How do we live with (cultural) difference? Or perhaps : how can we deal with all the conflicts in our contemporary world that are perceived to be associated with cultural difference? “We don’t want to, take it away” seems to be the preeminent political answer of governments, as well as a prominent trend of “public opinion” across the world, or more specifically: the geopolitical West of this world. This book is about a particular genre of intervention—which we call organised cultural encounters—into encounters with difference. It is a genre that seeks to establish a positive answer to the first question by working on, or dealing with, the conflictual breaking points addressed in the second. This genre of intervention can be found across the globe, but in this book we explore how it plays out in contexts that are either located in Denmark or related to a Danish organisation. In that limited sense, the book is also about Denmark.
In Denmark, as elsewhere, over the last 30 years or so cultural difference has become an increasingly heated political topic, to a large extent through its association with immigration. In particular, the presence of newcomers from countries deemed culturally alien and religiously different have sparked an almost excessive interest in how to support cohesiveness, integration, co-existence, and so on; in other words, how can we mould the perceived threat of disorder, disintegration, and conflict into its opposite? While this was predominantly formulated in a language of inclusion during the last decades of the twentieth century, the language of exclusion has gradually taken over during the current century.
Policies at both national and local levels have increasingly defined and addressed problem areas in openly racialised terms. These include immigration and border control, gang crime, religious extremism and terrorism, labour-force marginalisation, ethnic and social “ghettos”, Muslim head coverings (the hijab and the niqab—the latter mostly called the “burka”), and honour-based violence (cf. Brochmann & Hagelund, 2012; Jensen, Vitus, & Schmidt, 2018; Keskinen, Skaptadóttir, & Toivanen, 2019; Keskinen, Tuori, Irni, & Mulinari, 2016).
As well as being prioritised areas of government policies, these issues have also been taken up by civil society activists and associations who concentrate their efforts—often economically or ideologically supported by a neoliberal policy focus on civil society—at the interpersonal and community level as the primary locus of transformation (Martikainen, 2016). Drawing on ideas about social integration and co-existence, some of these efforts belong to the genre of organised cultural encounters, in which the problems associated with cultural difference are addressed through programmes that seek to foster good—or meaningful—encounters (Valentine, 2008). These programmes rest on particular problem formulations, such as in the following descriptions by two Danish associations that organise dialogue meetings (a youth and a faith-based organisation, respectively):
Dialogue is necessary in a modern world characterised by contrast and change. This is a world where we meet each other, want to cooperate—and indeed have to do so, across borders, cultures, viewpoints and motivations. Dialogue can help overcome prejudice and create understanding of other people’s perspectives. It can show us new ways of perceiving the world. And it can expand our horizons. Dialogue enables reaching across an abyss of difference, as long as we see and recognise each other for what we are: different yet all human beings in the same world. (Helde, 2012, p. 10)
We cooperate with partners in Scandinavia, Asia, Africa and the Middle East—and have a long history of gathering people across religious beliefs and cultural affiliations.
We practice dialogue to achieve mutual understanding, solve conflicts or avoid the conflicts from even arise.
We do dialogue workshops in educational institutions, among civil society activist and in the religious sphere. We therefore meet people on many levels—from young people studying theology to high profiled religious leaders in for example the large-scale project Syrian Leaders. (Dialogue toolbox, n.d.)
Thus, the “abyss of difference” is a problem that can be overcome through encounters and dialogue. This genre of
intervention that works, in its broadest definition, through the organisation of face-to-face encounters, is adopted across a wide variety of social relations that are deemed in need of support, reparation, or
transformation. Occurring across different social fields, examples include: interfaith activities, cultural exchange programmes, reconciliation projects, community cohesion initiatives, and projects associated with the inclusion of immigrants (Christiansen, Galal, & Hvenegård-Lassen,
2017). Each subscribes to their own definition of the problem, the purpose, and particular techniques of
intervention, but they all rest on a definition of something “bad” that exists
before the encounter, which is then worked on in the
here-and-now of that encounter, to be effected
after the encounter through a desired
transformation of or among the participants. We have adopted the umbrella term “organised cultural encounters” to cover this broad range of
intervention strategies. Considered as
social practices, they share features, but they also differ, and in the research literature they are mostly dealt with through other classifications.
1 We are not arguing that the gathering together of these
intervention practices under the headline “organised cultural encounters” is more
accurate than other classifications. We do argue, however, that this conceptualisation allows us to approach old or comparatively well-known phenomena in new ways.
The term “organised cultural encounters” was coined during a collaborative research project2 involving fieldwork in five contexts in which encounters between people who are perceived to be culturally different were organised in order to produce “positive” effects. That is: attempts at creating a transformative space in which what are defined as the negative outcomes of cultural encounters in everyday life (e.g. prejudice, stereotypes, and conflicts) can be overcome and replaced by such aspects as understanding, communality, and peace. These five studies which are located in different social domains, all related to Denmark, form the empirical backbone of the analyses in this book.3
Across these studies and domains, we are curious about the performativity and practices of organised cultural encounters and their relation to the wider contexts within which they are played out. Our attention is directed towards what is (re)produced (e.g. positions, relations, difference, sameness, affect, knowledge) within these social spaces and how. This priority implies that we are circumventing the normative question of how change may best be enacted or how encounters may ideally achieve this aim. Given that organised cultural encounters are intervention strategies, and thus purposefully orchestrated events, it is not surprising that they are often studied through evaluative approaches that aim to establish “best practice” models through measuring the outcome in terms of success or failure (for examples, see Agergaard, 2011; Agrawal & Barratt, 2014; Fotel & Andersen, 2003; Kozlovic, 2003; Laurence, 2014). Seen from our perspective, the problem with these studies is that what actually happens becomes subsumed under what ought to have happened. This is a widespread tendency within the field of education, where intercultural education programmes (some of which could be conceptualised as organised cultural encounters), as well as research into these, predominantly work through developmental models (Perry & Southwell, 2011). These models conceptualise intercultural competence in individual terms, and research often aims to promote the spread of “best practice” cases. With respect to the programmes, this means that both aims and practices tend to become instrumental: a way of securing the current (power) state of affairs through different means (cf. Schoorman & Bogotch, 2010). David Coulby argues that
the theorisation of intercultural education […] is not simply a matter of normative exhortation, of spotting good practice in one area and helping to implement it in another. It involves the reconceptualization of what schools and universities have done in the past and what they are capable of doing in the present and the future. (Coulby, 2006, p. 246; see also: Dixson & Rousseau Anderson, 2018).
Organised cultural encounters cannot be analysed through the lens of everyday practices alone. The fact that the kind of encounters we study are purposefully organised, or, as we describe in detail in Chap.
3, scripted, means that, if not determined by their organisers, practices are at least partly (in)formed by their
intervention models. Consequently, we approach the practices that play out in the time-space of an organised cultural encounter as entanglements of everyday practices and practices that are encouraged by their organisers. In this way, we take into account the orchestrated character of these encounters, at the same time as we avoid the temptation (and mistake) to explain practices as the direct outcome of the organisers’
scripts.
Avoiding normativity, in the sense described above, does not mean that we are uninterested in the transformative potential of encounters. In our readings, we prioritise critical analyses of h...
