大咖云集！新推近期14场/次线上学术讲座预告（7月15-30日）

Organised by Prof. Fred Dervin and Prof. Ke Zhao, SUFE-UH Joint Research Center on Intercultural Studies, China

Please scan the QR code to register before 2:00 PM July 22, 2020, and the details of the scheduled Zoom meeting will be sent via email.

The study of workplace culture, in its multiple meanings, has attracted significant interest over the years social science research. Since the 80s the number of studies has grown exponentially and, the so-called, intercultural skills and competences are commonly associated with a global mindset and the skills an individual needs in order to interact successfully and work efficiently in multinational contexts. The different approaches to the study of culture, associated with Positivism and Constructionism and the influence of the Discourse Turn, are well known and widely debated. In this lecture, I intend to go beyond binaries of the past and to problematise core assumptions that have been widely adopted in relevant research. I argue for a holistic and context sensitive approach drawing on recent work in workplace sociolinguistics. I close the paper with a framework and a multidisciplinary agenda for studying culture at work.

Jo Angouri is Director of Undergraduate Studies in Applied Linguistics at University of Warwick, the university-level Academic Director for Education and Internationalisation and serves on the Education Executive. She is a National Teaching Fellow and fully committed to pedagogic innovation and education for global citizenship. Her research involves three interrelated strands: Leadership and teamwork in high-pressure, high-risk professional settings; Language, politics and ideology; Migration, mobility and multilingualism. Jo is co-directing two international research networks, one under the Warwick-Monash alliance on Migration Identity and Translation and one under AILA on Migrants in Working life which have brought together a range of established scholars, early career researchers as well as non-academic stakeholders. She is the founding editor of Language at Work series (Multilingual Matters). The newly-established high-profile series for multidisciplinary research in Workplace Studies and she is also co-editing Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, a flagship series for John Benjamins. She has strong presence and involvement in research policy and works for the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In the last ten years she has published 70 refereed papers, three special issues, two books, three edited volumes and two conference proceedings. She has been a visiting scholar in different institutions in New Zealand, Australia and Europe and she is currently a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Aalto University, School of Business, Finland.

The recent research trend of treating culture as practice has triggered an increased interest in borrowing research method from other field. One particular method is ethnography of communication, which views culture as practice and interprets culture as it is happening in everyday life. Ethnography of communication goes beyond research methodology and also an epistemology in nature as it takes into consideration both social praxis at the micro-level of social interactions, cognitive factors, and the dialectic relation between social practice and (social) cognition. In this presentation, I illustrate its application for a number of cross-cultural contexts followed by implications for further research in the area of combining research methodology and epistemology.

Yunxia Zhu (PhD, Australian National University) is Director of Internationalisation of University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project, Associate Professor in International Business at the University of Queensland Business School. She is Vice President of the Asian-Pacific Region for the Association for Business Communication. Senior Fellow of Higher Education Association, and an award-winning researcher and educator including an Australian National Citation Teaching and Learning Award. She is visiting Scholar to Imperial College London, Lund University and University of Michigan.

Dr. Zhu has an international reputation in cross-cultural management and communication. She has written two scholarly books and has published extensively in prestigious international journals (e.g., Academy of Management Learning and Education, Journal of Knowledge Management, Annuals of Tourism Research, Asian Pacific Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Management International Review, Public Relations Review, Discourse and Society, Discourse & Communication, TEXT, Discourse Studies, etc.). She serves on a number of editorial boards such as Journal of World Business, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Academy of Management Discovery, Discourse and Communication, Management and Organization Review, and Public Relations Review. Dr Zhu is also actively engaged in consulting and executive training with industries, holding adjunct and honorary professorial positions with a number of Chinese universities and co-authored books including a recent book on Belt-Road development and challenges.

20 years of studying and teaching interculturality as a British expat in France have shaped the way I think about and teach interculturality applied to business settings in today’s mediatized world. Accusations of cultural appropriation, discrimination, religious and ethnic tensions, even genocides are among the challenges societies are currently facing, linked to identity claims and power dynamics, where “cultures” serve very often as a pretext for symbolic or physical violence. Yet, despite the lonely protests of a few academics, dominant media discourse, numerous politicians as well as “public opinion” in many countries all tend to legitimise the view that “cultural differences” are insurmountable barriers to understanding, which need to be defended, respected, resisted, reduced, overcome or annihilated. 

In such a context, how should we go about presenting interculturality to students and businesspeople? If this target group is often relatively openminded, it also tends to bring its own ideological agendas, be they cosmopolitanistic, productivistic or exoticising. Within the “European Universities initiative”, launched by the European Commission within the Erasmus+ programme, learning about interculturality is also a key objective, although the term is often understood in a “Janusian” way, related to national identities. Working with intercultural trainers and the expectations of their clients can often involve similar emphasis on the question, whereas in the context of an MA programme in intercultural management we need to present students and professionals with more “complex” approaches to cultural and identity-based dynamics in order to better understand everyday social phenomena taking place within organisations and in society more generally. 

Finally, the Covid-19 pandemic, which arrived in a context of localism, of environmental concerns and cosmopolitan xenophobia, but also widespread accessibility of online communication tools, has currently, and maybe durably, reconfigured the situation. Online communication in businesses and universities has increased massively and will very likely remain as a common practice once the virus has subsided. Deterritorialized communication brings its own cultural challenges, both social and algorithmic, and interculturality is often presented as a key soft skill required for and acquired through “virtual exchange” or remote working in international teams. How might we link cultures, identities and algorithms in order to better prepare for the challenges of communication in the years to come? 

Alex Frame is associate professor in Communication Science at the Languages and Communication Faculty of the University of Burgundy (Dijon, France), where he runs the international MA course in Intercultural Management. Born in Britain, he graduated from the University of Oxford in 1998, before settling in France and completing his PhD in Communication Science at the University of Burgundy, in 2008. He is a member of the TIL (“Texte, Image, Langage”) research group (EA 4182), where he specialises in intercultural communication, organisational communication, and digital forms of political communication. He is also the institutional coordinator for the European University Alliance “FORTHEM”. 

来源：微信公众号上财外国语、中国社会科学院大学外语系、曲师大数字人文中心、微信群

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