You're kindly invited to our next virtual Plurilingual Lab Speaker Series event with Dr. Zhu Hua of University College London.
Culture Talks: Who Makes Culture Relevant and Why?
Culture Talks are meta-talks in which people talk about cultural characteristics and practices of a group. In this presentation, I will draw on the Interculturality research paradigm and my own experience of working and living in different cultures to explore the questions who talks about culture and for what purposes, and why it matters to applied linguists. I first reflect on how Culture Talks circulate in everyday life, how they are approached in academic inquiries, and the challenges in studying cultural differences. I then discuss what research on Interculturality tells us about Cultural Talks in interactions: the good, the bad and the ugly. They range from ‘happy and resourceful interculturality’ whereby speakers use cultural talks to create a sense of common ground and to facilitate engagement and learning in classrooms, to othering discourse such as nationality and ethnicity talk (NET) and ‘acts of distinction’ whereby boundaries are imposed and contested. I will conclude with the key message, i.e., understanding what culture does and how it does it should be one of the priorities for applied linguists if we are to respond to the rise of tribalism and nationalism in everyday life.
Zhu Hua is Chair of Educational Linguistics and Director of MOSAIC Group for Research in Multilingualism in School of Education, University of Birmingham. She will start a role as Chair of Language Learning and Intercultural Communication in UCL Institute of Education, University College London in January, 2022. She is an elected Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences, the UK, and Chair of BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics). Her main research interests span across multilingual and intercultural communication, child language and language education.
When: January 27, 2022 (Thursday)
Time: 12pm-1:30pm (EST, Montreal)
Mode of delivery: synchronous via Zoom
This is a public event and all are welcome. This Speaker Series is co-organized by the BILD Research Group and McGill's Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) Research Talks. A recording will be made available on our .
