ (Elliot, 1971, p. 70; Greene, 1995: 5; Freire, 1998) Moving from Ethnocentrism to Ethnorelativism: Differences  Connection and the similarities

Arts-mediated Transcreation: Ana’s evolving sense of intercultural personhood Binary comparison and Ethnocentric otherisation An in-depth understanding of what shapes who a person is and is becoming in intercultural communication: A person is surrounded by an invisible set of components… Being Becoming Knowledge Non-static Culture Connectable Language ‘Identical’/(similarities) Past Experience Porous Family background Agentive Education Fluid Personality Non-linear

Knowledge Transcreation Arts-mediated Space Knowledge: Self-knowledge – i.e. intercultural personhood Understandings of students’ intercultural experience and intercultural competence Transcreation: - Purpose: the transformation and (re)creation of knowledge and knowledging – i.e. an evolving sense of ‘self’ and intercultural experience through alternative ways of knowing - Process: (inter/intra)thinking creatively through the imaginative, reflective and interactive space powered by arts (Thomas Lamadieu, 2016)

Types of Transcreation Through the space of arts (e.g. my study) transformed and (re)created sense of intercultural personhood Through collaborations between language, intercultural researchers and creative artists (e.g. our symposium)  transformative practices to ‘knowledging’ and the evolvement of knowledge-landscape Through migrations across time and space, languages and cultures, and disciplines and domains (e.g. the concept ‘mindfulness’ (Huang, Fay, White, 2017))  transformed, recreated, and diversified understandings and applications of the concept and its knowledge landscape