Cultural Encounters as Intervention Practices

Setting up cultural encounters is a widespread intervention strategy employed to diffuse conflicts and manage difficulties related to diversity. These organised cultural encounters bring together people of different backgrounds in order to promote peaceful coexistence and inclusion. These transformative aims relate to the participants but are often also expected to spill over into the society, community or context addressed by the encounter. As a category, ‘Organised Cultural Encounters’ draws together a variety of activities and events such as multicultural festivals, dialogue initiatives, diversity training and inclusion projects – activities that are generally not considered to be of the same kind. Most of the existing literature on these types of encounters is instrumental and has an overall emphasis on evaluations in terms of outcome or success rate. This book goes beyond evaluations, and the contributors pose and debate theoretical and methodological questions and analyse the practices and performativities of particular encounters. Taken together, it makes an important contribution to the theorisation and analysis of intercultural relations and negotiations. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Lene Bull Christiansen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research has explored the diverse fields of gender and nationalism in Zimbabwe, Danish celebrity involvement in development aid campaigning and organised cultural encounters in volunteer tourism and music festivals.Lise Paulsen Galal is an Associate Professor in Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University, Denmark and the Project Leader of the collaborative project on ‘Organised Cultural Encounters’. Her research focus is interfaith dialogue as organised cultural encounters, Christian–Muslim relations (in Egypt and Denmark), migration and transnationality and religious minorities.Kirsten Hvenegard-Lassen is an Associate Professor in Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University, Denmark. She is a Senior Researcher in the collaborative ‘Organised Cultural Encounters’ project. Her research focuses on in- and exclusion processes related to (intersections of) race, ethnicity and gender in the Nordic countries.