A guide to interculturality for international and exchange students: an example ofHostipitality?

Abstract

As in many countries, internationalization and interculturality have become two key concepts in Finnish higher education. As such, several documents (often called 'survival guides') have been published by universities in this context to help international and exchange students to adapt to Finland and Finnish 'ways.' This article examines such a document dedicated to intercultural communication on Finnish campuses. We demonstrate by analyzing two different versions of the document that the constructed discourses contain rather culturalist, judgmental, and ethnocentric discourses about self and other. We argue that it represents a 'defeat of hospitality' or hostipitality. As such, interculturality and hospitality are reduced to 'educating' the students to adjust to certain stereotypical Finnish manners rather than teaching them to negotiate and co-construct new ways of being together. Our approach to interculturality is critical, constructivist, and relies on a pragmatic discursive analysis of two versions of the document.

Integrating Intercultural Competence in ESP and EMI: From Theory to Practice

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7. Finnish Engineers’ Trajectories of Socialisation into Global Working Life: From Language Learners to BELF Users and the Emergence of a Finnish Way of Speaking English

“…Discourses of evaluation acquired in the earlier stages of socialization persisted over the years of this study and the collective aspect of linguaculture was evident in the participants' discursive identity work. These findings suggest that these individuals have become socialized to ethnocentric and judgmental discourses at home and do not explicitly foreground what has been considered essential for genuine intercultural dialogue, i.e., mutual negotiation and the co-construction of new ways of speaking and being(Dervin and Layne 2013).However, some of the data revealed the participants' strong orientation to discourses ofFinnishness. This suggests that they are imposing upon themselves the identity of a silent Finn as a speaker of English, but over time challenged this position.…”

Thinking multicultural education ‘otherwise’ – from a secularist construction towards a plurality of epistemologies and worldviews

“…Regarding the current discourses on multiculturalism in Europe (see Lentin and Titley 2011), we feel that neither focusing merely on Islam nor paying attention to 'diversity' (to those labelled as 'the Others') in education, 'integrating' (or domesticating) 'the Other' into the society through education (Riitaoja 2013) or welcoming 'the Other' as a guest (Dervin and Layne 2013) would help deconstruct the representation of the colonial 'Other' in the Western modern space. Instead, we wish to make visible how the representation of 'the Other' is epistemologically constructed against the notion of the self.…”