Critical Autoethnography and Intercultural Learning: Emerging Voices 9780367234775, 9780367234768, 9780429280016

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CRITICAL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND INTERCULTURAL LEARNING

Critical Autoethnography and Intercultural Learning shows how critical autoethno­ graphic writing in a field such as intercultural education can help inform and change existing research paradigms. Engaging story-telling and insightful analysis from emerging scholars of diverse backgrounds and communities shows the impact of lived experience on teaching and learning. Different areas of intercultural learning are considered, including language education; student and teacher mobilities; Indigenous education; backpacker tourism; and religious learning. The book provides a worked example of how critical autoethnography can help shift thinking within any discipline, and reflects critically upon the multidimensional nature of migrant teacher and learner identities. This book will be essential reading for upper-level students of qualitative research methods, and on international education courses, including language education. Phiona Stanley is Associate Professor of Intercultural Communications (Tourism and Languages) at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. Previously, she was Senior Lecturer in Education at UNSW Sydney, Australia. Her research—which is qualitative and mostly auto/ethnographic—focuses on intercultural interactions in a range of settings, including education and backpacker/volunteer tourism.

CRITICAL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND INTERCULTURAL LEARNING Emerging Voices

Edited by Phiona Stanley

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Phiona Stanley; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Phiona Stanley to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stanley, Phiona, editor.

Title: Critical autoethnography and intercultural learning : emerging

voices / edited by Phiona Stanley.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019055986 (print) | LCCN 2019055987 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780367234775 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367234768 (paperback) |

ISBN 9780429280016 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Multicultural education. | Critical pedagogy. |

Education–Biographical methods. | Reflective teaching. | Reflective

learning. | Teachers–Biography. | Students–Biography.

Classification: LCC LC1099 .C744 2020 (print) | LCC LC1099 (ebook) |

DDC 370.116–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055986

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055987

ISBN: 978-0-367-23477-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-23476-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-28001-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

Cover image and artwork by Ying (Ingrid) Wang

CONTENTS

List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction 1 The journey Phiona Stanley

viii ix xii 1 3

PART I

Engaging with the western ‘academy’ 2 Epistemological violence and Indigenous autoethnographies Michelle Bishop 3 Yarning through the intricacies, tensions, and potentialities of (Indigenous) autoethnography Michelle Bishop and Dakota Jericho Smith

17 19

33

4 Alone but not lonely Isma Eriyanti

42

5 Double precariat: a migrant placeholder in a neoliberal university Madhavi (Maddy) Manchi

51

vi

Contents

6 Writing double precarity: recalling and re-presenting autoethnographies Madhavi (Maddy) Manchi and Elham Zakeri

60

PART II

Lingua-cultural learning

63

7 Escaping the comfort zone: the first language ‘bubble’ Anqi Li

65

8 “Where are you really from?” Hyejeong Ahn

76

9 Autoethnographic perspectives on first language use in second language learning Davina Delesclefs

84

10 Insecurities, imposter syndrome, and native-speakeritis Hyejeong Ahn and Davina Delesclefs

95

11 Beginning and becoming: expectations of the teaching body in English language teaching Alana Bryant

100

12 Running away from ‘Chineseness’ at an Australian university Jinyang Zhan

110

PART III

Intercultural learning in the world

119

13 The farm Tara McGuiness

121

14 ‘But you’re not religious!’ Navigating a faithless fascination Martha Gibson

131

15 Living in flux Matthew Crompton

142

16 Imaginaries: Turkey, Australia, the world! Elham Zakeri

153

Contents

vii

17 De-Chinese and re-Chinese: negotiating identity Ying (Ingrid) Wang

162

18 “Which side are you on?” Between two cultures Gesthimani Moysidou

174

Conclusion

183

19 Learning, critiquing, emerging Phiona Stanley, Michelle Bishop, Madhavi (Maddy) Manchi, Davina Delesclefs, Elham Zakeri, and Alana Bryant

185

Index

191

FIGURES

12.1 12.2 17.1 17.2 17.3

Chinese flyers, Kingsford, April 2018 Jinyang’s foray into fencing, September 2018 Shut up, Ying (Ingrid) Wang, 2016 Flooded, Ying (Ingrid) Wang, 2016 Bridges in the rain, Ying (Ingrid) Wang, 2017

112 114 164

166

169

CONTRIBUTORS

Hyejeong Ahn works as a lecturer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her publications include Attitudes to World Englishes: Implications for Teaching English in South Korea (Routledge, 2017). She is currently researching the linguistic landscape of K-pop and the practice of using English as medium of instruction in South Korean universities. Contact: [email protected] Michelle Bishop is a Gamilaroi (Aboriginal) woman who grew up in and now lives on the lands of the Dharawal Peoples, in the country now known as Aus­ tralia. From a critical Aboriginal perspective, she critiques dominant practices in education and offers counter-narratives to advocate for emancipatory change. Her PhD research focuses on education sovereignty to envision an educational future outside of colonial-controlled schooling, centred in Indigenous axiologies, ontologies, and epistemologies. Contact: [email protected] Alana Bryant is based in Sydney, Australia, where she combines her work teach­ ing English as a second language with her practice as a yoga teacher. She is very interested in the power of words and using critical autoethnography to examine how discourses shape and are shaped by physical experience. When she’s not doing that, she enjoys listening to true-crime podcasts, journaling, garage sales, and pickling all the vegetables she can get her hands on. Contact: alana.bryant @sydney.edu.au Matthew Crompton is an American-Australian writer, educator, and photog­ rapher based in a location that will have changed by the time of publication. For money, he writes standardised literacy assessments and magazine articles. For fun, he engages in literary dirtbag travel, investigating pressing questions such as whether it’s possible for a town’s cheapest hotel to simultaneously be its worst

x

Contributors

value. (Spoiler: it is.) A fan of the outdoors, bicycles, linguistics, languages, and philosophy, he relies on coffee to a shocking degree to perform his duties as a normal adult human being. Contact: [email protected] Davina Delesclefs is based in Sydney, Australia. Her interests lie in languages

and culture, particularly in relation to power and identity. She loves world cinema, keeping fit, sausage dogs, and spending time doing pretty much any­ thing with her husband and two children. Contact: [email protected] Isma Eriyanti is from Medan, and currently based in Tangerang, both in Indo­

nesia. She completed her master’s degree in Education with the specialisation of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at UNSW Sydney. Her interest has always been in language learning and early childhood education. Contact: [email protected] Martha Gibson is from Edinburgh, Scotland, and she has recently come home after more than 20 years of working in education overseas. During the day, she works in digital learning and assessment at Heriot Watt University, with a particular interest in global digital divides. At all other times, she is feverishly pursuing her fascination with the sociology and rituals of Abrahamic religions. She is also a big fan of watching professional tennis and is often ridiculed by friends, family, and colleagues for her ‘Jewishness and tennis’-themed holidays. Contact: [email protected] Anqi Li is based in Sydney, Australia, and Beijing, China. After getting a degree

in TESOL, she is working on migration law and practice, with interest in how immigrants settle in Australia and consider it as home. She loves reading, the beauty industry, documentaries and TV series about CSI/Forensic medicine, and potato chips. Contact: [email protected] Madhavi (Maddy) Manchi is from India and now lives in New Zealand. She

currently works as a research assistant and research administrator at the Univer­ sity of Auckland. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include media, food, gender, and social memory. A budding research interest is migration, race, and postcolonial theory. She is a huge movie and music buff, and often speaks in pop culture references. Contact: [email protected] Tara McGuiness is based in Dublin, Ireland. Her research is situated in critical

White studies, new material feminisms, and qualitative methodologies. She loves dogs, coffee, parks, and lying in the sun. Contact: [email protected] Gesthimani Moysidou is currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland, working as

a Research Assistant and Associate Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University. Her background is interdisciplinary but she is currently focused on critical

Contributors

xi

hospitality research, mobilities, welcoming and inclusion. She is passionate about refugee and asylum seeker issues and in her free time she is mostly reading, binge watching TV shows, and trying to find the motivation to go the gym. Contact: [email protected] Dakota Jericho Smith is currently studying a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of

Education (Secondary). He was born on the land of the Wurundjeri people, but has done all of his growing interconnected through lore with with Gomeroi, Dharawal, Weilwan, Guring-gai, and Darkinjung country. He is invested in the critical analysis of the colonial legacy of assimilationist policies and how these manifest in the day-to-day narratives of Indigenous peoples navi­ gating the Western education industrial complex. Dakota is wholly devoted to aligning his future work with his cultural responsibilities and is actively and collectively seeking an alternative future to the corporatisation of education, in a bid to save the planet. Phiona Stanley lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, which is where she grew up and

also where she moved back to in January 2019 after 25 years of working over­ seas, including 15 in Australia. She is an Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University and her research and teaching focus on how people engage in intercultural settings, including tourism and education. She loves camping, hiking, cats, craft, travel, and whisky. Contact: [email protected] Ying (Ingrid) Wang is based in Auckland, New Zealand. Originally from China

and having lived in her adopted culture for nearly two decades, her life experi­ ences as an immigrant, mother, wife, designer, artist, and lecturer have inspired her to work as an art-based researcher and arts therapist. She is passionate about empowering people to find the strength and potential within themselves through art. Her current research interest is art-based critical autoethnography on the subject of identity. Contact: [email protected] Elham Zakeri is based in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are international

education, mobility, identity, including academic identity, and agency. She loves nature, yoga, reading, and long walks. Contact: [email protected] Jinyang Zhan is based in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include lan­ guage and culture education, international education, and second language acquisition. She enjoys reading, dancing, singing, and travelling. Contact: [email protected]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Phiona Stanley would like to thank Hannah Shakespeare and Matt Bickerton at Routledge, who have been supportive, wise, and efficient all along. Over cof­ fees, over the phone, and over many, many emails, Hannah has been a great supporter of this project, and it is thanks to her enthusiasm and encouragement that it is what it is today. Thank you, also, to those in the autoethnographic research community who have been invaluable sounding boards and advice givers throughout. In particular, big thanks to Anne Harris, Daniel Clarke, Fiona Murray, Jonathan Wyatt, David Purnell, Ken Gale, Esther Fitzpatrick, and Fetaui Iosefo. Hyejeong Ahn would like to thank Susanna Carter for her insights and crit­ ical comments, which greatly assisted in the crafting of this manuscript. Hye­ jeong also wishes to thank the editor of this book, Phiona Stanley, for her helpful comments and support during the preparation of this manuscript. Madhavi Manchi would like to thank Phiona Stanley for the nudge to foray into CAE, as well as her immense support in putting this chapter together. Thank you also to Elham for the enriching conversation that became Chapter 6. Maddy would also like to acknowledge the awesome delegates and organisers of the Critical Autoethnography Conference in Auckland in 2018, for their encouragement. The seeds for her chapters were sown in and developed through a presentation made for this conference.

Introduction

1 THE JOURNEY Phiona Stanley

As I write, in September 2019—in the first week of the new academic year—the UK international education sector is feeling ‘elated’ at the prospect of being able to ‘compete effectively with other destinations’ again. The UK government has bowed to industry pressure to reinstate post-study work rights—revoked in 2012— for international students graduating from British universities. Two of the UK’s main competitors in this market, Australia and Canada, already offer similar schemes. From 2020, international graduates will be able to work in the UK for two years after they finish their degrees, with no restrictions on the type of jobs they can apply for (PIE News, 2019). The students themselves are excited, too. The Times of India reports that some of the class-of-2019 graduating cohort—presumably due to start or continue their degree courses this week—are already deferring their studies so as to qualify (Canton, 2019). Why does this matter? The right to live, learn, and work in the Anglophone ‘West’ speaks to many students’ reasons for undertaking international education more broadly, an insight that can be gained through the British Council’s (2019) ‘Study UK’ advertising campaign. This sells the UK as a study destination as fol­ lows, with the captions pasted over stirring music and various aspirational scenes from British university life: Studying in the UK can open doors. World-ranked universities. Worldclass facilities. A very warm welcome awaits. A UK qualification opens doors. Discover culture. Discover travel. Discover you. These soundbites hint at the very real potential of intercultural learning to offer self-reflection (‘discover you’) along with first-hand engagement with intercul­ tural ‘otherness’ (‘Discover culture. Discover travel’). These, we know, are part of what students want from intercultural educational experiences (e.g. Heng,

4

Phiona Stanley

2017; Jackson, 2018). Additionally, of course, a very warm welcome and some swanky facilities may entice the undecided. This is the offering, and it seems to be selling well. In a year, from September 2018, the advertising campaign has ‘generated 22,000 direct leads’ for British universities (British Council, 2019). In Australia, meanwhile, the thirty-four-billion-dollar-a-year international education sector—the country’s largest export after primary industries—is reeling from a recent ABC News Four Corners documentary (2019), which investigated the undermining of academic standards by universities ‘waiving their own Eng­ lish entry standards in a bid to admit more high-paying international students’ (Worthington, 2019). Staff and students interviewed for the programme included Associate Professor Schroder-Turk from Murdoch University, who said, ‘Admitting students who don’t have the right prerequisites, or the correct language capabilities, is setting them up for failure. … That’s not what education is about’ (Four Corners, 2019, 17:38). The ABC described the documentary— called Cash Cows—as investigating ‘how Australia’s higher education system is being undermined by a growing reliance on foreign fee-paying students … aca­ demics and students are speaking out to reveal a picture of compromised academic standards’ (Four Corners, 2019). Although universities advertise English-language entry standards (e.g. for many master’s degrees at the University of Sydney, students are asked for IELTS 6.5; IELTS is the International English Language Testing System), some of the required levels are too low both for academic study and also for students to enjoy a connected social life and rich cultural experience. IELTS itself says, of ‘linguis­ tically demanding academic courses’ that IELTS 6.5 is insufficient and that even for ‘linguistically less demanding academic courses’ 6.5 is only ‘probably accept­ able’ (IELTS, 2019, p.15). Given that many students study abroad thanks only to their parents’ hard-earned savings, this puts the students themselves under enormous pressure to succeed against odds that are stacked against them. But even these standards are being subverted. For example, the University of Sydney’s Centre for English Teaching offers a ‘Direct Entry’ course for students with IELTS scores from 5.0. For context, the IELTS promotional materials describe a band-5.0 user as a ‘modest user’ of English, who: ‘[h]as partial com­ mand of the language, coping with overall meaning in most situations, though is likely to make many mistakes’ (IELTS, 2019, p.14). But from the Direct Entry course, students need only pass internal assessments for direct entry into degree courses. While some doubtless do fail, the pressure is likely on teachers and the college itself to pass them, as the Centre for English Teaching is branded by the same university, its unique selling point is its capacity to offer direct entry with­ out further language testing, and international students pay substantial fees for their degree programmes. Most universities have similar pathways providers with similarly conflicting interests. Together, these news stories and the machinations behind them offer a microcosmic insight into the slick, joined-up operation of international educa­ tion, in which myriad stakeholders with divergent interests jostle in a sector

The journey

5

worth billions of what is very often individual families’ hard-earned savings. Policy levers are pulled. Universities make money selling to those who may not be eligible for entry. Students may struggle to make friends, to understand their courses, and/or to represent themselves. And many people’s jobs rely on the delicate balance staying the way it is. The Law of Inertia states that a body at rest will remain at rest, and international education, for all the mobility it entails, seems to be a body at rest. We should be discussing these issues, and there are plenty of conferences at which we might do so. But international education conferences are big, slick, industry affairs e.g. the Australian International Education Conference (AIEC), British International Education Association (BIEA), and the (US) Association of International Educators (still known by its former acronym NAFSA: National Asso­ ciation of Foreign Student Advisers). And although these organizations may talk about ‘an interconnected world characterized by peace, security, and well-being for all’ (NAFSA, 2019), the programmes and attendance of these conferences are dom­ inated by the business of the industry: marketing, sales, risk management, quality frameworks, operations, and agents and pathways colleges as ‘strategic partners’. Stu­ dents are sometimes mentioned: there are presentations on ‘student retention’, for instance. But branding and operational excellence dominate, and although there are sometimes research-focused events tacked onto the conferences—for example, AIEC hosts a ‘Research Summit’—researchers must contend with an industry dominated by, well, the industry itself. Where is the critique? Within this multi-billion pound/dollar industry upon which so many jobs rely, where is there space for questioning received wisdom? Where is there space to note that, in an advert only twenty-seven words long, the British Council (2019) twice peddles the enduring symbolic and cultural capital of Britishness, thus potentially perpetuating the colonization both of the consciousness and of cultural space? Where is there space for pushback against the discourses themselves, including the marketing-speak in which both inter­ national education and international students themselves are commoditized? Where is there space to problematize the profound power imbalances reified in the global marketplace of ideas if students are rendered voiceless by language policies that set them up to struggle? And where are the commentaries on the potential for epistemological, ontological, and axiological violence when students from myriad cultural backgrounds are subsumed into the (ideologically positioned) education systems of the Anglophone ‘West’ in the name of cultural capital and symbolic cachet? None of this is in any way neutral (Connell, 2007; Cupples & Grosfuguel, 2019; Phipps, 2019). This also extends, of course, beyond international education, to intercultural education more broadly: education of subcultural and subaltern minorities within a given society within educational establishments designed by and for those who experience some measure of cultural dominance in that society. This has the potential to be a robust and equitable exchange of ideas, just as international education has that potential, at least in theory. More plausibly, though, it has

6

Phiona Stanley

the potential to be a colonization of minds, bodies, and tongues (e.g. Ngũgĩ, 2009), in a process through which those from the cultural margins may be tram­ melled in their ways of thinking, knowing, and being, resulting in censure and erasure. Cultural genocide, in other words. But the colonization of the consciousness is not all push-driven. There is also the pull. Interculturally and internationally mobile students may buy into the idea of Centre-West logical rationalism and English as a lingua franca, and per­ haps even that its associated places, people, and cultures are somehow ‘better’. This, of course, taps into larger global flows of economic, military, and cultural power. Another important question is therefore to ask: to what extent is it pos­ sible to use the master’s tools (e.g. academic texts like this one) to speak back to the master’s paradigm? We rarely talk about these things in intercultural education, whether international education, Indigenous education, bilingual education, or any other sub-field. Instead, when we talk about diversity, we tend to focus on food and festivals: nice, safe, colourful topics. Show us your tropical dances and we’ll teach you our scien­ tific rationalism. But we need to. We need to talk about what we think of as ‘normal’, laudable ways of thinking and being, and we need to talk about the power relations that let these norms go unchallenged. We need to talk about this and, more importantly, we need to listen to those on the margins: those not already subsumed into ‘the industry’ of intercultural education. That’s what this book does.

Why this book? This book proposes and showcases ways in which critical autoethnography can help a research area get beyond its existing paradigm by listening to subaltern voices in the field. The case study examined is intercultural education, but the book is a worked exemplar for any field that is stuck in its usual ways. The cen­ tral thesis is that critical autoethnographic insights from emerging scholars have an enormous potential to shake things up. In this book, a range of emerging scholars problematize taken-for-granted assumptions and norms in different areas of intercultural education, including language education, student and teacher mobility, Indigenous education, teacher identity, and student experience. This is timely—and vital—because intercultural education has become paradigm bound. While ‘the industry’ pushes govern­ ments to pull levers to enable student recruitment—as in the British Council (2019) advertisement cited above—measures of ‘success’ remain numbers and profit rather than student wellbeing or learning. Students’ experiences are rarely considered beyond retention counts and failure rates. No one asks whether international contact produces intercultural competence—on either ‘side’, i.e. for domestic or international students—and whether the unfairly stacked power relations leave a bitter taste, perhaps resentments, all round. Few listen to the peripheral voices of students, emerging scholars, and those teaching in precar­ ious, casualized jobs in the sector, under pressure from ‘the industry’ to comply

The journey

7

with policies of sometimes questionable ethical integrity. If they did, they might hear a different story: one that speaks back to the paradigm. Critical autoethno­ graphy thus lets some light in. This book presents emerging scholars’ accounts of intercultural learning in a very wide range of contexts. Their voices help move the debate along and, in so doing, the book as a whole is a worked example of how this research method can shift thinking in a field that has become stuck in its usual ways. The book asks: whose ways of being, and whose values, does intercultural education hold up as aspirational, or un/acceptable, and why? Whose ways of knowing are assumed to be better, more rigorous, and/or more ‘truthful’? What do teachers and students see as ‘normal’, and ‘valuable’, whether in terms of pro­ cess or product? How does power operate? And, where we realize we don’t normally ask such things and we notice that these questions make us uncomfort­ able, the book asks what’s going on in the silent spaces where researchers rarely tread. Because it is the difficult questions—and the conversations they spark— that this book is all about.

Ethnography’s troubled history But before we begin, it is necessary to problematize the research method itself, because qualitative inquiry, itself, is a situated practice. Ethnography in particular— within whose tradition sits autoethnography—is far from a neutral thing to be doing. Etymologically, ethnography is the writing (grapho, the ancient Greek verb to write) of people (ethos) (McCarty, 2015, p.29). But the putative neutrality of writing about people or writing culture conceals ethnography’s troubled past. Like intercultural education, ethnography packs a hefty postcolonial punch. Ethnography has its early roots in the descriptive accounts of ‘missionaries, settlers, [and] colonial officials’ (Pratt, 1986, p.27), and in common with mis­ sionaries’ and colonizers’ accounts, ethnography centred—and arguably still, now centres—the ‘“seeing man”… he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess’ (Pratt, 2008, p.9). That is to say, ethnography was born of colonial subjectivity in which the Western gaze described, classified, judged, and reduced the exoticized Other. For this reason, Erickson (2018) revisits the usual denota­ tive translation (of ethos, or ethnoi, as ‘people’), instead proposing the more nuanced ‘people who were not Greek’, noting that ‘[t]he Greeks were more than a little xenophobic, so that ethnoi carries pejorative implications’ (p.39). Given the way ethnography has historically been undertaken, this connotative translation makes more sense. Leeds-Hurwitz (2013), sketches the early twentieth century anthropologists who travelled the world to research mainly so-called ‘primitive’ cultures in ways that they thought were objective. Such writing sought to hypothesize about and uncover the ‘truth’ of a given way of life, necessarily rooted in a positivist epis­ temological stance and a discourse that ‘construe[d] the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest’

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Phiona Stanley

(Bhabha, 1996, p.92). Within this paradigm, ethnography was a putative ‘scien­ tific’ endeavour, a philosophy of science akin to ‘social physics’ that sought to uncover Humean causality and general laws of social processes (Erickson, 2018) within cultures conceived as ‘fixed, unitary, and bounded’ (McCarty, 2015, p.24). The cultures studied included the First Peoples of Canada’s Baffin Island, the Tro­ briand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, and Samoans, choices that matter because all were non-Western cultures. Although anthropology came to refute the racism underlying early models of ethnography, shifting the focus to societies’ internal coherence and coming to rely on the notion of cultural relativism (McCarty, 2015), ethnography remained part of the ‘colonial discourse’ and its ‘apparatus of power’ (Bhabha, 1996, p.92). For some, this conceptualization has never gone away. This includes ethnog­ raphy within the academy but also outside, such as in documentary filmmaking. In 2017, for instance, the (UK’s) Telegraph newspaper ran a headline that reported: ‘British explorer Benedict Allen goes missing in jungle while searching for lost tribe’ (Henderson, 2017). In contrast to the ‘researched’, the Yaifo people, the article depicted Allen as ‘a very experienced explorer’ whose ‘daring expeditions’ involved ‘a hard hike up through rather treacherous terrain’ (ibid). This discourse is lifted straight from colonial-era narratives in which ‘British masculinity … is constituted in the geography of adventure’ (Phillips, 2013, p.55). In some ways, then, ethnography’s past is still present. While Allen was making a BBC documentary, some researchers may still imagine that they are pinning down a ‘neutral, tropeless discourse that would render other realities “exactly as they are”, [and] not filtered through our own values and interpretive schema’ (Pratt, 1986, p.27). But it is impossible to objectively depict social ‘reality’. The historical Redfield-Lewis case illustrates this point: two researchers set out, one in the 1920s and the other in the 1940s, to do fieldwork in/on the same Mexican village. But their accounts, seventeen years apart, came to the opposite conclusions. Assuming that the village of Tepoztlán had not changed beyond recognition between their visits, Erickson (2018, p.48) asks, ‘Do the perspective, politics, and ideology of the observer so powerfully influence what he or she notices and reflects on that it overdetermined the conclusions drawn?’ Well, yes. We are, all of us, positioned within a specific paradigm. Just as a fish is unaware of water until it is lifted, flapping and gasping, onto dry land, it is diffi­ cult to perceive the arbitrary and constructed nature of the things we regard as right or normal. By way of illustration, Australian Robert Dessaix (1994, p.62), who was a rare, non-Soviet literature student at Moscow University in 1966, describes the nature of that paradigm, pointing out that the system there then was no more constructed or arbitrary than any other: In 1966, Dostoevsky had only just been rehabilitated and for the first time since the early years of the Revolution it was possible to discuss Dostoevs­ ky’s Christianity and novels like The Devils freely. I say ‘freely’, but

The journey

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I don’t mean by this that all was permitted. In our weekly tutorials with Mr Tiunkin, a frightened rabbit of a man, terrified the Australian in his class might suddenly come out with a heresy he’d then have to deal with, we’d begin with a short lecture[.] … Then the class would have what was called a debate. Tiunkin would announce a proposition (for example, ‘the figure of Raskolnikov [from Crime and Punishment] is anti-revolutionary’), appoint one student to defend it and one to oppose it, and then at the end of the tutorial he, Tiunkin, would tell us who was right and who was wrong and why. It was freedom of sorts. The class paper we had to write was less ‘free’: it had to be couched in strictly Marxist literary terms and the bibliography had to begin with the letter L for Lenin, then go onto M for Marx, E for Engels, and only then onto A, B, etc. No one minded or thought it odd. We were just giving unto Caesar. Much the same thing happens today in Australian tertiary institutions, after all, where, if not in the bibliography at least in the text, we find the obligatory mention of Kristeva, Said, Foucault, Lacan, Irigaray. We just have a wider range of orthodoxies struggling for dominance here—and the public’s indifference to all of them is not concealed, just ignored.

On autoethnography This is why emerging scholars’ critical autoethnographies offer such valuable insights from the margins of intercultural education. In autoethnography, writers begin from their own experiences. Clearly, however, issues of paradigm bound­ edness and the slipperiness of ‘truth’ still emerge; the writers may be outside of the normative paradigm, but they are still (as we all are) paradigm bound. Ellis, Adams and Bochner (2011, p.3) write: Autoethnographers … recognize how what we understand and refer to as ‘truth’ changes as the genre of writing or representing experience changes. … Moreover, we acknowledge the importance of contingency. We know that memory is fallible, that it is impossible to recall or report on events in language that exactly represents how those events were lived and felt; and we recognize that people who have experienced the ‘same’ event often tell different stories about what happened[.] … For an autoethnographer, ques­ tions of reliability refer to the narrator’s credibility. Could the narrator have had the experiences described, given available ‘factual evidence’? Does the narrator believe that this is actually what happened to her or him? … Closely related to reliability are issues of validity. For autoethnographers, validity means that a work seeks verisimilitude; it evokes in readers a feeling that the experience described is lifelike, believable, and possible … [Citing Plummer] ‘What matters is the way in which the story enables the reader to enter the subjective world of the teller—to see the world from her or his point of view …’ … An autoethnography can also be judged in terms of whether it

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helps readers communicate with others different from themselves or offer a way to improve the lives of participants … In particular, autoethnographers ask: ‘How useful is the story?’ and ‘To what uses might the story be put?’ This is a process that makes very different assumptions about the nature of knowing and learning. It puts the researcher in a very different position, and it engages differently—much more tentatively and much less arrogantly—with the ‘truth’. But is it enough? Is it research? This is best addressed autoethnographically, through a story. I recently co­ edited Questions of Culture in Autoethnography (Stanley & Vass, 2018) and an inductive reading of our long editorial discussions about papers we rejected sug­ gests that there are at least three ways in which autoethnography can be done badly. Here, then, are three problem areas that Greg Vass and I identified in texts purporting to be autoethnography. From these can be gleaned a set of evaluation criteria for autoethnography (but see also Schroeder (2017) and Le Roux (2017) for more complete sets of evaluation criteria). First, not all would-be autoethnographers can tell an engaging story in which they situate the self and the lived experience. The seeming freedom of ‘writing from the heart’ (Pelias, 2013) may appear as an opportunity to rant rather than to set a compelling scene and narrate action, and some of the writing submitted and ultimately rejected from the book read as angry online opinion pieces rather than as stories. This is simply not what autoethnography is. Related, another issue (and a different rejected submission) was writing that looked, on the sur­ face, like autoethnography: full of punchy slogans about writing differently and vague statements about feelings. But this text was, at best, a form of writing-as­ therapy. Now, although the political is never far from the autoethnographic and there are few things quite as theoretical as a good story, ‘personal’ writing does not mean simply grinding an axe of opinion. And nor does the vague writing of fleeting feelings and cribbed soundbites constitute autoethnography. As with any other ethnographic method, there is a need to ground interpretations and inductive theorizing in meaningful, storied ‘data’, thickly described. Second, any individual’s so-called ‘personal’ narrative is necessarily situated, and it is the engagement with power relations that makes autoethnography ‘crit­ ical’. (Indeed, the very notion of the ‘individual’ self is a situated, Western onto­ logical position, which both enjoys rather too much normative power, and which is far from universal; Iosefo, 2018). This is particularly relevant in mobili­ ties contexts, like intercultural education. As Sheller (2018, p.21) writes, of mobility justice more broadly, there is a need for ‘sustained attention to aspects of colonial history and an understanding of the historical formation of contem­ porary forms and patterns of global im/mobility’. Thus, when one writes one’s ‘own’ story, there is a need to draw on the surrounding context and literature and, when writing about interculturality in particular, postcolonial and intersec­ tional power relations must be central. Critical autoethnography is thus a very different genre from autobiography, memoir, or creative non-fiction. However,

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some of the writing we reviewed for Questions of Culture in Autoethnography told ‘personal’ stories that were almost entirely decontextualized. Autoethnography is very much scholarship rather than personal writing. The difference from other forms of academic writing is only that individual experience is foregrounded, not that rigour does not matter. The third and perhaps most contentious criterion is that autoethnography has an overt political agenda: it seeks to right ethical wrongs. This is what Ellis, Adams, and Bochner (2011) mean when they ask, ‘How useful is the story?’ and, ‘To what uses might the story be put?’ An autoethnography may be both compelling to read and well contextualized, but if it doesn’t work towards making the world a better place, it is not autoethnography as such. This is of course immediately contentious, particularly in our politically polarized times. As I have written elsewhere, of activism: [I]f we rely on an inductive construction—the assumption that we know activism when we see it—it is also necessary to trouble the ‘we’ that is doing the perceiving. Does activism necessarily invoke a progressive politics, and, if so, how is this to be defined? Or is it still ‘activism’ if it is the altright that perceives the objective as desirable social change? … If any and all social-change goals are the legitimate target of ‘activism’, does the term retreat from usefulness, becoming a catch-all for any and all impassioned or vaguely ‘helpful’ activities—per the paradigm of the in-group itself— that can wrapped up in ‘activism’ to confer legitimacy? (Stanley, in press) So it is with the political agenda of autoethnography, which is necessarily an activist, change-oriented methodology that seeks to problematize taken-for­ granted canonical knowledges and empower other ways of knowing, being, and doing. But while the specific politics of these may be contested, this core polit­ ical agenda is a pre-requisite: autoethnography is about new and useful ways of seeing and about seeing new and useful things. This is why this book comprises critical autoethnographies written by emerging scholars. Situated just outside ‘the academy’, and outside of intercultural education as an industrial complex, they can perceive things differently; sometimes radically so. They problematize many of the comfortable certainties promulgated by the international education discourses described in the opening section. And all spin a compelling yarn about what it is like to live their own particular stories within the context of intercultural learning.

Navigating the book This book is organized into three sections: engaging with the western ‘academy’, lingua-cultural learning, and intercultural learning in the world. Section I begins with Michelle Bishop’s provocative and powerful chapter, written from her

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Indigenous Australian standpoint, in which she traces the contested values, ways of being, and ways of knowing that are part of what Indigenous stu­ dents (indeed, any non-Western students) encounter in Western education. She traces the study of psychology, in particular, to its sordid roots in eugen­ ics, noting her own sense of devastation as she reads depictions of Indigenous people as inferior, backward, child-like, and primitive. How can she respond to any of this? She reads about decolonizing methodologies that reclaim and foreground Indigenous epistemologies and writes, for a university assignment, an Indigenous autoethnography. Decentring the self, she offers an account of ‘flipping the gaze’ by questioning the privilege typically awarded to Western research methods. In Chapter 4, Michelle passes the baton to Isma Eriyanti, who writes movingly about her experiences as another non-Western student—she is Indonesian— encountering the Western academy. Focusing primarily on private as well as uni­ versity life, she describes her fears, homesickness, and struggles as an international student in the Anglophone ‘West’. Her difficulties are not least linguistic—even though she has a ‘good’ IELTS score of 7.0—and she shares her anxieties but also the strategies she found to support herself as she made friends and made a success of her time overseas. The theme of the Western academy continues in Chapter 5, where Maddy Manchi writes an ingenious microcosmic critique of postcolonial power—including xenophobia and racism—through her own experiences as ‘a marriage migrant and a “global” scholar’. Undertaking her PhD at a very presti­ gious Indian university, she moves to New Zealand and is dismayed to find herself ‘chipped away into silent invisibility’. Gradually, she takes on the Western acad­ emy, cold-calling scholars until she is hired, piecemeal and casualized, as a postdoctoral research assistant. But the xenophobia and racism remain, and on the 15th of March 2019, she watches in horror as a White1 supremacist murders fifty-one people at two Christchurch mosques. Reeling, she writes that the attack is the physical manifestation of all the xenophobia and racism that people of colour have known about and felt viscerally, silently, for years … I feel no need to lift the rug anymore, to examine all that has been swept under it. It has been pulled from beneath our feet, forcing us to get our hands, feet and bodies dirty. The national conversation and reflection about racism in New Zealand that fol­ lows the attack, she provocatively concludes, is a conversation we need to have in the Western academy, too. Interleaved, in Chapters 3 and 6, are conversations about process and method: the issues, tensions, and possibilities of writing critical autoethnographies like these. In Chapter 3, Michelle Bishop sits down with Dakota Jericho Smith, an Indigenous undergraduate student, to discuss the intricacies and potentialities that arise for each of them as they write Indigenous autoethnographies but also

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as they sit as Indigenous students in university classrooms. In Chapter 6, Maddy Madhavi and Elham Zakeri pick up the conversational thread, in a discussion of vulnerability and memory in writing their own intercultural autoethnographies that span India, Iran, Turkey, New Zealand, and Australia. Part II, on lingua-cultural learning, is bookended by Chapters 7 and 12, in which Anqi Li and Jinyang Zhan, respectively, write about their own, different experi­ ences as Chinese international students in Australia. In Chapter 7, Anqi focuses on her own learning of (and at times passion for) English in China, where she engages with US popular culture and feels excited to go to university in Sydney to under­ take a master’s degree. But, heart-wrenchingly, when she arrives she describes the lingua-social isolation she feels as one of the ‘Asian students’ in class: [W]e sat apart and were quiet while they talked … We watched. They judged. And we judged, too, but probably they didn’t know that. They talked. And we were silent. The only communication I had with an Austra­ lian woman classmate in that class was when she picked up my dropped pen lid. The whole process lasted for only 20 seconds, without any eye contact. I felt very upset: I’d thought that I could develop friendship, or at least that I might discuss about the class topic with her. But there seemed a mountain between us, which let me feel separated from their world. In that class, I gave up speaking with anyone, feeling upset and under pressure to keep up. This thread is picked up in Chapter 12, by Jinyang, who describes the Chineselanguage landscape around her university campus in Australia and the efforts she has made to escape from this first-language ‘bubble’, in an effort to have a more authentically Australian (or ‘international’?) experience. Their two stories reson­ ate, reverberate, and at times contrast, although these two young Chinese women writers have never met. Both are legitimate users of English although both grapple with their identities in being this, and both find ways of negotiat­ ing their alienation in a setting that is, by turns, as ‘Chinese’ as it is ‘Australian’. The question of legitimacy as a user of English is then picked up, in Chapter 8, by Hyejeong Ahn, who writes about her negotiated identity as a Korean-born, Austra­ lian-citizen scholar in Singapore. She navigates questions like the contentious ‘Where are you (really) from?’ and paints a picture of lingua-cultural identity that is, above all, hyphenated and negotiated. The complexity continues in Chapters 9 and 11, where Davina Delesclefs and Alana Bryant, respectively, write searingly honest, insightful accounts of their own early experiences of teaching English in Switzerland, Italy, and Cambodia. Davina problematizes many language schools’ ‘English-only’ policies and the attitudes of her colleagues, some of whom are monolingual users of English, afraid, perhaps, to let go of some of their classroom power. Alana approaches the question of teacher power differently, considering the teaching body: the norms and expectations of so-called backpacker ‘teachers’ in Southeast Asia and beyond. These chapters are again interleaved, in Chapter 10, by a ‘conversation’, in which Hyejeong and Davina

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problematize their experiences of insecurities, imposter syndrome, and what they term ‘native-speakeritis’ in their work in English language teaching. Part III then moves out of the academy and language classrooms and into intercul­ tural learning in the wider world. In Chapter 13, Tara McGuinness writes evocatively about critical race theory and, in particular, Whiteness and migration in the context of Brazil. Writing about visiting her husband’s family farm in Minas Gerais, she ques­ tions the ongoing privileging of Whiteness and, citing Sara Ahmed, discusses bodies in or out of place and the ongoing unmarkedness of her own Whiteness. From race the discussion then moves on to religion, and in Chapter 14, Martha Gibson considers her own intercultural learning about and from Abrahamic religions, her work among Muslims predominantly in Yemen but also Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and her interest in the sociology of Jewishness in New York City and other settings, such as Spain. Despite her deep interest in Abrahamic religious and cultural practices, she writes that she is yet to find a ‘god-shaped void’ in her life. Nevertheless, she engages with and learns from religious cultures around her, writing about the tensions and assumptions that result. In Chapter 15, Matthew Crompton engages critically with the extreme mobili­ ties of long-term, location-independent ‘nomadic’ lifestyles associated with but dis­ tinct from backpacker tourism. He writes of his own alienation growing up in monocultural, small-town Ohio, USA and his sense of release and relief among a transnational community in Guatemala, at first, and then in India, South Korea, and Colombia, among other places. The theme of imaginaries of place continues in Chapter 16, in which Elham Zakeri writes about growing up in Iran and the way social imaginaries there constructed her homeland as ‘periphery’ and the for­ eign as ‘centre’. ‘As Iranians, we looked up to foreigners,’ she writes, describing her own leaving of Iran first for Turkey and Georgia, and then, eventually, to Spain and Australia, where she experienced the thrill of ‘not wearing a headscarf and feeling the wind dancing in my hair’. But her Iranian-ness still haunts her, and she struggles with social imaginaries of Iran outside the country, feigning that she is French to a class of Chinese students. Her chapter speaks deeply to the ten­ sions and negotiations between appropriated and attributed identities. These themes continue in Chapters 17 and 18, in which Ingrid (Ying) Wang and Gesthimani Moysidou, respectively, each grapple with complex questions of national identity and identification. Ingrid (Ying), a Chinese-born, New Zealand-resident art therapist, writes about her own attempts to ‘de-Chinese’ and then ‘re-Chinese’ herself through her remarkable art and poetry but also through re-naming, re-imagining, and re-working her own narrative. Gesthimani, meanwhile, is ‘half-Greek, half-German, and full-foreigner’: a multilingual, bicultural, pan-European ‘international student’, undertaking her first master’s degree as a Greek citizen in Germany during the global financial crisis (in which she is pushed to explain and represent Greek perspectives to Germans, and vice versa), and then as a Greek-German ‘full-foreigner’ undertaking a PhD in Scotland. There, at last, she comes to a sense of home and selfhood that are congruent with her friends and her surroundings: in cosmopolitan Edinburgh, she finally feels ‘at home’ among other othernesses, seeking out familiarity in cultural

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difference. Together, then, this section speaks to the complexities and possibilities for intercultural learning in the wider world but also the difficulties and tensions in main­ taining and re-negotiating our own identities as we navigate lingua-cultural difference. Chapter 19 concludes the book, revisiting the overarching themes of postco­ lonial power and intercultural learning in the western academy, in language edu­ cation, and in the wider world. Echoing the process sections—the conversation chapters—this last chapter is presented as a conversation, in which the substan­ tive but also the methodological issues are teased out between the editor and some of the chapter contributors.

Note 1 Capital letters are used throughout this book to denote socially constructed ‘race’ labels: ‘White’, ‘Black’, and also ‘Brown’ (see p. 55 and p. 146). This indicates that these categor­ ies are considered matters of ideology/identity and that their use may be contentious and contested. Capitalizing these terms is also recommended by the APA style guide.

References Bhabha, H. (1996). The other question: Difference, discrimination, and the discourse of colonialism. In H. Baker, Jr., M. Diawara, & R. Lindeborg (Eds.), Black British cultural studies: A reader (pp. 87–106). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. British Council. (2019). Study UK: ‘Discover you’ campaign. British Council. Accessed from: www.britishcouncil.org/education/ihe/what-we-do/study-uk-campaign Canton, N. (2019, 16 September). Extend 2-year post-study visa to all international stu­ dents in UK: Indians. Times of India. Accessed from: https://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/world/uk/indian-students-campaign-for-two-year-psw-visa-to-be-extended-to­ current-intake/articleshow/71141096.cms Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Cupples, J. & Grosfuguel, R. (2019). (Eds.) Unsettling Eurocentricism in the westernized university. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Dessaix, R. (1994). A mother’s disgrace. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), Art 10. Erickson, F. (2018). A history of qualitative inquiry in social and educational research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (5th ed., pp. 36–65). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc. Four Corners. (2019, 6 May). Cash Cows: Australian universities making billions out of inter­ national students. ABC News In-depth [Video file]. Accessed from: https://youtu.be/ Sm6lWJc8KmE Henderson, B. (2017, 15 November). British explorer Benedict Allen ‘goes missing in jungle’ while searching for lost tribe. The Telegraph (UK). Accessed 23 September 2019 from: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/14/british-explorer-benedict-allen-goes­ missing-papua-new-guinea/ Heng, T. T. (2017). Voices of Chinese international students in USA colleges: ‘I want to tell them that’. Studies in Higher Education, 42(5), 833–850.

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IELTS. (2019). Guide for education institutions, governments, professional bodies and commercial organisations. Accessed from: www.ielts.org/-/media/publications/guide­ for-institutions/ielts-guide-for-institutions-uk.ashx?la=en Iosefo, F. (2018). Scene, seen, unseen. In P. Stanley & G. Vass (Eds.), Questions of culture in autoethnography (pp. 69–79). Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Jackson, J. (2018). Interculturality in international education. London and New York: Routledge. Le Roux, C. S. (2017). Exploring rigor in autoethnographic research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 20(2), 195–207. Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (2013). Writing the intellectual history of intercultural communication. In T. K. Nakayama & R. T. Halaulani (Eds.), Handbook of critical intercultural communica­ tion (pp. 21–33). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. McCarty, T. L. (2015). Ethnography in educational linguistics. In M. Bigelow & J. EnnserKananen (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of educational linguistics (pp. 23–37). New York: Routledge. NAFSA. (2019). NAFSA programs and events [website]. Accessed from: www.nafsa.org/pro grams-and-events Pelias, R. J. (2013). Writing autoethnography: The personal, poetic, and performative as compositional strategies. In S. Holman-Jones, T. E. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 384–405). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Phipps, A. (2019). Decolonizing multilingualism: Struggles to decreate. Basingtoke: Multilingual Matters. Phillips, R. (2013). Mapping men and empire: Geographies of adventure. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. PIE [Professionals in International Education] News. (2019, 10 September). Two-year work rights for international students in UK reinstated for 2020/21. The PIE News. Accessed from: https://thepienews.com/news/two-year-work-rights-for-international­ students-in-uk-reinstated-for-202021/ Pratt, M. L. (1986). Fieldwork in common places. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture (pp. 27–50). Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Schroeder, R. (2017). Evaluative criteria for autoethnographic research: Who’s to judge? In A. M. Deitering, R. Schroeder, & R. Stoddart (Eds.), The self as subject: Autoethnographic research into identity, culture, and academic librarianship (pp. 315–346). Chicago, IL: ACRL Publications. Sheller, M. (2018). Mobility justice: The politics of movement in an age of extremes. London: Verso. Stanley, P. (in press). Problematizing “activism”: Medical volunteer tourism in Central America, local resistance, and academic activism. Special Issue of Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research on Activism, edited by Jonathan Wyatt, to be published in 2020. Stanley, P., & Vass, G. (Eds.). (2018). Questions of culture in autoethnography. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Ngũgĩ, wa T. (2009). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Nai­ robi: East African Educational Publishers. Worthington, E. (2019, 6 May). Universities ignoring own English standards to admit more high-paying international students. ABC News (Australia). www.abc.net.au/news/ 2019-05-06/universities-lowering-english-standards/11063626

PART I

Engaging with the western ‘academy’

2 EPISTEMOLOGICAL VIOLENCE AND INDIGENOUS AUTOETHNOGRAPHIES Michelle Bishop

Introduction During my Master’s in Educational Psychology programme, I stumble upon an early description of Aboriginal Peoples’ cognitive capacity, published in the Children’s Encyclopaedia (1908). It proclaims: [T]he small brain of the Australian native … their lot is inescapable … these people do not merely know less than we do but are never able to learn as much as we do, even when they get an equal chance. (Lowe, 1998, p. 657) It’s devastating to read this. Anger and sadness conflicts inside me as my brow deepens and I think about the stories of trauma and humiliation I’ve heard from my Nan, Aunt­ ies, and Uncles. A steady pulsing in my throat becomes noticeable. Sticky palms reach for the squishy ball I keep on my desk. For moments like this. I can’t believe this is what people thought and relied upon to justify dispossession and genocide. How the State assumed control over every aspect of Aboriginal1 Peoples’ lives. Still ongoing. Do people continue to think like this, deep down, maybe without them even knowing it? Has it become embedded in people’s psyche – that Aboriginal Peoples are unquestionably ‘primi­ tive’ and ‘inferior’? Where did these ideas come from? As a Gamilaroi woman, entering ‘White’,2 patriarchal spaces can be a little unsettling. This was especially the case when I returned to university in 2016, this time to one of Australia’s top universities, and began a Master of Education (Educational Psychology). The dominance of Western knowledge systems was startling, and during class discussions, it was common to hear outright assertions being made of the superiority of Western knowledges.

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Unwavering arrogance and belief in ‘truth’ and ‘empirical evidence’. Though not trying to be malicious, but lacking awareness of the presence of colonial discourses as purposeful Western constructions designed to reinscribe colonialism and present the stratification of society as natural. I’m careful to refrain from revealing my reactions and wrestle to keep my facial expressions calm. Casually I look around the room for allies; who will meet my eye in dismay? Within the field of educational psychology, and the academy more broadly, the pervasiveness of colonial discourses continues to reify Western knowledge as ‘universal’ and ‘normal’. I draw on the work of Homi Bhabha (1996, p. 92) who defines ‘colonial discourse’ as the ‘apparatus of power’, which seeks to ‘construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’. It is therefore imperative for me to position myself upfront; cen­ tring who I am and where I am (coming) from. I do not claim to be neutral nor objective, and therefore wish to acknowledge and proclaim my subjectivities. As the only Aboriginal woman in the classroom, I often felt saturated and submerged by the primacy of Western knowledge systems. Sometimes it didn’t feel safe to identify myself, and so, like an interloper, I would sit, silent and sullen, wondering if my fair skin meant no one would expect an Indigenous person to be in the room. Watching. Lis­ tening. Building my arsenal of encounters with White supremacy. Other times, I identified myself early on, and navigated unrelenting classroom dilemmas – to challenge, appease or tune out? In this chapter I seek to explore the presence of colonial discourses in educa­ tional psychology, and the epistemic violence that ensued. My intention in revealing the omnipresence of colonial discourses is to demonstrate how easily they go unrecognised. There remains a tendency for educators to perpetuate these indirectly or unknowingly. For example, the opposing binary – primitive/ civilised – appears to be embedded as ‘truth’ within the field of educational psychology: ‘just the way things are’. This presumption permeates educational policy today, most notably in Australia with the ‘benevolent’ Closing the Gap3 campaign (Commonwealth of Australia, 2018). I do not believe educators are malicious or scheming Western supremacists when they assert such binaries; they often don’t know what they don’t know. Therefore, it is crucial to reveal ‘everyday’ normative practices and taken for granted ‘truths’ within educational psychology. In order to do this, it is essential for me to first understand and build a knowledge base of the ontologies and epistemologies of educational psych­ ology: where is it (coming) from? I thought studying educational psychology would grant me ‘scientific legitimacy’ from which to speak, and assumed (naively) that, based on what educational psychologists know about learning and schooling, they would have to be advocating for alternative schooling models. I was wrong. Unfortunately, throughout my studies, it became apparent that educational psychology was focused primarily on how students learn, without ques­ tion (or interest) in who was learning, what they were learning, or why. It proved

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difficult for me to just concentrate on the how. I worry about the intergenerational conse­ quences if systems and structures of education remain the same. Are we apprehending gen­ erations of young people in an education system that is inhibiting social, emotional, cultural, and cognitive growth? What is the purpose of schooling? As the experts on how people learn, I wanted to know what educational psychology thought of the structure of the schooling system. But, as I found out, the discipline of educational psychology was created and designed to legitimate and support formal schooling. And, more than that, through my research, I uncovered shady origins. A sordid foundation on which educational psychology today has been built. These epistemological beginnings were never acknow­ ledged during my Master’s, and yet they underpin the way schooling is conducted today. To what degree must educational psychology account for the harmful effects of schooling, particularly in regards to Indigenous students? Throughout the chapter, I rely on Indigenous autoethnography as a ‘reassertion of Indigenous ways of knowing and being’ (Tynan & Bishop, 2019). Distinct form of analysis. Not autoethnography. Marked in italics, my autoethnographic dataset of narrative, reflection, and storytelling demonstrates a defiance to conventional forms of academic writing; offering a ‘central form of resistance to the colonial forces that have consistently and methodically denigrated and silenced them’ (Wilson, 2004, p. 71). However, Indigenous autoethnography also fulfils an important ethical imperative. It provides a space where I can walk my talk; not just state, but show my positionality, and in doing so, forge a connection and sense of relatedness with the reader (Martin, 2008; Wilson, 2008). However, I would like to acknowledge that this puts me in a somewhat vulner­ able position; ‘Indigenous autoethnography’ demands personal exposure. This is risky business in the academy where you’re expected to maintain control (McIvor, 2010). Smith (2012, p. 37) warns that ‘writing can be dangerous because sometimes we reveal ourselves in ways which get misappropriated and used against us’. This worries me. There is a danger that I may encounter opposition and con­ frontation from those working in educational psychology. I am terrified this could harm my credibility as a person and as a scholar or have negative effects on my collegial relationships or career prospects. My intention in writing this chapter is not to discredit or vilify anyone. Rather, I am convinced that the discomfort and epistemic violence I experienced during my Master’s was not an isolated occur­ rence, that this is something that affects many Indigenous students in higher edu­ cation (cf. Barney, 2016). Therefore, my aim is to provoke an awareness of the pervasiveness of colonial discourses in educational psychology, and the academy more broadly, and the harm this may cause Indigenous students.

Establishing an Indigenous autoethnography Indigenous postgraduate students can become frustrated by being forced to accept western, ethnocentric research methodology that is culturally remote and often unacceptable to the Indigenous epistemological approach to knowledge. (Foley, 2003, p. 44)

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My desk is stacked with research textbooks. On the computer, 17 tabs remain open. I’m trying to find the ‘right’ methodology for my Master’s project. Is this what I’m meant to do – just choose one? I read how narrative inquiry is fighting for recognition as a valid research methodology (cf. Bell, 2011), and how mixed-methods research has become a ‘risk reduction strategy’ by including a quantitative component to ‘back up’ qualitative findings (cf. Bryman, 2007). It seems the epitome of research is quantitative/positivist and anything that deviates from this needs to justify/verify itself. But doesn’t this just reinforce the norm as the norm? I settle on critical discourse analysis. I figure I can analyse programme materials to reveal the reliance on colonial discourses in educational psychology. But the weeks slip by and in every attempt to ‘do’ the research I experience tension and hesitation. I spend many nights berating myself and my abilities to do research. Intensely frustrated, I begin to think maybe I’m not cut out for this. Foley’s words above affirmed my hesitation in ‘selecting’ a methodology and provided justification for me to reframe and re-centre who I am and where I’m coming from. Tuck and Yang (2014, p. 6) concur, insisting ‘who we are and how we see the world matters as it influences and informs everything we do, including methodological “choice”’. I devoured such research being produced by Indigen­ ous ‘warrior’ scholars from all over the world (cf. Martin, 2008; Smith, 2012) who expose the ways in which Western research paradigms have been assembled and based upon Western values and philosophies (Blair, 2016), and how decolon­ ising methodologies are reclaiming and foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies. In this way, decolonising methodologies are simultaneously enhancing complexity and critical analysis (Bunda, Zipin, & Brennan, 2012) whilst encompassing and engulfing Western hegemonic frameworks (Foley, 2003; Martin, 2008; Smith, 2012). For me, centring decolonising methodologies as an overarching theoretical framework eventually led to my selection of methodology. In effect, it selected me. I was going to write an ‘Indigenous autoethnography’. Indigenous autoethnography differs from autoethnography. As Maori scholar Paul Whitinui (2014, p. 461) argues, Indigenous autoethnography provides an opportunity to discuss the ‘cultural underlays/overlays associated with time, space, place and identity … autoethnography, as the dominant discourse … at times lack[s] a certain esoterically, metaphysical, and w(holistic) edge specific to an indigenous reality’. For me, autoethnography didn’t quite ‘fit’. Typically, the ‘auto’ in autoethnography denotes ‘self’ (Wall, 2006), a concept which, as iden­ tified by other Indigenous scholars (Iosefo, 2018; Whitinui, 2014), I felt needed to be expanded in recognition that ‘self’ is a bigger entity than an individual. Despite contrary assumptions, I am not an individual. My knowledge comes from my family, my communities, my connections. My ‘self’ belongs to them. Hence, Indigenous autoethnography invokes a way of researching that chal­ lenges and contests the ‘official, hegemonic ways of seeing and representing the other’ (Denzin, 2006, p. 422). This, I would argue, is a lived reality for myself and many Indigenous Peoples. Houston (2007, p. 47) concurs, stating ‘Aborigi­ nal authors … are acutely aware that their personal histories have been shaped by social forces, and in particular a series of government policies and educational

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practices’. We are consistently reminded of ourselves as the ‘other’. It is from this place that Indigenous autoethnography ‘flips the gaze’, resisting the unquestion­ ing privilege typically awarded to Western research methods. It examines and exposes systems and structures of power and interrupts ‘conventional’ (i.e. Eurocentric and patriarchal) research and writing practices. Furthermore, it refuses to be pinned down, and cannot be reduced to a single definition or set of practices. Indigenous autoethnography is agentic, allowing a freedom, unbound by regulations and instead bound by obligations. To family and community. To Country.4 To Indigenous Knowledges. Where storytelling can spiral into a bigger pattern, an interconnectedness that recognises and links together infinite experiences across time and space. It is accessible and offers a voice to those human and non-human stories that are often silenced, ‘worthless’.

Shady discipline? Throughout my Master’s, I tried to remain optimistic about the possibility of a future edu­ cation revolution. I was interested in how the brain ‘worked’, but, more than that, I wanted to be part of a movement to change Australia’s school system. I’m not convinced that the current schooling model in Australia is the best way to ‘do’ education; schools are often sites of harm for many Indigenous students (Gillan, Mellor, & Krakouer, 2017). Initially, we were systematically excluded, and then, in New South Wales at least, upon our inclusion, there remained an ‘Exclusion by Demand’ policy whereby Principals could exclude any Aboriginal student upon request by a non-Aboriginal person (Fletcher, 1989). This was in place until 1972! It is not hard then to imagine the intergenerational devas­ tation caused by formal schooling. Do schools continue to be ideological vehicles designed to assimilate, indoctrinate, and acculturate Indigenous Peoples? I know from my Elders that our way of education is extremely effective – it has been in place (and of place) for tens of thousands of years. But this system goes unrecognised. Invisible. Invalid. Educational psychology was established in the late 19th century as psych­ ologists were struggling to keep ‘their infant science alive’ and educators were facing the ‘daunting task of providing universal compulsory education’ (Mayer, 2008, p. 11). They joined forces, with educational psychology today being described as ‘studying how people learn and the implications for teach­ ing’ (Duchesne, McMaugh, Bochner, & Krause, 2013, p. xviii), with the intention to ‘improve educational policy and practice’ (Woolfolk & Margetts, 2016, p. 10). Thus, it seems, educational psychology was created to authenti­ cate the institution of schooling, and, in doing so, sought to prove itself as a ‘science’. As I searched the literature, looking for the origins of educational psychology, searching for its epistemological underpinnings, there lurked a shady history. It appeared a close relationship with eugenic ideologies5 had shaped the development of the discipline. In fact, one of the first educational psychologists, Henry Goddard, aspired to ‘infuse eugenics into educational theory and practice’ (Stoskopf, 2002, p. 127).

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Where did educational psychology really come from? What does that mean for educators (and students) today? During the search, I uncover more and more abhorrent depictions of Indigenous Peoples. Our presence is everywhere. I want to stop reading but I can’t. There are remnants of these attitudes in schooling today. The deficit view of Aboriginal students as a problem to be ‘fixed’. The reliance on testing to determine ability. It’s painful and infuriating. The words people used to describe us, the ‘work’ people have built upon to establish their careers and credibility. My fingertips pulse and cheeks glow hot. Our per­ ceived ‘inferiority’ has justified Western supremacy. My gut churns with a desire for retri­ bution. This needs to be known. I have to intersperse these readings with books written by Blackfullas,6 people like Bruce Pascoe (2011, p. 6) who emphasise how the sheer scale of our sustainable society over thousands of generations demonstrates a ‘level of cooperation [that] has never been practised with such success on any other place on the earth’s surface’. What a relief. Why aren’t people looking at this in awe, asking how it is possible, and wanting to learn from us? How can we possibly be considered ‘inferior’? Early educational psychologists, such as Henry Goddard and Lewis Terman, were deeply influenced by eugenics, in particular the belief that ‘intelligence’ was heredity, fixed and finite (Stoskopf, 2002). Terman became a pioneer in the development of intelligence tests, despite ‘blatant class, cultural and ethnic bias’, and developed the basis of the Stanford/Binet intelligence test, which, now in its fifth edition, is still in use around the world today (Stoskopf, 2002, p. 128). Similarly, Goddard conducted mass-scale intelligence testing, believing it to be ‘the best predictor for what a person was capable of doing in life’ (Stoskopf, 2002, p. 127). However, Ranzijn, McConnochie, and Nolan (2009, pp. 190–191) argue that intelligence tests were ‘created to confirm the eugenic pos­ ition’ and ‘designed to discriminate against the … “morally degenerate” and to confirm that their position was the result, not of oppression or exploitation, but of personal inadequacies’. In Australia, eugenics was ‘everywhere, nowhere, and eventually somewhere’ (Garton, 2010, p. 244). It unobtrusively slipped into the cracks of government policies, infiltrating ‘prisons, lunacies, health, education, and child welfare, where innovation without legislative sanction was always possible’ (Garton, 2010, p. 244). Described as the ‘psychological “capture” of education’, Austra­ lia’s leading academics in this field, Stanley Porteus, Richard Berry and Alexan­ der Mackie, contributed significantly to the reification of intelligence as fixed and inherited by relying upon intelligence testing as ‘proof’ of cognitive ability (McCallum, 2013, p. 130). Lowe (1998) insists that the substantial influence of eugenicists can be seen in educational policy and practices around the world, particularly through the prolific use of standardised testing, and the hereditarian assumptions when interpreting test results (Stoskopf, 2002). For Aboriginal Peoples this is evident in the federal government policy aimed at ‘Closing the Gap’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 2018), where standardised test results are scrutinised and publicised yearly, with Indigenous students benchmarked against the non-Indigenous ‘norm’ (Vass, 2015). It is troubling to witness the ways in

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which teachers, schools, researchers and governments have come to depend on test results as being an accurate reflection of Indigenous students’ ability (Deary, Strand, Smith, & Fernandes, 2007), often providing justification for diverting students from academic pathways (Lowe, Backhaus, Yunkaporta, Brown, & Loynes, 2014). I want to call out the discipline of educational psychology for trickery. It has not dis­ closed its origins or epistemology and instead assumed a neutral and universal axiology and ontology. Perhaps I’m not meant to be questioning this. And, surely, critics may say, things have changed now, Ed-Psych is no longer linked to eugenics. But I felt the legacy of eugenics and the presence of colonial discourses in my classes, in discussions about defin­ ing and measuring intelligence, intelligence testing and ranking, human development, cog­ nition, motivation. One leg bounces in a frenzy as I convince myself this experience will be useful one day. I type furiously, highlighting my notes in purple: What definition of knowledge is this based on? (Class notes, 19/10/2016) And: Desire for objectivity and denial of subjectivity … we all come from our own epistemology, why not name it? Testing as a concept and practice is not objective, it comes from an epistemology that tries to classify, com­ pare, define people (Western science). (Class notes, 23/03/2017) Why am I surprised? I know how these systems work. They protect themselves, with themselves. That’s what universities were created for, aye? To spread and enshrine the imperial agenda.

Epistemic violence I wonder if I’m being hyperbolic. Whether anyone will take this seriously. What is it I’m trying to ‘prove’? I think back over the 18 months it took me to complete my Master’s, searching for the ‘evidence’. What experiences can I put forth that demonstrate the perva­ siveness of colonial discourses in educational psychology? Examples are often ‘slippery’; hard to pinpoint and even harder to refute. It feels so intangible now. Unnameable. But I felt it. I know it’s there, embedded in the very fibres of the discipline. I felt the dominance and pervasiveness of colonial discourses most pertinently when there was no mention that the knowledge being presented came from a Western epistemology. It caused me to wonder what other students were con­ cluding from this, and whether it would lead to implicit presumptions that Western knowledges are ‘normal’, superior, and universal. Internalised domination? The sys­ tematic embedding of the ‘imperial curriculum’ (Smith, 2012) inscribes Western Peoples as the epitome of civilised man, and Indigenous Peoples as primitive, the missing piece of the ‘human puzzle’. This civilised/primitive dichotomy, as an example of colonial discourse, is commonplace and used extensively. This can be seen in the excerpt below, set as a core reading in my Master’s:

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1. Society (including formal instruction) is crucial for human develop­ ment. ‘The moral superiority said to be natural to man is only the result of civilisation … [and without society, man] pitifully hangs on without intelligence and without feelings, a precarious life reduced to bare animal functions.’ 2. People learn in order to satisfy their needs. ‘In the most isolated savage as in the most highly civilised man, there exists a constant rela­ tion between ideas and needs.’ 3. Instruction programs should be based on science. ‘The progress of education can and ought to be illuminated by the light of modern medicine, which of all the natural sciences can help most powerfully toward the perfection of the human species.’… The conclusions of Itard, written 200 years ago, can serve as a starting point for this book on the promise of educational psychology’s future (Mayer, 2008, pp. 5–6). I get it. These statements were written a long time ago, times have surely changed since then. I should be finding ‘new’ literature to ‘prove’ my point … But have times changed? Why are these educational issues included as a starting point for an educational psychology textbook written in 2008 and set as a core text in 2016? The assertion of the superiority of Western knowledges in the words above are frightening. The primitive/civilised dichot­ omy is unassailable. The reification of the concept of intelligence is irrefutable. The con­ struct of science is idealised, and the eugenic ideologies inherent in working ‘toward the perfection of the human species’ is startling. These are colonial discourses. These serve an imperial agenda, and as a result, Indigenous Peoples suffer very real consequences. Not­ withstanding all this, I did not feel safe going into this class. I felt shut out and unable to offer an Aboriginal perspective to these ‘starting points’. The normalisation of knowledge hierarchies presents as an impenetrable colo­ nial discourse in educational psychology. This establishes an inferior/superior dichotomy and is closely linked to discourses of primitive/civilised (as seen above), and the European notion of ‘progress’ (Battiste & Henderson, 2009). Battiste and Henderson (2009, p. 6) explain how Western knowledge holds the belief that ‘only European consciousness counts as progress and that Indigenous peoples’ consciousness was frozen in time’. In this sense, Indigenous and West­ ern knowledge systems are operating from ‘different theories of knowledge that frame who can be a knower … [and] what constitutes knowledge’ (Nakata, 2007, p. 8). This was exemplified in another core reading: Although folk biological knowledge7 provided the foundation for the emergence of the scientific classification system of Western biology, this folk knowledge is rudimentary in comparison to the vast knowledge of modern-day biological science. (Geary, 2002, p. 331)

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Here, ‘primitive’ is portrayed as inferior and ‘rudimentary’, whilst ‘civilised’ equates to superior with ‘vast knowledge’ (Geary, 2002, p. 331). This is also a prime example of the ways in which colonial discourses astutely assert the exist­ ence of knowledge hierarchies, and carefully ensure their position at the top. As my studies progressed and I read more and more literature within and outside of the discipline, I kept uncovering the harmful effects educational psychology has had on Aboriginal Peoples. My family, my ancestors. We were the fodder for ‘scientific discoveries’ providing the supposed baseline data from which to measure others’ superiority. There is current literature which reiterates this (cf. Lynn, 2012). Does the discipline know this? Do educators know this? And if not, why not?

To be Indigenous in the academy Without recognition and inclusion of Indigenous standpoints, the institu­ tion can be a dangerous and frightening place, inimical to the interests, safety and health of Indigenous people. (Bunda et al., 2012, p. 946) It is essential for universities to acknowledge the potential dangers of the univer­ sity for Indigenous students, and subsequent concerns for cultural safety. There continues to be a gap ‘between the intentions of academic teachers and descrip­ tions of actual practice’ (Martin, Nakata, Nakata, & Day, 2017, p. 1168), and as yet it remains to be seen whether good intentions can carry into good practice. In class, I would pay close attention to my bodily responses. This would ensure I was recentring my standpoint always and listening to all of my reactions. The pervasiveness of colonial discourses is hard to ‘see’ sometimes, but I sure ‘felt’ it. It made me feel alone, ashamed, angry. It stirred the ‘educator’ inside me to name it, take away its power, and, in doing so, hopefully prevent other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students from feeling alone, ashamed, angry. It felt tiresome being the only Aboriginal woman in the classroom challenging centuries’ worth of systemic degradation. Is this the experience of all Aboriginal students? Each class existing in a state of hyperarousal, awaiting the moment we must decide: fight or flight? Are educators of Indigenous students aware that these reac­ tions may occur in their classrooms? In Australia, increased attempts are being made to provide university pathways for Indigenous students, making higher education more possible than previous generations (Gore et al., 2017). However, the possibility of university does not automatically make it desirable for Indigenous students. There has been import­ ant scholarship conducted that investigates Indigenous students’ experiences of higher education, including encounters with racism, cultural safety, isolation, and participation (cf. Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2013; Bodkin-Andrews & Craven, 2013). Evidence of such negative experiences can be seen in the bleak representation of Aboriginal students in higher education, comprising 1.6% of enrolled students in 2015 (Universities Australia, 2017). In addition, between 2005 and 2013, more than 20% of Aboriginal students never returned to

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university after their first year, compared with 8% for non-Indigenous students, and only 47% of Indigenous students completed their degree, compared with 74% completion for non-Indigenous students (Australian Government, 2016). Research conducted into the experiences of Aboriginal students in psychology found that courses were seen to be ‘solely Eurocentric in orientation’ with class­ room environments ‘hostile to any attempt to consider Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives’ (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2013, p. 46). This example encapsulates what Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson (2013, p. 31) refer to as ‘epistemological racism’, a form of racism that is ‘deeply imbedded within educational practice, research, theory, and teaching.’ Historically, racism has been overt and easy to identify; however, contemporary manifestations of racism are increasingly more subtle and argued to be ‘one of the most dangerous forms of racism in existence today’ (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2016, p. 10). Indi­ genous students encounter such racism through the presence and normativity of colonial discourses which can have negative impacts on emotional well-being, physical health, and education outcomes (Bodkin-Andrews & Craven, 2013). Have I reverted to privileging Western research practices by attempting to provide ‘evi­ dence’, using empirical research, studies and statistics? Why have I felt compelled to do this? Do I need more ‘evidence’ of the negative implications for Indigenous students in the academy? Am I not evidence enough?

Concluding towards a beginning? All Indigenous peoples continue to strive for a decolonized context in an hysterically antagonistic Eurocentric canon, a context in which our Indi­ genous cultures, languages and knowledge can exist legitimately and safely. (Battiste, 1996, as cited in Blair, 2016, p. 474) Using Indigenous autoethnography as an epistemological process and methodo­ logical tool has illuminated a path to disclosing axiology and ontology. How to state who you are and where you’re (coming) from. And why this is important. Because everything exists in relation to something else, despite colonial dis­ courses that try to convince us otherwise: Colonialism is a total relation of power … thoroughly infused with the values of domination and submission, fear and compliance … it is an arti­ ficial culture that is impossible to sustain and an existence that disconnects people from their lands, their communities, their histories, and their languages … (Alfred, 2004, p. 91) It is important to remember where colonialism comes from and the ‘work’ it was destined to do. It has very real and ongoing consequences for Indigenous Peoples, and, arguably for all Peoples. Therefore, by exposing colonial

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discourses, calling them out, disrupting and challenging them, it changes every­ thing. You’re able to see more clearly the arbitrary binaries, deceitful knowledge hierarchies, the false classifications of racial supremacy. Alfred (2004, p. 89) claims that ‘Indigenous academics have the responsibility to work to defeat the operation of colonialism within the university and to reorder academe’; how­ ever, I would argue that this is the work of all scholars. This can be achieved, in part, by practising critical self-reflexivity, and becoming more literate about col­ onisation. Graham Smith (2009) suggests there is a failure in seeing new forms of colonisation and, therefore, a substantial need for people to develop ‘critical literacies’. This is a starting place. The presence of colonial discourses in educational psychology is one part of a much larger conversation, a starting point in a discussion about change in Australia’s education system, and an awakening of the shared history of this country. The presence and perva­ siveness of colonial discourses is harmful, it allows colonialism to endure and it continues the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples. And so, something has to change.

Notes 1 I use the terms ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’ interchangeably in reference to the First Peoples of Australia. I recognise these words are colonial constructs. 2 The term ‘White’ refers to the ‘invisible omnipresent norm’ of ‘Whiteness’ as a social construction, encompassing knowledge systems, race, privilege and institutional hegemony (Moreton-Robinson, 2000, p. xix). 3 A federal policy aiming to ‘Close the Gap’ in life outcomes for Indigenous Peoples includes three education targets: literacy and numeracy, year 12 attainment, and attendance. It has been argued the policy takes a racially comparative and deficit approach (Vass, 2015) and neglects to identify the role education has played in harm­ ing the life outcomes of Aboriginal Peoples. 4 The term ‘Country’ is purposefully capitalised in recognition of the sacred and specific connection to land/sky/water/place that is held by many Indigenous Peoples in Australia. 5 Eugenicists believed that behaviour, intelligence, and morality were innate and hereditary, and that individuals or groups of people with bad heredity could have a detrimental impact on society. As such they endorsed the existence of racial hierarchies (Fallace, 2016). 6 Blackfullas is a term used amongst Blackfullas to describe Indigenous people in Australia. 7 ‘Folk biology represents the evolved ability to develop classification systems of flora and fauna, and mental models of the essence of these species’ (Atran, 1998 as cited in Geary, 2002, p. 331).

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Barney, K. (2016). Listening to and learning from the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to facilitate success. Student Success, 7(1), 1–11. doi:10.5204/ssj. v7i1.317. Battiste, M., & Henderson, J. Y. (2009). Naturalizing Indigenous knowledge in Eurocentric education. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 32(1), 5–18. Bell, J. S. (2011). Reporting and publishing narrative inquiry in TESOL: Challenges and rewards. Tesol Quarterly, 45(3), 575–584. Bhabha, H. (1996). The other question: Difference, discrimination, and the discourse of colonialism. In H. Baker, Jr., M. Diawara, & R. Lindeborg (Eds.), Black British cultural studies: A reader (pp. 87–106). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Blair, N. (2016). Researched to death. International Review of Qualitative Research, 8(4), 463–478. doi:10.1525/irqr.2015.8.4.463. Bodkin-Andrews, G., & Carlson, B. (2013). Racism, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identities, and higher education: Reviewing the burden of epistemological and other racisms. In R. Craven, & J. Mooney (Eds.), Seeding success in Indigenous Australian Higher Education (Vol. 14, pp. 29–54). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Bodkin-Andrews, G., & Carlson, B. (2016). The legacy of racism and Indigenous Australian identity within education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 19(4), 784–807. doi:10.1080/ 13613324.2014.969224. Bodkin-Andrews, G., & Craven, R. (2013). Negotiating racism: The voices of Aboriginal Aus­ tralian post-graduate students. In R. Craven, & J. Mooney (Eds.), Seeding success in Indigenous Australian Higher Education (pp. 157–185). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Bryman, A. (2007). The research question in social research: What is its role? International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 10(1), 5–20. doi:10.1080/13645570600655282. Bunda, T., Zipin, L., & Brennan, M. (2012). Negotiating university ‘equity’ from Indigen­ ous standpoints: A shaky bridge. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16(9), 941–957. doi:10.1080/13603116.2010.523907. Commonwealth of Australia. (2018). Closing the Gap Prime Minister’s Report 2018. Depart­ ment of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Retrieved from www.pmc.gov.au/sites/ default/files/reports/closing-the-gap-2018/sites/default/files/ctg-report-20183872.pdf? a=1 Deary, I. J., Strand, S., Smith, P., & Fernandes, C. (2007). Intelligence and educational achievement. Intelligence, 35(1), 13–21. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2006.02.001. Denzin, N. K. (2006). Analytic autoethnography, or déjà vu all over again. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 419–428. doi:10.1177/0891241606286985. Duchesne, S., McMaugh, A., Bochner, S., & Krause, K.-L. (2013). Educational psychology for learning and teaching (4th ed.). South Melbourne, Australia: Cengage Learning Australia. Fallace, T. D. (2016). Educators confront the ‘science’ of racism, 1898–1925. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 48(2), 252–270. doi:10.1080/00220272.2015.1088067. Fletcher, J. (1989). Clean, clad and courteous: A history of Aboriginal education in New South Wales. Marrickville, NSW, Australia: J. Fletcher, Desktop Publisher. Foley, D. (2003). Indigenous epistemology and Indigenous standpoint theory. Social Alter­ natives, 22(1), 44–52. Garton, S. (2010). Eugenics in Australlia and New Zealand: Laboratories of racial science. In A. Bashford, & P. Levine (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of eugenics (pp. 243–257). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Geary, D. (2002). Principles of evolutionary educational psychology. Learning and Individual Differences, 12(4), 317–345. doi:10.1016/s1041-6080(02)00046-8.

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Gillan, K. P., Mellor, S., & Krakouer, J. (2017). The case for urgency: Advocating for Indigenous voice in education. Camberwell, Vic: ACER Press. Gore, J., Patfield, S., Fray, L., Holmes, K., Gruppetta, M., Lloyd, A., … Heath, T. (2017). The participation of Australian Indigenous students in higher education: A scoping review of empirical research, 2000–2016. The Australian Educational Researcher, 44(3), 323–355. Houston, J. (2007). Indigenous autoethnography: Formulating our knowledge, our way. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 36(S1), 45–50. doi:10.1017/S1326011100004695. Iosefo, F. (2018). Scene, seen, unseen. In P. Stanley, & G. Vass (Eds.), Questions of culture in autoethnography (pp. 56–64). Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge. Lowe, K., Backhaus, V., Yunkaporta, T., Brown, L., & Loynes, S. (2014). Winanga-y Bagay Gay: Know the river’s story. Curriculum Perspectives, 34(3), 59–91. Lowe, R. (1998). The educational impact of the eugenics movement. International Journal of Educational Research, 27(8), 647–660. doi:10.1016/S0883-0355(98)00003-2. Lynn, R. (2012). IQs predict differences in the technological development of nations from 1000 BC through 2000 AD. Intelligence, 40(5), 439–444. Martin, G., Nakata, V., Nakata, M., & Day, A. (2017). Promoting the persistence of Indi­ genous students through teaching at the cultural interface. Studies in Higher Education, 42 (7), 1158–1173. doi:10.1080/03075079.2015.1083001. Martin, K. (2008). Please knock before you enter: Aboriginal regulation of outsiders and the implica­ tions for researchers. Brisbane, Australia: Post Pressed. Mayer, R. (2008). Learning and instruction (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall. McCallum, D. (2013). The social production of merit: Education, psychology, and politics in Aus­ tralia, 1900–1950 (Vol. 7). Oxon, UK: Routledge. McIvor, O. (2010). I am my subject: Blending Indigenous research methodology and autoethnography through integrity-based, spirit-based research. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 33(1), 137. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2000). Talkin’ up to the White woman: Aboriginal women and feminism. St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press. Nakata, M. (2007). The cultural interface. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 36 (S1), 7–14. doi:10.1017/S1326011100004646. Pascoe, B. (2011). History: The real gap between black and white. In N. Purdie, G. Milgate, & H. R. Bell (Eds.), Two way teaching and learning: Toward culturally reflective and relevant education (pp. 3–10). Victoria, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research. Ranzijn, R., McConnochie, K. R., & Nolan, W. (2009). Psychology and Indigenous Austra­ lians: Foundations of cultural competence. South Yarra, Australia: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, G. H. (2009). Transforming leadership: A discussion paper. Paper presented at the Leading Change in Education, Simon Fraser University Summer Institute Lecture Series. Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd ed.). London, UK: Zed books. Stoskopf, A. (2002). Echoes of a forgotten past: Eugenics, testing, and education reform. The Educational Forum, 66(2), 126–133. doi:10.1080/00131720208984814. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 811–818. doi:10.1177/1077800414530265. Tynan, L., & Bishop, M. (2019). Disembodied experts, accountability and refusal: an autoethnography of two (ab)Original women. Australian Journal of Human Rights, 1–15. doi:10.1080/1323238X.2019.1574202.

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Universities Australia. (2017). Indigenous strategy 2017–2020. Retrieved from www.universi tiesaustralia.edu.au/ArticleDocuments/212/FINALIndigenousStrategy.pdf.aspx Vass, G. (2015). Putting critical race theory to work in Australian education research: ‘We are with the garden hose here’. The Australian Educational Researcher, 42(3), 371–394. doi:10.1007/s13384-014-0160-1. Wall, S. (2006). An autoethnography on learning about autoethnography. International Jour­ nal of Qualitative Methods, 5(2), 146–160. doi:10.1177/160940690600500205. Whitinui, P. (2014). Indigenous autoethnography: Exploring, engaging, and experiencing “self” as a Native method of inquiry. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 43(4), 456–487. doi:10.1177/0891241613508148. Wilson, A. C. (2004). Reclaiming our humanity. In D. A. Mihesuah, & A. C. Wilson (Eds.), Indigenizing the academy: Transforming scholarship and empowering communities (pp. 69–87). London, UK: University of Nebraska Press. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Winnipeg, Canada: Fernwood Publishing. Woolfolk, A., & Margetts, K. (2016). Educational psychology (4th ed.). Melbourne, Australia: Pearson Australia.

3 YARNING THROUGH THE INTRICACIES, TENSIONS, AND POTENTIALITIES OF (INDIGENOUS) AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Michelle Bishop and Dakota Jericho Smith

I can feel the warm winter sun on my neck as I write on Dharawal/Yuin Coun­ try. I am on sovereign, unceded Aboriginal land in the country we now call Australia. There’s a light breeze, enough to keep the windows closed, but a welcome reprieve from the fierce winds we’ve had over the past few days. Where are you reading this? What can you see? As a Gamilaroi woman, I am far from my ancestral Country, yet feel very welcome and cared for here. This Place has been looked after for tens of thousands of years, and I hold deep respect for Ancestors, Elders and Country for sustaining cultural knowledges and practices. Who has taken care of the Place where you are? I am a granddaughter, daughter, aunty, sister, partner, and also an educator, writer, researcher. My name is Michelle. My critical stance on education and research is informed by my critical Aboriginal lens. It shapes who I am and where I am coming from. How would you introduce yourself? How I introduce myself depends heavily on the context of who I’m intro­ ducing myself to and why. There are aspects of my identity that are cement, and there are aspects of my identity that are fluid and evolving, as identities do. My name is Dakota Jericho, I am a grandson, a son, a brother, an uncle, friend, partner, tutor, and a student, both in university and in my culture. I’m Aboriginal, though I’m uncomfortable with the word, as it’s a colonial construct, but it’s an easy identifier considering I do not know my ancestral land due to policies of dispossession and removal. I write this from Gomeroi Country, with the sunlight caught in my eyelashes, reflected off the dust in my backyard. I am cared for and connected here. The connection, care, respect and recognition from and for Country is where I am coming from. Where I am coming from shapes how I see and informs all that I do.

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I met Dakota Jericho within my first month as an ‘academic’. He was one of two Aboriginal students in my very first tutorial. What a relief. I was nervous, expect­ ing students to want to learn about Aboriginal peoples, not from us. Having other Aboriginal people in the room helped as we were able to share and support each other in an environment that sometimes felt hostile. At times, the hostility emerged through students’ curiosity and a genuine desire to learn (about us). These students ‘meant well’, yet their persistent questioning quickly became intru­ sive and inappropriate, especially when it was aimed at Aboriginal peers in the room. At other times it felt like a violent attack, an active refusal to acknowledge White privilege or consider the world/education system through an Aboriginal lens. Students conveyed this in different ways: through their body language – rarely bothering to look up or engage in activities, or through direct dismissal of the pervasiveness of colonialism in education. Generally, the first two weeks were spent justifying the existence of a compulsory Indigenous education course in a teacher education program. Yeah, I felt nervous before that first class, and pretty much every class since. The anticipation of potential derogatory/negative/ inappropriate comments weighs on my mind before each class, right until the very last week of the semester. I’m hyperaware, attempting to overturn 13 years of institutionalization and centuries of denigration, whilst ‘walking my talk’ and doing my best to build relationships with all students, maintain composure in my facial reactions and exercise a profound patience because it is imperative teachers know the education system they are entering into. Since that time, Dakota and I continue to have critical conversations, reflecting on the genius of our Ancestors, the rules and codes of the academy, and Indigen­ ous futurities (among many other things!). And so, it made sense to invite him to collaborate here, to transform our yarns to black squiggles on a white page. It was also serendipitous that Dakota had been asked to write an Indigenous autoethno­ graphy to fulfil an assessment requirement and we could grapple together with the intricacies, tensions and potentiality of autoethnography. I often reflect on when Michelle and I first met, under some young fig trees on Bedegal Country. We were outside a tutorial room, I remember we shook hands and I felt a sense of relief in being recognised and having a confirmation of interconnection. Having Michelle in the space for what was the first academic course I had undertaken was pivotal for the direc­ tion of my educational journey. The course was emotionally challenging for me. I ultimately learned that it was not my fault that I did not com­ plete highschool, but it was the schooling system that failed me. During this course, I was given the tools to critique the systems that are forced on Aboriginal peoples, that are so heavily juxtaposed to our ways of knowing, being and learning. But if it weren’t for Michelle’s presence, support, and demonstration of knowing, I would not have felt valid in the space. It was the small glances that we shared, along with the other Aboriginal student in my class, that let me know that I was safe.

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The ongoing conversations after class reinforced my feelings of heart­ break when unpacking the systemic injustices that were forced upon me as a young person. I would never have guessed that I could find a space within academia, through connection with this fierce Gamilaroi woman, that my heart could be held together with cultural integrity, as it healed. It’s this cul­ tural connection and positioning that gives me strength in undertaking this writing with Michelle, and it’s infuriating to think that the huge majority of Aboriginal students are never granted these connections of support in ter­ tiary or even public schooling situations. Despite this support, I feel terrified of this process, being so new to recording my world in writing. I personally think that this fear is justified, as I am critical of the support so few of us Aboriginal undergraduate students get in navigating tertiary education. We’re given so much support around academic literacy – in learning how to reference properly, etc. – and we are supported (or pushed) in our career aspirations. But it is incredibly rare to have access to an Aboriginal academic who has the resources (emotional, spiritual, financial/time) to support us navigating the hostility and violence embedded in the systems of western education. In considering the potentialities of autoethnographic writing, I find myself wishing that it informed and shaped a level of protection for me, rather than making me feel visible and accessible within the academy. There is a terrifying vulnerability in doing this type of work because of not know­ ing who will read it or how they will interpret it. It feels like shouting into darkness in a place I’ve never known. There’s such a vulnerability in writing/researching in this way, aye. Exposing yourself for an unfamiliar audience. Although, it’s not so simple. Because, simultaneously, in positioning myself, who I am and where I’m from, I am also announcing my posi­ tionality to other Indigenous readers. These signals of relationality and solidarity feel empowering on my end, a connecting-up of global Indigeneity. And I hope my words are received with a level of comfort and strength, it certainly feels that way to me when I read work by Indigenous scholars, and settler scholars, who position themselves. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to assume ‘neutrality’, to not have to disclose who you are and where you are (coming) from, or even think about it. There’s a real privilege in assuming ‘neutrality’. Absolutely. It’s hard not to feel a huge sense of injustice when thinking about people who sit within ‘neutrality’ or within the identities that flow through the academy with an invisibility that is so securely safe. Identities that allow an existence where little to no reflection or conscious critique of positionality is required of them. I have had many strange and surprising reactions when voicing my positioning and perspective, from non-Indigenous students, tutors and lecturers, which is often negative and always embedded with racist nuance, or just outright violence …

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Michelle Bishop and Dakota Jericho Smith

It has been a painful but telling journey of broken trust when I have worked hard to build connections with academics as part of my own learn­ ing and cultural needs. Despite there being systematic approaches to measur­ ing ‘student satisfaction’ in tertiary education, the current education structure does not afford wiggle-room for interpersonal, professional con­ nections. It has been important for me to connect with my tutors and lectur­ ers so that I can know who they are and where they’re coming from, and they can know the same of me. The majority of these people have identified themselves as anti-racist, allies of Indigenous peoples, on our side, fighting injustice. It was always comforting to know that people could make time for me, in the pressure-cooker environment of academia, and to feel that they valued and reciprocated the importance of our connection. Unfortunately, I have found myself calling out into that unknown darkness, for help from these same people, only to be kicked in the teeth. I don’t have enough fingers to count the amount of times I have voiced my concerns, to White academics who claim to be ‘a safe space’, about my experiences of racism, only to be silenced and invalidated. I have been told that I am oversensitive, imagining things, too angry … That perhaps I should defer from university for a semester and seek counselling. I have even had an academic open a dictionary and read the definition of ‘racism’ aloud. One of the most confusing, frustrating and anger inducing responses that I have had when confiding in a White academic was that ‘conversations about racism hurt the perpetrator’. It’s hard and exhausting being responsible for doing this work, even though telling my story comes (relatively) easy for me. Because of my ongoing experiences of defensive and aggressive reactions, I feel exhausted when anticipating responses to my future work. It makes me question how many people are really ready to engage with Aboriginal criticalities. Whoa, it’s hard to hear that these things have happened to you, though not sur­ prising. It seems that often people are willing to engage when it involves ‘saving’ or ‘fixing’ Indigenous people, and become defensive/confronted when they realise the work has to start with/on themselves. For a start, imagine if everyone positioned themselves ethically/culturally and acknowledged who they are and where they’re (coming) from; that feeling of being exposed and vulnerable you wrote about earlier would be redundant. For me, it feels strange and dishonest not to position myself. This is where I feel excited by (Indigenous) autoethnography. It expects positionality where you can reveal yourself, your critical standpoint, layer by layer – although that doesn’t necessarily negate the risk involved in how people receive that revelation. I agree that is feels dishonest not to do so, and more importantly, it feels disrespectful to my Ancestors. As you’ve said, it doesn’t necessarily negate

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the risk in relation to the reader, but it does negate the risk of breaking protocol as part of cultural praxis. I do wonder if critical autoethnographic work can positively inform a shift within the academy? A shift that flows into a new practice where every person who has the privilege to write within these spaces has an inher­ ent need to state their position, to explain their motives with a level of trans­ parency and relationality. Imagine – a mass shift in cultural processes of all people involved in the sociopolitical sphere of hegemonic knowledge (re) production! It’s important what you said about motives and being transparent. What is the research for? Who benefits? If research is designed/expected to ‘benefit’ society, then isn’t there an obligation for researchers to be upfront about their motives, their interpretation of ‘benefit’ and ‘success’? These concepts are informed by cultural values, right? And, for the reader, surely this shapes the way they approach/read the work? Surely! It’s strange to me when people can’t tell that they approach the work from a specific (cultural) place. So many academics I’ve talked with aren’t aware of their own ingrained bias. I’ve had a Faculty Executive ask me if I know what epistemic violence is, only to speak over me as I responded with an example drawn from my own experiences, while they went on to explain how my answer to the question was wrong. A few months later the same person asked me if I’d be willing to be a connection point between the university and a local Aboriginal Knowledge Holder for future work in ‘decolonising the curriculum’. Later the Executive made a sweeping com­ ment that invalidated and devalued the knowledge of that community member. How can somebody spout this triumphant, self-aggrandizing rhet­ oric of an absolute knowing of what epistemic violence looks like, while also practicing the same violent behaviour? But these behaviours aren’t contained to just a few individuals – I feel these behaviours are informed by the indoctrination into western know­ ledge hierarchical structures. I have seen many incredible people doing ongoing critical self-reflective work to unpack these behaviours and biases within themselves, but I wish I could say the same of all academics. How can they not see their cultural positioning? Their inherited understandings of the world? This makes me wonder: if they don’t know where they are coming from, how can they know where they are going? What do you think, as the reader, can people learn how to know where they are coming from? Can you? The most negative reactions to my work have come from people who don’t seem to know where they are coming from. People who are not aware of their own positioning. It is these people that make this work feel unsafe. I have consistently been told that academia is purely objective, that

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I have to leave myself out of my university assessments, and only get my ‘facts’ from published, peer-reviewed works. How am I supposed to write about my truth when academia has purposely misrepresented Aboriginal peoples since it first got the chance? Therefore, writing anything within aca­ demia means having to search through problematic research that is person­ ally damaging to read, until I find something that might support what I need to say. I search and search and search for arsenal … weaponry … an Elder’s words to keep me safe. And even when I am able to write what I want to, what feels right, supported by academic references, the reader can still mark my work with an internalised bias they might not even know exists, because they have a preconceived idea of Aboriginality that they were indoctrinated into thinking. There are risks in doing autoethnographic work in any context, whether it’s going to be published in a book, or submitted through an anti-plagiarism web­ site as an undergraduate assessment. Because not having any understanding of who will read it means ‘putting myself out there’, often in a way that feels like I’m going into battle. I would rather my work feel like I am sitting by the fire having meaningful conversations that are part of something bigger. I want my work to inform a space where connectedness, healing, growth and purpose are woven together. I can definitely feel the warmth of that big old fire on my face – the dan­ cing light from the flames flickering off the surrounding trees – when I read other Indigenous autoethnographies. And I hope that my work can be that warmth for other Blackfullas. Although, I feel conflicted about the reality of autoethnographic work informing a shift in future academic practices, because of those negative responses from non-Indigenous people that I’ve received so far. It’s tricky with writing when you don’t know the reader, and they may not know you. This makes it hard to build a relationship in the writing process as much as we try/want to be relational through the approach. Is it possible? And yet, writing has been touted as a beacon of civilisation and is prized and rewarded in academia. In many ways, though, writing is static, stagnant and out­ dated before it’s read. I have to keep asking myself – what is this for? Who benefits from this? Who benefits from this? It depends on where we place value? Sure, accessing this kind of work is an ‘opportunity’, but I understand writing in a similar way to what you have described. For me, writing is ‘past-tense’ and everything I read is old news. I’ve also been finding the process of autoethnographic work relatively alienating due to writing for nonIndigenous academics marking my papers, who (due to the historic

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exclusion of Indigenous peoples from Western education) don’t know people like me. I have had to write about myself as ‘the other’, which forces me to use a language that is palatable for non-Indigenous people, or digestible for those comfortably sitting within Whiteness. An example of this is having to use language to signify who I am to a non-Indigenous audience, such as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Indigenous’, when these words carry heavy, outdated, Eurocentric connotations and stereotypes along with them. I then have to unpack or deconstruct those stereotypes for the reader, to be able to reconstruct and define myself as who I actually am. In a perfect future, I will not have to explain myself in such a defensive and categorical way, but I will show myself through my experiences, interactions and knowledges, in the same way that Country has learned who/how I am. The more I learn to speak about myself in the language of ‘the oppressor’, the less I am able to communicate and connect with my family, my friends and other Blackfullas. Having to write about myself using aca­ demic language feels like it changes my understanding of myself and this feels a tiny bit out of my control at this point. Perhaps this is the ‘past-tense’ of writing who I am. I wonder if people who don’t write about themselves ever go through this? I get what you mean, by the time the writing is ‘finalised’ I feel I have already moved from that point. Though I do like the way Indigenous autoethnography makes my work more accessible. My family tell me they often skip the ‘aca­ demic’ bits and go straight to the story, that’s where the meaning and message is for them. It reminds me not to get caught up in this new language I’ve learnt in the academy – thus, notwithstanding, albeit – I wouldn’t be caught dead talking like that at home. On the other hand, I certainly don’t feel as though such col­ loquialisms would be permitted in an academic paper. How can we make sure we’re able to speak to be heard, not just write to be read? To speak back and talk to? Speak to be heard, not just speak to be interpreted or appropriated. I ache for a world where stating who I am and where I am (coming) from is not considered brave, new or groundbreaking. There have been moments during my undergraduate degree where I have called out racism in the acad­ emy – in course content, deficit perceptions of Aboriginal people, misrepre­ sentations of Indigeneity, etc. – and these moments have been responded to in ways that I did not expect. The most common responses have been defensiveness and aggression, as if my calling out racism is somehow a personal attack. This being said, the reactions that initially caught me off guard, but now are so patterned that I can expect them, are when I am praised. My ‘bravery’ and ‘courage’ will be heralded and heroed, I will get commended – as if speaking back to racism is something new.

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Michelle Bishop and Dakota Jericho Smith

Since invasion Indigenous peoples have warned of the harm of Western know­ ledge hierarchies. Exposing Whiteness is not new. But it seems these stories still fall on fresh ears; people are surprised, shocked, transformed. Or defensive and dismissive. Sometimes, for me, it feels repetitive, distracting, and I worry that it just perpetuates a centring of Whiteness. This is easy to say in general. But these are actual people and actual conversations. I feel cruel sometimes in my exasper­ ation when I think of individuals who have been transformed by Indigenous Knowledges and are genuinely ‘trying’, yet their attempts at ‘trying’ places the burden of responsibility onto the shoulders of Indigenous people to explain, share and offer advice. I am conflicted in wanting to educate, needing to edu­ cate, yet unable to shake a feeling of being exploited. Blah blah. Indulgent? What I experience pales in comparison to policies and actions of genocide faced by my Ancestors. So what’s my obligation in this space they fought hard for me to be in? I don’t want to keep exposing Whiteness and being rewarded for doing so … it’s hard to think people still don’t know (or don’t want to accept) the shadiness of Whiteness, the way it reforms and deforms to retain power. Especially within higher education where ‘rigorous’ research is expected. But rigorous is viewed to be objective. Can (Indigenous) autoethnography offer an impetus for people to want to learn more, to do the work and shift the paradigm? Then we can concentrate on the future without distractions of continued epistemic violence. I think that you naming epistemic violence as a distraction from the real work is profoundly accurate. Navigating Whiteness at every twist and turn in my undergraduate degree is exhausting and is definitely wasting my time, and my ‘potential’. I feel I could be doing work that is far more important – something that my Ancestors are really asking of me, if I weren’t being forced to dance with Whiteness. One of the major distractions that comes with trying to do the work in the academy is non-Indigenous academics assuming that I am their gateway to ‘all things Indigenous’ – an accessible, intelligent and palatable ‘Abori­ gine’. Non-Indigenous people look to me for answers, without doing the work themselves. I know the answers they seek have been written and spoken about for decades, and so it’s frustrating to me that I am called on by people who are finally willing to listen. There is so much accountability shoved onto my shoulders, because of the position that lazy/entitled/privil­ eged people put me in, that I feel I’m not allowed to have ‘off days’, not allowed to express anger, frustration, boredom … anything. Obviously not being able to express myself as someone with an entire landscape of emo­ tional experiences can be damaging. To have to hide aspects of myself, of my story, to hide parts of my truth is not healthy or safe. Safety to me is the ability to express my thoughts without feeling like I am on the back foot or have to defend what I want to say, by rigorously explain­ ing myself and also taking care of the potential defensiveness of the person reading/hearing me.

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It is one thing to care for the people around me, but it is another thing to put the feelings of the oppressor before my own healing. I have to soften myself – smooth my edges – in order to appease the social norms of the institution, as if it is more disrespectful for me to speak of my experiences of racism than it is for someone to perpetrate it. In regards to your comment about the future – I wish I could say that I am writing this for other Blackfullas, whether or not they read it. I guess that’s the internal conflict popping up again – feeling that this work won’t change anything, because Whiteness is such a brutal, adaptive and reflexive machine. So much of my autoethnographic work thus far has been in response or resistance to the academy, as a form of survival. But if I’m writ­ ing for other Blackfullas, I don’t want my work to be purely about surviving these processes and systems that have been designed to destroy us (our cul­ tures, our peoples, our Place). I want my work to inform future generations about ways in which we can tear these systems down, so that the systems can no longer hurt/distract us. So instead the real work can be done. Yes! I’ve often thought of autoethnography as a form of epistemic disobedi­ ence, a way to disrupt and ‘speak back’ – but does this just re-centre objective and positivist paradigms as the norm? If we’re too focused on ‘shifting’ the para­ digm then isn’t this still privileging the dominant paradigm and recalibrating everything else to the periphery? Is this how hegemony works? How can we slide away from opposing/exposing and ‘speaking back’ to just ‘speak’?

4 ALONE BUT NOT LONELY Isma Eriyanti

Flying ten hours from Medan, Indonesia, the city I had lived in all my twenty-three years, I finally arrived in Sydney to pursue my dream. My whole heart was filled with gratitude, abundant expectations, and admittedly also anxiety. I was grateful that all the hard work I had done while preparing to get here had finally paid off. I was hopeful that the decision I had made to study here would drag my feet closer to a lengthy list of plans for my desired future. I was also worried as doubted if I could go through the upcoming year all by myself. It was a sunny Tuesday afternoon when I wandered around the brick build­ ing, reading the number on each classroom door, and tried to find the one matching the number written in my note. Once I found it, I walked in and tried as hard as I could to put a smile on my face. Deep inside, my heart was pounding, and I felt like all eyes were on me. I was quite nervous to see people with blond hair and pale skin talking comfortably with other people who looked like them. I saw some Asian students, mostly Chinese, whose faces and accents were not really strange to me. I had planned the night before that I would just immerse myself in the classroom. Yet in my throat I was choking, and I found it hard to say the sentences I had planned out so fluently in my mind. I was afraid that others would not understand what I said and so over­ whelmed that I couldn’t really get what other people around were talking about. I questioned myself, ‘Will I be able to make it to the finish line?’ I pressed my lips together, holding my own hands, and not really saying a word, trying to hide what I was feeling throughout that first two-hour class. This, then, is what I write about in this chapter, about my international stu­ dent experience, how I dealt with the emotional tensions of being far away from home for the first time, and how I adjusted and finally immersed myself in my new environment.

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Australia is the third most popular study destination for students from across the globe and, as of 2017, there were 520,737 international students enrolled in Australian universities. Indonesia is listed among the top ten source countries, contributing as many as 13,687 of the total number (Department of Education and Training, 2017). Pursuing study in an unfamiliar educational system with people from diverse backgrounds is undoubtedly challenging. Research shows that international students face academic, emotional and social difficulties in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as in Australia (L. Brown & Hol­ loway, 2008; Khawaja & Stallman, 2011; Malau-Aduli, 2011; Novera, 2004; Sawir, 2005; Sherry, Thomas, & Chui, 2010). These include: academic stress, cultural differences, language barriers (Zhai, 2002), unmet expectations, psycho­ logical distress (Khawaja & Stallman, 2011), financial problems (Sherry et al., 2010), loneliness (Sawir et al., 2008), discrimination, and other problems associ­ ated with changing environment (Smith & Khawaja, 2011). Others have explored the available support, coping strategies as well as psychological and sociocultural adaptation experienced by these foreign students (Kambouropoulos, 2014; Terraschke & Wahid, 2011). However, only a few studies, most published before 2011, have elaborated specif­ ically on Indonesian students’ experiences of studying in Australia, and none, to date, has considered the embodied, emotional ‘journey’ that students undertake. But Indonesian students keep coming to Australia, our numbers are rising, and still our stories are rarely heard. This is why it matters to investigate our experiences. As with all individual students, my story is both unique and typical. For this reason, while I cannot claim numerical generalisability, I hope that this piece resonates conceptually with others’ stories, so as to add to understanding of what Indonesian students’ experiences are like more generally. For this reason, I present my thick description of what it feels like—or what it felt like for me— in the hope that Western academics might pause to reflect on why their students might seem ‘shy’ or ‘quiet’ or even ‘slow’, or whatever other troubling label might come into their minds when they think of ‘us’, the ‘other’.

Language barriers? The most obvious challenge international students face in their effort to adapt and integrate into the host country is English, although Zhai (2002) emphasises that language barriers contribute less to students’ stress than do the academic burden and culture shock. She further argues that students have usually antici­ pated communication problems, but they do not really think about academic stress or cultural differences, with the effect that these sneak up on them. Nevertheless, although language barriers are something that international stu­ dents expect, most are inadequately prepared with language competence in real contexts of use. As Sawir (2005) shows, language difficulties experienced by international students are often due to poor language learning experiences in their home countries.

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I would add that the language difficulties faced by international students may be exacerbated by the low level of language requirement set by the universities. However, universities, including mine in Sydney, seem to close their eyes to this, because what matters to them is recruiting students and in turn making more profit. It is we students, however, who can only struggle and blame our­ selves. Brown (2008, 2009) found that language anxiety often leads foreign stu­ dents to flock together, communicating only or mainly with the other students from the same nationality (co-nationals). This ghettoisation phenomenon—the tendency to gather only with co-nationals—is common in adjustment experi­ ences of international students. But the comfort gained from such friendships in turn hampers English language progression (Brown, 2008).

My story Whereas traditional positivistic research traditions perceive anything based on the self as subjective and distorting valid knowledge claims, autoethnography values the self as a rich repository of experiences and perspectives that are not easily available to traditional approaches. —(Canagarajah, 2012, p. 260)

By centring my personal experience in this chapter, I hope readers will be able to relate their own experiences when reading my stories. As Sykes (2014) says, when experiences narrated in autoethnography resonate within us, we under­ stand their relatedness and significance. Further, autoethnographic narratives pro­ vide glimpses into ‘the author’s own taken for granted understanding of the social world under scrutiny’ (Humphreys, 2005, p. 840). I therefore present narrative vignettes to depict critical moments from my life as an international student, to engage readers with my story. My narrative vignettes are based on my diaries, blog posts, and social media posts (translated and abridged from the Bahasa Indonesian original versions). These ‘auto’ narratives are then discussed by considering their relatedness to the broader, ‘ethno’, social context.

Vignette 1—linguistic insecurity 28 February 2017, 07.15 p.m. Calm down, Isma! You just need to focus a bit more. I whisper to myself trying to comfort my nerves. There I sit with around twenty other people in a room, in the second class I have to attend in my first week. Right in front of me are the printed copies of three journal articles the lecturer has assigned us to read. From a distance, you can see the contrasting colours of highlighters on several lines on the paper. My not-so­ neat handwriting must also add to the my deskmate’s assumption that I am such a well-prepared person. But, hey! What happened to me? What is the result of many hours I have spent reading those articles? Why can’t I engage in the conversation about what the authors ‘argue’ in those papers? Hah? What does she say? Why is she

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talking that fast? What accent is he using? Why does it sound so strange for my ears? God, I cannot catch what they said! Okay, this is my turn. I can do this! ‘Yes, What I understand from the article is that the CLT, hmmm I mean Communicative Language Teaching, is a good approach, hmmm, however the implementation in my country is still far beyond how it is designed to be …’ I said it. But why do they frown their foreheads? Why aren’t they paying attention? Don’t they get my points? Am I speaking like an alien? Have I said something wrong? There are just so many questions whirling around my head. I guess I am not ready for this. Walking down one of the famous steps in my university, I’m on my way home after the class. In my silence, I keep thinking. How can I do well in the assessment task the lecturer just explained in the class just now? I did not even understand all the words that she said. The group discussion too, I could not really understand what all those people say. Too many words I don’t know. Even if I know, I have to process them slower that everyone else in the group. And by that time, they have left me behind, they moved to other topics. I suppose I need to be braver in asking them to repeat and explain more. But, how would they think about me? No. No. I am afraid to be negatively judged. I can speak English. I know I can speak English. Didn’t you get 7.0 for your IELTS, Isma? Oh my, why doesn’t it help? My English is not so bad. I speak fluently, I listen well, and I understand what others are talking about. I read many English texts and sometimes I write. But here in Sydney, everything is quite different from what I expected. The locals, the other international students: they pronounce English words differently, and there’s their speaking pace! Some speak really fast while others meander slowly and vaguely. Each is confusing in its own way. Malau-Aduli (2011) found that most international students are not accustomed to Australian slang and accents and may have limited written and verbal communication skills, hindering them to perform well in their study. More specifically, Indonesian students’ language difficulties are not only caused by the unfamiliarity of ‘Australian’ English but also the pedagogical and linguistic approaches to English learning in Indonesia, where English is treated as an object of study (and wonder) and not as a tool, a set of skills, for getting things done (Novera, 2004). So, although my English was ‘good’, I wasn’t used to my classmates’ accents and word choices and I found it hard to understand. I couldn’t even laugh at their jokes and I blamed myself for being afraid to lose face in front of my classmates by asking them to explain. I felt ashamed that they might guess I did not understand them, and I laughed along, pretending. I’m a fraud. I began to question my English and I doubted, then, that I could ever thrive here.

Vignette 2—paradigm boundedness 27 March 2017. 2.45 p.m. I am scrolling up and down my notebook screen using my tiny orange mouse. My lips are mumbling, reading word by word of that two-thousand-word reflective essay in my muffled

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little voice. I am sitting on a chair in front of my white painted study table in my bedroom, glancing at the clock from time to time. I don’t remember how many times I have revisited and revised the assignment I have been working on for weeks. I realise I’m not good at academic writing. It is the first assignment in my postgraduate degree and I’m so nervous. I don’t have any idea about my lecturer’s expectation. Have I answered the questions of this assessment task? Have I fulfilled all the criteria in the scoring rubrics? It even takes me ten minutes to finally submit the essay to the university web portal. It is 3.03 p.m. I sigh and rush to get ready for attending two classes for a consecutive four hours that evening. I am relieved that I can submit it on time, yet my heart is still pounding. 11 April 2017. 5.15 p.m. I’m in the lecture room, half-listening to the lecture, but only my body is there as my mind wanders. Oh my God, I cannot stop thinking about my assessment task result. It has been two weeks after the submission. Why isn’t up on Moodle yet? Isn’t it today? I keep refreshing the web page on the browser I access on my mobile phone. I know it is not right, I’m supposed to listen to the lecture. But the number I am expecting is everything to me. Then it pops up: 30/40. I saw it! I saw it! I am not expecting that number, though. Should have I scored higher? I have done my best. Honestly, I do not even know how to do it better. But why? Why do I only get 30? What kind of essay does she expect us to write? Oh, no! Here you go! The real struggle starts from now on, Isma! You’ve gotta be harder on yourself. I finished my undergraduate degree with ‘summa cum laude’ honours two years ago. That fact built my confidence to pursue a Master’s degree. And I assumed that my English proficiency, marked 7.0 in IELTS, would be enough for me to perform well in the academic tasks in an English-speaking country. However, my initial expectation did not meet reality. I struggled to complete the two- or four-thousand-word essays assigned by my lecturers and I found it hard to build concise sentences to precisely represent my ideas. Although I was not sure about the assessment tasks, I expected a good mark since I had done my best. I read through the scoring rubrics and thought that I had addressed the assessment criteria well. But then, I was surprised when I saw my result. Among my four first assessment tasks which I submitted, two are labelled as ‘Distinc­ tion’, one is a ‘Credit’ and one is a ‘Pass’. The Australian grading system distinguishes the following levels of pass: High Distinction (85%+, analogous to First Class in the UK system or an ‘A’ grade), Distinction (75–84%, equivalent to UK Upper Second, or ‘B’), Credit (65–74%; akin to lower second in the UK, or ‘C’) and Pass (50–64%; Third Class: still a pass, but no higher; a ‘D’ in some systems). I considered those results as not good enough because I compared it with the standard in my former university. I used to always get an ‘A’ for each of my assignments. This truth slapped me in the face; I realised I am not that brilliant. It made me aware that I am bounded by my own paradigm, and that the sky is much higher than I had thought. I felt small. Defeated. My cheeks flushed as I hastily closed the webpage and looked back up at the lecturer. No one had noticed, but everything had changed.

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Vignette 3—embracing fear ————Original Message————————

To: My lecturer [who is anonymous, here]

From: ‘Isma Eriyanti’ [email protected]

Date: 14 March 2017 23:21

Subject: A little regard from a TESOL Student

Hi,

It’s me, Isma. I’m writing to express my gratefulness for being in your class. I’m not trying to compare with the other classes that I take, but I do feel so engaged and believe that everyone in the class does. So, thank you for never letting anyone be left behind. As an international student, I find it a bit hard to follow the lectures at first. Yet as time goes by, I realise that I just have to get accustomed with things around. The way you treat all the class members really amazes me. I’m proudly saying that now I have you to look up to. I look forward to exploring many things for me to implement in my home country. Again, thanks so much. The text above was an electronic mail I sent to one of my lecturers. I had begun, by then, to be quite accustomed to my new life as an international stu­ dent in Sydney. I was used to being awakened by my alarm, preparing my meal and eating by myself, finding a spot to study in the library by myself, reading the four to five journal articles assigned for the weekly readings, and trying to follow the plot of classroom group discussion. The reason I sent that email was because I was amazed at the way this one lecturer always tried to value every­ one’s opinion. She always smiled and patiently waited for every single word uttered by us, the international students, no matter how slowly and unclearly we spoke. It meant a lot: I realised that there are people who sincerely put their effort to help me go through this journey. ‘If they were willing to help, why wouldn’t I help myself?’ That was what I thought that night. Ever since, I tried to embrace all the fear which has been haunting me. After my first few shaky weeks, I started to ask questions and give my opinion in class. I also tried to mingle with other students, both locals and other international students, before or after the classes. I swallowed my fear. I swallowed my shame. I swallowed myself. And, strangely, doing so made me feel much better than before.

Vignette 4—ghettoisation as a support system 07 June 2017. 3.15 a.m. It has been exactly 110 days since I first set foot on the ground here in Sydney. Who knows how this crybaby finally got to today. It is still clear in my mind how I always found my pillow wet every morning when I woke up in the first week. My heart was lonely and empty. Pessimism crept around in my blood at that time, telling

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me that I wouldn’t make it. But then as time passes by, things are getting better. Especially because I met kind-hearted people who made Sydney feel like home. If family is defined as the ones who can walk in your shoes, who fight in the same battle as you, who you can share all your stories with, and who make your day even more beautiful, then I would say that the friends I have made here are my family. Coming from diverse backgrounds and characterised by different personalities and interests, we are united here in Sydney. I am beyond blessed to be surrounded by them. I cannot stop being grateful for the way God makes my loneliness and home­ sickness vanish. Dear mom and dad, your little daughter is safe and sound here, I mumble to myself, staring at their photographs on my phone screen. I often felt anxious because the people I love were not around. I also often felt being excluded from the people around me, especially the locals. Not just once or twice, I noticed that they tended to avoid interacting with me or any other international students. Is it that they don’t like us? Or we’re just too much bother? However, three months here and I’ve settled in. Rather than bewailing my loneliness and homesickness, I acknowledged that I needed to help myself regulate my emotion. As Lazarus (2000) notes, individuals who wish to cope must firstly be able to identify and label their feeling before making up their mind on which strategies they think appropriate to deal with it. As an extrovert person, I understood that I should satisfy my need to find other people. Thus, I sought such friendships with the other Indonesian students at my university. I believed, as we share many commonalities, it would be easy for me to engage with them. I began to attend the weekend gatherings. Sometimes, instead of eating by myself on the library lawn as I always did before, we ate lunch together. Of course, all those interactions were done mostly in Bahasa Indonesia, so my English went nowhere, although not having to worry about grammar was nice, for a while. But I kept pushing, and made some friends with international stu­ dents from Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philip­ pines. We studied, ate lunch, and hung out together and I realised their stories were just like mine. They, too, had struggled here at first. Then, gradually, I interacted with the locals more too, especially during class. I chose to be seated at the same table with different students each week, to expose myself to more diverse perspectives during the group discussions. And I even made a Sydneysider mate who was always kind to me. I remember he cheered me up when I was down after getting the result 11/20 (55%) in an assignment. Walk­ ing out of class, he approached me and said, ‘Don’t worry, Isma! At least it’s a pass. You want me to send my assignment to your email for you to look at? Maybe you could learn from it for your next one?’ I was delighted that I had found the determination to build a stronger connection to people around me, instead of confining myself in my small bedroom and then my small co-national community.

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Conclusion My decision to immerse myself in the diversity of Sydney benefits me in two ways. First, it allows me to gain more confidence as I got more chances to practise my English. Second, having more exposure to a diverse environment has enabled me to find my voice. Enthused, I pushed myself further: I became the international student representative on the Teaching and Learn­ ing Committee in the School of Education, and I volunteered for a mentoring programme to encourage high school students from disadvan­ taged areas in New South Wales. And, at last, I found myself evolving a new self. I discovered that the key point of my adjustment journey lies on the way I perceive things. I used to think that other people should always agree with me, but the truth is that everyone sees things from different points of view. And I used to think that I would not be able to go through this jour­ ney alone, but in fact, I had never been alone. Everyone used their own ways to support me, which was not always in the form of physical attend­ ance: my parents still called and, slowly, my smiles became genuine and not forced, faked, feigned. Slowly, even though I was ‘alone’, I became myself again, because in reality I was never alone. The ups and downs, the bitter-sweet moments I’ve had here will always be an exciting story I can share with people when I get home. And, above all, I’m grateful that I’ve almost reached the finish line of this alone-yet-not-so-lonely marathon. Almost a year has passed here in Sydney and, very soon, I’m going home. I’m myself, still, but I’m my new self now. I’m alone, still, but I’m not so lonely.

References Brown, L. (2008). Language and anxiety: An ethnographic study of international post­ graduate students. Evaluation and Research in Education, 21(2), 75–95. doi:10.2167/ eri410.0. Brown, L. (2009). An ethnographic study of the friendship patterns of international students in England: An attempt to recreate home through conational interaction. International Journal of Educational Research, 48(3), 184–193. doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2009.07.003. Brown, L., & Holloway, I. (2008). The adjustment journey of international postgraduate students at an English university: An ethnographic study. Journal of Research in Inter­ national Education, 7(2), 232–249. doi:10.1177/1475240908091306. Canagarajah, A. S. (2012). Teacher development in a global profession: An autoethnography. TESOL Quarterly, 46(2), 258–279. doi:10.1002/tesq.18. Department of Education and Training. (2017). International student enrolment data 2017. Retrieved May 20, 2017 from https://internationaleducation.gov.au/research/Inter national-Student-Data/Pages/InternationalStudentData2017.aspx Humphreys, M. (2005). Getting personal: Reflexivity and autoethnographic vignettes. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(6), 840–860. doi:10.1177/1077800404269425. Kambouropoulos, A. (2014). An examination of the adjustment journey of international students studying in Australia. Australian Educational Researcher, 41(3), 349–363. doi:10.1007/s13384-013-0130-z.

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Khawaja, N. G., & Stallman, H. M. (2011). Understanding the coping strategies of inter­ national students: A qualitative approach. Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 21(2), 203–224. doi:10.1375/ajgc.21.2.203. Lazarus, R. S. (2000). Toward better research on stress and coping. American Psychologist, 55 (6), 665–673. doi:10.1037//0003-066X.55.6.665. Malau-Aduli, B. S. (2011). Exploring the experiences and coping strategies of international medical students. BMC Medical Education, 11(1), 40. doi:10.1186/1472-6920-11-40. Novera, I. A. (2004). Indonesian postgraduate students studying in Australia: An examin­ ation of their academic, social and cultural experiences. International Education Journal, 5 (4), 475–487. Sawir, E. (2005). Language difficulties of international students in Australia: The effects of prior learning experience. International Education Journal, 6(5), 567–580. Sawir, E., Marginson, S., Deumert, A., Nyland, C., & Ramia, G. (2008). Loneliness and international atudents: An Australian study. Journal of Studies in International Education, 12 (2), 148–180. doi:10.1177/1028315307299699 Sherry, M., Thomas, P., & Chui, W. H. (2010). International students: A vulnerable stu­ dent population. Higher Education, 60(1), 33–46. doi:10.1007/s10734-009-9284-z. Smith, R. A., & Khawaja, N. G. (2011). A review of the acculturation experiences of inter­ national students. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. doi:10.1016/j.ijintrel.2011. 08.004. Sykes, B. E. (2014). Transformative autoethnography: An examination of cultural identity and its implications for learners. Adult Learning, 25(1), 3–10. doi:10.1177/1045159513510147. Terraschke, A., & Wahid, R. (2011). The impact of EAP study on the academic experi­ ences of international postgraduate students in Australia. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 10(3), 173–182. doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2011.05.003. Zhai, L. (2002). Studying international students: Adjustment issues and social support. Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education, 11, 1–20. doi:10.5191/jiaee.2004.11111.

5 DOUBLE PRECARIAT A migrant placeholder in a neoliberal university Madhavi (Maddy) Manchi

Introduction It is July 2014, India. I’ve just finished presenting the first draft of my PhD thesis to an internal review panel. I have four weeks to sort out administrative and paper work with my university in India. Four weeks, before I re-join my husband of eighteen months in New Zea­ land, after six months apart. I was, at this point, a marriage migrant and a ‘global’ scholar who needed to uproot and re-root everything – midway through my doctoral programme. In this chapter, I take an intersectional look at being a first-generation migrant, and early career academic (ECA) in a neoliberal university. I write this autoethnographic account to make sense of what it is like to be an ‘outsider’ trying to gain entry into a sector that, as it stands, makes it hard for its ‘insiders’ to fully belong. I say ‘make sense’ for a couple of reasons. Firstly, sense-making, it is argued, is a key tenet of doing autoethnography (Adams et al. 2015: 27). Secondly, this is an ongoing journey, a life-in-progress. It is a phase of profes­ sional coming-of-age. I’ve merely paused here, on this page, in self-reflection, allowing for further sense-making to happen (Ibid). Much has been said and written about neoliberal universities and their impact on academic lives (e.g. Ryan-Flood and Gill 2010; Hall 2016; Hartung et al. 2017; McLachlan 2017; Taylor and Lahad 2018; Puawai Collective 2019). Commonly, managerialism, audit culture, and a pervasive corporate culture, com­ bined with increased workloads, reduced tenure positions, and casualisation of labour are identified as some of the features of a neoliberal university. The Puawai Collective succinctly capture the affective dimension of working within a neoliberal university. They write: [R]esearch shows intensified feelings of precarity, anxiety and stress in aca­ demic staff, and the toll this inevitably takes on bodies and minds when

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faced with constant metrics of quality and success, and escalating work­ loads … Moreover, individualization of academic labour and overwhelm­ ing pressure to perform within compressed timeframes can lead to feelings of exhaustion, helplessness, failure, and loneliness. (2019: 33) Some have researched and recounted experiences of ECAs and mid-career aca­ demics within such neoliberal contexts (e.g. Thwaites and Pressland 2017; Alfrey et al. 2017; Barker 2017; Enright et al. 2017; Morgan and Wood 2017). A good proportion of this literature however, is where ECAs are spoken for, or spoken about, with some exceptions (for example see Matsuoka 2017; Williams et al. 2017). Similar is the case with experiences of ECAs and academics who are migrants or persons of colour. While there are some mentions (e.g. Gill 2009: 241; Puawai Collective 2019: 34) and research studies (e.g. Kidman 2019), this area remains sorely under researched. In sum, I have struggled to find voices that resonate with my own experi­ ences, especially of being a migrant ECA. I hope, in writing this chapter, to interlay these many hyphenated identities: migrant-ECA-cis woman-spouse­ Indian-Kiwi-upper caste-third world- academic, with a sense-making process that in turn provides ‘a perspective that others can use to make sense of similar experiences’ (Adams et al. 2015: 27).

Location, location, location Back to July 2014, India. I’m talking to the administrative head of department about extensions, and converting from full time, on-campus PhD study to part-time, off-campus. I would, in reality, be a full-time student, off-campus. We are going through all the dry and boring procedural stuff attached to this. The head concludes our meeting with a remark that sounded to me like half pep-talk, half caution. It is better for me to graduate with my PhD degree as soon as possible, they said. I would then know the value of a degree from such a prestigious university when I relocate abroad. It is after all, a respected institution ‘globally’.While the caution did register, I also felt proud of myself and my univer­ sity. Proud that I belonged to such a prestigious university. What my head of department was perhaps hinting at was the cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986/2011) such a belonging would afford me when I stepped out into the world. As he described it, such social capital ‘entitled’ members like me, with ‘credit, in the various senses of the word’ (Bourdieu, cited in Hazelkorn 2015: 16) For a soon-to-be-ECA like me, this felt like a reasonable assumption. All this, given my university’s reputation, my supervisors, their professional networks, and how hard it had been to get in in the first place! I was also attached to a good ‘academic lineage’ (whose PhD student you are facilitates certain social capital too!). It felt like a support system I count on, no matter where in the world I found myself. I returned to New Zealand that year, reassured. I graduated in May 2016, feeling quite accomplished. I was the first PhD in my family.

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In my six years of living in New Zealand, I’ve realised just how wrong all these assumptions are. In six years, I have met two or three people who know the name of my institution. Whereas in India, my university’s name would raise impressed eyebrows, here I am greeted with blank faces of non-recognition. It didn’t receive the ‘recognition’ that, say, top ranked American Ivy League schools, Australian Group of Eight universities or the British Russell Group does. And, to me, this felt like a slow-motion implosion of all the social capital I was counting on. The doors that my university’s prestige would open for me never really opened. And, reeling, I was chipped away into silent invisibility. On reflection I suspect, such reactions have less to do with New Zealand’s geographically insular location and more to do with my home university’s social location in the world. If I may dare argue, I’d say this is how the forces of global university rankings, built on the remnants of colonial structures, manifest in individual scholarly lives. The higher the rank, the higher the reputation, and the more valuable the ensuing social capital (Hazelkorn 2015: 15–16)! But my institution, so very prestigious in India, was simply: not.

Mobility, privilege, support Skip to August 2016, Christchurch. The terrible part about graduating was losing the little access I had to my university support system. I missed my peers and good friends, who reassured me when I was anxious about my writing; those who could tell me that it was a natural thing, part of the process, to sometimes manage only a paragraph in a day. We were stuck in different, awkward time zones. We couldn’t support each other through rejections from reviewers, prospective employers, and post doc applications! I missed my academic community, my friends! And I wandered on, here in New Zealand, untethered and not knowing anyone. The only other academics I did meet were in a conference two years earlier, all from outside New Zealand. Rejection after rejection on the job front, in academic and non-academic sectors, only left me more frustrated, angry and confused! I didn’t quite know what to hold onto or how to move forward. We’re encouraged as academics to be mobile and international: confer­ ences, visiting fellowships, promising positions in universities around the world. Indeed, it’s been remarked that, ‘academe is one of the most inter­ nationally mobile of all professions’ (Bentley et.al cited in Mason and Rawl­ ings-Sanaei 2014: 1). But being mobile and ‘global’ isn’t always the rosy thing it is made out to be. If anything, I’ve found that this mobility isn’t always a favourable thing. The idea of ‘global scholars’ and the ‘international­ isation’ that universities pursue needs urgent critical scrutiny. If my case were an example, not everyone is equitability positioned to make international/ global transitions. The way social capital and academic labour gets devalued or revalued through mobility, within a neoliberal context, is complex, nay, complicated. Bauder (2015: 9) argues that:

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neither public nor academic debate problematizes academic mobility as a potential mechanism of the neoliberalization of the academic workplace. Instead, debates concentrate on academic mobility as an element of know­ ledge production and an ingredient for nations to gain a competitive advantage. All of this is not to dismiss the level of privilege I did and do hold in my coun­ try of origin. I’m an upper caste, upper class Indian, with all of my education finished in English as the medium of instruction. In my country, I am from the dominant elite! So much of my prior self-assurance (and sometimes hubris) stems from there. And of course, this cultural capital has contributed to my resilience and breakthroughs achieved in the course of my resettlement. For the first time though, in this new country, I was confronted with my racial and migrant identity.1 It was beginning to resemble what Paret and Gleeson (2016: 284) call the ‘precarity-migration-agency-nexus’. This messiness, of having to build a sense of belonging on two levels – within the local academic commu­ nity, and in New Zealand at large, had me feeling like a double precariat (see also Sang et al. 2013).

Networking, networking, networking I don’t know where or how I finally dug up the courage to send that first cold-calling email. And after I started, I didn’t stop for two weeks. It was two weeks before I lifted my head up, took my eyes off the screen, and stopped squeezing every New Zealand university’s website for faculty details. I had cold-mailed pretty much any faculty member who was remotely connected to my research interests. If a 100% rejection rate on online job applications didn’t throw me off, what could a few unanswered emails do? How do we put it? ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!’ In September 2016, my husband and I moved to Auckland: a second round of uprooting and re-rooting for me. An unsupported and lost feeling still clouded my mind. If finishing a PhD away from academic support was hard, then the soul-crushing emptiness that followed graduation was worse! I was still struggling to find a job, any job. I’d lost all access to my university library resources and didn’t quite know how to fill all this gaping time. The saving grace was preparation for a conference presentation that November, and the brief reunion with friends. Networking with Auckland-based academics at this conference, and some positive response to my cold-calling spree paid off. There was some light at the end of this very long, dark tunnel. A concise way to describe what I did throughout early 2017 was drinking a lot of coffee with a lot of new people. That networking is important for aca­ demics is stating the obvious; it’s at least as important as one’s academic lineage, if not more. Usually, the social capital that comes with academic lineage affords ECAs like me accesses to certain networks. But what do you do when lineageled networks become inaccessible? For me, it meant putting in those hours of

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cold emailing, coffee drinking, and networking, networking, networking. Net­ working and social capital are closely related, as Davis and Warfield note: Social capital resources, both actual and potential, reflect membership to a network of relationships which are strengthened by symbolic and material exchanges. These exchanges result in a multiplier effect of pre-existing capital. (2011: 101) But it isn’t always easy, all this networking. Not when you’re suffering from severe loss of self-confidence, imposter syndrome, and imploded social capital. For me, it meant digging deep for the strength to stay open-minded and vulner­ able, with no safety nets. To committing fully to meeting strangers with a smile. It felt like skydiving non-tandem, with fifty-fifty odds for parachute deployment: networking, I risked being judged and marked as ‘different’ because of my accent, my Brown skin, and my university from the global south. With each new person, I patiently explained where I come from and how I came to be here, before talking about more exciting things like my thesis. Networking was picking myself up over and over again when met with indifference or a dead end, or an ‘unfortunately we’ve faced huge budget cuts recently’. This is stuff involves serious emotional labour (Hochschild 1983/2012)! Despite this internal struggle, it was networking that got me the breaks that mat­ tered. I’ve crossed-paths and bonded with wonderful people who, over coffee, have assuaged my imposter syndrome. They’ve remained cheer-leaders and helped me feel like I belong. While I’ve faced the loss of one type of social capital, I’ve been able, with help from people taking a chance on me, to build some capital back up again. This of course only goes on to underscore the importance of networking. Again, the observations of Davis and Warfield resonate with my own experience: While networking may be viewed as an optional activity, the findings illus­ trate its importance in academic and professional development. Attention to the role of networking in the process of building cultural and social capital may enhance career preparation and productivity for students. (2011: 109) Such networking had a defining role in finding my first academic job in a New Zealand university. None of my roles have been permanent, but they are a start: a foot in the door. Morgan and Woods words resonate with my feelings here: Casual work in universities means metaphorically lining up at the factory gates in front of the foreman and waving as visibly as possible. Both have to rely upon networking, upon nurturing relationships with secure work­ ers. They need to put in the emotional labour by keeping superiors ‘sweet’ and by managing upwards. (2017: 84)

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Networking has always been important in to academic careers. But now, in neoliberal universities, network is the only way (especially for ECAs and, in par­ ticular, ‘outsiders’ like me). One’s next source of livelihood seems dependent on who we know, and how recommended we come.

Double precarity August 2018, Auckland. I think I’m burning out! I hope Mum and Dad are better! I feel like I’m caught with a double-edged sword. I wish I could have flown back to India to take care of them! I still wake up terrified at late night messages … are they ill again?? My three contract jobs don’t seem to help. Yes, they’re earning me some money. But not enough to take sudden trips back home. And I need to take on as much work as I can now, because two contracts finish soon, and I don’t know when the next opportunity will be. I’ll have to start putting the word out that I’m looking for work again. I wish I’d got one of those teaching vacancies I’d applied for. It feels like I walked away from one wall and right into another. Why does my work for this university seem invisible on my CV! Haven’t I got my foot in the door yet? What more do I have to do? Maybe I should just move to the private sector, or try for those council jobs again?? Aah! What’s the use, they’ll just reject me all over again!!! Besides, the six years I spent on my PhD: all that’ll be such a waste! But I should be more grateful that I have something, anything. I should stick it out, and hopefully something will come along soon. Precarity (Bourdieu 1986/ 2011; Standing 2014). This is what looks, feels and sounds like. Academic precarity! Migrant-academic precarity. Double precarity. This is what it looks, feels and sounds like. Academia was the first place I felt a true sense of belonging. More than any­ where else, it was in academia that I could go exploring big ideas and make noise for social change. In the uprooted feeling that came with moving coun­ tries, I thought academia would help root me back down again, into the earth: build back the sense of belonging and sense of place. But, oh boy! It was a jump from the proverbial frying pan and straight into the fire. It has been hard to build a sense of belonging here in New Zealand but also in kiwi academia. Out there, on the streets, it is fending off racist slurs from bigots. At university, it is the struggle to shape a coherent professional identity. Neoliberal university structures make it hard to build one (Standing 2014: 12; Morgan and Wood 2017: 81). The feeling I’ve had of my work being invisible on my CV is not singular to me. It is what Morgan and Woods observe as the consequences of increasing casualisation of academic labour. They write of ECAs such as myself: they suffer a lack of professional recognition, condemned to be academic outsiders, even where they work for many years at a single institu­ tion … but to be employed long term on a casual basis can be a source of stigma. (2017: 81)

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Further, ‘they also suffer a deficit of professional recognition’ (Ibid). This to me, feels like a hard hit in the chest. It feels demoralising, when after six long years of hard work and hardship, the profession you choose doesn’t quite choose you back. We’re not told, when pursuing PhDs, that there isn’t enough work to go around. That we should keep an open mind about jobs in the academy – or outside of it. I’ve tried my hand at other work. I’ve sincerely tried to manage my expectations (Hall 2019), like so many ECAs, and I’ve applied for jobs in non-academic sectors. That was a deep learning curve in itself, with some hard lessons. No one teaches us the basics, like how to ‘trans­ late’ an academic CV for non-academic jobs. How to ‘market’ oneself in the neoliberal corporate world. What are some of these coping mechanisms and survival strategies? Are there any? I have lots of questions but no real answers here. In the meantime, not having permanent, secure employment, means putting off long-term life goals (Morgan and Wood 2017: 81). For me, this is something as basic as owning a house; it is hard to walk in and apply for a home loan on a series of contract jobs. I don’t have the confidence, or a solid sense of my profession, to do so. And owning a home helps migrants like me feel like we belong; it is ‘critical to the process of home-making’ (Cain et al. 2015: 1146). Double precarity means fixed terms contracts on jobs but also on things like rented homes; it’s not knowing when you’ll have to leave this one and go on the hunt for another. I have no real answers or ideas of where I will head to next. I’ve paused here on this page, in reflection and for sense-making. I only know, for this moment, that I needed to add my voice in the rising number of voices speaking out against neoliberal workplaces. Until then, it is a lot of coffee with a lot of new people and hopefully more exciting things to come.

Postscript2 I thought I was going to write this chapter differently. It was going unpack how the colonial scaffolding hold up present day global universities, amplifying inequalities with neoliberal cement. But then, the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on the 15th March 2019, left me emo­ tionally incapacitated for a while. To me, the attack was a physical manifestation of all the xenophobia and racism that people of colour have known about and felt viscerally, silently, for years. So, the context framing this chapter feels oddly different and yet the same. I feel no need to lift the rug anymore, to examine all that has been swept under it. It has been pulled from beneath our feet, forcing us to get our hands, feet and bodies dirty. And this chapter feels like one of many conversations we’re having in New Zealand, in this moment of reflection. It is one we must have in the academy, too.

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Notes 1 Edwina Pio (2005: 1292) in her study on Indian women migrants to New Zealand observes that this is often the case. She writes, ‘While for many people of colour, racial/ethnic identity develops during early socialization, in the case of the Indian women, they had not considered themselves coloured or ethnic until they arrived in New Zealand’. 2 This postscript is inspired by Rosalind Gill’s postscript in her chapter on doing research in neoliberal universities (2009: 242). The parallels in circumstances of writing our chapters struck a chord with me, and I had to acknowledge it. So much about our world changes, and yet it stays the same. It also goes to show how any research and writing cannot be done independent of all that we are affected by. This autoeth­ nographic exercise is also way for me to make sense of how this incident has affected me and my life in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

References Adams, T.E., Jones, S.L.H. and Ellis, C. (2015). Autoethnography: Understanding qualitative research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.1–20. Alfrey, L., Enright, E. and Rynne, S. (2017). Letters from early career academics: The physical education and sport pedagogy field of play. Sport, Education and Society, 22(1), 5–21. Barker, D. (2017). Ninjas, zombies and nervous wrecks? Academics in the neoliberal world of physical education and sport pedagogy. Sport, Education and Society, 22(1), 87–104. Bauder, H. (2015). The international mobility of academics: A labour market perspective. International Migration, 53(1), 83–96. Bourdieu, P. (1986/2011). The forms of capital. In Szeman, I. and Kaposy, T. (Eds.), Cul­ tural Theory: An Anthology 1, (pp. 81–93). Cain, T., Meares, C. and Read, C. (2015). Home and beyond in Aotearoa: The affective dimensions of migration for South African migrants. Gender, Place & Culture, 22(8), 1141–1157. Davis, D.J. and Warfield, M. (2011). The importance of networking in the academic and professional experiences of racial minority students in the USA. Educational Research and Evaluation, 17(2), 97–113. Enright, E., Rynne, S.B. and Alfrey, L. (2017). ‘Letters to an early career academic’: Learn­ ing from the advice of the physical education and sport pedagogy professoriate. Sport, Education and Society, 22(1), 22–39. Gill, R. (2009). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. In Ryan-Flood, R. and Gill, R. (Eds.), Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflec­ tions (pp. 228–244). London: Routledge. Hall, G. (2016). The uberfication of the university. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, R. (2019). Are PhDs just cheap labour for universities?. The Guardian. Published on 01-04-2019. Accessed on 17-04-2019. Hartung, C., Barnes, N., Welch, R., O’Flynn, G., Uptin, J. and McMahon, S. (2017). Beyond the academic precariat: A collective biography of poetic subjectivities in the neoliberal university. Sport, Education and Society, 22(1), 40–57. Hazelkorn, E. (2015). Rankings and the reshaping of higher education: The battle for world-class excellence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hochschild, A.R. (1983/2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kidman, J. (2019). Whither decolonisation? Indigenous scholars and the problem of inclu­ sion in the neoliberal university. Journal of Sociology, 1440783319835958. https://doi. org/10.1177/1440783319835958 Mason, C. and Rawlings-Sanaei, F. (2014). Introduction: Where is the narrative around academic migration?. In Mason, C. and Rawlings-Sanaei, F. (Eds.), Academic migration, discipline knowledge and pedagogical practice (pp.1–9). Singapore: Springer. Matsuoka, M. (2017). Embracing vulnerability: A reflection on my academic journey as a Japanese early career feminist academic abroad. In Thwaites, R. and Pressland, A. (Eds.), Being an early career feminist academic (pp.255–266). London: Palgrave Macmillan. McLachlan, F. (2017). Being critical: An account of an early career academic working within and against neoliberalism. Sport, Education and Society, 22(1), 58–72. Morgan, G. and Wood, J. (2017). The “academic career” in the era of flexploitation. In Armano, E., Bove, A. and Murgia, A. (Eds.), Mapping precariousness, labour insecurity and uncertain livelihoods: Subjectivities and resistance (pp. 82–97). Abingdon, UK & New York: Routledge. Paret, M. and Gleeson, S. (2016). Precarity and agency through a migration lens. Citizen­ ship Studies, 20(3–4), 277–294. Pio, E. (2005). Knotted strands: Working lives of Indian women migrants in New Zealand. Human Relations, 58(10), 1277–1299. Puawai Collective. (2019). Assembling disruptive practice in the neoliberal university: An ethics of care. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 101(1), 33–43. Ryan-Flood, R. and Gill, R. (eds). (2010). Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections. Abingdon: Routledge. Sang, K., Al-Dajani, H. and Özbilgin, M. (2013). Frayed careers of migrant female profes­ sors in British academia: An intersectional perspective. Gender, Work & Organization, 20 (2), 158–171. Standing, G. (2014). The Precariat-The new dangerous class. Amalgam, 6(6–7), 115–119. Taylor, Y. and Lahad, K. (eds). (2018). Feeling academic in the neoliberal university: Feminist flights, fights and failures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thwaites, R. and Pressland, A. (eds). (2017). Being an early career feminist academic: Global perspectives, experiences and challenges. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, B., Christensen, E. and Occhino, J. (2017). Tinkering through transition: On “doctoring” as an early-career academic in physical education and sport pedagogy. Sport, Education and Society, 22(1), 73–86.

6 WRITING DOUBLE PRECARITY Recalling and re-presenting autoethnographies Madhavi (Maddy) Manchi and Elham Zakeri

Chatting via video conference, Ellie and I share our experience of doing autoethnography. Here, I’ve presented non-linear fragments of this conversation,1 interspersing it with citations, mostly, from the book Autoethnography (Adams et al. 2015). The two themes from our chat that I’ve chosen to describe here are vulnerability and the ethical dilemmas of representing other people in autoethno­ graphic (AE) stories.

Being vulnerable And do you at any … point, I mean, did you feel like, “I should have put this”… because I had a feeling [when I wrote my chapter] … I was feeling like, “I’m putting too much of myself, especially the very, very vulnerable … parts on the paper. And I was not sure whether I want to be represented … in that way, as a person more as a citizen of a country” … I was feeling so vulnerable at many moments of my writing. So I had this, you know, internal … question and answer like, “oh, should I want to write it this way or this way?” MADDY: That was the tricky bit, right … It’s about balancing, like, the theory with the emotional, evocative, feeling bit … I find it hard to be vulnerable on paper. So I find myself ducking behind theory very quickly [laughs]. So then, I figured that … doing it in italics as little vignettes at the start of each section … it took me a couple of tries, like, a couple of drafts … and reworking it, then I realised that if I were to put it fair and square, like a like a full on, proper vignette, there’s no escaping that bit. And then it also kind of becomes a way to keep linking my theoretical arguments back to what I was feeling … It became a way to balance, and at the same time cope with the fear of being vulnerable on paper. ELLIE:

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Being vulnerable on paper was one of the hardest things for me about doing critical autoethnography. The fear of exposing my feelings lead me to “hide” behind theory and academic literature. But because the personal and emotional are so significant to CAE, I found myself needing to strike a balance. It was about finding ways to “embrace the vulnerability of asking and answering ques­ tions about experience so that we as researcher, as well as our participants and readers, might understand these experience and the emotions they generate” (Adams et al. 2015: 39). Because I kept “ducking behind theory”, I had to make sure I wasn’t writing “the stories and then begin[ing] the search for a theory to “fit” them” (Holman Jones 2016: 229). My writing structure helped work some of these fears out and helped “embrace vulnerability with a purpose” (Adams et al. 2015: 40). Moving between italicised vignettes, theoretical citations and arguments in first person, the chapter is written in realist AE style providing a “layered account: which juxtapose fragments of experience, memories, introspection, research theory and other texts. Layered accounts reflect and refract the relationship between per­ sonal/cultural experience and interpretation/analysis” (Adams et al. 2015: 85).

Total recall? It’s different when it’s when it comes out of a journal, where you’re putting your thoughts down, and you, kind of, have some control over what you do share [or] not share [and] how you present it. But I think it gets tricky when you when you go to a point where you’re reporting conversations where there’s other people involved, and I think there I did have to think doubly hard about how necessary or not it was to bring names, bring people in, [and] make them characters in my story … ELLIE: Interesting. So you were taking into consideration the ethics of your writing, and you were thinking, how to address and acknowledge your own subjectivity. And, of course, your own points of view, in your own writing. I think this is a very big issue, not “issue”, but this is a thing which needs to be acknowledged in all kinds of qualitative writing, that, well, “I am writing as a person, and we have the power”… MADDY:

Recalling and representing experiences within qualitative research, and CAE particularly, present many ethical dilemmas. I found myself anxious about putting words in other people’s mouths when reporting conversations. The same anxiety plagued me around anonymising people who are characters in my story. This goes to the heart of how we write CAE and deal with the consequences. I reminded myself that CAE is a qualitative method that provides situated knowledge (Adams et al. 2015: 21). Further, “any story we construct is partial, privileged, and rhet­ orically crafted for an audience” (Adams et al. 2015: 82). Reflexivity is key to this process, which, “asks us to explicitly acknowledge our research in relation to power” (Adams et al. 2015: 29). I’ve limited the inclusion of conversations with others, and used “distancing or abstracting techniques to obscure identities ”

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(Adams et al. 2015: 61). I also take a position that is akin to “standing corrected”. By this I mean staying open to hearing and acknowledging alternate versions of events by other actors, from our shared situations. It also means sustaining relation­ ships and conversations for as long as is needed (Adams et al. 2015: 25).

Note 1 These fragments have been edited for readability.

References Adams, T.E., Jones, S.L.H. and Ellis, C., (2015). Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holman Jones, S., (2016). Living bodies of thought: The “critical” in critical autoethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 22(4), 228–237.

PART II

Lingua-cultural learning

7 ESCAPING THE COMFORT ZONE The first language ‘bubble’ Anqi Li

Introduction This paper records my experiences of cramming for and passing English tests in China and then, in total contrast, actually learning to use English in Australia in a process of trial and error I call ‘dabbling’. This is my confes­ sion: I am a language dabbler. I write this chapter in the hope that readers may learn something from my successes and also my failures in coming to be proficient in English, which is, for better or worse, the world’s lingua franca. Some readers are, themselves, likely tempted to try to ‘learn languages’ by hacking and reverse engineering language tests—as I did. The language teaching and testing system in China both encourages and enables such an approach (Hu, 2005), even though it benefits no one. Other readers, meanwhile, will likely be university teachers in ‘western’ universities, wondering what makes their Chin­ ese students tick. (Or, more negatively, they may wonder why their students don’t understand them or why we don’t speak up in class.) I am writing for both readerships. Learning and using languages are core parts of what it means to engage and to learn interculturally and I hope this contribution sheds some light on the process—or, at least, my process—of dabbling in and finally coming to know English in ways that, now, I can say have boosted my intercultural understanding. As I keep moving through this amazing language and culture journey, I reflect on how I have expanded my horizons. This autoethno­ graphic account of the process is for those who, themselves, may have not traveled quite the same ‘journey’ as me and who may be wondering, as I did, how on earth they can unlock the door marked ‘bilingualism’.

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Part 1: China I was born, raised, and educated to undergraduate level in China, and I started learning English in third grade of elementary school. Foreign language learning— which in China means one thing and one thing only, and that is English—was compulsory, and I was absolutely fine with that because I got high scores in almost every exam. I was obsessed with English. Picture me, gleeful, getting 137 out of 150 in the national college entrance exam and then passing both the CET-4 and CET-6 exams in my first year of university. Picture my classmates struggling, taking two or three years to prepare for these same tests. And now picture me slinking off back to bed after class to watch yet another episode of Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory, because I was such a fan of American humor. English was ‘my thing’ and I laughed along with Sheldon (a character in The Big Bang Theory) as he rambled on in long, sweeping English statements about physics or comic books or life. I was unusual, though. In recent decades, ELT (English Language Teaching) in China has developed rapidly, but many problems remain (Hu, 2005). The big problem is the culture of testing: English is a gatekeeper from primary school to higher education, which is to say, throughout their school years, Chinese stu­ dents need to pass English exams every time they want to enter a higher grade (MOE, 2001). But the English that is tested is not the English I’m using here; it’s not the English you and I would use if we met at a coffee shop. No, the English tested—and therefore the English that is taught—is all about memorizing vocabulary, digging forensically around in texts (an activity called ‘intensive reading’ that is rather more archaeological than it is linguistic), and learning the technicalities of precise, grammar-heavy translation. But I was eager to prove myself as a competent learner of English, so I registered for both the CET-4 and CET-6 tests in my first year of university and I devoted myself to preparation for those tests. The test registration officer was really curious about my motives for attending the test in advance, because as he saw it, few of the freshmen were interested in taking tests. Most went to parties and enjoyed their first year at university after all the years of hard work in high school. Although I was passionate about language learning, preparing for the CET tests was neither interesting nor challenging at all. I went to bookshops and bought past test papers as well as vocabulary books and in my spare time, I spent hours in empty classrooms doing the test papers and then comparing my answers to the standard answers given. Just like my former experience in dealing with other exams, in these language tests the trick was to become a skilled ‘test candidate’ and not necessarily a good language user. For instance, without knowing the meanings of key nouns in an article, I was still able to conclude its main points and answer the multiplechoice questions. By analyzing the rationality of each choice, it was not hard to exclude the wrong answers and pick the right one. I also skipped most of the vocabulary memorization step. In my opinion, to memorize thousands of new

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words in a year was unrealistic. So, instead, I listed the most common adjectives used in the past papers to show the writers’ attitude; they always asked about that. And I learned the verbs used to describe changes in things; that came up a lot, too. Testing strategies like these are not a new thing in China, and my high school teachers had encouraged ‘hacking’ or subverting tests like this, to get an additional few points. But to what extent do these tests represent my English competency? They don’t, quite simply. On the surface it seems like I spent a lot of time ‘learning’ English; I passed both the CET-4 and CET-6 tests in my first year. In comparison, one of my roommates attempted the CET-4 tests three times. Since one cannot attend CET-6 until they have past CET-4, she struggled with CET-6 in her last six months at university, frantic that it would stop her from graduating. She expressed her admiration for me and I accepted it. However, I wasn’t aware that my test-taking ‘success’ would leave a variety of problems to deal with later on. The way I approached English tests, speaking skills were not important at all (the CET exams do not test speaking skills), and ‘listening’ was just another excuse to take texts apart and examine their grammar. Making meaning with a stream of sounds was never my goal, but nor was it the goal of the test writers. Multiply my strategy by millions of Chinese learners and teachers, and you find the widespread ‘deaf and dumb English’ phenomenon, in which learners are generally quite well equipped with grammatical and lexical knowledge even if they can’t use English communicatively. But what else is a language for if not for communicating? Well, in China it is used for separating the dragons from the snakes: there are those magical, mythical creatures who can strategize and memorize and regurgitate and collocate and parse. The dragons do well in Eng­ lish tests. And then there are those who slip around on the ground, snake-like; they struggle. Back then, though, I was a dragon, breathing fire over the testing system. The system wanted to separate the dragons from the snakes, and I was okay with that. But in my last months at university—along with more than seven million others graduating in China that same year, under pressure to find an edge and, eventually, hopefully a job—I asked myself, ‘What next?’ While some of my classmates embarked on internships, I—like so many others—decided to attend classes leading to the Postgraduate Entrance Examination (PEE), a stepping stone to a master’s degree and, we fervently hoped, better career opportunities. Well. If ‘deaf and dumb English’ is a problem in China generally, my PEE experience was its zenith (or perhaps its nadir). The course was the very oppos­ ite of communicative language learning. We did not learn to make meaning with the sounds from our mouths, and we did not learn how to interpret sounds from American mouths. Instead, students’ hand writing was improved (fluid joins of the script were not allowed), so-called ‘advanced vocabulary’ was pushed upon us, and we spent hours and days and weeks deeply digging into yet more grammar rules and subtle details in sentences. I found myself bound by

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the regulations and repetitions, and my passion and interest in the language was ruined by never utilizing English to express myself. After classes, I stopped chas­ ing new seasons of American TV shows because I was so sick of English. Now, on The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon did his opaque scientist talk with his long, rambling statements, it didn’t sound funny anymore. Now, it sounded just like my PEE teacher. I did finish the PEE course, mainly because of the tuition fees I had paid, but I knew I needed to escape from that system. I didn’t want to take the risk that my postgraduate years would be a replication of yet more of this, and I was worried that my motivation for language was already in tatters. So, after a long discussion with my parents, I decided to do my master’s overseas. Australia seemed like a good destination. The first consideration was language level. My lack of procedural knowledge of English (that is, the ability to use the language, rather than knowing all about it; Stanley & Murray, 2013) limited my choice of universities in the UK and the USA. They required very high English proficiency on tests like IELTS, which test language users’ holistic macro-skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—and I didn’t have that. So, although Oxford and Edinburgh and York, and Yale and Stanford and UCLA were really attractive, I realized that I had to be realistic. Other factors were just as prosaic: Britain was too expensive as the exchange rate meant that fees and living expenses were pricier, even, than normal. And the US colleges had especially strict admission requirement of stu­ dents’ undergraduate schools. I graduated from a small so-called ‘normal’ univer­ sity, which was not swanky at all. In comparison, the tuition fees at Australian universities were relatively rea­ sonable for my family, and Australia welcomed students whose average scores are above 75 (my average was 85), but was not as strict in which university they had attended. This gave me the possibility to achieve my dream of undertaking further education overseas. Therefore, Australia became my new obsession. But first I had to go to a test preparation institution for IELTS preparation. Attending pre-test courses is common, in China, before taking language tests. And since IELTS test-takers are those who are about to go abroad, the tuition fees are way more expensive than other kinds of extra-curriculum schools. I spent 30,000 Chinese RMB (about $6,000AUD or €4000EUR), for intensive courses in each of the test parts. We had small classes of six students and four teachers, one for each part of the test. Finally, my Big Bang Theory obsession started to pay off. I finished all the practice tests and my scores in reading and listening were 7.0 to 8.0 points in almost every quiz. (This corresponds with level C1, ‘Effective Operational Proficiency’, on the Common European Frame­ work for Languages. The C1 level descriptor reads: ‘you can understand long, demanding texts, speak fluently without searching for expressions, and under­ stand implicit meanings’.)

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However, I met many difficulties in the writing and speaking tests. I was seldom educated to make any output in English, and my teacher never corrected mistakes in my homework passages, focusing instead on praising my neat handwriting. This was sweetly unhelpful, but I knew she didn’t have time to check a class of 60 students’ homework one by one. This is the reality of Chinese schooling. In the IELTS preparation courses, the writing-class teacher separated the topics we might encounter into several themes, including economics, social problems, science, and so on. Then she provided us with useful vocabulary and a possible text structure for use in each theme; our job was to memorize these. She emphasized that grammar is very significant for high scores in writing test. To some extent, my previous test success helped me, but as I read through a large number of sample articles and tried to imitate them and commit them to memory, I realized that this approach was backwards. I was learning how to write the test but not how to write English. My writing habits in English differ enormously to those in my first lan­ guage. In Chinese, I always keep the topic sentences to the end of each para­ graph, but topic sentences in English are usually at the beginning and they lead the rest of the content. This meant that academic writing in English required more forethought. I couldn’t write myself into the argument and instead needed to arrange my thoughts and opinions logically in advance. I wondered whether this reflects the differences in the ways that Chinese speakers and English speakers think. In Chinese, I write to know what I think whereas in English I felt I needed to know what I was going to say from the very beginning. It felt like a waste of writing, which, for me, is about discovery. In addition, in speaking, it was a new thing for me to produce proper sentences spontaneously in real-time communications. I was so anxious about it and I paused a lot, searching for the correct words, hesitating about grammar mistakes, and apologizing for the errors I made. (This is what Krashen (1982) calls the affective filter, and it impeded me, freezing the words in my throat.) In class, at last, we were given chances to speak in English. But as soon as any mistake was made, the teacher would stop us, correct the mistake, and move onto the next topic or speaker. Of course, this only heightened my anxiety, even though my teacher said my pronun­ ciation was really good, ‘without much Chinese accent’. I didn’t realize it at the time, but implicitly, nativeness was what we were all supposed to be striving for, as impossible as that is. Thus, there was the anxiety of our impossible goal and the anxiety of the constant interruptions, and every time my teacher jumped in to cor­ rect my mistakes, my anxiety was raised to a higher level and I felt annoyed. I just needed more time, chances, and confidence. (And, now, after studying foreign lan­ guage acquisition in my master’s, I believe error correction should be delayed and not immediate. This is to allow for the spontaneous production of the language, because fluency and complexity are just as important as accuracy. I know this now, but I didn’t know it back then. I wish I could go back in time and explain this to my teacher. Ideally, I would interrupt him mid-sentence to say so. Ha!)

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But in fact, my speaking-skills ‘teacher’ was not really a teacher at all. The institution employed a young Canadian man who was traveling in China; he had no previous teaching experience or qualifications. The strategy he used was simple and seemed scientific. We watched a short video in each class and were given five minutes to organize our language. Then we spoke in front of others in turn, and once we used ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘um’ or a pause, the speech would be over. Although it brought to the class a lively and competitive atmosphere, I got upset after every workshop because there was no space and time to express myself freely. Being a native speaker didn’t mean that our ‘teacher’ knew how to teach a language, and I didn’t see any significant improvement of my speak­ ing in that workshop. But how could I express my dissatisfaction at wasting my time and money? I was too afraid to offend the high-status, native speaker ‘for­ eign guest’. Status was everything, then. So, I reverted to what I had always done: I practiced with past test papers. And after a while I was confident to attend the reading and listening parts of test. However, although I spent a lot of time reading IELTS sample writings, I was as afraid to put pen to paper as I was to open my mouth. No one had really ever helped me in revising my written articles and I had never had a patient partner for speaking practice. Not surprisingly, then, I got 8.0 in listen­ ing (thanks Sheldon!) and 7.5 in reading, but sadly 5.5 in each of speaking and writing. It wasn’t enough. So: more money. Next, I took a one-to-one course specifically focused on speaking and writing, and, at last, I was able to practice my skills and get feed­ back from professional teachers. No one interrupted me, and my confidence grew. My teacher corrected my written errors, and my writing improved. And at last I satisfied the IELTS requirement of 6.5 in speaking and writing. Jubilant, I left for Sydney.

Part 2: Australia It was in Australia that I finally became a language learner—a dabbler in the mysterious ways of English—rather than a test taker. For my master’s, I studied TESOL—Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages—and, as a future language teacher and applied linguistics researcher, I recorded many thoughts, tips, and feelings about my own English learning along the way. Though I was introvert and shy as a fresh student, I was determined to break down the cultural and psychological barriers, to enjoy my new life overseas. What I noticed straight away was that my learning and ease of speaking up, in English, in class, had a lot to do with the lecturers’ personalities and attitudes. Thankfully, I met some teachers with outgoing personalities, welcome attitudes toward international students, and a good understanding of different cultural backgrounds. Although I was really timid, and I would hesitate every time I spoke up in class, I was encouraged by some lecturers and classmates. The first good guide was Dr. M, a teacher I had in my first semester. She was very easy

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to get along with and she always dressed very casually, even like a student, which made me feel close to her. She was a social scientist lecturer who had often worked with international students, and she used many strategies to help me and my international classmates to build our confidence in class. The first strategy was her modified speaking style. Dr. M’s accent was ‘mid-Pacific’—a bit British and a bit Australian, but actually neither. British people are hard for me to understand when they speak quickly, and Australian locals’ pronunciation was so new and unfamiliar for me. But Dr. M was careful to speak at an accept­ able speed with a clear, almost ‘universal’ pronunciation, which helped me a lot in focusing on her speech and gathering information by purely listening to her. She also backed up everything she was saying on handouts that we could refer to later or if we got lost in class. Later, I understood that she was consciously doing teacher talk, or foreigner talk. This is the systematic simplification of the formal properties of a teacher’s speech, as I learned in a linguistics class later. Although the teacher is an expert in her field, she avoided too-formal speech and always anticipated and explained the complexity of the specialist vocabulary. So, she did not avoid terminology, but she would always explain it in normal words and with vivid examples or metaphors. For example, when explaining ‘paradigm’, she compared it to a ‘bubble’—with a picture of a bubble on the handout, just in case!—in which people see things from within their own beliefs and perspectives. These strategies made the course content much more understandable, and easy to remember for me. And just as importantly, Dr. M helped me to feel involved in the classroom as a participant in the discussions. In her class, I learned that it was okay to try to express myself. It was there that I started to dabble. In contrast, I struggled in another lecturer’s class. That class was given by Dr. V, whose accent was strong and whose class content was complex. He seldom simplified the complicated terminology that appeared on his crowded lecture slides, and he used many sophisticated words to express every idea. Was he showing off? Was he afraid we would think he wasn’t an expert, if he didn’t use all those big words? This was confusing, though. Dr. M wasn’t afraid to make the big ideas simple, so why was Dr. V? Was he higher status, and more of an expert? Or, we realized later, was she higher status than him, and so no one was going to question her as an expert? Comfortably expert, she could per­ haps afford to make things accessible for us. We didn’t know, but my classmates and I often complained about him as we speculated about this and waited for the bus after class. Either way, my language dabbling plan failed in Dr. V’s class. I couldn’t understand the topics that I was supposed to talk about, so how could I try to communicate if I was always running to catch up? I couldn’t. But Dr. M’s class was still going, and I came to love the atmosphere of dis­ cussion and debates in the classroom. Each week, I pushed myself to speak up and I noticed my speaking speed and lexical complexity increase. Dr. M’s class­ room was lively and welcoming, but we were always pushed to think about something, add more to what we were saying, think deeper, and contribute to

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small-group talks. In week one, I was thinking and speaking really slowly, and I expect I appeared very nervous and anxious. In week two, I knew what to expect and I felt a bit more comfortable. In week three, I sat next to a Korean student and by the end of the class we were laughing together, and I confessed to her that I had never made a foreign friend before then. As the weeks passed by, I experienced a noticeable growth in my communication in Dr. M’s lively classroom, while still feeling challenged in other classrooms, like Dr. V’s, where I couldn’t develop friendly relationships with others. Part of the problem was that in some classes I found a strange ‘boundary’ among students. In some courses, I noticed that students from English-speaking countries would be sitting in front part of the room, closer to the teacher while Asian students from China, Indonesia and Korea would sit at the back, with three to four rows of empty seats between the ‘local students’ and the ‘Asian students’. Apart from the visible line, people from English-speaking countries and Asia seemed have a psychological boundary, and seldom interacted with people from ‘the other side’. Local students discussed a lot of issues while Asian students kept really silent there. In that environment, my language dabbling came to a standstill. Was that racism? I don’t think so. Not as such. Certainly, this weird circum­ stance made me uncomfortable and confused. Usually, by now, I was willing to get more engaged in class and to melt into casual social discussions around the tables when we did group discussion tasks. But here: I was silent. The problem, I think, was that the participants had too little in common: the local students were already working as teachers in local schools whereas most of the Asian stu­ dents had just finished undergraduate study, and none of us had done much teaching practicing. So, when it came to topics around teaching, we didn’t have much to share. But these gaps in our professional status and the lack of common topics raised the level of anxiety in socialization among us, since we didn’t want to encounter any awkward silences. So, we sat apart and were quiet while they talked about all their teaching experiences. We watched. They judged. And we judged, too, but probably they didn’t know that. They talked. And we were silent. The only communication I had with an Australian woman classmate in that class was when she picked up my dropped pen lid. The whole process lasted for only 20 seconds, without any eye contact. I felt very upset: I’d thought that I could develop friendship, or at least that I might discuss about the class topic with her. But there seemed a mountain between us, which let me feel separated from their world. In that class, I gave up speaking with anyone, feeling upset and under pressure to keep up. I tried to see it from the opposite perspective: how did the local students see us, the silent Asian students? One problem was the gaps in our language. We struggled with English, and we also had less knowledge than the experienced local students. So, we were quiet. Shy. Terrified. And also, because we were lost, sometimes bored. And to them, I think, it seemed like we were not willing

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to engage. I could see my Asian classmates under pressure in catching up with the teacher’s main points, because I noticed most of them were really concen­ trating and always took lots of notes. So perhaps, also, the other students may have been afraid to interrupt their silent Asian classmates who were fully con­ centrated and looked very serious in class. Perhaps this was why there was the gap. What it meant, though, was that I couldn’t spare my attention in language dabbling or try to discuss anything in English under the pressure. In that class, I was just trying to keep up. Outside of class, I also made an effort to dabble in English as much as I could. But I didn’t always succeed. On my second day in Australia, I needed to buy myself some living goods, such as bedding. At a bus stop, I asked two Asian-looking students in my new and careful English which bus I could take to the mall. For a moment, there was silence, and I thought maybe they didn’t understand me. And then they laughed, their hands over their mouths, and one of them spoke to me in Chinese, making fun of my question because she was from China, too. My cheeks went red and I spoke in Chinese, also laughing, or pretending to laugh, but so embarrassed. Then I wrote in my diary that evening: ‘Why did they feel I was ridiculous just because I speak English to Chinese people? What’s wrong if I speak the official language in a foreign country? How could I tell who are Chinese and who are not? What if I was Australian-born Chinese, how would they know?’ These four question marks showed my end­ less doubt about some Chinese peers’ attitude toward English-speaking. Not all of them wanted to learn English, as I so sorely did. Some of them (or us) feel uncomfortable, resorting to joking about speaking English with people from the same country. Even in a group that I joined to practice my English—an afterclass discussion group for the exact purpose of learning English—whenever more Chinese students joined in, Chinese replaced English in communication. This, of course, make the group discussion pointless, in terms of language practice. Why does this happen? To some extent, I can understand. Speaking a foreign language—like English—with your friend in front of others isn’t very polite because it excludes some people. Even between friends it may not be polite: if my English is better than yours and we speak it together, it may seem like I’m show­ ing off, and I will make you lose face. Or, conversely, if your English is better, I will lose face and you will be embarrassed for me. So it is safer for everybody if we speak Chinese. Add to this the language anxiety—as I experienced it—is very common. I was lucky to have enough money to pay for one-to-one language practice in China, but not everybody is. As I found during my PEE and IELTS preparation courses, anxiety really limits students’ motivation to use English. And, finally, there is the question of group recognition. Especially outside of our home country, language is a symbol of who we are. But I was motivated. I was a dabbler. And so, I forced myself to overcome these issues, even as I thought and wrote about them obsessively in my journal. I resolved that, despite these questions of politeness, it is still good manners to speak English with a stranger in an English-speaking society when I’m not sure

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about his or her nationality, which is what happened at the bus stop. And as being around Chinese people made this more complicated, I started to eventu­ ally ‘escape’ from the Chinese social circle and push myself into using English. But where to begin? As I did in Dr. M’s class, I had been trying to join in every debate and discussion in my classes, and to express myself loudly and con­ fidently in front of my classmates. Doing this, I had some really inspiring and in-depth discussions about qualitative research and also about life with a local woman, an Australian classmate, who was really warmhearted and open-minded. This was a revelation for me, and shyly I told her that the more I speak to her, the braver I feel, and then the more fluent and natural I can be when I am speaking. She smiled, then, and patted my hand, and told me that I was amaz­ ing. Amazing. I repeated the word to myself in my head. Amazing. I think I struggle in English, but my Aussie friend thinks I am amazing because I speak fluent Chinese and also the English that we speak together. This is amazing, I tell myself later. It is amazing. It is. And then one day, when I was speaking in front of classmates, one of my teachers witnessed my progress, too. After class, she told me privately that in the beginning I was like ‘a little mouse’, quietly sitting on the corner, but now she noticed that I’m much braver and engaged in group discussion. I did not tell her, but I thought it: ‘Yes, because I am amazing.’ I smiled a lot, then. Escaping from the Chinese ‘bubble’ doesn’t mean refusing to be a member of the group. In contrast, I began to purposefully break down the barrier between Chinese students and other students, engaging everyone who wanted to talk in discussions, and freely exchanging ideas—in English. Not everyone wants to, and that’s their choice. Although I am breaking some of the Chinese ‘rules’, I treat every classmate the same regardless of their nationality or first language, neither trying to be closer to Chinese friends nor talking only with English native speakers. Sometimes there are embarrassing moments and misunderstand­ ings, but the more we do this, the more the anxiety goes away. I keep remind­ ing myself that what we are doing is amazing. Amazing. I can hear the word in my Aussie friend’s voice, now. We have come from a Chinese system that teaches us about English, and here we are, using it. This is amazing. And, at last, I have decided I need to memorize vocabulary. I side-stepped this part when I was preparing for the CET exams, but it is needed, I realize, if I want to keep being amazing. I downloaded an app called ‘Baicizhan’ (Vocabu­ lary Ninja) and now I memorize 25 English words each day. This app is really suitable for people, like me, who don’t want to use ‘boring’ dictionaries or vocabulary lists, since it has several alternative methods to help users remember new words through tasks and games. I do find that only going through the tasks once left me a vague impression of the words, which means I can recognize them when they appear but rarely use them in communication, and my lexical complexity in speaking and writing remains limited. So, I repeat the tasks every day, since English is my forever task.

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Last but not least, my social life in Australia also influences my English learn­ ing, especially the pragmatic skills of how the language is actually used rather than the way it is represented in textbooks. I have noticed that I learn a lot from awkward circumstances. Now, I know that, in shops, people say ‘What are you after?’ to mean ‘What are you looking for?’, but at first, I was completely baffled. I’ve learned that when expressing gratitude ‘Cheers’ is friendlier and faster than the traditional ‘Thank you’, but that the meaning is the same. When­ ever I use ‘Cheers’ like this, I smile, and the person I’m thanking always smiles too. These little language experiments are just a glance at my everyday life in English, now. As my confidence grows, so does my risk taking and language dabbling, and the more I do that, the more I learn. And my aim has changed, too. I’m learning the language to melt into this hospitable society, but I’m not chasing after native-like language proficiency anymore. In China, I used to insist on sounding British or American. But I’m now not tangled by how my accent sounds or where I sound like I’m from. Hopefully, one day, I can speak English confidently, clearly, and fluently with anyone, and tell punch lines to my English-speaking friends without anxiety. Until then, I remember this: I’ve come a long way and whereas once I was good at taking tests, now I’m good at English. I speak fluent Chinese and I’m also dabbling in English, and this is amazing. I am amazing.

References Hu, G. (2005). English language education in China: Policies, progress, and problems. Language Policy, 4(1), 5–24. Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. MOE. (2001). Jiaoyubu guanyu jiji tuijin xiaoxue kaishe yingyu kecheng de zhidao yijian. [Guidelines for promoting primary English language teaching]. Beijing: Ministry of Education. Stanley, P. & Murray, N. (2013). ‘Qualified’? A framework for comparing ELT teacher preparation courses. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 102–115.

8 “WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM?” Hyejeong Ahn

“You’re not from North Korea, right?” I arrived in Australia almost 20 years ago as a backpacker. Since then, I have had a range of jobs in Australia such as a farmhand during a working holiday, a waitress in an Italian takeaway shop, a staff member at a childcare centre, a primary school teacher, a lecturer at several universities and an English teacher in various English language centres. Socialising with people I then perceived as “Australians” probably started while I was a farmhand. My working holiday visa allowed me to travel and work in Australia for up to one year (Work and Holiday visa, n.d.) and with this visa I was able to accept a harvesting job in a rural area of Australia for a few weeks. That job, which I took when I had almost run out of money, was in Bundaberg, a city near the southeast coast of Queensland, Australia. The city was then popular among backpackers with working holiday visas who were looking for temporary farm jobs as fruit and vegetable pickers. There were several “working” hostels in Bundaberg, which arranged harvesting jobs for backpackers who stayed at their hos­ tels. The first job arranged for me was picking zucchini at a small, family run farm. On the first day, the owner, Sally, warmly welcomed me and even congratulated me for being short as it would make it easier for me to withstand the prolonged bending to pick zucchini, which tended to play “hide and seek” under the large, broad green leaves of the plant. There were several other workers there from the same hostel. I was nervous, as I had never worked on a farm before and I had never seen zucchini plants either. I was also anxious as I wasn’t confident in my English skills, so I was not too keen on taking part in the seemingly cheerful conversations that the other workers and Sally seemed to be having. I was even more worried about damaging the fragile looking zucchini plants and their fruits. At the end of the day, I was quite happy with the amount I had harvested. It was my first day working on a farm in Australia.

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During the tea break on the second day, Sally complimented me on my work so far that morning. I smiled at her as a way of returning her compliment. I realised several days later, after working on a few different farms, that in this context people complimented each other on their buckets full of freshly picked fruits and vegetables by way of a greeting. I felt foolish as I thought their com­ pliments were genuine. People in Korea, at least my teachers at school, did not compliment me on my work, unless they really meant it. Anyway, I did not know how to respond to these “empty” compliments so I just I smiled back. During the lunch break on the second day, Sally, asked me where I was from. “Korea,” I replied. “Are you from North Korea or South Korea?” She asked. “Of course, I am from South Korea,” I replied with surprise. “I am glad you’re not from North Korea,” she said. I smirked. I was actually shocked at her question, because I thought that when I said, “I am from Korea,” people would immediately identify “Korea” as “South Korea”. Who could even imagine that they could meet a North Korean here? Didn’t they know that North Koreans can’t travel of their own free will? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and was annoyed about the ignorance displayed about the partition of the Korean peninsula by my fellow workers. After working at several farms over a few days, I realised that when I replied “I am from Korea” to this question about my nationality nearly everyone wanted to check that I was not from North Korea. I wondered whether their asking if I was from North or South was part of their communication strategy. I felt it was completely unbelievable that people in Australia could even ask such a nonsensical question. In the section above, I illustrated two intercultural communication incidents involving different expectations during the initial stage of a conversation between myself and people from a range of cultural backgrounds. Several studies have highlighted various cultural-specific expectations in a range of speech con­ ventions (Brick, 2004; Clyne, 1994). Australian cultural greetings which use for­ mulaic compliment utterances were a very perplexing experience for me. Despite this being uncomfortable initially, I applied these cultural greeting “rules” involving complimenting people on their work for most of my time in Australia. I tried hard to identify the things that are valued in Australian society and compliment people on them as one of my greeting strategies. This turned out to be particularly successful in various Australian contexts, especially when I had to give small presentations as part of my work. Even though from a Korean cultural standpoint these compliments seemed empty, people in Aus­ tralia use these compliments all the time and it doesn’t bother them if they are just out of politeness rather than being meaningful at all (Barraja-Rohan, 2003). Even if they are “empty” comments, it is nice to give and receive compliments, I thought, and decided that I might as well use this custom to my advantage to help me to fit in. I have also applied this complimenting strategy in Australia when commenting on students’ work as a way of motivating them. This strategy seemed to be well received by the majority of my students in Australia. How­ ever, when I started working in Singapore, my students told me that I was “too

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generous in giving compliments” and “my compliments are seemingly insin­ cere”. My learned “complimenting” strategy was unwelcome in Singapore. I wondered if my Singaporean students were feeling the same response I had when I received compliments about my harvesting work in Queensland. Back then, the emptiness of the praise seemed really strange to me. The questions about whether I was North or South Korean made by Austra­ lian farmers may have been the indication of a genuine effort to get to know one of their non-Australian workers better by using the small talk strategy of finding a topic that we could talk about together (Coupland, 2000; Coupland & Robinson, 1992). Despite their good intentions, asking me if I was from North Korea came to me as a total surprise. My annoyance could have been the result of my indoctrination over the years with propaganda referring to North Korea as an enemy country, a term which only recently was removed from the white paper on defence by the South Korean government (Yeo, 2018; Yoo, 2019). I was faced with a moment of realisation that I was a total stranger in Australia and that Australians had hardly any knowledge of my country. This made me feel both annoyed and sad at the same time. Although their intentions may have been well meaning (whether the question was sincere or jocular), I could not help feeling irritated by this all too frequent question.

Hazel, Anne, Maggie and Lydia … Hyejeong? In the year 2000 during my travels in Australia, I met many backpackers from various “Western” countries. They usually asked my name. “I am Hyejeong,” I replied. My answer was often followed by an awkward silence or a call for clarification as if they were thinking I had said “Hazel” or some other more familiar name. I often softly and politely corrected them. I found constantly trying to get people to understand how to say my name uncomfortable and they in turn often gave up trying. “Is my name that difficult to pronounce? It only has two syllables.” This was the first time it had ever occurred to me that my first name is a common one for girls in South Korea. After several experiences like this, I accepted that telling non-Koreans my name was a challenging task which could cause awkward moments for both parties. I also understood their problem too, as I do not always remember the names of people from unfamiliar countries. I quickly gave up trying to teach others my Korean name. Instead, I decided to give myself the new anglicised name of Hazel. This was often the name which people thought they had heard when I said “Hyejeong”. For the next few months I started introducing myself as Hazel to the people that I met on my journey around Australia. I did this even though it made me feel very uncomfortable, as Hazel sounded to me like the name of an old English lady but I was a 20-year-old Korean girl. I did not have any affinity with that name. Finally, I decided I could never be a Hazel. After a few days of mulling over what to call myself, I gave myself the new name of Anne with an “e”. I thought

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that adding the “e” made the name slightly less boring than Ann which was the name given to me by a “native” English teacher, Daniel, when I was studying at a private English language institute as a high school student. My family name is Ahn, so Daniel must have thought that it would make sense to call me Ann. However, three months after giving myself the name Anne, I met three other Annes, one from Holland and two from England. They did not look anything like me. All three were much taller and they spoke English so well. It felt uncomfortable introducing myself as Anne to them. The names Hazel and Anne were clearly not the names that worked for me. However, I continued to intro­ duce myself as Anne to people that I met during the next couple of months, as I could not find a better anglicised name. After a stay at Airlie beach, an Australian resort town on Queensland’s Whit­ sunday Coast, I went to Sydney to look for a new temporary job to fund my next trip, which was to the Gold Coast. I found a waitressing job at an Italian takeaway shop in a train station in Sydney. There were three waitresses. One of them was Anne. Again! A real Anne! I certainly did not want to be another Anne there. Anne was not even my real name. I had been searching for a new anglicised name and thought the name Maggie sounded cute and cheerful. I thought this name suited me, so I was Maggie at the Italian takeaway shop, during a stay on the Gold Coast and until my Australian working holiday visa expired. When I returned to South Korea, I found a job at an “English Kindergarten” teaching English to pre-schoolers. I was supposed to have an anglicised name at this place. As soon as I introduced myself as Maggie, the kindergarten kids sitting in front of me burst out laughing. “Teacher is Meggie … hahaha … Meggie … Meg­ gie …”. I realised that Meggie sounds very similar to the Korean word for catfish, which is me-gi. The kindergarten children started teasing me about my name and even one of the parents expressed her surprise to learn that I had given myself such a name. She asked me why I had chosen it and even commented that it sounded really funny. I had to change my anglicised name again! I was also preparing to return to Australia to study and I was very concerned about not having a “good” anglicised name there. One day, I heard the name Lydia on the television. I liked the sound of it. It did not sound like an old lady’s name, it did not appear too common, it did not sound like any Korean word. “This is it! I am Lydia. Perfect!” I was exuberant. When I returned to Australia, I enrolled at university and introduced myself to my classmates as Lydia. When lecturers called me Hyejeong, according to the roll, I corrected them without hesitation, “You can just call me Lydia.” They seemed relieved. I was happy about my new anglicised name. People in Austra­ lia seemed to be able to say it easily and I did not have to suffer the awkward silence that ensued whenever I revealed my Korean name to new people. Not too long after, a good friend of mine from Canada told me she saw me on campus and yelled out from a distance, “Lydia, Lydia,” to get my attention and that I did not respond. I was still not yet used to being called Lydia.

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I was also called Lydia during a part-time job at a private childcare centre in Adelaide. After a few months working there, I became close to a colleague called Emma, who had started working there at the same time as me. Chatting during a 15-minute tea break, we began talking about names. I told her, my real Korean name was Hyejeong. She seemed so shocked to learn that I did not use my Korean name and had decided to be called Lydia. Two other staff mem­ bers overheard our conversation. They both asked me, why I had another name. On my way home, I started wondering the same thing myself, “Why did I ask people to call me Lydia?” Only one year before my graduation, I started introducing myself by my Korean name. I told all the staff at the childcare centre who had been calling me Lydia to call me Hyejeong. The staff at the childcare centre were willing to learn my Korean name. They said, “It is not hard at all, Hyejeong.” I felt rather embarrassed about making them call me Lydia for so long and then asking them to learn my real name. I also told people I had known for a long time, and they began to call me by my Korean name. My real name. When I met people for the first time, I introduced myself by my Korean name. I also met many other international students from Malaysia, Brunei and Sweden and realised they had all kept their “exotic” names. Why hadn’t I? I had several anglicised names in the first five years of my life in Australia, but I have only been called “Hyejeong” for the past 15 years. It is not uncommon practice for Koreans and Chinese to adopt anglicised names. It is not difficult to find Korean students with anglicised names, who study overseas or study English in South Korea, or staff with anglicised names working in Korean hotels. Adopt­ ing anglicised names is not unique to the Korean context. It is also common for Chinese English learners. Edwards (2008) identifies the Chinese practice of taking on anglicised names in the English language context as a Chinese cultural practice. He argues that having an anglicised name offers students studying Eng­ lish an identity associated with the language. Giving oneself another name is an act of assimilating into English-speaking culture. In Korea, names are used far less frequently than in an English-speaking society like Australia. It is because the terms of address in the Korean language are finely encoded in person deixis with a highly stratified set of linguistic codes as a means of precisely designating the social position that any individual occupies (Ahn, 2017). Calling a person by a socially appropriate term, generally not one’s first name, is a significant cultural practice in Korea. In particular, when women in their 60s play several socially respected roles, they are called by the name appropriate to their status and role according to context. For example, my mother is addressed in at least 11 differ­ ent ways. The name she uses and hears the least is her given name, Jeongja. She tells me that she does not remember the last time she was called by her given name. In her community her given name, Jeongja, plays little role in identifying her as who she is. She would feel more comfortable and rather be called by sev­ eral terms of address, such as mother-of-X, by various other kinship terms or occupationally related titles depending on the context.

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For Koreans, having an alternative name is not “a big deal”. It is common for Koreans to give themselves a new Korean name for various reasons (Kim, 2009). Statistics collected from 2005 to 2015 showed that 1.52 million, or about one in every 34 Koreans, had changed their official first name at least once in their life time and the numbers are steadily increasing (Jeong, 2018). A person could give him/herself a new name because they are preparing for a highly competitive exam since it is believed that a more auspicious first name could bring better luck. My decision to adopt an anglicised name could be associated with my Koreanness, in the sense that my name should represent my social situ­ ation with other members of any community that I am connected with. Since I was in Australia, interacting with Australians who have English names, my name needed to show how I fitted in. Replacing my personal name with a socially familiar name in Australia is a naming practice common to Korean culture. I believe my decision to keep my Korean name demonstrates my embrace of Australian culture and represents my new “learned” Australian iden­ tity. My given first name has become an important part of that identity.

“Where are you really from?” I have more than one home country. I currently reside in Singapore, a highly transnational society with various ethnic groups and nationalities living together. Friendly taxi drivers in Singapore often greet me with the question, “Where are you from?” when they realise that I am not a local. If I answer that I am from Australia, they do not seem to be fully satisfied with my response, expecting additional explanation. However, if I say, “I am from South Korea,” their ques­ tion is answered, and they often move to talking about the South Koreans they have met or places that they visited in South Korea. Why do the people that I meet here think of Australia as a country of White people? Why does my answer about my country of origin raise questions for them? Is it because of people’s ingrained cultural or racial stereotypes that see Asians as only originating from Asian countries, or is it because Australia has the stereotype of being a country only inhabited by White people? Australia, indeed, had a White Aus­ tralia Policy which has indelibly marked the history of the country and created complicated realities about race relations. In my world history class at high school, all I remember about Australia was my teacher’s explanation of the White Australia Policy. I do not remember the details, but I do remember thinking of Australia as being full of White people and that I, as a Korean, would not be welcome there. The White Australia policy was officially dis­ carded in 1975. Australian society nowadays has a completely different landscape and almost 28% of the total population was born outside Australia (OECD, n.d.). Only Luxembourg and Switzerland, of all the OECD countries, have a higher propor­ tion of their population born elsewhere. As more than a quarter of Australians were born outside of Australia, it is commonplace to hear different languages

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spoken on the street and see “non-traditional” cultural and religious celebrations in the media. The festive season in Australia does not only mean the Christmas season anymore. Lunar New Year celebration posters abound in the CBDs of major cities in Australia, and discussions about non-traditional Australian celebra­ tions in the media are common. Australia has become racially and culturally diversified, affirming to the world that the White Australia Policy is done and dusted (Jupp, 1995). However, the people outside Australia, even the people that I meet in highly multiracial and multicultural Singapore, do not seem to have internalised the changes in Australian society. Regardless of how much the landscape of Australian society has changed, a strongly ingrained view in Singa­ pore exists that “an Asian girl must come from an Asian country”. This view is held even by people who live in Singapore, a country which promotes its own cultural and racial diversity as a meaningful asset. Australia has been my home country for the past 20 years, and I call Australia my home. The country where I was born is not the place where I have lived for the best part of my life and the language I use in my private and public life is not the language that I acquired at birth. With the continuing upsurge in international mobility, the number of people with multiple “home” countries is dramatically increasing. The section above illustrates how having multiple transnational identities is per­ ceived by laypeople and offers us an opportunity for considering the social meaning of any transnational identities an individual would develop as a result of living in several countries.

Concluding comment In preparing this manuscript, I have reflected extensively on my own experiences with “taken for granted assumptions” and how those assumptions may have guided me in understanding the issues investigated in this manuscript. These included my annoyance at receiving “empty” compliments in early greeting exchanges, my jour­ ney with my anglicised names and the question of my country of origin. The obser­ vations that I present in this manuscript not only reflect my interest in critical issues arising from transnational identities and intercultural living experiences, but also project who I am as a bilingual-Korean-Australian-English-language learner who teaches the English language and lives in Singapore. Transnational identities are held by many people around the globe and intercul­ tural communication is now the default context of communication in everyday life. The new era of intercultural communities has witnessed an unprecedented increase in the complexity of communication. Although the instances that I discussed in this chapter are mainly taken from my interactions with “Australians” and “Singa­ poreans”, the scale of intercultural communication that is now taking place is much more dynamic and complicated than that and expectations of the parties in intercul­ tural communication events, especially in the early stages, can differ drastically. However, I hope what I have discussed here provides a discursive context largely overlooked by previous intercultural studies.

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References Ahn, H. (2017). Seoul Uncle: Cultural conceptualisations behind the use of address terms in Korean. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), Advances in cultural linguistics (pp. 411–432). Singapore: Springer. Barraja-Rohan, A.-M. (2003). How can we can make it meaningful to ESL learners? In J. Lo Bianco & C. Corzet (Eds.), Teaching invisible culture: Classroom practice and theory (pp. 101–118). Melbourne: Language Australia. Brick, J. (2004). China: A handbook in intercultural communication. Sydney: Macquarie University. Clyne, M. (1994). Intercultural communication at work: Culural values in discourse. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Coupland, J. (Ed.). (2000). Small talk. London: Longman. Coupland, J., & Robinson, J. (1992). How are you?: Negotating phtic communion. Language and Society, 21, 207–230. Edwards, R. (2008). What’s in a name? Chinese learners and the practice of adopting ‘English’ names. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 19(1), 90–103. Jeong, Y. (2018, August 06). Kay-myeng-u-lo wun-ul kay-sen-ha-ko te na-un in-sayng-ul chang-co-han-ta (Renewing your name creates luck and a better life). Korean Spirit. Retrieved from www.ikoreanspirit.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=52164 Jupp, J. (1995). From ‘White Australia’ to ‘part of Asia’: Recent shifts in Australian immi­ gration policy towards the region. International Migration Review, 29(1), 207–228. Kim, M. (2009, March). I-lum-ul pa-kkwu-myen wun-myeng-to pa-kkwin-ta?ss-kay­ myeng-ey tay-han kwung-kum-cung (Chaning your name changes your fate?…Curios­ ity about renamining). Lady Kyeng-Hyang. Retrieved from http://lady.khan.co.kr/ khlady.html?mode=view&code=10&artid=12281 OECD. (n.d.). International student mobility. Retrieved March 18, 2019, from https://stats. oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EAG_ENRL_MOBILES_ORIGIN# Work and Holiday visa. (n.d.). Retrieved February 28, 2019, from https://immi.homeaf fairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-listing/work-holiday-462/first-work-holiday-462 Yeo, J. (2018, December 26). NK may no longer be described as ‘enemy’ in S. Korea’s defense white paper. The Korea Herald. Retrieved from www.koreaherald.com/view. php?ud=20181226000579 Yoo, K. (2019, January 16). Defense Ministry’s latest white paper omits language describing N. Korea as “the enemy”. Hankyoreh. Retreived from http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/eng lish_edition/e_national/878629.html

9 AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FIRST LANGUAGE USE IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING Davina Delesclefs

I am sitting in a TESOL1 classroom full of French businessmen in Geneva, Switz­ erland, ploughing my way through worksheets while the teacher, my mother, tries to explain a grammar point. Her talking is white noise to me until I hear her start to speak in French. I look up startled. As usual I am embarrassed by her ter­ rible English accent when speaking French and begin to shrink in my chair, wish­ ing she would stop. There is a chorus of “Ahhhhh!” accompanied by smiles and nodding as the grammar point is finally understood. To my amazement, my mother speaking French in a TESOL classroom has not only enabled better understanding of the English language but also endeared her to her students. It is 1986. I am six years old. Fast-forward twenty years and I am standing at the front of a classroom in Sydney, Australia giving my third observed lesson as part of the CELTA2 course. I am teaching General English to a class of mainly Asian students with a handful of Europeans. The topic is current health issues and childhood obesity. As I am monitoring the students discussing in groups, I overhear the only French student asking for clarification about why preservatives are a health issue. Immediately I am aware of the cause of his confusion. In French, “préservatif” means “condom” and is a classic example of a “false-friend” (or false cognate) in language learning. Despite the best efforts of other group members, the French student is still confused and turns to me for clarification. My instinct is to quickly offer a translation in French and draw his attention to the “false-friend”. However, I look up at my six classmates and tutor watching me and I know this would go entirely against CELTA’s Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach in which all communication and teaching should take place in English. As a result, I embark on a long-winded definition and explanation of what preservatives are, making no reference to French or the understandable cause of his confusion. I am left wondering whether or not the student has

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really understood the meaning and question the CLT method. During feedback with my tutor I raise my concern with him. I ask him: As I speak the student’s language and understand the reason for his confu­ sion, would it not be more effective to quickly give him the translation of “preservatives”? Surely it would save time and clarify the language issue, which results in better language learning. TUTOR:

What about the rest of the class who don’t speak French? Wouldn’t that put them at a disadvantage? ME: But the rest of the class didn’t have an issue. The French student was confused because the word “preservative” has an entirely different meaning in French. TUTOR: Well the best way for him to learn is to think in English and not rely on French to make meaning of English words. This will only increase his confu­ sion. Studies have shown that second language learning is most effective when the first language is kept well separated. I do not question my tutor or the CLT method further. I feel that experts in language learning practice must know best and who am I to question proven linguistic studies? However, I am left unconvinced and curious. Brought up bilingual in French and English and later learning German and Italian, I find that I cannot “switch off” one of my languages. One may be more active than the other, depending on the situation but it is active nonetheless and has a relationship with the others, often solidifying linguistic concepts. For example, from a young child until today, I still hesitate on the spelling of words that differ slightly in French and English. I can still hear my mother telling me, “Carrot has two ‘r’s and one ‘t’ in English but two ‘t’s and one ‘r’ in French.” (Other fastidious words are apartment and address.) It is only by contrasting the spelling of the words that I accurately spell them. Similarly, my mother ensured that my brothers and I kept up our French vocabulary when we relocated to the UK by asking us the meaning of words in French on a daily basis. If ever we were driving during sunset she would ask us, “How do we say twilight in French?” and we would all call out in (increasingly unenthusiastic) unison “Cré­ puscule!” much to her delight. As I sit listening to my tutor give feedback to my classmates, I think that per­ haps being brought up bilingual means that I have a different experience in lan­ guage learning. After class I start chatting to one of my classmates, Maria, and ask her about her language learning experience. Maria is Filipina, has a Spanish name and is of European appearance. English is her first language and she can speak some Spanish and Tagalog. I find this interesting. Why was English her first language when it is not part of her culture or heritage? She told me she went to an all-girls Catholic school run by nuns who would punish them if they spoke a language other than English. Her family are highly educated and from what I gather, of a high social status. They speak English at home. I begin

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thinking about my husband’s family who, despite being Lebanese-Maltese, all speak French amongst each other, attended French schools and universities in Egypt, have French names and chose to pass on French and not Arabic to their son, my husband. Arabic is not valued but French is. For Maria, English is the language of value, status and power. Why was my language learning experience so different to Maria’s? Why was I never punished for using English when learn­ ing Italian or German? Perhaps it is more about power than linguistic profi­ ciency? In this chapter I explore the complexity of these questions through my bilingual and bicultural upbringing; from being a native English speaker,3 a language learner, a TESOL teacher and finally, as an educator, currently responsible for the development and delivery of English language support at a leading Australian university.

English only policy or monolingual fallacy? Since the late nineteenth century, the teaching and learning of a second language4 has been considered most successful when done exclusively in the second language itself, with no use of the learner’s first language. It was assumed that the use of the first language would interfere with the acquisition of the second and not only decrease the rate of acquisition but also learner motiv­ ation (Hall & Cook, 2012). This monolingual instructional method was not based on research but on the assumption that a second language is best learnt by emulating first language acquisition (Cummins, 2005) and to avoid confusion or linguistic interference, languages should strictly be kept apart. However, studies show that in the minds of multilinguals, all acquired languages are continuously activated to a certain extent and cannot be made dormant or separated (Cum­ mins, 1984). In fact, research has suggested that the first language can be a cognitive tool which enhances and does not impede second language acquisi­ tion. Central to effective learning is engagement of prior learning and as all prior knowledge is encoded in a learner’s first language, it is the most valuable cognitive resource in learning a second language (Cummins, 2008). Despite these findings, for almost half a century, the only language permitted in the TESOL classroom has been English and the use of any other language either strongly discouraged or forbidden. This “English Only” approach resulted from the advent of Communicative Language Teaching in the 1970s in con­ junction with logistical reasoning that English is the only common shared lan­ guage in a multilingual classroom. The premise for an English Only approach is therefore logical and teachers accept it unquestionably. However, it is also prob­ lematic and controversial. Firstly, an English Only approach allows monolingual native English speaker teachers to teach students how to learn a second language when the teachers themselves have no (successful) experience in second language acquisition. In Australia there is no requirement for second language knowledge or experience in TESOL teaching courses (Ellis, 2016) and yet this is akin to

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asking a failed maths student to teach maths; an absurd situation that would be normally incomprehensible and yet is accepted in TESOL (Stanley, 2018). This special treatment of TESOL highlights a fundamental basis of English Only policy which is related to linguistic imperialism and the effort to maintain English as the language of power. An English Only policy ensures linguistic and cultural domination of English speaking countries such as Britain, Canada, Aus­ tralia and the USA (Cummins, 2005; Hall & Cook, 2012; Lucas & Katz, 1994) as well as providing substantial economic turnover through language assessments such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and Testing Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) (McNamara, 2011) and publishing material (Sampson, 2011). It is important to note that English varieties from “Centre” nations (Canagarajah, 1999) are much more highly valued in this para­ digm than English varieties from the “centre-periphery” (Canagarajah, 1999), such as Indian Englishes, Singaporean English or the Englishes of African coun­ tries. This further enforces the political ideology of English Only policy in TESOL and has repercussions on TESOL teachers in the way native English speakers are favoured and seen as superior to non-native English speakers (Cana­ garajah, 1999; Ellis, 2016). This preference in teacher is particularly evident in periphery countries in Asia where English language centres advertise the stereo­ typical blonde-haired, blue-eyed Western teacher as part of their marketing (Stanley, 2016). As a result, many students expect their TESOL teachers to match the advertised images of “the Western teacher” and thus, the imperialistic view is constructed by the periphery nations themselves. This “native-speaker fallacy” (Phillipson, 1992) whereby a native English teacher is considered the “best” teacher allows native English speakers, some of whom have no teaching qualifications, to be employed in periphery countries based solely on their coun­ try of origin and Western appearance, not on their linguistic knowledge or teaching experience. In fact, many native English teachers have very little gram­ mar knowledge, are often unable to explain grammar points to students (Ellis, 2016) and make more grammar errors than non-native English speakers (Penny­ cook, 2012).

Geneva, 1998 I look at my watch. It’s ten to four in the afternoon. Only ten more minutes to go and I can meet my friends for drinks. “OK!” I tell my class. “Let’s go through the answers. How would you begin a letter of correspondence to follow up on an initial meeting? Hands up if you chose A.” The class is made up of Saudi men doing an intensive Business English course, paid for by the Saudi King. The institute running the course is a well-known American lan­ guage school. I’m teaching during my summer holidays to make extra money and got the job through my mother’s contacts. I turn up, go through the text­ book, drill some words and go out to party. I make good money; almost twice as much as my Swiss friends who work at the local supermarket. I feel incredibly

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lucky to be a native English speaker as I will always have an inherent value. Every time I make new friends during my holidays in Switzerland, I see their interest on learning that I spend most of the year in the UK and they are always keen to practise their English or hear me speak. English is the language of the world and that opens doors for my brothers and me. One of my brothers is cur­ rently backpacking across the world and teaching English to fund his travels. This is what English language teaching is for us; a good way to make pocket money. We have been dealt a lucky card and we are reaping its rewards. I get through the exercises in time, and by half past four I’m sipping a vodka cruiser in the sun by the lake.

Naples, 2000 I’m one month into my teaching assistant job at a run-down high school in the bustling heart of Naples, in the south of Italy. I’m standing in the corridor sip­ ping my second espresso when my French counterpart walks past me with an armful of papers. I have barely spoken to her as she always looks busy and full of purpose. I smile at her and ask her (in French) how she is finding the job. She smiles at me sweetly and tells me her classes are lovely and hardworking. I find this unsettling as we share the same classes and I find them far from hard­ working. My experience is that we barely get through any of the textbook and the classes are long and tedious with the bulk of the class time taken up with trying to control the students and their rowdy behaviour. I ask her what the papers are that she is holding. “Oh, we’ve been working on past tenses and I got them to write a one-page story to practise using the grammar we’re learn­ ing.” I glance at the papers and see she has attentively gone through them all with a red pen. My unsettling feeling increases. It dawns on me that I would not know how to teach past tenses in English. My Italian, French and German grammar is sound, but I have never been formally taught English grammar. I suddenly feel inadequate. I do not spend any time preparing my lessons; I just turn up, go through the pages in the textbook that the main class teacher wishes to cover, pronounce words on demand and time permitting, play a cassette tape of the latest number one hit and teach the class the lyrics. They seem happy enough and the class teacher has often mentioned how lucky they are to have a native speaker there to model correct pronunciation. I thought that was enough but after my interaction with the French teaching assistant, I’m left wondering; what use am I really? Are the students learning anything from me at all? What can I offer that their main teacher cannot? I spend the rest of my time as teaching assistant trying to stay under the radar with no idea how I can match my French colleague. I tell myself that being a native English speaker is enough. I am more important than my French col­ league; after all, English is the language of power, not French. I don’t need to know grammar. Everyone I encounter is keen to practise English and I have almost superstar status amongst my growing group of local friends. This is what

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I tell myself and to the outside world, I ooze confidence. However, every morning I wake up feeling a sense of shame and embarrassment. The only person I dare confide in is my mother, who has almost thirty years’ TESOL experience. She’s currently running an English language school in Budapest. I give her a call. “Darling,” she replies, You are doing a wonderful job. They are lucky to have a native speaker. Your role is not to teach them grammar, their teacher can do that. That’s not why you were hired. Why don’t you show them an episode of Ab Fab?5 My fears subside slightly but I still wonder whether other English language teachers feel inadequate? I know I can’t be the only one who lacks confidence in teaching English grammar as my grammar is better than most native English speakers. Why, then, do I feel uncomfortable teaching English as a second lan­ guage? Would it be acceptable if a teacher of French or Italian could not teach grammar? Perhaps I am more questioning because I have been raised bilingual and bicultural? Does this give me greater insight and a broader perspective on the issue? These questions cross my mind fleetingly, but I am too insecure to explore the issue. It’s easier to keep up the front of the confident native English speaker.

Sydney, 2015 Australia should significantly increase its population. Do you agree? This is the title of the weekly essay my students have to write as part of their ten-week intensive pathway course into a leading Australian university. I have been teaching Aca­ demic English for over six years and love it. I glance up at the large envelope pinned to the notice board. Written on it in red capital letters is, “$1 fine for speaking a language other than English”. I look back at my class and tell them, “Brainstorm ideas in groups for and against this statement. If you find it easier to brainstorm in Chinese, then that’s fine. Whatever helps you generate more ideas.” Immediately there is a hum of Mandarin in the classroom as the students get to work. Based on my own experience as a language learner along with the low standard of essays I’ve encountered in the past, I have been encouraging my students to reflect on their language use; when it is important to only use Eng­ lish and when their first language can be an aid. I am also doing a Master’s of Education and my current subjects are two electives in Applied Linguistics: Bilingualism and Issues in Second Language Acquisition. I have been reading research that shows that if students brainstorm in their first language, they generate ideas and plan faster, which allows them to spend more time on the linguistic aspect of assessment. As a result, although I am going against the language institute’s English Only policy, I am confident in my approach. My students’ essays are of a much higher quality; the ideas are more developed with evidence of critical thinking and for the first time, not only do they finish within the allocated time, but they have time to proofread their work.

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After lunch I hand over the class file to my co-teacher, Jan, with whom I share the class. He is German and learnt English as a second language. He pinned the envelope of monetary fines on the classroom wall and enforces an English Only approach in his teaching. I like Jan. He is witty, caring and fun. I consider him a friend as well as a colleague and for this reason, I do not wish to come across as confrontational or questioning his teaching approach. How­ ever, I am becoming increasingly interested (and uncomfortable) with an English Only policy and am curious about his language learning experience. I ask him (already confident in his answer), “Jan, when you learnt English in Germany, what language was spoken in the classroom?” JAN:

German, of course. Hmmmm, I find that interesting because here students are discouraged from speaking their first language. JAN: That’s different. If students speak their first language together, they exclude other students who don’t share the same language. ME: But 97% of the students here are Chinese and most classes are made up entirely of Chinese speakers, including ours. JAN: Yeah, I guess so. ME:

And he turns to get himself a cup of coffee. I do not wish to press the matter further, but my interest only grows.

Sydney, 2017 I’m sitting outside in the courtyard, basking in the autumn Sydney sun and having lunch with colleagues. I have been teaching at this university language institute for over two years and it’s my final year of my Master’s degree. My final research project is on teachers’ perceptions of first language use in the TESOL classroom and the topic is being discussed around the table as we all have our lunch. Rhonda, a monolingual native English speaker in her mid-50s, appears quite rattled by the topic, I don’t get it. Isn’t our job to prepare the students for study at an Austra­ lian university? They need to speak English as much as possible or how will they survive? Unless they are forced to speak English, they’ll just speak Chinese all the time. They all live together, they shop in Chinese shops, eat in Chinese restaurants. They have no need to speak English while living in Sydney. Just the other day, I was on the bus with my grandson who had fallen asleep on my shoulder. Across from me was a Chinese grandmother with her grandson. She smiled at me and began speaking to me in Chinese! Can you believe it? They already expect us to all speak Chinese! In Australia!

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I know my topic is a sensitive one and I remain quiet to see what the other teachers say. However, I am bothered by her story about the Chinese grand­ mother. I have no doubt that if roles were reversed and Rhonda were travelling in China, she would speak in English to the locals and expect them to respond in English. Another monolingual native English teacher, Mark, pipes up, Look, the way I see it, when I go to the beach, I want there to be a lifesaver with experience and practice. The same goes for our students. They need to get as much practice and experience as possible. The only way is to take a hard approach with them. I tell my students that the 5% participation mark is assessed on the amount of English they speak in class. I find Rhonda and Mark’s approach concerning. There is a sense of power, authority and double standards. Although Mark’s analogy is logical, it is also contradictory. There is no doubt that despite all my classroom learning of Ital­ ian, it was not until I lived in Italy and used the language daily that I became truly fluent. However, as a monolingual with no second language learning experience, Mark’s role as a second language teacher could be similar to a lifeguard with no training or experience. Despite my best efforts to explain the positive role a learner’s first language can play in second language acquisition, my words fall on deaf ears. Later, as I walk back to the staffroom, the director of the language institute thanks me for raising the issue of language policy in the classroom. “Many teachers need a paradigm shift. They are simply unable to see a learner’s first language as a learning tool.” This notion of paradigm resonates with me. We can only understand what we have experienced. My language learning experience enables me to comprehend the positive role a first language plays in learning an add­ itional language but how can I expect others to understand if they have never learnt another language?

Sydney, 2018 It’s my last day at the language institute. I have been offered a position as Aca­ demic Skills Advisor at a leading Australian university. I’m saying goodbye to a dear friend and colleague. Her name is Vaishali, she’s in her fifties and is of Indian origin. She tells me she is thankful to have met me, that we’ll keep in touch and talk more about linguistic imperialism. You know Davina, the relationship between language and power is very subtle. For example, whenever I speak Bengali or Hindi in the staffroom, there is always silence or staring, whereas when a European language is spoken, there is a positive response. Teachers express awe or a desire to learn a few words in, say, French or Spanish.

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This has a profound effect on me. Throughout my career as a teacher, I have received admiration and positive responses for my linguistic abilities. If col­ leagues overhear me speaking French to my children, they comment on how impressive and beautiful it sounds. I think back to all the times I’ve heard Italian or German in the staffroom and my ears have pricked and I have joined in with other teachers in conversing a little. I think back to the times I’ve heard Vaishali speak in Hindi or Bengali and, as she said, there is no reaction. We all just carry on with our duties. I am left acutely aware that despite my belief that I held insights into the complexities of language and power, I am, nonetheless, restricted within my own paradigm.

Sydney, 2019 I have been in my new role as Academic Skills Advisor for six months now. I am part of an English language support project aimed at enhancing English communication skills amongst students. My colleagues and I have set up a student representative group so that we can gain insight into their needs. We are holding a focus group and currently discussing the issue of confidence. Many students of non-English speaking background, we are told, don’t engage in tutorial discussions and don’t go to support workshops or consultations because they are ashamed of their level of English. A Chinese student, Rick, tells us, “We are worried that the native speakers will not understand us, or they will get tired of listening to us speak so slowly and making so many mistakes.” I can relate to this embarrassment from my experience living in Italy. However, I kept telling myself that I was learning an additional language and if I really wanted to be fluent, I had to take risks. I tell Rick, “You know, coming to Australia to study in a foreign language is very brave. You should be proud of your achievements. Don’t forget that most of the local students here don’t speak a language other than English.” RICK:

Yes but English is a more important language. If we can’t communicate in English, we cannot succeed in our academic careers.

He is right, of course. English has a unique global status. I cannot compare my experience to his. I ask him about his view on language policy RICK:

The only way to encourage Chinese students to speak English together in class is to grade them on it. If there is no grade or incentive, they won’t do it. We don’t like speaking English amongst each other because if we speak better than our friends, they will lose face and that is very bad in our culture.

Once again, I am made aware of another complex dimension that affects lan­ guage policy.

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Later that week I am giving a workshop on pronunciation and begin, as I always do, by asking each student why they are here and what they wish to gain from the workshop. They all have the same two answers: “I want to sound like a native English speaker” or “Sometimes native speakers can’t understand me. I want to be able to communicate with them.” I think about what “native English speaker” means to these students. I think about my Singaporean friends, my Indian friends, my Nigerian friends, my Glas­ wegian friends, my Cockney friends. They are all “native English speakers” but is this what these students want to sound like? Or do they want to sound like the people in the CDs that come with the TESOL textbooks sold globally; the “clean”, “standard English”? Is it about intelligibility? Or is it really about power?

Notes 1 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

2 Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults.

3 While acknowledging its contested and situated nature, I use the term “native English

speaker” to refer to individuals from economically developed Western nations, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for whom English is a first language. 4 I use the term “second language” to refer to any non-native language acquisition. I acknowledge the term is restrictive and misleading but have chosen to use it as it continues to be commonly used. 5 Absolutely Fabulous is a British comedy series.

References Canagarajah, S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cummins, J. (1984). Bilingual education and special education: Issues in assessment and pedagogy. San Diego: College Hill. Cummins, J. (2005). A proposal for action: Strategies for recognizing heritage language competence as a learning resource within the mainstream classroom. Modern Language Journal, 89(4), 585–592. Cummins, J. (2008). Teaching for transfer: Challenging the two solitudes assumption in bilingual education. In N. H. Hornberger (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and education (pp. 1528–1538). Springer US. Ellis, E. (2016). The plurilingual TESOL teacher: The hidden languaged lives of TESOL teachers

and why they matter (Vol. 25). Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

Hall, G., & Cook, G. (2012). Own-language use in language teaching and learning.

Language Teaching, 45(3), 271–308. Lucas, T., & Katz, A. (1994). Reframing the debate: The roles of native languages in Englishonly programs for language minority students. Tesol Quarterly, 28(3), 537–561. McNamara, T. (2011). Managing learning: Authority and language assessment. Language Teaching, 44(4), 500–515. Pennycook, A. (2012). Language and mobility: Unexpected places (Vol. 15). Bristol, UK: Multi­ lingual Matters.

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Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sampson, A. (2011). Learner code-switching versus English only. ELT Journal, 66(3), 293–303. Stanley, P. (2016). Must the (western) Hydra be blond(e)? Performing cultural ‘authenti­ city’ in intercultural education. In P. Bunce, R. Phillipson, V. Rapatahana, & R. Tupas (Eds.), Why English? Confronting the Hydra (pp. 93–105). Multilingual Matters. Stanley, P. (2018). Review of Ellis, E. (2016). The plurilingual TESOL teacher: The hidden languaged lives of TESOL teachers and why they matter. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 40(3), 339–342.

10

INSECURITIES, IMPOSTER SYNDROME, AND NATIVE-SPEAKERITIS Hyejeong Ahn and Davina Delesclefs

DAVINA:

So, do you think you suffer from imposter syndrome? You know, I only came across this term not long ago. For me, I always think, ‘If I can do it, anybody can do it.’ You see for me, I always feel I don’t deserve what I achieve. Even in my cur­ rent job, I think that somebody else should have got the job, that I’m not good enough, that a mistake must have been made or standards have dropped. I never think I’m quite good enough. Hmmmm. I did my Master’s out of insecurities, really. Then I learnt to love my topic in the field of ESL and TESOL and that’s how I ended up doing a PhD. But you had a real interest and passion in doing your research and PhD? Yes and no. Really. I did have passion but I do suffer from imposter syndrome because I’m a non-native speaker of English and also I’m a teacher of English language. I’m always going to be deficient in one way or another. I was a terrible language learner at school; in English, French even Korean! I was much better in maths and science. And yet I’ve ended up being a so called ‘expert’ in the language I hated to learn and I was terrible at. That’s why I always think, ‘If I can do it, anyone can do it!’ When I finished my degree in primary school teaching I thought that because I’m a foreigner and I don’t know Australian culture that well, par­ ents might not like me teaching their children because I’m a foreign teacher who doesn’t speak English properly. So I felt I needed some kind of a back­ up so I did my Master’s in TESOL but that really didn’t help in terms of overcoming my own insecurity and people’s prejudice. I still felt that parents or my colleagues thought that I wouldn’t be a great primary school teacher. There must have been a lot of prejudice against foreign teachers. At least

HYEJEONG: D:

H:

D: H:

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that’s how I felt or how I projected the situation. But when I was doing my Master’s I realised I was good at thinking, reading academic articles … I was doing well, getting good grades and I realised for the first time that I could write an academic essay. I felt maybe I’d finally found my talent in writing so thought I’d do my PhD in writing skills so I could gain insight, through research, into how I improved my own writing. However, in the end I completely changed my PhD topic from focusing on writing skills to Eng­ lish as an international language with a more sociolinguistic perspective. Studying the area of English as an international language in fact gave me real confidence in being an English language teacher even though I am not a native speaker. D: That’s really interesting because everything you describe, I can relate to, but from a native English speaker perspective. We’re kind of opposites! I was always good at languages and my mum was an ESL teacher. I was brought up being bilingual in French and English so learning European languages was easy for me. What I love about you is you went after the things you weren’t good at to try and improve whereas I always stuck to what I was good at. You becoming an expert in English language is like me becoming an expert in maths, which I was terrible at! You being an English language teacher is a massive achievement whereas being an English language teacher for me isn’t. I’ve just taken advantage of, and benefited from the gifts I’ve been given. And I guess what interests me and the reason I did my research on native-speakerism is the capital you gain from being a native English speaker. I have friends from Singapore, India, Korea, etc. who are English language teachers and they tell me they always experience prejudice from their students. They walk into a classroom and the students question their grammar, their credentials and don’t seem satisfied that their teacher is not a native English teacher. And that never happens to me. When I walk into a classroom and say I’m from the UK, I can see the students are so happy, beaming and feeling that they are getting the product they had paid for. But speaking with my colleagues who are not native English speakers, I realised they were far better qualified to teach English as a second language because I didn’t know how to teach grammar, I didn’t know the areas that were difficult for students. As my teaching journey went on, I began questioning my situation more and more. I could make such quick money simply from being a native English speaker. I was offered a job teaching in Dubai and was told that if I applied with my British passport I’d get more pay than if I did so with my Australian pass­ port. If I had a US passport I’d be paid even more and I thought, ‘This is really problematic.’ In the end my research was on teacher perspectives of using a first language in the second language classroom because as a native English speaker learning a second language, we were always encouraged to use English but in TESOL,

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even when the entire class is from the same language background, students are not allowed to use their first language. And I began to realise that it’s more about power than it is about language and learning. So in terms of my research into teacher perspectives, it was very useful being of mixed background because I was accepted by both groups of teachers; the native and the non-native English speakers. But when writing up my research and also this chapter, it was very problematic because a lot of the teachers are also my friends and when they read this chapter, some of them will recognise themselves and could be offended. Probably not though, because a lot of them are not even aware of what they are doing. Perhaps, but I can relate to these teachers. Exposing the capitalisation of ‘White nativeness’ and the incompetence that lies behind that status was very hard for me. It’s hard to admit that you’re a crap teacher, that you’re not qualified and that you are insecure. Writing this chapter and reflecting on the process of autoethnography was confronting. I have had the insecurity of being a non-native speaker of English for my entire career and my entire life since I have learnt the language. I’m always defined as a non-native speaker and I never have the status that native speakers have. Even in Singapore I feel insecure about this issue. Singapore has a ‘Speak Good English’ movement, which says that students should speak ‘good’ standard English and not Singaporean English. Even Australian English is seen as a dialect, implying it is ‘not good’. They seem to have a very clear idea of what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ English is. Singaporean students consider them­ selves as native English speakers and I’m not, yet here I am teaching them English. I simply don’t fit into their expectations of whom they should be taught by. I had all these insecurities and then in the classroom in Singapore I often couldn’t understand what the students were saying. I consulted with one of my colleagues about this who told me I should pretend I understood what they said and not let the students know I didn’t understand because, he said, ‘They think your English is not good and that is why you don’t understand.’ I have an embedded, deeply rooted insecurity and this comment from my colleague completely threw me off. I was thinking, ‘Maybe I’m not good enough.’ From that moment I always stressed that I did my studies in Australia so that my students could, I was hoping at least, see me as a proficient English speaker. I had to put so much effort in the beginning to gain respect from my students. Now it’s been four years and I’m more comfortable. I’ve been receiv­ ing good feedback and I don’t emphasise my Australian studies as much. Even though I’ve been an English educator for so long, I don’t think I can ever overcome the insecurity of being a non-native English speaker. My Eng­ lish is much better than my Korean and yet my insecurity continues. We have flipped imposter syndrome! You struggle with your non-nativeness whereas I feel like a fraud because I feel I’m only valuable because by chance

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I was born in the UK to a British mother. I don’t actually have the skills. At the beginning of our teaching careers, you had something to base your teach­ ing on. I had nothing! I had no teacher training. I landed a job because I was a White native English speaker, which meant I could more or less land a job anywhere. But surely now you no longer have imposter syndrome in your teaching. You have qualifications, experience … For teaching but not in terms of doing a PhD and even in applying for my current role, I still do. Same as me. When I got this job I thought ‘Wow, I’m so lucky to get this job.’ Yeah, we feel lucky but you know that you’ve worked hard to be where you are whereas I always think things have been handed to me undeservingly. And that’s not easy to admit. This was the first time I’ve written an autoethnography and it was really hard. My first draft was too academic and I was told to make it more personal. It was really challenging because I realised that academic writing is a really nice blanket to hide behind. You can present all your ideas and views and hide behind hedging and objectivity which makes it safe. So I rewrote the chapter and decided to start from scratch. It was really con­ fronting because there were points where I had to really admit my own inse­ curities; that I was a crap teacher. Absolutely! This is my second time writing an autoethnography. The first time I talked about my relationship with the English language where I mentioned my own insecurities and the way I viewed English as a powerful, prosperous language. The status of luxury and success that it has and yet it’s not. It’s a language of communication. The way I was educated in South Korea was that English was the language of success, the language of the rich, but then I came to Australia where beggars use English. It was a reality check. It is really a confronting and an intimidating experience writing an autoethnogra­ phy, but the second time it was much easier! Yes, but I wonder if your experience is different to mine? We always hear about the power of writing to help marginalised voices be heard. I wonder if the authors of the other chapters find it empowering. For example, you as a non-native speaker of English who teaches English as a second language; is it empowering to have your voice heard because you can change things? Absolutely! To be able to say these things publicly. To be able to voice my insecurities. That’s already a sign that I am starting to overcome these insecur­ ities. I know where these ideas and prejudices come from so I have gained a tool to interpret these issues. I’m much more comfortable with whom I am as an English teacher than ever before, and that’s why I was able to write this chapter. For me it was very different because writing this chapter was not empowering. It left me feeling very vulnerable because there aren’t any other native English

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teachers writing about what I talk about as far as I know. It’s not easy to admit your own insecurities and that you’ve capitalised on your White nativeness. Yeah, because you are revealing the vulnerabilities of other native speakers. Exactly. And writing the chapter, I do feel exposed and the only saving thing I have is that I’m half British. I still have my other non-British half. Other­ wise, I think if I was entirely British, it would leave me very vulnerable and feeling that I don’t belong anywhere. Reading the other chapters, I felt I was really in my own camp. I’m from the privileged side but I’m admitting that all this privilege is unwarranted and problematic. Admitting that there is no foundation to the status that you’ve acquired and that you are an imposter in a way. And it’s a very strange situation to be in. It’s really interesting to hear that as a native speaker, who is supposed to enjoy the privilege and status, you’re resisting and criticising the privilege that you have been granted. But people may not like you! Yes! I’m putting myself in front of the firing squad! In this book, Phiona is giving the marginalised a voice and now I’m the marginalised one because I’m the native English speaker exposing the vulnerabilities and the façade. Yes, but as a native speaker there is also the pressure and expectation of feeling that you have to act as a walking dictionary. Have you ever felt that? Yes, that’s true. You’re expected to know everything; all the grammar, all the words. And you can’t possibly know everything about the English language. That’s another flip side to being a native English speaker. We go well together, you and me! We’re looking at the same issue from a different perspective. Was it empowering and cathartic to write the chapter for you? I’m not sure. I was able to write about my vulnerability because I already felt empowered and had overcome some of my insecurities. If I hadn’t overcome them, I wouldn’t have been able to write them to be published. I was too busy hiding the fears that I had. When I was writing the chapter I was think­ ing that I wanted to empower those who are in the position I used to be in. So when you’re writing, you’re hoping you are reaching others and can make a difference? Yes. Yes. Whereas, when I was writing mine, I knew that I’ll just be pissing other people off and losing friends! That’s the problem.

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BEGINNING AND BECOMING Expectations of the teaching body in English language teaching Alana Bryant

Vignette 1: blank stares Barely 22 years old. Standing in front of a tiny 1x1m blackboard in a northern Cambodian tourist town. Clad in dusty flip-flops and a grey souvenir t-shirt that is sticking to my back. Sweat drips down the backs of my calves. I suppose I’m a teacher now. Six pairs of expectant dark eyes look up at me from cross-legged positions on the floor, quizzically alighting on my streaked-blonde hair, knotted into the beginnings of dreadlocks and wrapped in a bandanna, my sunburnt forearms adorned with brace­ lets and trinkets, and my blotchy red face staring back at them. In that moment, I think perhaps that I am more terrified of them than they are of me. I clear my throat and my hand raises as if independent of me, a stick of chalk clutched in my fingertips. ‘My name’s Alana,’ I say, haltingly, quietly, too quickly, too Australian-y. The kids return my introduction with blank stares. Being a teaching body is tricky business. What does it look like? How does it act? Did standing in front of a chalkboard in the tropical heat of South-East Asia with a B.A., an Australian accent, White skin, and a bundle of enthusiasm mean that my body was a teaching body, then? Or is it now, that I have four teaching qualifications, a raft of experience, and the understanding that raggedy fisher­ man’s pants do not constitute appropriate teaching attire that I inhabit a legitimate teaching body? And who says? While I surely felt them under my skin at the time, these were not questions that I ever found the words (let alone the answers) for during that first six months abroad on my ‘grand tour’ of exploration and saviourism. They certainly are now.

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Autoethnography may help me to answer these questions and unpack my rather problematic entry into a complex professional industry, not simply for myself, but for the verisimilitude that comes for others when reading a story that resonates with one’s own. Carolyn Ellis’s (Ellis & Bochner, 2006) conceptu­ alisation of herself as ‘only a head, cut off from my body and emotions’ (p. 431) suggests that I am not alone in imploring the physical body back into scholarly analysis, as oxymoronic as that may sound. In this chapter I seek to do away with the assumption that ‘teaching and learning take[s] place solely between minds’ (Zembylas, 2007, p. 20) by positioning the body—its physical actions and appearance—as a site of professional practice knowledge, after Reid and Mitchell (2015). Obviously, what we do as teachers matters in defining who we are as teachers. But coursing underneath, through and around this, is also who we are as people. In English Language Teaching (ELT), and more specifically as a White person abroad, this is even more complex. The vignette above, from early on in my first ELT experience abroad, illustrates much regarding local expectations of a youthful White Westerner in this particular international teaching context. Some of it pedagogical, but as much is social and even physical. As my teaching context has changed, so too have the expectations placed upon my ‘teaching body’, metamorphosing into a number of different shapes and silhouettes. The thing that has remained unchanged throughout these experiences, though, is that ‘teacher’ is embodied in my actions and physical features both chosen and unconscious.

Unravelling the oxymoron Now, as a language teacher, it is physical teaching bodies that interest me. For Judith Butler (1993) and other postmodern scholars after Foucault (1979), bodies become the surface upon which discourses are inscribed and enacted as texts. However, this problematically reduces the material body to the purely symbolic realm of linguistic utterance, potentially denying agentive ability (Burkitt, 1999) and the notion that while discourses may affect our experience of embodiment, they do not wholly produce this experience. Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) work in phenomenology goes further in accounting for the body as not only discursive but productive by positing the existence of an ‘I can’ as prelude to ‘I think’, although this still stops short of adequately addressing the impact of the symbolic and imaginative on the body and how this constitutes an ‘I am’. Iris Young’s statement that ‘no experience of reality is unmediated by language and symbols; nevertheless, there are aspects of perception, action and response that are not linguistically constituted’ (Young, 1990, p. 13) spurs my desire to express the physicality of what it is to teach. As the who in teach­ ing is just as important as the what and how (Parker, 1998), I contend that it is impossible to account for the who without this explicit reference to the body itself as a site of professional practice knowledge (Reid & Mitchell,

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2015). I therefore seek to account for the who in English language teacher identity through engaging critically with my own embodied experience of being socialised into the role of ‘teacher’ in an intercultural context: who that body is, what it is expected to do, and how this reflects and reproduces entrenched cultural scripts. I deliberately use ‘socialisation’ rather than ‘devel­ opment’, as I believe that the stories I present reflect the large role of uncon­ scious privilege in enabling progression and opportunities in my career trajectory. But, like all things in identity work, this privilege is not straight­ forward: it is situated and intersectional in ways in which I will attempt to unravel over the course of this chapter.

‘I’m an artist; this just pays the bills’ While it has been established that ELT is indeed a profession and its teachers may build careers, it is also transient, temporary and at times unbearably light (John­ ston, 1997; Thornbury, 2001). This is largely made possible through the postcolo­ nial legacy of English linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992), and Thornbury’s (2001) coining of the phrase ‘barefoot teacher’ highlights the permeability of the ELT industry in almost all of its guises (Maley, 1992). Depending on the hiring organisation, required qualifications for English language teachers range from Masters’ programmes to simply a seemingly appropriate passport. There exist numerous individuals whose stories are similar and yet different to mine: White, Western, ‘native’1 speakers residing in ‘native’ English-speaking countries who undertake a medium-to-lengthy sojourn or ‘gap year’ overseas to teach in what may be termed an ‘Outer Circle’ or ‘Periphery’ country2 (Kachru, 1986) with little more than an undergraduate degree and a vague desire to ‘help’, ‘develop’, ‘explore’ or ‘get out’ followed by (maybe) a return to the West and the pursuit of qualifications and a career, or (maybe) a job which ranks just slightly higher than waitressing in the social imaginary (and arguably lower in the economic pecking order; Stanley, 2016, p. 185). From ‘I did a year in Spain before I started teaching at a university,’ to the ‘restaurateur moonlighting as an English teacher,’ the ‘I’m an artist, this just pays the bills,’ to the aspiring Master’s candidate, each story is vastly different and maintains a variety of embodied expectations and ideas. Recent studies have begun to address elements of this ‘underbelly’ of the ELT profession (Appleby, 2016; Lan, 2011; Stanley, 2010, 2012) from various perspec­ tives, yet rarely do these take the form of a first person account. Perhaps it is a desire to distance ourselves from the uncomfortable issues of privilege surrounding such stories that has led to a gap in ELT literature regarding these origin stories, though it is covered quite comprehensively in the backpacker/volunteer tourism literature (Conran, 2011; Griffin, 2013; Guttentag, 2009; Krzeszewski, 2011; Simp­ son, 2004). It is important to note, however, that ‘the mechanisms that afford us privilege are very often invisible to us’ (Kimmel & Messner, 2004, p. x), and in these stories I aim to illuminate and, perhaps selfishly, unpack my own blindness to this privilege throughout my first teaching experience. My intention in critically

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examining my own story is not emancipation for myself, but instead to follow Appleby’s (2016) framework for researching privilege in studying the ‘fragmented, shifting, contradictory, and contextually contingent’ (p. 763) nature of identity, and especially as it pertains to the physical teaching body.

Vignette 2: the collective muddle Orientation, they call it, when in reality it is a muddle of young 20-somethings in dusty clothes sitting around a table, hungover from a successful first night together, flicking mindlessly through battered, ancient textbooks and children’s books. Our supervisor is a Dutch woman named Sara, who is about five years older than us and has lived and worked in the town for two years. Sara hands me a small exercise book in which previous teachers have written sparse, disconnected notes on lessons they have taught and advice to future volunteers. ‘OMG, the little kids are so cute!! We did FEELINGS today and they just loved colouring in the little hearts and rainbows.’ ‘Taught the morning class about SPORTS today—swimming, soccer, dancing, tennis, rugby—they really liked it, especially coz we spent half the class kicking the ball around outside!’ ‘The kids change timetables at government school every month, so some of the morning ones will swap to the afternoon and vice-versa. It just happens randomly, you’ll show up and there’ll be a bunch of kids you didn’t know were gonna be there.’ This is the entirety of my teacher training, the whole of the instruction and prepar­ ation I have before walking into a classroom as ‘teacher’ for the first time in my life: a small notebook filled with anecdotes and smiley faces, and a shelf of mismatched textbooks. I feel a shudder of apprehension, which is quickly forgotten as the 20­ something muddle collectively decides that it’s time to head back into town for a recovery beer. Sara grins and wishes us luck.

Teaching actions and entertainment It is clear that the expectations of my teaching body in this context are far removed from what may be expected in a professional setting. Pedagogically, the diary entries of the previous teachers privilege a ‘fun’ teaching experience consist­ ing of colouring and playing games over effective instruction. While teaching children undoubtedly necessitates a different approach to teaching adults, this was also the expectation of the teachers in Stanley’s (2010) study at a university in Shanghai and speaks to a risky equation of learning with fun that Okan (2003) labels ‘edutainment’. Indeed, my memory of this suggests some truth: the classes that lent me an embodied sense of ‘success’ were those in which we sang songs, played games, and crafted. This may suggest that my job, in fact, was not to teach but perhaps some blend of free babysitting and intercultural exchange.

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This emphasis is further indicated by the fact of students switching classes with­ out warning throughout the month, suggesting that little importance is attached to planning lessons for specific students. Minimal preparation and training pro­ vided by the hiring organisation supports this contention that there is no real expectation of needing any tangible skills beyond the simple fact of being a ‘native speaker’. Ruecker and Ives’ (2015) analysis of online teacher recruitment spaces supports this contention, finding that the majority of recruitment organisations visually and discursively emphasise the benefits for individuals that embody an idealised view of the ‘White native speaker’, while glossing over any concrete skills or qualifications needed, beyond a university degree (in any discipline at all).

Social actions, relational identities, coping mechanisms, and a lot of drinking But why all the beer drinking? Alcohol, and the action of drinking (and drink­ ing a lot), is a common theme in the experiences of teachers in similar roles abroad (Stanley, 2010), and may speak to the underlying discomfort of inexperi­ enced teachers’ inability to perform what they perceive as a ‘successful’ teaching role. My ‘20-something muddle’ in Cambodia collectively decided to go out drinking as an act of solidarity, a means by which to bond as a group who were unsure of (and nervous about?) the teaching that lay ahead of us. Or perhaps our drinking was relational and performative: performing ‘Wes­ ternness’ in the classroom may filter into social interactions more broadly, as the sense of ‘being foreign’ is heightened and can result in a ‘self-Othering’ in response. Might this help explain the excessive drinking and pack-like behaviour that plays into the trope of the ‘badly behaved Westerner’ abroad? And/or might alcohol function as a substitute for community and family in an unfamiliar environment? Whatever the underlying reasons, my willingness to be a regular drinker enabled my group membership to flourish and facilitated an overall positive experience for me in Cambodia. At the same time, I undoubtedly contributed to popularly-held stereotypes. Sara wishing us luck supports this reading: her tacit approval of our actions suggests this is expected and sanctioned behaviour for ‘for­ eigners’ in the setting. Performing the stereotypical role of ‘badly behaved West­ erner’ teacher may function as a coping mechanism, but it may also be part of our performance as non-locals: noticeably distinct and all the more legitimate as Eng­ lish teachers for it. Because while we weren’t tourists, we also weren’t locals, and we only had each other to help us make sense of our ‘in-betweenness’.

Physical appearance and being White My outward physical appearance is also important. As it is my contention that a large part of the teaching habitus is ‘lived in the body, felt in the bone and situated within the larger body politic’ (Pineau, 2002, p. 53), it is integral to

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examine not only the nature of my actions, but the physicality of my body itself as a site of embodied cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). I am a young, White, Western woman, and at the time I had no real teaching qualifications or prior experience, just the vague sense of enthusiasm and ‘saving the world’ (Stanley, 2010) that characterise many such sojourns that are problematic in their repro­ duction of systemic global inequities (Simpson, 2004). The physical description of a cheap t-shirt, bandanna-wrapped dreadlocks (yikes), and bracelet-adorned arms could have easily been pulled straight from the Lonely Planet archives, yet rather than embracing the ‘hedonistic backpacker’ image (O’Reilly, 2006), I was seeking to embody the persona of ‘honourable volunteer’ (Griffin, 2013). This distinction is clearly discursive, as my appearance simply signals a desire to more broadly display the ‘road status’ (Sørensen, 2003) of one labelling herself a ‘traveller’ but never a ‘tourist’. Corroborating entries from my journal support this ideal of the neo-colonial eagerness for ‘seeing/ saving the world’ over any real pedagogical impetus: Everyone seems to have all these travel plans for everywhere else after this program too, which has really inspired me to do the same thing. I’ll see how I go with the first few weeks of [teaching] and see if it’s something I want to pursue or whether I want to go in another direction. All in good time! (Alana, journal entry, 21/3/09) Though this does not suggest negative intentions, it does speak to the uncon­ scious mechanisms of privilege that enabled me and a multitude of others, with­ out questioning, to travel and teach without experience or qualifications but simply ‘Westernness’ as a form of legitimisation. When framed in this way, my outward appearance both matters and does not matter. However, in seeking to align myself with the backpacker/traveller subculture there is a subtle rejection of the professionalism of a teaching career that is assumedly characterised by a well-maintained appearance. As ‘bodies and affects inevitably produce pedagogy, just as they produce subjects’ (Zembylas, 2007, p. 28), my body in these examples inevitably reproduces a pedagogy which, although it may be something akin to ‘teacherly’ in that it is a body (marginally) in control of a classroom, is not professional in the way that is expected of ‘professionals’. And yet, in this context I am still (socially, contextually) ‘licensed’ to perform the job of a teacher, and this is because of my embodied cultural capital: as a Westerner and a native speaker, and in my White-skinned physical body. This may also support ideas explored in the previous section about the ‘foreign teacher-as-entertainer’, as there is a clear differentiation between my presentation and what might be expected of a local teacher in the same context.

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This may function as a self-producing symbolic and embodied discourse on ‘what a temporary foreign teacher looks like’ in Cambodia, while also serving to promote in-group belonging as did the social actions of excessive drinking and partying. Similarly, Stutelberg’s (2016) collective memory work of female Eng­ lish teachers explores the manner in which gender, race, and clothing confers capital and pre-determines interactions in professional practice. She theorises this as far from straightforward, but rather reflective of the reductive nature of taken-for-granted discursive social norms dictated by the need to belong. Indeed, all of the foreign teachers that I encountered looked and dressed almost exactly like me—slightly scruffy, a little bit hippie, and White. There are people from the Netherlands, England, Australia, Germany and I think Sweden—such a mixed crowd! (Alana, journal entry, 21/3/09) This journal entry, written three days after my arrival in Cambodia, unwittingly reveals the thorny relationship ELT has with race and racial stereotyping, and especially in Asia: a teaching programme populated with people who were visibly White mattered more than the consideration of who counted as a ‘native speaker’ of English. I remember not seeing any problems with this at the time, which again speaks volumes to the invisibility of mechanisms of privilege. Kubota and Lin’s (2006) deconstruction of the notion of ‘culture’ in ELT discourses shows that race is often implicitly (and yet silently) bound up in discussions on lin­ guistic, professional, and pedagogical practices. Holliday (2007) supports this, citing empirical studies in which ‘“non-native speaker” can be a label for the non-“White” Other’ (p. 122). Further, Lan’s (2011) study of Western migrants in Taiwan describes instances of ‘native speaker’ African Americans and teachers of Asian descent experiencing racial discrimination in ELT hiring. In some contexts, then, including the setting in which I worked in Cambodia, Whiteness trumps nativeness as a hiring criterion. While the literature seems hopeful that this may be changing, plenty teachers’ accounts of semi­ professional teaching experiences in East Asia—like mine—suggests otherwise.

Vignette 3: out of the ashes of failure ‘Can we come to visit your school tomorrow, Alana? Your kids sound adorable!’ I know she means well, but Evelyn’s words fill me with terror. Yes, the kids are adorable. But no, you can’t come to visit, because I’m not a teacher. Not a good one, anyway. The last thing I need is these friends I have tentatively made, these Very Cool People who have somehow accepted me as one of them, seeing that I am utterly abysmal at my job. What made me think I could do this, anyway? I take a deep breath, swallow, and laugh hesitantly. ‘Yeah, like, if you want, I guess. It’s going to be boring though, we’re doing grammar tomorrow, and it’s an 8km bike ride at 7am!’

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Evelyn grins and flaps her hands as if to say ‘Oh, that’s nothing’. ‘That’s fine! As long as we don’t go too hard at the pub tonight!’ My deeply-remembered feelings of failure throughout my time in Cambodia are etched under my skin—enfleshed knowledge (Spry, 2001)—that continues to both haunt and inform my current practice, as an English teacher, now, at a university in Sydney. But still I quake at the thought of peer observation, and I’m the last to volunteer for demonstration lessons. However, I doubt I was a poor teacher in terms of the role I was assigned and expected to play in Cam­ bodia. In this sense, perhaps what is expected of foreign ‘teachers’ in some set­ tings overseas is not teaching at all; Stanley’s (2010) title of ‘performing foreigner’ may be a more apt description in some contexts. Or, perhaps we need to pluralise the construct of ‘teacher’ to reflect these different expectations of what it means to be an English language teacher in different contexts. In analysing the embodied experiences of a volunteer English teaching pos­ ition in Cambodia against any other standards of ELT employment abroad, there is a risk in essentialising these experiences down to a stereotype of ‘this is what it is like to teach in (all countries, all cities, all circumstances)’. I recognise that my account is situated both geographically, temporally and economically, amidst myriad other differentiating factors, and it has not been my intention to say that such experiences are all the same, or that the discourses that prompt these are identical. My goal has been to show that my embodiment in professional prac­ tice—a teaching body—for English language teachers may be far from straight­ forward when one crosses geographical and ideological borders. It may be bound up in long-held ideologies that privilege an experience of being White and Western. This has resulted in culturally-produced local scripts about what our bodies can and should do, and, perhaps against our best intentions, these are enacted and reproduced over and over again. Reflexively examining these stories has been an embodied experience, too. Perhaps in shining a light on these stories and speaking to the community of prac­ tice that they represent this chapter may begin to unpick a murky legacy of past travel experience. Physically and discursively, we may also build new bodies and embodied practices—as teachers but also as travelling Westerners who are highly privileged, relationally legible against local scripts, and—perhaps—young, drunk, and clueless even as we are well intentioned and just starting to learn and reflect.

Notes 1 The binary notion of ‘native’ vs ‘non-native’ speaker has been problematised by many authors as being both linguistically unviable and perpetuating political (and often racial) inequalities within TESOL (Cook, 1999; Holliday, 2006; Kubota & Lin, 2006). These discussions often centre on the ‘othering’ of ‘non-native’ colleagues and stu­ dents, which serves to reinforce and reproduce cultural stereotypes in language class­ rooms. In this chapter, I enclose the terms in quotation marks to indicate their status as an ideology rather than matters of fact.

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2 Kachru (1986) outlines three circles of English-speaking and -using countries: the ‘Inner Circle’ or ‘Centre’ is countries where English is the native or mother tongue e.g. the UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. Kachru calls these countries ‘norm-providing’. The ‘Outer Circle’ constitutes countries in which English is commonly used as ‘lingua franca’ amongst its residents e.g. India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Kenya. These are termed ‘norm-developing’. The ‘Expanding Circle’ or ‘Periphery’ countries are those in which English is not commonly used outside international communication and are ‘norm-dependent’ in that they depend on native speaker standards. These labels are both linguistic and pol­ itical and are heavily entwined with notions of the ownership of English.

References Appleby, R. (2016). Researching privilege in language teacher identity. TESOL Quarterly, 50(3), 755–768. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook for theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press. Burkitt, I. (1999). Bodies of thought: embodiment, identity and modernity. London: SAGE Publications. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. New York: Routledge. Conran, M. (2011). They really love me! intimacy in volunteer tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 38(4), 1454–1473. Cook, V. (1999). Going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 33(2), 185–209. doi:10.2307/3587717 Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2006). Analysing analytic autoethnography: an autopsy. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 429–449. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage. Griffin, T. (2013). Gap year volunteer tourism stories: sharing more than memories. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 22(8), 851–874. Guttentag, D. A. (2009). The possible negative impacts of volunteer tourism. International Journal of Tourism Research, 11(6), 537–551. Holliday, A. (2006). Native-speakerism. ELT Journal, 60(4), 385–387. Holliday, A. (2007). Standards of English and politics of inclusion. Language Teaching, 41(1), 119–130. Johnston, B. (1997). Do EFL teachers have careers? TESOL Quarterly, 31(4), 681–712. Kachru, B. B. (1986). The power and politics of English. World Englishes, 5(2–3), 121–140. Kimmel, M. S., & Messner, M. A. (2004). Men’s lives (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Allyn & Bacon. Krzeszewski, L. B. (2011). Poverty, English and evangelism: a qualitative study of young adults in a church-based English language program in Cambodia. Charlotte, NC: The University of North Carolina. Kubota, R., & Lin, A. (2006). Race and TESOL: Introduction to concepts and theories. TESOL Quarterly, 40(3), 471–493. Lan, P.-C. (2011). White privilege, language capital and cultural ghettoisation: Western high-skilled migrants in Taiwan. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(10), 1669–1693. Maley, A. (1992). An open letter to ‘the profession’. ELT Journal, 46(1), 96–99. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London: Routle­ dge & Kegan Paul.

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O’Reilly, C. C. (2006). From drifter to gap year tourist: mainstreaming backpacker travel. Annals of Tourism Research, 33(4), 998–1017. Okan, Z. (2003). Edutainment: Is learning at risk? British Journal of Educational Technology, 34, 255–264. Parker, P. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pineau, E. L. (2002). Critical performance pedagogy: Fleshing out the politics of liberatory education. In N. Stucky & C. Wimmer (Eds.), Teaching performance studies (pp. 41–54). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Reid, J.-A., & Mitchell, D. M. (2015). Inhabiting a teaching body: Portraits of teaching. In B. Green & N. Hopwood (Eds.), The body in professional practice, learning and education (pp. 89–104). Switzerland: Springer, Cham. Ruecker, T., & Ives, L. (2015). White native English speakers needed: The rhetorical con­ struction of privilege in online teacher recruitment spaces. TESOL Quarterly, 49(4), 733–756. Simpson, K. (2004). ‘Doing development’: The gap year, volunteer-tourists and a popular practice of development. Journal of International Development, 16, 681–692. Sørensen, A. (2003). Backpacker ethnography. Annals of Tourism Research, 30(4), 847–867. Spry, T. (2001). Performing autoethnography: An embodied methodological praxis. Quali­ tative Inquiry, 7, 706–732. Stanley, P. (2010). Performing foreigners: Transnational English teachers’ training needs, role, and identities at a Chinese university. (Doctor of Philosophy), Australia: Monash University. Stanley, P. (2012). Superheroes in Shanghai: Constructing transnational Western men’s identities. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 19(2), 213–231. Stanley, P. (2016). Economy class? lived experiences and career trajectories of Englishlanguage teachers in Australia. In P. Haworth & C. Craig (Eds.). The career trajectories of English language teachers (pp. 185–199). Oxford: Symposium Books. Stutelberg, E. B. (2016). These are stories about our bodies: Collective memory work and the peda­ gogical imaginaries of our teacher bodies. (Doctor of Philosophy), University of Minnesota. Thornbury, S. (2001). Point and counterpoint: The unbearable lightness of EFL. ELT Journal, 55(4), 391–396. Young, I. M. (1990). Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Zembylas, M. (2007). The specters of bodies and affects in the classroom: A rhizo-ethological approach. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 15(1), 19–35.

12

RUNNING AWAY FROM ‘CHINESENESS’ AT AN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY Jinyang Zhan

Introduction Before leaving China and going to Sydney as an international PhD student, I had many pre-departure imaginaries about Australia. Being surrounded by Chineseness was not one of them. However, arriving in eastern Sydney, I encountered a linguistic landscape (e.g. Shohamy, Ben-Rafael, & Barni, 2010) very different from what I had imagined. Chinese students were everywhere, and so much around me was still in Chinese. By this I mean that I encountered many Chinese people and things, symbols and phenomena; everything, in other words, that I (and my PhD study participants) participants perceived to be Sinitic. This autoethnogra­ phy interrogates my feelings and reactions toward this – as a Chinese woman – and my experiences of consciously stepping away from this (and my own?) Chineseness. The power of autoethnography lies in its ‘opening to honest and deep reflection about ourselves, our relationships with others, and how we want to live’ (Ellis, 2013, p. 10). This is why I use it here, drawing on memories and reflections recalled from the multimodality of diaries, photos, interview data, field notes, and research memos, which demonstrate the various different perspectives on which I reflect. These include my own changing perspectives and those of my study participants, particularly Jun (not his real name). This autoethnography thus serves as my reflec­ tion on our shared dissatisfaction with being surrounded by ‘too much’ Chineseness (‘But this is AUSTRALIA!’) to the fulfillment we perceived when, finally, we man­ aged to extract ourselves from all the Chineseness (‘Oh, THIS is Australia!’).

The flight from Harbin, China to Sydney, August 26, 2017 I’d never left China in all my 26 years, and the lousy 24-hour series of connecting flights to Australia left me drained. But, ‘This is the prelude to my PhD studies,’

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I said to myself, excited, nervous, and exhausted all at the same time. A flurry of thoughts filled my mind: mixed feelings of uncertainty, passion, and determination. My overseas PhD means so much to me and also to my parents. It will make me the one with the highest professional qualifications in my family. As an only child, like so many other Chinese people of my generation, great educational and profes­ sional expectations hang over me. Luckily, though, I crave knowledge and have a great interest in research, and my parents and I believed that our investment in doing a PhD in Australia (Bourdieu, 2013; Norton, 2015) would create a bright future ahead of me. In China, a PhD is the gatekeeper for academic jobs and identities in univer­ sities, and, in this regard, an overseas PhD offers a major competitive advantage over domestic equivalents. While both are embodied forms of educational cap­ ital, overseas PhD qualifications, especially those from English speaking coun­ tries, are endowed with much more symbolic capital. Such ‘self-marginalization’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2006, p. 22) of our own educational system and its outcomes falls into the trap of ‘west versus the rest’ (Hall, 1992) and ‘native speaker vs. non-native speaker’ (Canagarajah, 1999; Holliday, 2006): dichotomies we may or may not have realized. However, as part of this social imaginary – accepting that an overseas doctoral degree enjoys much more legitimacy and cachet – my parents were willing to pay the incredibly expensive tuition fees and to support my studies in Australia. I was lucky, but also I was under pressure to show rich returns on this hefty investment. Compared to my 46 kilograms of luggage that I could barely lift, the expectations that I carried to Sydney were much heavier. To a great extent, the expectation for me is to experience something different from doing a Chinese PhD, in order to realize and justify the enormous investment of time and money. To my great surprise and disappointment, however, my first impressions were far from those I had expected. Arriving in Australia – which has the highest percent­ age of international students in the world, and whose number-one source country is mainland China – I arrived into a Chinese microcosm. Having flown for 24 hours from China, I had seemingly arrived back in the same place.

Chineseness on campus and in Kingsford Figure 12.1 provides a glimpse of the (Chinese) linguistic landscape around my Australian campus. But the Chineseness I encountered went far beyond flyers on walls. For my PhD research, I’m considering the intercultural experiences of Chinese students on a university pathway program, and my first conundrum was this: almost all the students in every class are, in fact, Chinese. So where, I asked myself, is the ‘intercultural’ in their classes (classroom observation field notes, 12.09.2018)? Such student composition provides the students the convenience and safety blanket of speaking Chinese in class, but this may consequently hinder them from mixing with others, both their university classmates and the community more broadly.

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FIGURE 12.1

Chinese flyers, Kingsford, April 2018.

Kingsford (and neighboring Kensington) are the closest suburbs to my univer­ sity, and they are like a miniature China. Walking these streets, one encounters Chinese students doing their grocery shopping at Asian supermarkets, enjoying their hometown dishes at Chinese restaurants, or having after-class tutoring at Chinese-language cram schools. In Kingsford, Chinese international student mobility has profoundly affected the very structure of the suburb and the prod­ ucts and services one can buy there. And while this is convenient for Chinese students (and doubtless very good business for those serving their needs and wants), it establishes a secure and familiar comfort zone. Those living, shopping, eating, and studying in Kingsford have, in effect, never really left China.

A popular Sichuan restaurant, Kingsford, 21.04.2019, my research memo After today’s interview with my participant, we headed to a Sichuan restaurant in King­ sford. ‘你好, 欢迎光临, 几位?’ The lady welcomed us in Chinese: ‘Hi, welcome! How many will be served?’ I was shocked. After being seated, I realized that the whole restaurant was full of Chinese students waiting for their spicy food to be served. I opened the menu, finding that it was written in Chinese, with pictures of dishes. Spicy Boiled Fish, Kung Pao Chicken, Mapo Tofu: you name it! I am wondering if I am back in China.

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It is important here to note that I am not rejecting my own Chineseness or that of others. Not at all. Instead, as this anecdote shows, my reactions were more those of surprise, at first, and then over time a weary resignation to the fact of the Chinese microcosm in my part of Sydney. There is always a voice in my heart reminding me that I came to Australia to have different experiences compared to undertaking my PhD in China. For this reason, I didn’t want to let myself drown in a monocultural everyday existence – studying, hanging out with Chinese friends, communicating only in Chinese. I was afraid that my family’s and my expectations would never be achieved if I immersed myself in Kingsford. So, believing there must be other ways of living my life in Australia, I resisted. And I decided to run away.

Exploring wider Sydney Sydney is a giant mosaic, assembled by many small pieces like Kingsford. There is Cabramatta (Vietnamese food, language, and wonderful imported silks), Kellyville (Thai restaurants and voices at every turn), and Lakemba (perhaps the center of cultural gravity for Lebanese-Australians). But as a Chinese speaker, Kingsford did not offer me diversity; it offered me cultural sameness. Gradually, therefore, I came to accept its existence as (just) one piece of Sydney’s complex lingua-cultural landscape. It is part of Sydney, but it is not all of Sydney. And recognizing this, I saw that if I did not step into the outside world, I would never know what may be waiting for me. Wary but intrigued, I decided to explore other facets of Sydney’s complexity. My PhD years have therefore been a process of constant learning, reflecting, and developing. I have successively learnt salsa, tango, fencing, and archery. I have polished my French by practicing with my French friend and, living in college with other international students, I have also developed my Korean and Japanese as additional languages. I have honed my watercolor painting, swim­ ming, and singing skills in my leisure time. But I have no intention of becoming an athlete, an artist, or a linguist. These activities were simply my attempts to step out of my comfort zone: to enhance motivation, acquire knowledge, and gain fulfillment. And, in the process, I found great personal challenge and change.Yoga and belly dancing are popular in China. Basketball and badminton are popular in China. But tango, salsa, fencing (see Figure 12.2!), and archery belonged, for me, only in the Olympics or the movies. I had never imagined I would one day dance the tango and I had never pictured myself masked and poised for fencing. This is part of what I perceive as cultural differences. Even in metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, it is hard to find these activities. Here in Sydney, though, I feel an inclusiveness perhaps traceable to the city’s migrant history, its tolerance, and a higher degree of openness. Here in Sydney, by taking advantage of these odd opportunities (of course, through my own will­ ingness and agency, too), I physically experienced what I had never even imagined.

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FIGURE 12.2

Jinyang’s foray into fencing, September 2018.

More importantly, these experiences have helped me better develop myself, as I find them challenging. Taking tango as an example, I am interested in it because its beauty lies in the tempo of passion and seduction. After I learnt it, I found it would be more appropriate to be described as feeling the move instead of making the move. It is through such feelings that its moves are accomplished. This challenges me a lot as this is a type of thinking and a way of moving that were entirely alien to me, at first. I have to say that all the activities that I engaged are difficult and I did suffer from setbacks, but through patience, perseverance, and persistence I honed my skills. This is the same as doing a PhD. Through solving problems, I have gradually learnt to keep calm, con­ centrate on my goal, and to carry on. Eventually, there I am: feeling the move. I can hold my breath and tell something about my dancing partner’s tempera­ ment and habit even from a simple move. Just as importantly, by taking part in these activities I gained opportunities to communicate and make friends well beyond the Chinese linguistic landscape. Taking part in these activities helps me pluck up the courage to start conversa­ tions with people I have never met before, including those from places I struggle to locate on a world map. We share our experiences and life stories;

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we care about and support each other. As Kramsch (2009) describes it, ‘[W]e only learn who we are through the mirror of the others, and, in turn, we only understand the other by understanding ourselves as Other’ (p. 18). Communica­ tion across cultures encourages self-reflection, and I realize now that I know more about myself through my relationship with Other others.

My diary, 02.10.2018 While my study participants and I wish to enhance our English proficiency, we also want to acquire either British or American accents, according to personal preference. My partici­ pants admit that it is still ‘English’ when it is spoken with other accents, but it is ‘weird’. To speak ‘like’ Americans or Brits, they imagine, moves us beyond mastering the second language itself. The symbolic meanings hooked on the language naturalizes and legitimizes the role of native English. The same happens to my choice of learning a second foreign language, either French or Japanese. I chose French without hesitation, because whenever I mention this language, the romantic French people, the art and architectures, the great works of Hugo, and French philo­ sophers come to my mind. For me, French, by the name itself, implies profound meanings. But today, my friend, a French woman, told me that not all French are romantic. She, her­ self, is an example, who is not that romantic and is not interested in any romantic novels or movies at all. I was stunned. I realized that I had made wrong judgments on people through labeling. ‘Positive’ stereotyping like this is still reductive. I see that now.

My diary, 24.06.2019 My experiences in Sydney have broadened my horizons. I was born and raised in a very large city in Heilongjiang Province, which has over ten million people. And yet I had never knowingly seen a foreigner in my hometown. I met my first non-Chinese person – my foreign language teacher – only when I went away to university. In total contrast, Sydney is an incredibly diverse cultural melting pot. Being here brings me opportunities I would never have had if I’d stayed in my hometown: the opportunities of learning and making new friends, but also constantly reflecting on the process. One thing that I learned in the past two years is not to judge a person according to their nationality, gender, race, or appearance. Most times, I find that when I make a priori judgments, the person turns out to be nothing like I had assumed. More fool me. Maybe I have also been labeled or discriminated against by others, as just another Chinese student here in Sydney? I don’t know. What I do know is that I will try never to do that again.

Jun’s agency Autoethnography ‘acknowledges and values a researcher’s relationships with others’ (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015, p. 1). Understanding those rela­ tionships adds another dimension of understanding to oneself. For this reason, here I consider my friendship with Jun, who is one of the participants in my

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PhD research. I met him on campus on the fourth day after his arrival in Aus­ tralia and, like me, Jun has tried to run away from the Chineseness in which we both found ourselves initially. At first, Jun lived with other Chinese students in a rented apartment in King­ sford. Convenient to organize, certainly, and a nice enough place, this apartment offered Jun very little chance to break out of the Chinese circle. But rather than resign himself to an easy if dissatisfying Sydney experience, after four months, Jun moved into one of the student accommodations on campus. Here, he shared an apartment with five students from five different lingua-cultural back­ grounds. They became close friends.

Jun’s birthday party, his apartment on campus, 28.10.2019, my research memo I am so happy to be invited to Jun’s birthday party and celebrate together with his friends! This is a diverse ‘family’ of students from different countries (Australia, Ireland, China, the US, Spain, and Bangladesh), all studying very different subjects at the same univer­ sity. Jun’s roommates also brought their friends to the party, so the air was buzzing with excited voices speaking different languages. I was surprised that Jun also knows them quite well, too.To my great surprise, Jun talked with me in English and communicated with his friends in a very natural, comfortable, and confident way. I’d met Jun at the very begin­ ning of his studies in Australia. Back then, he was not confident speaking English in front of others; not at all. I still remember before he moved to his current apartment, he asked me several times to help him check his accommodation application because of his poor English. Now, it was his turn to tell me: ‘Don’t be shy! My roommates are very friendly, please make yourself at home.’ I am impressed by this change in him, and the effort he has put in to make his life more interesting and challenging. I can see his enthu­ siasm and his willingness to get out of his comfort zone, and how he has changed and grown by taking the initiative. I look around the living room: clean and cozy, as his roommates have decorated it especially for his party. My eyes are drawn to a set of Photoshopped pictures on the wall. Each picture characterizes one of the roommates with his or her hobbies or favorite things. In Jun’s picture, he is depicted as leaping from the hot pot, which is his favorite food. The image has been Photoshopped from a picture of Jun leaping into the sea. Looking at these images – made by and for roommates with love for and knowledge of each other’s passions – I realized that Jun’s flat is very much a place called ‘home’.

Conclusion Looking back over the time that Jun and I have spent in Australia, I am impressed by how much we have gained from expanding our social, cultural, and linguistic circles. Beyond the comfort zone lies, for us, an eagerness, an ini­ tiative, and the love of life. Intercultural communication is not only the dis­ courses that happen between people but also what occurs within people

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(Scollon, Scollon, & Jones, 2011). Our eye-opening experiences have enriched our experiences of studying abroad but they have also helped us gain insights into ourselves, too. As Jorge Luis Borges (1964, p. 15) writes: A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face. So it is with intercultural learning. Although we may set out thinking we are going to investigate the Other, what we learn, in the end, is much more about our own selves.

References Adams, T. E., Holman Jones, S. L., & Ellis, C. (2015). Autoethnography: Understanding quali­ tative research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Borges, J. L. (1964). Dreamtigers. (trans: M. Boyer & H. Morland). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bourdieu, P. (2013). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Abingdon: Routledge. Canagarajah, A. S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, C. (2013). Carrying the torch for autoethnography. Handbook of Autoethnography, 9, 12. Hall, S. (1992). The West and the rest: Discourse and power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Holliday, A. (2006). Native-speakerism. ELT Journal, 60(4), 385–387. Kramsch, C. J. (2009). The multilingual subject: What foreign language learners say about their experience and why it matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kumaravadivelu B. (2006). Dangerous liaison: Globalization, empire and TESOL. In J. Edge (Eds.), (Re-)Locating TESOL in an age of empire. Language and globalization (pp. 1–26). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Norton, B. (2015). Identity, investment, and faces of English internationally. Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, 38(4), 375–391. Scollon, R., Scollon, S. W., & Jones, R. H. (2011). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Shohamy, E., Ben-Rafael, E., & Barni, M. (Eds.). (2010). Linguistic landscape in the city. Bris­ tol: Multilingual Matters.

PART III

Intercultural learning in the world

13

THE FARM Tara McGuiness

“How many more hours from here?” I ask in the back of Jose’s mother’s Volkswagen. “We’re about three more hours from Lavras, then it’s an hour to the farm road,” he replies. The farm road is a fifty kilometre stretch of dirt that winds through and climbs the mountains and fields to the house. It is cratered with pot-holes, wide and deep from the regular downpours of rain, which dry to a crusty clay in the long burning sun. When we get to Lavras, his mother, Marlene, drives us to a restaurant for lunch. The restaurant serves regional dishes of fried pork fat, simmering pots of beans and a variety of meats. She doesn’t eat anything, though, just slumps her head on the table because she has a headache from the heat and the driving. I offer to drive the rest of the way but when I try to reverse, the car lurches forward startling all three of us. The car was in gear, but Marlene is nervous about the roads and says, “No, I should drive, the roads very dangerous, many trucks.” I don’t want to insist because she is nervous, so I move to the back seat again and look out the window. The road from Lavras to the farm road is narrow and there are a lot of trucks but no other modes of product transportation because of the lack of railways and airports. We drive for another hour before reaching the farm road. Clouds of red dust spray upward and settle into trails behind our car. We are only about fifteen minutes into the bumpy stretch of dirt when we encounter a large puddle which has turned the clay soft. Jose’s mother tries to drive through it, she turns the wheel toward the higher ground, but she is too late. The earth isn’t hard enough because of a recent downpour, and we get stuck. She pushes down on the acceleration but there is no grip. We get out of the car and stand around it, looking perplexed. She accelerates again but the wheels just spin, flicking lumps of mud into the air.

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“Can you call someone?” I ask. They are thinking, they seem worried. “There’s no signal,” Jose replies with his hand on his hips. Marlene sits on the grass next to the fence and tries calling her brother; his farm is twenty kilo­ metres away. Flies start to bite my skin and I swat them away with my hand. The afternoon heat is heavy, and I feel nauseous from the long drive and the humidity. Jose and his mother converse more in Portuguese. I decide to stay put, on my hardened mound of mud. The landscape is vast here, the sky on top of us in all directions with huge cumulus clouds silently gliding above the land. In Ire­ land, the horizons aren’t so far away; we look inward, to the bog. Marlene says she’s going to walk to a nearby farm, and while she’s gone, Jose and I try to move the car by placing branches under the wheels, to no avail. We resign to waiting. After about twenty minutes a small Fiat with four men in it pulls up. It’s Jose’s uncle, his two cousins and an Afro-Brazilian man. I have been to the farm before and I have met Bea, an Afro-Brazilian who lives on Jose’s farm. He is the farmhand, and Jose tells me this man is Bea’s brother and he is the farmhand on his uncle’s farm. His uncles and cousins have deep tans and weather-beaten faces, blue eyes peering out under dark eyebrows. Their guts stick out of half-buttoned shirts like pregnant bellies in the third trimester. His uncle pulls his up mindlessly, scratching his bare belly while looking at the car and then to me. I find it hard to understand their Portuguese as they have a strong Minas accent. His uncle and cousins pull me to their bellies to hug me and kiss each of my cheeks. “Tudo bom?” (How are you?) they ask. “Tudo bem,” (All good) I reply. Bea’s brother doesn’t offer me his hand or hugs, in fact he stands a few feet away and averts his eyes. When Jose offers his hand, he is reluctant for a moment then shakes it. All five men congregate next to the car, they are laughing and looking at it, inspecting what’s in front of them. I notice that one of his cousins is barefoot, now he has clay up to his ankles. They lean against the front right side of the car and his uncle gets in, and on the count of three they lift the car and his uncle accelerates. The sound of the engine revs and the dirt crunches underneath until you can hear the tyres grip the earth and the car lurches forward. The men are ecstatic, cheering and laugh­ ing. His uncle has a look of pride on his face and as he gets out of the car you can tell his son and nephew look up to him and his practical skills. At that moment, Marlene arrives in another car, three men in toe. Two of them are White and the third is another Afro-Brazilian man. They exchange pleasantries with each other but once they realise the situation is resolved they leave and head back to their farm. Marlene asks her nephew to drive the rest of the way because “he knows best”. The barefoot man gets into the driving seat and navigates the bumps and holes without blinking, it looks like it is instinctual to him. Again, it is hard to follow their conversation, I am tired and longing for

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a shower. Marlene and her nephews engage in a lively conversation. She seems to have got a second wind since seeing her family again. It takes a while to reach the farm because it is deep into the countryside. We pass several plantations which Jose explains to me are of soya beans and eucalyp­ tus trees. This part of Brazil is mountainous, so we ascend and descend on the dirt road, the driver talking effervescently while navigating this terrain. We drive past a bull who looks at us suspiciously and beep the horn at some horses who are eating grass in front of us. The colonial house with the veranda appears between the trees. It is nestled in a valley, its white façade and blue shuttered windows visible from the road we’re on. There are huge pine trees around it and a row of palm trees intentionally planted to signify a bespoke driveway (Jose showed me this on my first visit as well as the fruit trees planted near the house and the model airplanes his dad works on when he’s here). When I met Jose in Dublin a couple of years before, he showed me pictures of the farm. He explained to me how his parents had met. His mother was twenty years old, she lived on the farm next to this house. Junior was forty and had grown up in Sao Paulo. Junior’s father was a Spanish immigrant who had a lucrative rubber producing factory and who had decided to buy this land next to Marlene’s parents’ farm. Junior arrived on his Harley Davidson, a city slicker, and a romance between him and Marlene ensued. Nowadays, Marlene lives in Sao Paulo and Junior lives on the farm. He drives to Sao Paulo every three weeks and stays for about a week until he gets restless and drives back to Minas. I ask Jose why they have this set up. He explains that his mother has to keep her full-time job since the rubber factory went bust and his father gets restless in the city. This is true; whenever Junior stays with us in Sao Paulo, he gets restless and irritable. On the farm, he has a garage where he works on his truck and his bike. As we arrive onto the driveway we are greeted by Junior standing on the porch, “Black Magic Woman” by Santana is blaring from his speakers in the living room. Junior is a huge fan of rock and roll and the first thing he does when he arrives in Sao Paulo is to put a song on full blast. Jose’s mother starts cleaning and arguing with Jose’s father because he hasn’t cleaned since her last visit. I notice the numerous coffee stains on the tiled floor, the musty smell from the bed clothes and the grime on the dishes. Marlene insists we take the master bedroom. There is no internet and no phone and at night I don’t sleep well because of all the unfamiliar noises. The next morning when we go to eat breakfast, Jose’s mother is already cooking and cleaning. There is a pot on the stove and she is sweeping the floor with her yellow rubber gloves on. I spend most of the day on the veranda read­ ing a book or looking out at my surroundings from the hammock. The days pass slowly here. One of the days, Marlene spends six hours making feijoada (Brazilian bean stew). I am used to seeing her in Sao Paulo where her routine is completely different. She works as a teacher in two schools there. I usually see her for

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breakfast early in the morning and then again at night when she gets home, has a shower, watches a soap opera and goes to bed. Here she seems much happier and less stressed. She puts on her sun hat to go out into the field and brings a basket to collect fruit. She lights up the large stove in the kitchen and bakes bread for breakfast. She rides her horse to her mother’s farm. Jose and I watch a TV series on his dad’s old television with the shutters closed to keep out the light. I feel like his mother is my mother and we are the children. Although Jose is used to the farm, he tells me he’s more at home in the city. I think about my life in Dublin and I think about how modern it is in comparison. At the time, I am frustrated I don’t have access to the things that make me feel “normal”: the internet, my car, cafes, shops, restaurants. Without all the distractions of technology and the city to lean on, I feel useless. Did I ever live in a world without the stimulation of man-made inventions? I can remember as a child enjoying summers riding my bike in the park, creating fan­ tasy narratives as we played on the banks of the Tolka River. Somewhere in growing up that world was lost to me, replaced by limitless distractions which never seem to satisfy me in the same way. One day, Jose takes me on a hike up the mountain at the back of the house. We bring a backpack, water and a puppy, who followed us on the way. The puppy gets tired quickly, so we put him in the backpack. When we reach the summit, we have a view of the farms below and the mountains that stretch for miles. I ask Jose how he knows this route so well and he tells me that every summer he would spend the school holidays here with his parents. He would go on these hikes alone. He looks sad recalling this and he says with nostalgia in his eye, “I hated those summers.” As the days go by, I tell him I want to go back to Sao Paulo sooner. I’m restless and anxious. At night, I can hear scratching from the ceiling and my legs are covered in mosquito bites. Jose reassures me, he promises that we will go to Sao Paulo soon. He says he feels the same way. I feel guilty because I don’t know if he does feel the same way, I watch him and he spends hours in the kitchen with his mother, they both love cooking. There’s so much difference between us and I think the space and solitude here illuminates it. The days pass slowly. It’s the last day and I’m feeling less miserable because we’re leaving tomor­ row. I spend the morning finishing my book and sitting in the sun. Jose helps his father vaccinate the cows. He arrives back to the house at lunchtime, his father and Bea too. Bea is the farmhand. He lives in a small house on the farm. He doesn’t own a car so he spends all his time in this part of the world. One week out of every month he gets a lift from Jose’s dad into the nearest town, Itachinga, and spends his wages on cachaça (a Brazilian spirit). Jose tells me he can’t read or write. I sit on the veranda as Marlene is almost done preparing lunch. Junior and Bea are sitting on a bench just a few feet from me. Their foreheads glisten with sweat in the midday sun. I am reading an article, Sandra Lee Bartky’s (1997)

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‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernisation of Patriarchal Power’. I have my highlighter in hand and I’m wearing my glasses. I look up and watch Bea and Junior sitting on the bench and suddenly I become self-conscious. I pack up my stuff, take my glasses off and go inside. Jose is putting food on a plate. “Are you going to give Bea his first?” I ask. “Yeah, this plate is for him,” he replies. “Oh, good.” “Why?” he asks, puzzled. “It’s just usually you bring his food up after we eat and I didn’t want him waiting for us to finish.” Jose smiles at me and looks at me kindly, a look of reassurance, as if to say there’s nothing to worry about. And so, we take our seats at the cedarwood table in front of a very large rectangular window. The family of four White people eating in unison in the colonial style house whilst Bea retreats to his bare shack to eat his plate of food alone. And as I sit here reflecting on it, I can’t help but recall the last pages of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Reflections on ‘The farm’ Eduardo Galeano, in The Open Vein of Latin America, writes, “Minas Gerais was once accurately described as having a heart of gold in a breast of iron” (1973/ 2009, p.52). The Farm is set in Minas, a land locked state in Brazil into which thousands of slaves were shipped for the purpose of extracting gold by Portu­ guese colonisers. Galeano, in 1973, also reported that: “Today the Minas Gerais countryside, like the Northeast, is the kingdom of the latifundio and the ‘haci­ enda colonels’, a dauntless bastion of backwardness” (p.53). My visits to the farm took place almost thirty years later, and between 2012 and 2017 I would make several journeys to the farm. Each journey brought new understandings and learnings and I found myself changed after each venture into the heart of gold. Sara Ahmed talks about bodies out-of-place and “the boundaries of bodies” (2000, p.44) in which the skin is a boundary. Ahmed describes bodies at home or in-place, unmarked bodies which are actually marked by privilege. She argues that bodies out-of-place are excluded from the body politic and these exclusionary practices which are imposed on marked bodies include “modes of racism: exclu­ sion, inferiorisation, subordination and exploitation” (2). Ahmed argues that unmarked bodies (and she uses the White body as subject) experience inclusion into the social space. Firstly, I want to explore Ahmed’s arguments about the skin as a boundary line. She argues that the skin acts as a boundary to the world as it is that which contains or, Ahmed drawing from Fanon that which is a seal. Additionally, Ahmed points out that the skin is not only that which acts as a seal, protecting the inside from the outside but also as an opening out to others, the skin acts as an exposure to the other (Jean-Luc Nancy, 1994). Ahmed goes on to argue that techniques and practices of differentiation are bodily and inter-bodily with the intent to differentiate marked and unmarked

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bodies: “bodies become differentiated not only from each other or the other, but also through differentiating between others” (2000, p.44). Ahmed uses the term the economies of touch to illustrate how touch is a mechanism in which bodies are differentiated: “There is a relation of closeness and proximity between particular bodies and the ‘body’ of the social … For what is meant by the social body is precisely the effect of being with some others over other others” (2000, p.49). In thinking through my first encounter with Jose’s uncle, cousins and the farm­ hands on the dirt road, Ahmed’s theory works well in my analysis of that encounter. I was in fact the stranger, yet I was hugged, kissed and embraced by the White men with blue eyes. Ahmed talks about rituals of familiarity like hug­ ging among bodies which are included in the social space or at large, the body politic. In contrast, the Afro-Brazilian man stands at a distance from my body, does not touch me and even averts his eyes. Jose, the son who has been living in Europe for several years and has arrived home with a White European wife, offers his hand to him, perhaps as a signifier of his cosmopolitanism. The paragraph in which I describe sitting on the veranda reading Foucault and watching Bea rest in the sun captures a few moments when two bodies dichotomously positioned socially share the same space and time. The scene is an aberration in this valley deep into the mountains. Bea and I never speak. I have been to the farm a handful of times for different lengths of time. I sunbathe in the grass, sit on the veranda, and go for walks through the fields, but he and I don’t interact. Even when we are in close proximity, it feels like there is a chasm between us, it is as though there is an invisible rule that we are not supposed to talk or more importantly, to touch each other. I feel like an imposter, a young White woman chattering away in English, lolling around the house and the grass reading Foucault. I think about Bourgeois and parochialistic binaries, and Ahmed’s argument about exclusionary practices of exclusion, infer­ iorisation, subordination and exploitation (Ahmed, 2000). When we sit around the kitchen table to eat dinner together and Bea is given his dinner to eat alone in his little bare abode, the exclusion and subordination of this practice haunts me: “racism is a set of postulates which serve to deny participation in economic, political, social and cultural life” (Anthias et al., 1992, p.15). I reflect on my gender and because I perform femininity in a normative way, I am very much included at the table: “In a racially and sexually imperialistic country, the woman who is seen as inferior because of her sex can also be seen as superior because of her race, even in relation to men of another race” (Hooks, 1982, p.140). During my visits to the farm, despite the fact that I was an outsider, a foreigner and completely out of my comfort zone, I was not treated as a body out-of-place in a way that made me feel unwelcome or undervalued. It was quite the opposite, which was unsettling too, for I was the recipient of privilege, of the unearned assumption of progression, status and superiority. Some migrants can experience “a surplus of rights, in particular, a world right to circulate unhindered” (Balibar, 2015, p.83). When we visit Jose’s grandmother, I notice

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a framed photograph of me and Jose on our wedding day next to the photo­ graphs of all her other grandchildren. I have an unsettled feeling in my stomach. I am grateful but bewildered by these gestures of generosity, protection and acceptance in the family. I do not feel like I have earned any of it. The inclu­ sion into this social space is what unsettles me. Jose and I have lived together in Ireland and we have talked about several instances in which he is not included and in which he feels the need to prove he is not inferior. At my family gather­ ings in Ireland, he is under scrutiny and has to prove his likeness to them to be included. “Oh, your English is amazing,” they exclaim, surprised, “Oh you’re of Spanish descent,” they say approvingly, “a Spanish passport, that’s fantastic!” they say. The fact that I am a White European English speaker means I carry the historical and cultural narratives with me when I travel and these scripts inscribe themselves onto my body meaning I am embraced, I am invited to sit at the dinner table and to sleep in the master bedroom. However, it is important to note here that these invitations of intimacy are not deployed solely because of my Whiteness. My performance of femininity is heteronormative and my body, although gendered, is an able body, the correct age, and a body which is deemed (by social-cultural standards) to be an acceptable weight and size.

Ethics Describing these experiences brings up ethical issues for me. I want to avoid the stereotypes of the backward, catholic, simple, developing south and at the same time I want to be true to my observations. Tasha Rennels (2015) wrote about this quandary when she carried out research for her dissertation “You better red­ neckognize” in which she conducts research with working-class Whites in America. She wrote: Among the many challenges I encountered, figuring out how to ethically present participants was the hardest. I wanted, more than anything, to pre­ sent them as contradictions to common stereotypes about White workingclass people so I could confront the judgement that plagued my childhood. At the same time, I knew I needed to honour and remain true to what I observed and what participants shared with me, even if this information reinforced the stereotypes I was trying to debunk. I constantly struggled with what details to share, like Randy’s mullet haircut and Ellen’s kitschy décor. These details were important to the stories I composed but contra­ dictory to my desire to invite readers to understand, not judge, White working- class people. (2015, p.141) I was struck by the same ethical quandaries as Rennels, in my descriptions of Bea as the simple farmhand, Marlene as the housewife and my selfrepresentation as the educated White western woman gazing on the other.

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How else might I be true to characters and multiplicities of the question except to perhaps graphers might grapple with argues that:

my observations without decomplexifying the these individuals? I do not have an answer to ask the reader how White western autoethno­ these ethical dilemmas? Chandra Mohanty

The distinction between Western feminist representations of women in the third world and western feminist self-presentation is a distinction of the same order as that made by some Marxists between the “maintenance” function of the housewife and the real “productive” role of wage labour, or the characterisation of developmentalists of the third world as being engaged in lesser production of “raw materials” in contrast to the “real” productive activity of the first world. These distinctions are made on the basis of the privileging of a particular group as the norm or referent. Men involved in wage labour, first world producers, and, I suggest, western feminists … all construct themselves as the normative referent in such a binary analytic. (Mohanty, 2003, p.22)

Gender The gender dimension to this experience is the part of the story in which the hierarchy distorts. On the farm, physical labour is required for everyday activ­ ities; intellect is not highly valuable. This presents two insights, firstly, and the one in which I will address now is gender and secondly, the sedentary work life of an academic. When the men arrive on the dirt road to help move the car, Marlene and I do not offer our help, we both stand aside while the men huddle and plan their course of action. The men organise themselves into a hierarchy of mascu­ linity, the uncle who is the oldest and the father of the younger men takes charge and is rewarded with cheers for moving the car. I recall being quiet and observant during the rest of the journey to the house, a heavy feeling weighed on me. Additionally, at the house Marlene monopolises the cooking and clean­ ing; it is evident from the stains on the floor that this has been left for several months especially for Marlene to clean. The sexual division of labour is much stronger in this environment than what I am used to in Dublin. I harbour a sense of uselessness in this place where subsistence living is paramount. Although there is a division between the men and the women on the farm, for me, the distance which bothers me most is between myself and Marlene. Her ease, her sense of purpose and duty cooking for the family and her ability to ride horses across the terrain evoke a feeling of inadequacy in me. This brings me to the second point I wish to address about the sedentary life of an academic and the international division of labour.

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Labour In my MA thesis, I argued that the homemaker was devalued in many western households and domestic labour was often undertaken by women from the global south (McGuinness, 2015). My experience on the farm compounded this argument further for me. The lack of domestic skills highlighted my investment in an intellectual economy, an economy of ideas and therefore one that is seden­ tary and not of much value or utility on a farm. On the farm where I was not welcome to participate in either gendered activ­ ities (helping with the car, cooking for the family) I realised the spatial­ temporality of gender and I wondered how much my Whiteness exempted me from participation in labour which was more manual and subsistent. Addition­ ally, Bourdieu describes a cultural field as a series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories and titles which constitute an objective hierarchy and produce certain discourses and activities, additionally, cultural capital is a form of value associated with culturally authorised tastes, consumption patterns, attri­ butes, skills and awards (Webb et al., 2002). If I apply the concept of the field to the farm, within this field (on the farm), my cultural capital (academic awards, teaching and writing skills) do not have value the way in which they hold value in the cultural field I am situated in in Dublin (middle class suburb working at a university). That is not to say I do not hold capital on the farm; my privilege as a heteronormative White European assumes me symbolic capital and an exemption of expectation to perform tasks in this cultural field.

Conclusion I wrote ‘The farm’ in 2017 while sitting at the kitchen table in Minas. I recall the story pouring out onto the page as though it was eager to be something material. Since then, I have continued to study race relations in Brazil, and I have been back to Brazil to carry out qualitative research with participants. I chose to carry out research with participants who self-identified as White, who were fluent in English and had migrated from a rich developed country. The motivation for these research choices was to invert the lens onto the White migratory body and to attempt to explore migration through the lens of Whiteness. My experiences on the farm and in an intercultural relationship influenced these decisions. Going to the farm and learning a bit about Bea it was impossible to ignore how our racialisation impacts the way in which our bodies occupy space. In a way, it was bizarre that I was at the farm. It was as though my privilege was a passport to even the deepest valleys of Brazil’s rural heartland. On the contrary, Bea, an AfroBrazilian man with little education, was very much inhibited to that space in the world. For him, even leaving the farm to get to the local town was only a monthly journey. I reflect again on Balibar’s statement that some migrants have “a surplus of rights and a world right to circulate unhindered” (2015, p.83) and

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I think, as recipients of privilege, we must make responsible choices about which spaces our bodies occupy. Revisiting this story and rewriting the reflections brings newness each time, particularly as the prominent relationship in the story is between me and my now ex-husband. In our travels together and our life together in Ireland and Brazil, a recurring experience was the way in which we had asymmetrical experiences of being the foreigner. In relation to each other, it was impossible to maintain a balanced, equal connection to one another because power always interfered. Coming back to Ahmed and her description of the “boundaries of bodies”, I wonder about these boundaries when one is so intimately dependent on another, the other, the one you have differentiated between others and I would want to be equal to that other, the one I allow to touch my skin, the other I open out to (2000).

References Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. London: Routledge. Anthias, F., Yuval-Davis, N., & Cain, H. (1992). Racialized boundaries: Race, nation, gender, colour and class and the anti-racist struggle. London: Routledge. Balibar, E. (2015). Citizenship. London: Polity Press. Bartky, S. L. (1997). Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power. In K. Conboy, N. Medina, & S. Stanbury (Eds.), Writing on the body: Female embodiment and feminist theory (pp.129–154). New York: Columbia University Press. Galeano, E. (1973/2009). Open veins of Latin America. London: Serpent’s Tail. Hooks, B. (1982). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. London: Pluto. McGuinness, T. (2015). Escaping domesticity: The replacement and devaluation of the homemaker with the use of migrant domestic workers. The School of Social Work, Social Policy and Social Justice. University College Dublin. The Thesis Centre (MA Dissertation/Thesis). Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, N.C and London: Duke University Press. Nancy, J. L. (1994). Corpus. In J. F. MacCannell & L. Zakarin (Eds.), Thinking bodies (pp.17–31). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rennels, T. R. (2015). “You better redneckognize”: White working-class people and real­ ity television. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (PhD Thesis). University of South Florida. Retrieved from: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5766/. Webb, J., Schirato, T., & Danaher, G. (2002). Understanding Bourdieu. London: Sage.

14

‘BUT YOU’RE NOT RELIGIOUS!’ NAVIGATING A FAITHLESS FASCINATION Martha Gibson

Introduction In truth, I don’t really know where my fascination with religion and specifically Abrahamic religions has come from or where it developed from. I don’t recall a singular moment in my childhood or early adult studies that sparked the inter­ est. Could it have been sparked by my first overseas posting with the British Council as an English language teacher, when I was posted to Yemen? Could it be from finding an article about the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta group and having my mind boggled at the difference, the strangeness, the otherness of this group of extreme orthodox Jews who are anti-Israel? Or was it at secondary school when I found out my friend was a Jehovah’s Witness and if she went to hospital, wouldn’t be allowed to have a blood transfusion? Or that my maths teacher was a Plymouth brethren? I really don’t know. But also, I don’t think it really matters, and nowadays, I would rather spend my cognitive energy on read­ ing, searching the internet and learning about the customs and rituals of Abraha­ mic religions than worrying where it all came from. Problematically – for some of those around me – I am not religious, I have no faith, I am an atheist (although that in itself is a problematic definition for the non-religious). I say problematically because on hearing that I plan my holi­ days around study of Abrahamic religions, some people around me, in the UK, are surprised and wonder why, given that I am not religious. I am culturally Christian, having been brought up in Scotland. At primary school, we went to assembly and sang hymns; we went to Harvest Festival at the local church. I even went to Sunday school because it was a way to be part of the community; Brownies and Guides were held in the church hall. I still know all the words for every Christmas carol and I love Christmas. So, cultur­ ally Christian. I don’t ever remember thinking that I believed in a god. I don’t

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ever remember needing the inclusive and loving embrace of a god in times of need that people suggest when they talk of finding God. There is no godshaped void in my life, yearning to be filled. There just isn’t anything there. For me. And it never really mattered because I was lucky enough to grow up in a country where religion wasn’t the defining paradigm of my existence; I had choice. It was just there in the background through the literature, the music, the architecture, the government and the laws of our culture. For me, the god in our culture didn’t make any noise and it didn’t have any colour or texture or pull. In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor (2007) describes how religion, or more spe­ cifically, the Church was for Europe in the Middle Ages. He asks the question: ‘why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?’ He describes us, in the West, as being buffered, whereas in the 1500s, they were ‘porous’. Having been lucky enough to live and work in several Muslim countries which one might define as ‘developing’ (Yemen, Bangladesh, Afghanistan), I can see within these cultures and traditions the all-encompassing religion and the god that is woven into the fabric of their lives. When I read Taylor for my Master’s in Abrahamic Religions, I made the connection between Europe in the Middle Ages and Yemen and Bangladesh. As harsh and as superior as it sounds, I likened these cultures’ experiences to Taylor’s Middle Ages and how they were ‘porous’. Where I had the choice to go to church or not and I had the choice to believe in a god or not, the people I met in these countries did not and didn’t question their belief and their culture. And they appeared happy with this and happy to share their experiences. While in my culture, there is the ongoing debate about whether there is a god and what faith actually means and judgements are made when someone declares themselves to have a faith and how they practise that faith. There is a scepticism. I am often looked at strangely when I tell people that I have a Master’s in Abrahamic Religions or that I went on a walking tour of Jewish Palma, Majorca or that I have read the Quran. Some say, ‘But you’re not religious,’ or ‘You’re not going to convert, are you?’ Others get defensive and immediately say, ‘I don’t believe in God, it’s all nonsense,’ as if I am proselytising to them or challenging them. A lot of people say, ‘Religion causes nothing but wars, what good does it do?’ In my culture, religion can be viewed as problematic, confusing, divisive; it causes scepticism. In Yemen, I found the opposite. In 1997, I got a job teaching English in Sana’a in Yemen. It was my first real job after university but not my first overseas experience. I was excited to go overseas again, excited to have left university and excited to be working fulltime again. Most of all, I was excited at the prospect of going somewhere that most people hadn’t heard of and had to look up on a map. It was also the first of several Muslim countries I would live and work in.

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Several months after arriving, I was asked to go to Hodeida on the Red Sea coast for six weeks to teach a group of midwives and public health nurses (all women) and another group of obstetricians and gynaecologists (all men). Another teacher, Natalie, was also sent; she was going to teach in a manufacturing company but we would share the house and live together for the six weeks. Bayt al Faqih, Yemen 1998 I’m sitting on a bed in the bride’s family house, in a village between Bayt al Faqih and Zabid. The one-room hut is packed with women, chattering and giggling because their friend is about to get married (and maybe also because there are two White women sitting on the bed). The girl is around 13 but no one knows for sure, and she’s clutching a copy of the Quran in one hand and having the other hand decorated with henna. She’s clutching, rather than reading, the Quran because she cannot read, and she certainly cannot read the classical Arabic of the Quran. But this is what you’re supposed to do. There are elderly women around her, dropping titbits of advice in her ear about marriage. She’s not smiling because she has to show that she is sad about leaving her family home. Embarrassingly, Natalie and I have been given the special honour of sitting on the bed. It puts us above – literally and figuratively – the other women, the bride and the bride’s mother and we look down on the scene, desperate to meld in with it but also fascinated by what is happening. I am full of questions – ‘How old are you?’ ‘Are you excited about your marriage?’ ‘What happens now?’ ‘What are the men doing right now?’ ‘When will you go and live with your husband?’ – but also aware that I shouldn’t be asking so many questions. It’s a three-day marriage ceremony, I find out the next day, having pestered my class of midwives at the clinic in Hodeida. These are the same women who took me to the village to show me how they teach rural communities about public health (they had a flashcard of a child pooing next to carrots in the field with a big red cross through it). Visiting one village, we had come across the marriage ceremony and had been invited to join them. Every day, Sunday to Thursday, at 2pm, I welcome these ten midwives into the classroom. As soon as the door is closed, they disrobe from their black abayas (robes) and headscarves and collectively, without fail, go, ‘Oooph,’ as they are relieved to cool off and take off the layers. Underneath they are wearing pyjamas and nightdresses. This rigmarole then happens in reverse when the lesson ends. In the tea break, when the tea boy knocks on the door with a tray of glasses, a flask of black tea and more sugar than should be allowed in a clinic, I have to go out, obscure the classroom view from the outside with my body, close the door behind me, take the tea tray from the boy and manoeuvre back into the classroom so no one inside can be seen. It’s a palaver but I do it because these women cannot be seen without their cover ups. I have no such restrictions because I am different.

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I pepper them with my questions after our visit to Bayt al Faqih. I selfishly spend 30 minutes of our lesson asking my questions but I justify it by telling myself that I am providing them with all sorts of authentic language practice. When I ask about the Quran the bride was holding and the role that Islam plays in a marriage cere­ mony, their eyes light up and they bubble over with information about it. Their dia­ logue is not strictly speaking all about Islam, it’s mixed in with their culture and tradition so I am lucky enough to hear all about Yemeni marriage tradition, the tribal culture of that particular area of Yemen and the Islam that they follow. But it’s not ‘religion’ they are talking to me about – it’s culture, it’s tradition, it’s a way of life, it’s ritual and habit, it’s instinctive and they don’t separate their faith from their cul­ ture. There is no stigma or assumptions attached to Islam in their context. They ask me about my religion and I tell them that I am a Christian. They grin and exclaim because they have heard of this and think it’s a bit like their religion – ‘Same God, yes? Same, same?’ they ask tentatively. ‘Yes. Same, same,’ I say. They confer amongst themselves in Arabic for a moment and then Huda, who is the best at English, says, ‘Next weekend, come to mosque with us, with all of us, it’ll be fun! We’ll show you how to pray.’ I smile and nod gratefully because, more than anything, I want to go to a mosque in Hodeida with a group of midwives to see how they pray. Women don’t generally go to mosque here, they tell me, but they’ll speak to the Imam and it’ll be a fun day out. We go to the mosque the next weekend, which is a simple, breeze block building with a crescent moon painted on the outside in view of the Red Sea. We’re the only ones there and they show me how to pray and get me to learn a couple of phrases. It’s only half an hour but it’s a free space and they are free and they are excited to share this with me and I realise I will never experience anything like this again. In class the next week, I again pepper them with my questions and so the cycle continues for the six weeks I am in Hodeida. My leaving present from them at the end of the six-week secondment is a Quran in English. A very small, beautifully coloured Quran. They hand it to me, delighted with their gift, and delighted that I accept it with humility. To these women, the faith and the rituals of their religion were inextricably linked. It was instinctive and instinctual. The traditions, customs and rituals of their Islam were how they practised their faith and how their faith manifested itself. In my presence, there was a positivity, a joy and a celebration of these customs and a joy in sharing them with someone who didn’t know anything. They were communicating their beings to me but not once did they ask the question, ‘Are you going to convert to Islam?’ It was almost like the question didn’t exist. To my culture, converting to a religion is a process, a journey, a step change. To these women, it seemed that there was no separation between their faith and their culture so they may as well have asked me to convert to being Yemeni or a convert to being a Hodeidan, for all the sense that made. I see the same instinct in orthodox Judaism, and I have endlessly researched this religion alongside Islam. Almost 20 years after that experience in Yemen

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with the midwives, I find myself even more fascinated by Abrahamic reli­ gions. In 2015, having just submitted my dissertation on the feminist dis­ course on modesty for Jewish and Muslim women, I went on holiday to New York to see the US Open tennis and to explore some of the Jewish places of interest, of which there are many. In my endless quest for all things Abrahamic, I booked and went on two walking tours, both in Brooklyn, both of the Hasidic strand of Judaism. There are certainly parallels with my experiences in Yemen with the Orthodox Jewish communities of Brooklyn, New York. Both are devoutly religious, both close-weave the religious with the culture and tradition.

Two Jewish Brooklyn walking tours, 2015 So, to Brooklyn I go, hungry for more information on orthodox Jewry. Satmar1 Williamsburg tour Our guide is a woman in her early 30s, I’m guessing. Bright, intelligent, sincere and friendly. She was an ex-Hasid,2 an ex-Satmar. That is, she had decided to leave Jewish orthodoxy and her Satmar sect but not before she had married and had had a child. She tells us all this by way of introduction. She is keen to point out that the tour is not going to be in any way negative or resentful of the community she is no longer a part of. It is respectful and exists to educate and eliminate misunderstanding, assumption and prejudice. In general, she continues, the community is tolerant of what she is doing but occasionally she gets cat-called at in the street or she bumps into a relative or a former friend (who will ignore her) so we should all be aware of that. She tells us that we should be respectful of the community so no staring, no pointing. I wonder if this self-selecting audience would ever behave like that but maybe experi­ ence has taught her that it needs to be said upfront. At the start of the tour, she tells us her backstory and asks us why we’re here on this tour. There are a few hipsters in the group who have heard talk of Williamsburg and its now trendy neighbourhood. There are some secular Jews from across the US. There’s no one like me: someone who is not Jewish but is interested in Judaism to the extent I would come on a walking tour to find out all about the Satmar. So, we set off. At the intersection of the aptly named Division Ave and Marcy Ave, we stop and hear about education – the yeshivas,3 what girls learn (and don’t learn) and why this is, why men should spend their life studying Torah (and why the women have to work to support this). She also points out some posters pasted to the wall in Hebrew which declare the community’s support for Donald Trump as the next president of the USA. Our guide is surprised at this campaigning but explains that generally the community is Republican (if they vote at all) in its politics and she compares this with the growing ultra-orthodox representation in the Israeli Knesset. We stop at a bakery and are allowed to select a kosher treat to eat and the baker talks to us about what kosher means and why it’s important. He also tells us a little

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of the origin of each of the cakes and biscuits he sells – mostly Eastern European and Hungarian – as the Satmar originate from Hungary – but now very much Brooklyn. As we walk down Lee Ave, I get into conversation with our guide about hair. I am very interested in Jewish women’s hair and what they do with it – hide it, cover it, shave it, emulate it with a wig – and why – and it turns out she’s writing her PhD on women’s hair in the Satmar community. I have just submitted my Master’s dissertation on modesty for Muslim and Jewish women so we have a really interesting conversation and I am giddy with pleasure, trying to pick her brain for all the nuggets of knowledge I don’t possess. Her PhD is obviously more specific to the Satmar com­ munity and I gather the facts like I’m harvesting apples from a tree. As we walk and talk, she says, ‘Don’t look now but that’s my cousin walking towards us. Watch how she ignores me.’ By leaving the community, our guide has been effectively shunned. She may have contact with her close family – parents, ex-husband – but the wider family and community won’t engage with her anymore. But she seems happy to be out of the very structured life of the Satmar Hasidic community. The end of the tour sees us in a kosher deli where we sit and chat as a group, ask questions and try various Hungarian and Eastern European dishes. I have to leave early to catch the next tour. I tell our guide where I am going and she grins and says, ‘Oy, you’re really going for it today! Orthodox deep-dive!’ As I walk out of Williamsburg, onto the subway and away from the insular Satmar world, I think to myself how privileged I am to have seen into the world. I knew a lot already from my studies and my endless reading but what I have just seen was ‘the real thing’. Lubavitch4 Crown Heights tour I make my way from Marcy Ave subway stop to Crown Heights. I have been instructed to go to the library of the community education centre. I arrive – a little late – and in a room, lined with bookshelves is a very small group of people. I am the fourth and last of our group, and our guide is sitting opposite us. He doesn’t make eye contact with me when I arrive and continues to talk in a quiet and reverential voice about the Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish faith and community. It’s fair to say he is a somewhat inex­ perienced guide, maybe standing in for someone else? He looks about 18 and has the awkwardness of a teenage boy who hasn’t quite got used to his adult body. He is reciting a memorised text but keeps forgetting chunks and goes back to recap, making it a jumbled speech. Once his speech is over, he shyly asks if we have any questions. As he has been talking about Hasidic men for the last 15 minutes, I ask a question about women. He doesn’t know the answer and looks at me with a blank expression. It’s difficult to know if this is because he doesn’t know the answer or he has not prepared the answers ahead and therefore cannot answer, paralysed by impro­ visation. Someone else in the group gives me the answer to my question. I find out later on in the tour that she is from upstate New York and is a secular Jew of the Lubavitch tradition. I say to myself – the first time of many times that afternoon – that I am really lucky to be on this tour, not only with this guide but also the others

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in the group. Again, there is no one like me in the group and I’m a bit of a curiosity to them – they are American, secular Jews, on holiday in New York. Our guide then stands up and shuffles towards the door, indicating that we are now leaving. He leads us tentatively up the street with people staring at him and at us. The stares are different this time – in Williamsburg, no one made eye contact but you could feel the looks and the ever so slight hostility all around. Here, they are openly looking and are curious. We turn a corner into a side street and he stops suddenly and says: ‘This is a ­ mikveh5 for your new pots.’ He stands back and grins goofily, as if pausing for dra­ matic effect. Maybe there is the making of a tour guide in him after all. I’ve heard of a mikveh of course, a sacred bath house where mostly women go to ritually purify6 themselves after their period and before their wedding. But this mikveh is a narrow but deep sink in the side of a building, filled with rainwater. It’s rather murky but it apparently has been blessed. As our guide is explaining what you are supposed to do at this mikveh, as if on cue, a black Toyota pulls up, stops in the middle of the narrow road and a Hasidic man gets out, goes into the boot of his car, takes out a colander and walks towards us. ‘Ahh!’ he says, ‘now you can see the mikveh in action!’ He grins and seems to relish the audience and the opportunity to demonstrate. He squeezes between us, dunks the colander in the sink several times while reciting what I assume to be a prayer or bless­ ing, removes it, shakes the water off, says ‘goodbye!’ cheerfully and gets back into the car, hands the colander to the man sitting in the passenger seat and reverses out of the narrow side street.Our guide has a huge smile on his face and seems delighted. I imagine he’s trying to say, ‘And I didn’t even set that up for your benefit!’ but he doesn’t quite get the words out. I too, have a huge smile on my face and am delighted because this is really interesting and I have learnt something new and not from the internet or a book but from real Jewish people going about their regular day. The next stop on the tour is a place where tefillin are made and the small scrolls of scripture for the tefillin are written. We see the men writing out the scripture on the small scrolls in elegant calligraphy and watch the men making the tefillin, the small black boxes and leather straps of the phylacteries. The men have smudged black fingers and hands and take little notice of the group of tourists in their midst. We then proceed to the global headquarters of the Lubavitch. This is clearly a very important building and I immediately feel privileged that I am allowed into such a place but I feel less excited, I realise, than I did when I saw the cooking utensils mikvah. This building is about the business and organisation and men of the faith, not about the ritual and habit of the people. It is a collection of rooms and narrow corridors and staircases and there’s bustle all around – men in long black coats and black hats, busily moving to and fro, the front door constantly opening and closing. We are taken into the communication room which is like walking back in time – there is a wall to ceiling old dial phone switch­ board with wires and cables and ports, each labelled with a country. We challenge each other to find a country that is not represented on the wall in front of us. I can’t

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find Chad or Niger but there aren’t many others countries that are missing. Our guide is not impressed with our impromptu quiz and I immediately feel humbled. He explains that when the Rebbe speaks, all these countries can dial in and hear him speak. I find out later that the Lubavitch Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson died in 1994 and there has been no successor. But he is spoken of in the present tense. It seems then, that this communication room and the entire Lubavitch commu­ nity has not heard the Rebbe speaking since 1994. But there is a man on duty in the room. It’s puzzling and I squirrel away this curious fact and mentally chew on it for many days. Finally, we enter the synagogue, to the women’s section as we are a mixed group. It’s a gallery above the main room of the synagogue, like pews in a church, I think to myself. There is Perspex panelling in the gallery so that you cannot drop anything down into the main floor. As we sit there and watch the men in their prayer shawls and tefillin, rocking backwards and forwards in prayer, a girl of about 12 comes over to me and asks where I’m from. ‘Scotland,’ I tell her. ‘I know someone who lives in Oxford!’ she tells me excitedly. I ask who it is and she says, ‘It’s a friend of a friend of my aunt. I don’t know her name but she lives in Oxford.’ I chat to her, asking questions. Again, it strikes me that someone from an insular community is happy to talk to me, is inter­ ested and curious about me, an outsider in their place of worship. Here I am, looking into her world and here she is, looking out and making connections with my world. In contrast, we were not allowed to enter the synagogues of Williamsburg. The tour is to finish up at a kosher Chinese buffet restaurant further up Kingston Ave. It was the first thing that our guide told us after his introduction speech in the library – you could see he was excited about it. So, by the time we leave the women’s section of the synagogue, he is beside himself with excitement and sets off at speed, down the road ahead of us, almost forgetting that we are there. I catch up with him and explain that I can’t join them as I have my flight to catch. He snorts and shuffles a bit, clearly mystified about why I will be leaving before the grand finale but I say thank you and the others in the group say goodbye and I leave. I make my way to Kingston Ave metro station and away from the world of the Lubavitch. To this day, I think about our guide’s glee at the prospect of a kosher all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet restaurant. It was almost as if his having to do these tours made it all worth­ while. Was it because it was Chinese food and so it was a treat, something different and otherworldly for him? Was it that he would be out, sitting separately from his family and community but with a group of outsiders? What the Williamsburg guide, an ex-Hasid, was able to do that my Yemeni midwives and the Lubavitch guide couldn’t do was to step outside of her trad­ ition, culture and religion and look in as a knowledgeable observer, an exparticipant. She could then communicate that to an unknowing audience. The Lubavitch guide wasn’t able to explain the ‘why’ of his tradition, only the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.

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Both experiences have me enthralled, looking in from the outside, marvelling at the rituals and the customs, hungry to populate my personal museum of artefacts.

My Abrahamic museum of artefacts I realise now that this is my main interest in religion – gathering stories, arte­ facts, discourses, facts, differences and images of these respective faiths. I am not seeking a god, I am not so interested in ‘Richard Dawinsesque’ discourse on the existence – or otherwise – of a god. For me, this is a non-discourse, as I know, for me, that there is a not a god. I am careful at every juncture to say ‘for me’ because I respect someone’s chosen or innate faith – how could I not? I ask endless questions about someone’s faith, so who am I to question their belief and not respect it? That, to me, is anathema. This is something that many people struggle with when I talk about my interest, my hobby. They struggle with my separation between the sociology of a religion and the ‘god’ question. Can I be interested and not believe? Surely not. So, I gather my religious artefacts – this phrase puts me in mind of Chaucer’s Pardoner (Chaucer 1965) with his sack full of false relics to sell for personal profit – and I archive them and sort them, make sense of them and thoroughly enjoy myself in the process. Last year, I went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and now liken my research to this style of museum: stuffed full of random Abrahamic curios, juxtaposing Jewish purity rituals with Christian Sci­ entist practices, with the differences in ways of prayer between the Shia and Sunni. I thought that doing the Master’s in Abrahamic Religions would help me sort all my artefacts, would help me reach a point of resolution with my hobby, put all my toys in a box, sorted and orderly, put to good use. I choose the word ‘doing’ rather than ‘completing’ because, for me, the process of studying those courses and writing that dissertation were joyful, enjoyable and I was in my element. I never went to the graduation and I have the certificate somewhere but it wasn’t the point of the experience. I remember sitting in the first course of the Master’s, an evening class lecture on Kant, thinking, ‘I have never been happier.’ Vizel (2019) is scathing about this type of collecting of facts in her blog. A book that I gobbled up hungrily was by Joseph Berger (2014), The Pious Ones. In it, he describes The World of the Hasidim and Their Battles with Amer­ ica, as it is subtitled. He talks about the details of the different Hasidic sects, the differences between the Bobov, the Satmar, the Lubavitch, the Ger, the Belz and many more. I loved it and read out passages to my family when we were on holiday for Christmas in Ethiopia, visiting my sister. It appealed to my thirst for information, details, rituals and behaviours. But Vizel, an exSatmar Jew, says, ‘The book is just a collection of laws and customs; so for­ mally laid out, it totally misses the forest for the trees.’ She says it is reductive and no collection of facts and details can give you the life and the complete

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picture of being a Hasidic Jew. When she was interviewed by the Washing­ ton Post (Powell 2006) about her life as a Hasid, living in Kiryas Joel (before she left the sect), the published article left her feeling ‘humiliated and flat­ tened into a caricature’. I do question whether what I do – collecting facts about religion – is harmful and ‘flattening’. Am I being lazy by not delving deeper? The Master’s merely augmented my fascination. It didn’t scratch the itch. My toy box is now a museum filled with everything all jumbled but respected like in the Pitt Rivers Museum. So what do I do with this museum of Abrahamic artefacts? I have toyed with doing a PhD, but because this is such a personal interest, unrelated with my work and I am not interested in the title of Doctor or the certificate or the graduation ceremony, I wouldn’t seek public funding for it. Why ask taxpayers to fund my hobby? I do worry that I am not applying enough intellectual rigour to my hobby, or interrogating sufficiently deeply – a PhD would certainly aid in that process. My problem with a PhD is narrowing down the area of study to one area. I’m inter­ ested in it all! But there is a glimmer of a ‘something’ that somewhere in the archives, in my museum and in my studies, is a way to be part of a discourse on understanding difference and otherness, to be part of the discussion on how my understanding and knowledge of Abrahamic religions lends itself to a deeper shift for change. Can all the knowledge I have and my appetite for more be put to some use? Could I work for a think tank? Could I get a job in counterextremism? In a foundation or charity that promotes interfaith understanding? Ultimately what I would like is for my knowledge and learning to be of some use, some purpose. In the meantime, I will continue to pursue my interest, widen my knowledge and increase my understanding from the outside. I feel that I know only the tip of the Abrahamic iceberg, even if my god-void still exists.

Notes 1 Satmar is a group of Hasidic Judaism. Considered to be one of the most insular groups, they originated from the town of Szatmárnémeti, Hungary (modern day Satu Mare, Romania) and are one of the largest Hasidic groups in the world. It is estimated that there are up to 75,000 Satmar worldwide. There are large groups of Satmar in the US, Israel, Europe and Australia. Their founder was Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum. 2 Hasidism or Hasidic Judaism is a Jewish religious group originating from Ukraine in the 18th century. Noted for their orthodoxy, conservatism and social seclusion, it is considered to be a spiritual revival movement within Judaism. 3 Jewish religious schools. 4 Another Hasidic group. The Lubavitch are noted for being the only Hasidic group to proselytise to secular Jews. Founded in 1775 by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi in Russia. There are communities all over the world, up to 95,000, mainly in the US, Israel, and Europe. 5 A mikveh is a ritual bath used for purification – women go to the mikveh before they get married, and married women go after their period has finished and after childbirth.

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Men also use it for spiritual and ritual purification. After death, a body is ritually puri­ fied in a mikveh, too. 6 The word ‘purity’ in Judaism is not what we often assume to have a clean/dirty defin­ ition. It is a ritual purification, cleansing oneself spiritually. I finally understood this definition by reading Eve Harris’s novel, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (2013).

References Berger, P. (2014). The Pious Ones – The World of the Hasidim and Their Battles with America. New York: Harper Perennial. Chaucer, G. (1965). The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, E. (2013). The Marrying of Chani Kaufman. Dingwall: Sandstone Press Ltd. Powell, M. (2006, June 4). Sons of The Father After the Satmar Grand Rebbe’s Death, a Tzimmes Grows in Brooklyn. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: www.washington post.com/archive/lifestyle/2006/06/04/sons-of-the-father-span-classbankheadafter-the­ satmar-grand-rebbes-death-a-tzimmes-grows-in-brooklynspan/aa308dc5-c333-4b0f-bb9b­ 31ca9ac1f4dd/ Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. London and Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp.25–27. Vizel, F. (2019, June 3). What Makes Shtisel So Accurate? [Blog post]. Retrieved from: https://friedavizel.com/2019/06/03/shtisel/

15

LIVING IN FLUX Matthew Crompton

I attended a talk a few years back by a septuagenarian scientist, blind from birth. He’d been born premature and placed immediately into a high-oxygen atmos­ phere in an incubator, and at that sensitive stage of development, the oxygen had caused irregular and terminal vascularisation of his retina without him ever seeing a single image. He talked about how people sometimes tried to explain visual concepts like the colour red to him, a person who never had and never would see it. ‘It’s like a tomato tastes,’ they’d say. ‘It’s like what being hot feels like.’ ‘People don’t understand that I don’t have that part of my brain,’ he said in the talk. ‘I know that it means something to them, but they can’t understand that I simply don’t have the capacity to grasp the sensation that they describe.’ I reflect on this often when people talk to me about the experiences of homesick­ ness. Though the discourses of ‘home and hearth’, and of nationalist territorial belonging to a particular state entity, are often taken (essentialistically) for granted, they are of course very recent cultural constructs, arising only with the Neolithic revolution about 12,000 years ago before intensifying in early modernity following the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. A simple internet search will reveal the at-least-superficially-popular contem­ porary rebellion against this notion of settledness, with the word ‘nomad’ (a Greek term originally signifying a people without fixed habitation, roaming in search of pasture) now featuring in everything from the names of travel insurance companies and tourism operators to travel clothing manufacturers and literally hundreds of personal travel blogs. Yet as Kannisto (2016, p.220) notes, ‘[t]ourism and migration studies are based on the assumption that people have a home,’ and it seems that the superficial appropriation of the term ‘nomad’ to refer to various types and dimensions of tourist activity remains firmly situated within that discourse.

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Though it explicitly suggests a kind of permanently unsettled and itinerant condition, this putative nomadism presents instead largely as a kind of shorthand for the increasing degree of physical mobility afforded (primarily) to citizens of the global North by cheap, ubiquitous air travel – enabled by their strong cur­ rencies and by the extensive visa-free international access granted by their pass­ ports – with the upshot of these citizens now consuming a far wider variety of global tourist experiences far more frequently than any other people in history. Yet this definition of tourism as a phase from which travellers necessarily return to an enduring home context (consisting not only of geography and nationality, but also of personal possessions and feelings consistent with a sense of member­ ship or belonging) serves to obscure a much rarer possibility: that this form of heightened mobility constitutes not just a temporary departure from home and hearth, but that it may be (or become) the defining feature and pre-eminent value of an extreme mobility lifestyle that, as Kannisto notes, ‘[challenges] the concept of travel’ itself (2016, p.230). This is to say: sometimes, tourists do not go home. As such, it’s important to draw distinctions from within that great mass of putative nomads: between those on a two-week holiday or gap year, and those whose entire lives have, over the course of decades, come to resemble a gap year that never ends. Likewise, within the populations residing at various points along that spectrum of ‘nomadicity’, crucial distinctions can and should be made in terms of the qualitative differences in the lives that these highly mobile indi­ viduals are living. In the case of those whose mobilities are truly extreme and enduring, observed lifestyles encompass everything from decades-long shoestring-budget drifting, to location-independent professionals living and working wherever they might find a suitable internet connection: the phenomenon of so-called ‘digital nomads’. I sit writing, now, in mid-2019, in a lush garden in a small town in the mountains of Colombia. Clouds hang over steep slopes carpeted in coffee bushes and, in the breeze, hummingbirds zip around, sucking nectar from the blossoms all around me. And as I sit here, performing an autoethnography of my own mobilities whilst in the midst of living them, I find it is important not only to examine where I fall, quantitatively and qualitatively, along that spec­ trum of putative nomadicity, but also to trace – in brief – the trajectory that has led me here. (Here: the physical place of hummingbirds and blossoms. But also, here: to my condition of nomadicity.)

Changing identities, shifting motivations I was born and grew up in the USA, in a small town in north-eastern Ohio that, even today, has barely more than 5,000 people. Ninety-eight percent White, overwhelmingly Christian, heteronormative and English-speaking, it was a place where ‘travel’ meant a visit to beaches in Florida or South Carolina, or in the most exotic and extreme cases – heard tell of only very rarely – perhaps

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a cruise to the Bahamas. It was not a place in which to develop cosmopolitan identities, or even to conceive of what a cosmopolitan identity might mean – the context of the place simply so homogenous, closed and totalising as to exclude it from meaningful consideration. The normal progression of schooling, marriage, career, children, and car- and home-ownership (typically in our home state and often in our same home town) was so monolithic that it admitted of internal variations, perhaps, but not of out­ right rejection. These assumptions about identity, belonging, nationality and the nature of the world at large were things that I looked at from the inside, embed­ ded in them and therefore largely without reflexivity or criticality. My sense of alienation as a weird, smart, atheistic kid, watching the various sanctioned kinds of conformity and productive/reproductive identities being enacted again and again, was profound, if inarticulate. My own identity, confused and inchoate, felt con­ structed in opposition to this dominant narrative and value system: I wasn’t sure where I belonged, exactly, but I was sure this wasn’t it. My exit was consistent with the discourse of escape found in many individ­ uals’ travel biographies (per Cohen & Taylor, 1992), and was not so much a movement-to as a flight-from, as Cohen (2011) suggests, pushed away from the alienation I felt. Graduating from university in Ohio at 21 years old, I moved two weeks later, at the instigation of a friend, to the San Francisco Bay Area, 3500km away. This was not exactly directing my own path, perhaps, but it differed enough from small-town Ohio. Living in a tiny studio apartment beside a noisy freeway in Oakland, I stumbled into an emerging identity-in-displacement: the anonymous transplant in a kaleidoscopically cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and richly multilingual urban agglomeration of more than six million people, populated in large part by anonymous transplants just like myself. If the construction of selfconcept or self-identity is a fundamentally dialogic ongoing process (per Mchwa, Frost & Laing, 2018) situated in contexts both geographical and social, what I discovered in this derangement of context was a nexus of potential reinvention based on choice and agency. These manifested themselves in where I chose to live, the relationships I engaged in (chosen, as opposed to those handed down to me from childhood and adolescence), and the narratives – for the first time in my life largely undetermined by the long history of my original home context and relationships – that I told as to what my life was about. Although I was enjoying my burgeoning sense of self-discovery in that new context, it was very much a work in progress, the baby fawn of my cosmopol­ itan identity wandering the Bay Area on its wobbly little legs, blinking in the sunlight of the bright wide world as I made new friends, waited tables, and tried to figure out just what my life there really ‘meant’. Yet just six month after moving to California, I found myself pushed further into a growing desire for reinvention, suffering a breakup with a partner that, as in the research of Maoz (2007), served as an impetus, in the form of emotional and psychological trauma, to further re-contextualise my self-concept.

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Why, in May 2005, I booked myself a ticket for a five-week trip to Guate­ mala is still somewhat obscure to me. I knew nothing, yet, about the world of backpackers – international ‘travellers’ – or the backpacker I myself was to become there. But there was something about the imaginaries of the country that drew me: its language and landscape and history; Spanish and volcanoes and black-sand beaches, and the ruins of ancient Mayan cities rising from the jungle. In contrast to the more or less passive flight from alienation that was the impetus for my move to California, this trip to Guatemala was very much a movementtoward, in which I consciously exercised an agency and actively sought a kind of reinvention as a ‘traveller’ (with muddy pretensions to worldliness floating halfformed in my mind). With a tattered 60-litre backpack borrowed from a friend and a journal full of early-20-something angst, Guatemala became my sandbox to explore and to make mine, if I could. As Desfroges (2000, p.929) citing MacCannell, observes, I was using international tourism ‘as a way of [intentionally] developing selfconsciousness about [my] place in the world, searching for “a … bigger pic­ ture … and thus … [my] place within it”’, not just through movement to a place different from my native context, but through glimpsing the world with­ out the lens of nationality and geography that had for so defined my sight.

Stumbling into reinvention When you are dropped blinking into the street-dog-haunted, ruin-strewn, col­ onnaded tourist city of Antigua, Guatemala, no one cares about the sordid backstory in which you have invested so much of your identity. No one knows the well-practised scripts of your autobiography, or indeed would know a true script from a false one if there were even absolutely such a thing. Enclavic, the bodies and stories of visitors from Denmark, Japan, the USA – and even Guatemala itself – meet up and part and come and go, in this mobile world-on-the-move composed of motley international transients variously drinking beer together. To me, then, our countries of origin and economic-productive identities seeming as incidental as our eye colour. And all this, then, was a revelation to me. The backpacker world that I found in Guatemala might have failed in its aspirations to being a Temporary Autonomous Zone of the type conceived of by anarchist writer Hakim Bey (2003), its pretensions to wholly eluding all formal structures of geographical and political control crumbling under a host of more- or less-visible social, governmental, linguistic and economic constraints. Yet even if it was an ersatz version of this ideal state, it was still the first thrilling inkling I had that such a place might exist at all. There on the road in the northern summer of 2005 we all spun in the space of our movement, for a moment unbound to our native geographies and to the work that we performed for money, to the flats or houses we lived in, to our tired possessions, and to the perceptions of the people that knew us ‘back home’. Per Deleuze and Guattari (1987), ours was an assemblage created each

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night, mutually invented and performed anew for each new acquaintance, and brought again and again into being with each bus we boarded – noisy with caged live chickens – to some new stop. The constantly-evolving and con­ stantly-substituted differences of the place, and of language, and of culture were so heightened as to defy our conscious unawareness of them for long. Was I a traveller? I was travelling, and so I was, I told myself, a traveller. What more to it could there be? To address some potential objections, I am more than aware of the criticisms of neo-colonialism embodied in this kind of travel. My Whiteness and my native English, my immense middle-class economic privilege (to say nothing of the privileges I enjoy as part of a largely heteronormative backpacker culture), as well as the effortless international mobility afforded by my passport from a wealthy industrialised country, are all incontrovertible facts that constitute a vast imbalance in power between myself and my poorer, Browner, and far more mobility-constrained hosts in Guatemala (or India, Nepal, or China, to all of which I journeyed for six continuous months just a year and a half later). Yet for my own part I did not and do not see a meeting-in-imbalance in itself as constitutive of pathology. A never-the-twain-shall-meet approach to rich and poor, to global North and South, places the forces and conditions of economics as primary over even the possibility of a mutually meaningful per­ sonal connection or cultural exchange in a way that, though it putatively criti­ cises the discourses and power structures of late capitalism, in fact implicitly holds them up and reinforces them as incontrovertible, and indeed superior to the force of our shared humanity. As such, I look for pathology or virtue in individual cases of intercultural interaction, and not in its general abstract forms. And though Bruner (1991, p.248) argues that ‘in the tourist encounter, the tour­ ist self is modified very little while the native self experiences profound change,’ I am far more inclined from my own experiences to align with the perspective presented by Mchwa, Frost and Laing (2018, p.23) that authentic ‘[s]elf­ transformations occurred where [travellers] could lose and re-invent themselves in different cultural settings … negotiating their different versions of self in the world.’

From traveller to lifestyle migrant Returning to San Francisco from my half-year backpacking journey through India, Nepal and China in the spring of 2008 – a trip in which I was ‘faced with challenging and at times possibly traumatising experiences, such as … bearing wit­ ness to extreme poverty, which could have the potential to dislodge a secure sense of self through feelings of guilt, failure, or hopelessness’ (Mchwa, Frost & Laing, 2018, p.16), I crashed headlong into the height of the Global Financial Crisis. Scraping through most of a year of intermittent unemployment in meaning­ less, poorly-paid temporary jobs doing data entry or waiting tables, I experienced not only a profound Marxian sense of alienation from my own

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labour, but also an increasingly pointed sense of alienation from my country of citizenship. Though the richest country in the world, the United States seemed unable to provide basic necessities like sustained employment and access to healthcare. I was uninsured, seriously depressed, and, unable to access counselling or other forms of treatment, increasingly plagued by suicidal thoughts. I wondered for the first time: what did the contract of citizenship even mean when a country was set up to make inessential luxuries like TVs cheap and basic necessities like healthcare unaffordable? With the egregious criminality, corrup­ tion, and general ugliness of the George W. Bush years as a backdrop, my estrangement from my identity as an American was profound, and I opportunistically leveraged the only forms of capital it seemed it could mean­ ingfully provide – my Whiteness and status as a native English speaker – into a job for which I was otherwise grossly unqualified and wholly unprepared: a primary school teacher in the public school system of Seoul, South Korea. I was now officially a lifestyle migrant. As Kannisto (2016, p.221) notes, lifestyle migrants differ from backpackers and other travellers who consume touristic experiences primarily for pleasure, in that they explicitly ‘leave their countries in order to search for a better quality of life’. And though lifestyle migration often occurs in a movement from lessto more-developed countries, my move to Seoul embodied an increasingly common kind of laterality: the ‘shopping’ of developed-world migrants for better social and economic conditions in other highly developed countries, the privileges of mobility afforded by our strong passports creating a kind of seamless internationality of access, the walls between countries increasingly soft perme­ abilities made only of paperwork and money. The intersectionality of English Language Teaching and mobility lifestyles is a well-documented phenomenon (see e.g. Codó, 2018), with the raging global appetite for unqualified, inexperienced English-speaking bodies creating the pro­ spect of easy mobility everywhere, albeit into wildly varying and typically diffi­ cult-to-foresee conditions; caveat magister. Yet the community of expatriates and home-country renunciates I befriended in Seoul sang similar songs about the elsewhere-sacrosanct idea of national belonging. ‘The job market in Glasgow? Yeah, that’s rubbish, and don’t even get me started on the Scottish diet …’ ‘Jacob Zuma, ugh. Just another mortify­ ing dickhead running South Africa into the ground …’ The Americans among us just exchanged a knowing nod; nothing more to be said. If being able to so easily decamp from your country of origin to where employment, healthcare and other foundational aspects of quality of life are materially better is a hallmark of membership in the contemporary class of the globally ‘mobile elite’, it is also a phenomenon of such increasing commonness that to view it primarily as a thing to which to ascribe value, good or bad, misses the importance of simply describing what this largely historicallyunprecedented degree of mobility means, suggests, and entails.

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For those of us transplanted and largely transitory weigookin (foreigners) living and working in Seoul, there was very obviously a seismic shift of values afoot, with the possibility of choice-enabling mobility and autonomy becoming prized and pre-eminent over traditional values such as ownership of a home or other prestige possessions, or of membership in a stable, enduring and geographicallysituated community. In part a reaction to the increasing insecurity of employment in the late-capitalist moment in which we found ourselves, large, immoveable and debt-producing possessions like homes and cars were regarded in my circle as liabilities. Who wants to be under a mortgage or car payment if the job market in Chicago, Auckland, Toronto, Jo’burg or Manchester suddenly tanks? Preserving the possibility of mobility was security, for so many of us.

Toward distributed communities That a sense of community remained an enduring social need for us (as the intensely social animals that human beings are), simply meant new forms of community and new ways of conceptualising what community meant. In part, it seemed a variation of the community-on-the-move that I had first found that heady summer in Guate­ mala. Just as much, it seemed composed of an Anglophone language community in which the possibility of deep mutual communication and of intimately knowing and being known by grew richly from the soil of our shared speech. As in the com­ munity-on-the-move in Guatemala, people and connections in our community in Seoul were always coming and going, a common and accepted feature in a group that embraced mobility and autonomy as pre-eminent virtues, necessary not only for a sense of self-fulfilment, but often also simply for economic survival. Moreover, though friends often left the group for destinations outside Korea, their presence was rarely negated, but only virtualised, and we all remained in frequent contact through Facebook, email and Skype, adding to those relationships we all maintained with friends and family ‘back home’. As Kannisto (2016) notes, the use of the internet and social media to maintain a geographically-widespread network of relationships is key supporting feature that enables an extreme mobility lifestyle, providing not only a distributed safety net in cases of need or misfortune, but helping to mitigate feelings of isolation that inevitably arise from frequent jumping from location to location. And though this is very much something I experienced in Seoul, as well as subsequently, I feel there is another feature of my time there that defines and describes the experience that I lived: that of the formation of an increasingly cosmopolitan identity admit­ ting of multiple forms and levels of societal membership.

Orbit memberships and cosmopolitan identities But if my only friendships and relationships in Seoul were with other native English speakers, it would constitute a very narrow form of cosmopolitanism indeed. In Seoul – an ultra-dense metropolitan area with a population equal to

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the entire country of Australia – I was immersed in the teeming electric heart of (South) Koreanness, swept up into the social, cultural and political life of the city, and brought into an increasingly deep network of friendships, acquaint­ ances, work relationships and in-passing daily interactions with the people who comprised the cells of that beating heart itself. As the cataclysm of the Korean War (1950–1953) had destroyed much of the nation’s physical culture, especially buildings and other heritage objects, people had thereby invested the Korean language (and especially its fantastically clever and literacy-enabling script, Hangeul) with an outsize cultural importance and significance. This meant that to speak and read it brought me into a kind of intimate contact with Koreanness, and a degree, however small, of genuine membership, recognition and belonging within the culture. Just as the various distributed English-language speech communities were a kind of home-identity and belonging for me, so too did even my transactional level of Korean language oracy and literacy come to form the basis of another kind of cultural membership, identity and belonging for me. Without going full Sapir-Whorf, I found that various idiomatic Korean practices, expressions and concepts – idioms that encapsulated and expressed meanings and nuances of meaning that were not and could never be fully translatable, and which were immovably situated in the context of the culture – slowly become a part of the way I saw and interacted with the world, and remain so even now, nearly a full decade later. My dialogic self, in Seoul, expanded to include the countless shared and situated qualia of Koreanness, and by embracing the webs of idiom­ atic social practices and norms, I gained not only a new sense of increasingly cosmopolitan identity, but a significant kind of membership in that cultural uni­ verse. It was tenuous, perhaps, but very real nonetheless. Indeed, I think it was in Seoul that I first truly settled into the feeling that to be apart from my native context was not a thing removed, but just another seamless experience that I was living within the unifying sense of phenomeno­ logical subjectivity that makes all spaces into a single unbroken place. Day by day by day, living and working in the city, inhabiting all my places and activ­ ities and roles and relationships, I found that ‘away from’ no longer meant ‘apart from’ for me. And to my increasing surprise, I felt more and more that I no longer required myself to be situated anywhere in particular in order to feel at home. Sometimes, rarely, in my daily routines amongst the city – going to work, my usual dinner haunts, transiting subway stops and parks and shops – I would see another non-Korean person, and their difference and non-Koreanness would immediately strike me as strange and foreign and out-of-place. What are they doing here? I would think instinctively, before realising that, on the outside, I appeared just the same. Only my insides had accommodated to this place in a way that I genuinely felt like here was mine, and that I truly belonged here as much as I did anywhere else on Earth.

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Kannisto (2016, p.223), citing Johnson, defines cosmopolitanism as ‘cultural literacy that enables individuals to negotiate the foreign and feel at home every­ where’, and though I gained money and friendships and an increasingly robust professional identity as an educator in my two years in Korea, it is this sense of cosmopolitan ease, this feeling of being-in-the-world, that seems the most profound legacy of my time there. It wasn’t a feeling wholly unamalgamated of any form of cognitive dissonance, of course, as my professional identity as an English teacher in Korea was one explicitly tied not only to my mother tongue (with all its various baggage), but also to the very Americanness that I felt so strongly no longer defined me. Yet, lingering dissonance or not, I left Korea for the road once again in March 2011, a deferred enrolment to a Master’s programme in Education await­ ing me a year later in Sydney, Australia. By then, travel had become not merely an instrumental thing for me; it was no longer mainly a way of alleviating alien­ ation or of securing a professional identity as a teacher rather than a waiter. Instead, by then, travel had become my way of inhabiting an ongoing liminal state richer in meaning and the possibilities for self-transformation than any set­ tled state I had ever known or experienced.

Life on the threshold Picture an object, a metal sphere perhaps, held at a perfect centre, suspended in space by the force of powerful magnets surrounding it. Now picture the whole apparatus in motion, as in a rocket, perhaps, blurring with speed. The sphere is still suspended in that perfect centre, self-contained in its own inalienable state of reference, perpetually moving yet poised within and never trespassing the boundaries that surround it. As an analogy for the liminality of travel, you could do far worse. I spent the next year travelling in Africa and Asia in a similarly liminal state, passing with my camera and notebook from one world to another and all the time feeding my experiences into the great fire of a professional travel writing and photography career that had been slowly growing since the end of my first year in Seoul. The kaleidoscopy of experience that year was a degustation, a peripatetic riot of constant and sometimes jarring difference, and yet in none of it did I ever feel truly apart. Using travel, and creativity within it, as an ongoing nexus of discovery and reinvention, I reimagined myself anew in each new place I ventured, in experi­ ences captured as narrative on the page or in my camera’s viewfinder. In the high-altitude desert of the Indian Himalaya one evening I slept out beneath the stars in a goat pen where some villagers had invited me to spend the night. There, I itched from the fleas in the borrowed woollen blanket that covered me against the deep chill of almost 4000 metres, and I struggled with the local lan­ guage, which was entirely impenetrable to me. But, scratching my dry desertravaged skin, staring up at the sky, and eventually falling asleep in that foreign

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mountain village, more than two days’ walk from the nearest road, I realised I felt no need of anything further. The moment, and I myself, were utterly and consciously full and complete.

Travel dilettante or global mobility bellwether? In January 2012, I arrived in Sydney with my backpack and execrable shoes to begin my Master’s degree, directly out of my year on the road. I hadn’t stopped ‘home’ between Korea and my arrival in Australia because, honestly, what home was there in Ohio? What succour would I seek from a return to some arbitrary geography that I did not carry within myself? Home was meaning, and meaning was to be found everywhere. Over the next seven years I would return to that state of liminality and creation of meaning again and again: to travel, to write, to create, to see the world and find myself within it anew, in repeated trips spanning six continents. And it is in this continued movement I have found a ‘home’ that is both everywhere and nowhere. I have consciously chosen a life and an identity that relies little on prevailing norms of economic production and on the discourses of ‘settling down’ and national belonging. Extreme mobility and its resultant liminal state do not represent, for me, the conditions of a fragmented or insecure identity. Instead, in nomadicity and lim­ inality, I find a wholeness that potentiates an ongoing creation of meaning. To say that such mobility obviates the potential for meaningful interpersonal relationships is to get things exactly backward, as I enjoy these relationships everywhere I go, both in-person and virtualised. My state of high mobility means that reunions with these valued others continually occur, each time generating fresh meaning in stops around the globe. More and more, I see aspects of my extreme mobility reflected in the lives of those around me and feel, as Kannisto (2016, p.221) notes, that my life may increasingly represent ‘a useful mirror of society … help[ing] us to understand where the world is now, and where it might be heading.’ Mine is a way of life centred on the ongoing creation of meaning through movement (as against eco­ nomic production and consumption), and on valuing mobility and intercultural competence not only as tools to facilitate that creation of meaning, but also to ensure economic livelihood and security in an increasingly changeable and glo­ balised world. To cite Tribe and Mkono (2017, p.109): For existentialists, authenticity is attained when a person is conscious of the mindless conformity that characterises society and transcends this con­ dition by choosing to pursue projects that grant meaning in life. Thus, existential authenticity embodies a state of psychological elevation; an assertion of true identity … [It] is intricately linked to personal identity, autonomy, individuality, self-realization and self-actualization … The con­ cept is ‘part of a long philosophical traditional concerned with what it means to be human’ … a search for who one truly wants to be, based on

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asserting one’s decisions and choices – living in harmony with one’s own sense of self, and being attuned with one’s individual experiences – instead of seeing the world through institutionalized frameworks … [E]xistential authenticity [is] eudemonic, relative, and dynamic. Thus, it is a highly nuanced, individual experience. It is also not something that one finds and retains, rather it must be pursued perpetually. I choose, in the end, to live in flux because in it I find meaning like nowhere else. If travel, for me, is a project that never ends, it is a project that, by that, is no different from any other in life. This is why I sit this morning in my small town in the Colombian mountains sipping rich coffee from a mug. The hills around me are green and lush and I am pursuing, endlessly, in another place, in another time, what it means to be, and to be myself, in the world.

References Bey, H. (2003). T. A. Z.: The temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Bruner, E.M. (1991). Transformations of the self in tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 18, 238–250. Codó, E. (2018). The intersection of global mobility, lifestyle and ELT work: A critical examination of language instructors’ trajectories. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(4), 436–450. Cohen, S. (2011). Lifestyle travellers: Backpacking as a way of life. Annals of Tourism Research, 38, 1535–1555. Cohen, S. & Taylor, L. (1992). Escape attempts: The theory and practice of resistance to everyday life. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kannisto, P. (2016). Extreme mobilities: Challenging the concept of ‘travel’. Annals of Tour­ ism Research, 57, 220–233. Maoz, D. (2007). Backpackers’ motivations – The role of culture and nationality. Annals of Tourism Research, 34, 122–140. Mchwa, M., Frost, W., & Laing, J. (2018). Travel writers and the nature of self: Essentialism, transformation and (online) construction. Annals of Tourism Research, 70, 14–24. Tribe, J. & Mkono, M. (2017). Not such smart tourism? The concept of e-lienation. Annals of Tourism Research, 66, 105–115.

16

IMAGINARIES Turkey, Australia, the world! Elham Zakeri

.‫ ﺳﺎﻝ ﺗﺼﻤﯿﻢ ﮔﺮﻓﺘﻢ ﺍﺯ ﺁﻥ ﮐﻮﭺ ﮐﻨﻢ‬۲۷ ‫ ﺟﺎﯾﯽ ﮐﻪ ﺩﺭﺁﻥ ﺑﻪ ﺩﻧﯿﺎ ﺁﻣﺪﻩ ﺍﻡ…ﺍﻣﺎ ﺑﻌﺪ ﺍﺯ‬،‫ﺍﯾﺮﺍﻥ ﺳﺮﺯﻣﯿﻦ ﻣﺎﺩﺭﯼ ﻣﻦ ﺍﺳﺖ‬ Iran is my motherland, where I was born, but after 27 years I decided to leave.

Introduction Neither leaving Iran nor the process of doing so was easy, but it seemed like the only way to move forward. Or it did to me, at least. This chapter tells the story of my journey, bringing a critical lens towards the imaginaries and hierarchies of place and identity that shaped my leaving and my arriving: leaving Iran (many times) and arriving in Australia (eventually). In this chapter, I share my stories as a woman in Iran and as an Iranian in Australia through self-interviews, consulting my diaries and social media pages, and writing from memory. At this point, it is important to mention that all the stories here (and generally) are reconstructions; I draw on memory and from notes made in the moment. As Grant (2010) points, the aim of autoethnography is to “create verisimilitude” (p. 578), which means that although the events appear in this chapter as I remember them, they may not be exactly what hap­ pened or how someone else might “read” the situation, because memory is flawed and, as storytellers, we are all positioned and partial. This is normal. What I remember is this: as Iranians, we looked up to foreigners. I didn’t know why. And also, back then, I didn’t think to ask why. This was long before I was acquainted with words like “imaginaries” (Taylor, 2002; Rizvi, 2011), “geographic imaginaries” (Said, 1978), and “Centre/Periphery” (Holli­ day, 2009). Whenever I saw tourists, I would rush up to talk to them, hoping to practice my English and thrilled to be able to communicate. I preferred blond, European-looking tourists, the women wearing their scarves in a funny way (or funny to me, at the time), and I noticed these tourists had a special

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“scent”, something you smell in a vintage clothes shop: sweet and bitter at the same time. To me, they represented something I longed for: the west. Blond hair and blue eyes were best because they embodied my imaginaries of the west. So, I yearned for the west without knowing quite why. For this reason, I strived to reach perfection in “their” language (i.e., English). (Did I know that Dutch and Swedish and French existed? I must have. But English was my focus.) And then, eventually, I crossed the border. I still remem­ ber that euphoria. What a night.

Turkish border, 2011 I remember it vividly. My first husband and I were heading to Georgia and we needed to cross eastern Turkey to get there. It was a cool autumn night, the middle of the night, and we were travelling by bus. When I got off at the border control, I remember feeling a cool wind on my face and the slight shiver that accompanied it; chilled, I wrapped my arms around myself as we queued at the little window for me to get my first ever stamp in my new passport. On the radio, a Turkish song played and the passport officer sang along; he looked happy. I greeted him in Turkish and he smiled broadly. But I was hap­ pier than this happy, singing man, because I was going to cross the border for the first time. He said, “Hoşgeldiniz”(welcome), and stamped my passport. So, there I was, about to cross a constructed, arbitrary line into a new land where I could be myself, or so I imagined. My husband was with me, so my freedom was still limited, of course. But I had crossed the border and I knew I was not in Iran anymore. I was almost dancing, though not openly because people were looking. I was smiling and laughing and so cheerful. It was a strange and lovely feeling. Beautiful. One thing I wanted to experience did not happen until much later, though: not wearing a headscarf and feeling the wind dancing in my hair. That came later. But that night I crossed the border. I was out of Iran and it felt great. I was not in the West, not yet, but I was not in Iran either.

Imaginaries “Social imaginary is a way of thinking shared in a society by ordinary people” (Rizvi, 2011, p. 228). Since social imaginaries are shared, they result in expect­ ations that frame individuals’ lived experiences, which then either correspond with, or differ from, the shared imaginary. Rizvi (2011) continues: “it is through the collective sense of imagination that a society is created, given coherence and identity, but is also subjected to social change, both mundane and radical” (p. 229). People’s social imaginaries are thus shaped by the narratives and stories prevalent in each community. The internet and media are partially responsible for shaping social imaginaries, particularly cultural notions of insider “selves” and foreign “others” but also socially constructed notions of acceptability, fairness, and freedom. In Iran, one example of negotiated normative social imaginaries is the enforced wearing of

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the hijab (headscarf). Crossing the border into Turkey, I longed for not wearing a scarf, which seems to be an increasingly shared feeling among Iranian women. Online movements actively (and peacefully) oppose the compulsory hijab, gath­ ering behind the #whitewednesdays hashtag, with women tagging pictures of themselves wearing white on Wednesdays, in solidarity with Masih Alinejad’s “my stealthy freedom” campaign (Hatam, 2017). This is indicative of people’s changing and negotiated social imaginaries.

English Language Institute, Tabriz, 2012 I am sitting in the interview room at the language institute to do the placement tests.

A tall young man enters with a piece of paper in his hand.

Hello, how are you today?

Hi, nice to meet you, I am fine, thanks.

ELLIE: Tell me about yourself.

STUDENT: Mmm, I am Ehsan. I am 22 years old. I study … no [laughs] … studied archi­ tecture at university. I am here to learn English, for TOEFL. ELLIE: Hmm, interesting. Why do you want to improve your English? EHSAN: English is the international language, and I want to go out of Iran to study, to live. ELLIE: Where do you want to go? EHSAN: [Laughs] … well, I like the US more, America, or maybe Europe, I am not sure. But if not, I wanna go to Turkey. It is better, you know, similar culture, food, good price, cheaper than dollar [laughs].” ELLIE:

STUDENT:

This conversation exemplifies a widely held Iranian notion about hierarchies of place. The West is held up as desirable, in common with many so-called “Periphery” cultures’ “geographic imaginaries” (after Said, 1978). This means that the West, as constructed socially, is perceived to have more kudos: it is somehow “better” than other places, promising more benefits for individuals who manage to migrate there or even visit. This, I think, was what attracted me towards blond, “Western” tourists in Iran.Geographic imaginaries are closely related to notions of the “Centre” and the “Periphery”, which are economic, cultural, and geopolitical labels rather than locational. Thus the global centres of cultural gravity – the centres of eco­ nomic and political power – comprise countries like the USA, the UK, Australia and Canada, even though these are geographically dispersed. But all attract tour­ ists and immigrants, and all use the language of global power: English. All of this confers high status in Iranian social imaginaries. The “periphery” countries are “the rest”, including countries like Iran. However, the notion of “Centre” is relative. This means that Turkey may be considered “Centre” to Iranians (because of its relative political and religious freedom) even as it is constructed as “easier” than the “West” (as it is closer, more affordable, and there are cultural similarities). As a result, Turkey is a popular tourist and student

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destination, granting a state of temporary freedom for those Iranians lucky enough to cross the border.

English Language Institute, Tabriz, 2013 So, what is your plan for the New Year holidays, Farnaz?

Oh, we are going to Turkey, Istanbul.

ELLIE: Hmmm, interesting, what are you going to do there?

FARNAZ: You know what? I am so excited. I have even thought about what to wear

each day. I am taking all the skirts and tops I can’t wear here. And I have learnt differ­ ent ways of doing my hair. It is going to be great. And since we go as a big family, we will go to discos and I’ll dance all night with my cousins. I am sure you have seen in Turkish series that they have nightlife in Turkey and Istanbul Geceleri [Istanbul Nights] is famous! [She starts singing a song in Turkish.] ELLIE: Alright, speak English all the time, that’s the motto in this class, remember? FARNAZ: Sorry teacher, I am just excited. And oh, I have been practicing Turkish to speak when we are there. I watch all their dizileri [series]. You should watch them too. They are soooo good. ELLIE:

FARNAZ:

At home, 2013 Daddy, has Turkey always been better than Iran?

Oh, no. I remember in the Shah’s time, they were poor and Iran was where a lot of

Turkish people wanted to go. But then things changed after the [1979] revolution. ELLIE: What happened? DAD: Well, we got more limited. And Turkey got more secular. I still think that if the revolution hadn’t happened, we would be in a better situation now. ELLIE: Then, why did you make it happen? Not you. I mean your generation? DAD: Oh, don’t start me on that, please! ELLIE: DAD:

English Language Institute, Tabriz, 2015 My fascination with English and the West as a better place to live grew over time. Its pinnacle was when I wanted to get a divorce. Sitting by myself after my last class in the language institute, I ask myself, “Why am I trapped in this marriage, in this country? If only I had been born in another country.” I’ve always thought life is much “better” in Turkey, in France, in Australia; literally anywhere but Iran. Especially for women fighting for a divorce! I have been trying hard for more than a year to find a PhD position somewhere in the world. To escape. So far, nothing. It is getting late. I need to go home. But honestly, I don’t want to.

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I visualise the airport scene, as I do obsessively: I am leaving Iran. I feel free. I’m in a window seat with no scarf on, up in the clouds. There is no ring on my left hand. The hope makes me smile and I pack up to go home.

At home, 25th May 2015 (exactly!) It was a beautiful spring Monday morning and I woke up to birdsong outside my window. I lay there for a while thinking about life, my unhappy marriage, my attempts in the last two years to escape Iran by winning a scholarship to study for a PhD in some corner in the world, and all the emails I’d sent to different universities. Eventually, I got out of bed to check my emails, dragging myself towards my laptop – lethargic and sleepy – losing hope. This had become my morning routine.A dozen emails awaited me, and as I scrolled down, I saw the name of an Australian university. I’d been awaiting a reply on the outcome of my scholarship application. My heart pounded. My breathing felt ragged.My hands trembled. I took a deep breath and opened the email. I shut my eyes. Prayed. Reopened my eyes.And I read, “Congratulations Elham! You have won a scholarship.” I froze. I could not breathe.My chest felt tight, like having a heart attack. Then I started shouting, jumping up and down, laughing, crying, making sounds with­ out meaning: joy, happiness, shrieking, laughing – all this tumbling from me. I did not know what to do, who to call, who to share it with. But then, who else could I call but my mum? The dream had come true. I had won a scholarship. But now the question was whether I could now make it happen. Could I go chase my dreams?

Requesting an extension, 2015 To: UNSW School of Education, research student coordinator From: Elham Zakeri Re: PhD enrolment extension Date: 29th July 2015 Hello, I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to let you know about a classical 21st century tragedy – not written by Aeschylus, Sophocles or even Euripides – but imposed upon me by the official law of my country. I am, indeed, writing to seek your highly-sought advice. For a good number of months – long before I was informed about UNSW’s scholar­ ship – I have had serious problems with my husband and I have been trying to convince him to terminate our marriage by reaching a compromise. According to Iran’s law which is entirely patriarchal, your husband can divorce you but you cannot obtain a divorce your­ self. I’ve already filed for divorce and my lawyer is helping me to get divorced so that I will re-gain my freedom to leave the country.

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The laughably stupid and totally insane problem is that I cannot leave Iran unless the Master – my husband – allows me. He has confiscated my passport and intends to lengthen the process of the divorce so that I will lose my scholarship. I am sending this email to inform you that I will do my best to arrive there on time but if I did not succeed, what would be the best solution according to rules and regulation of university for me? I really do not want to miss this opportunity; I am really enthusias­ tic to come to UNSW and do my PhD there. The minute I read about being granted a scholarship, I was over the moon and it felt like Alice in Wonderland. This is the request of a woman who doesn’t possess her freedom, is in acute distress and is fighting tooth and nail to pursue her academic dreams. I look forward to hearing from you.

English Language Institute, Australia, December 2015 I came out of Iran, happy, triumphant and proud, but my Iranian identity came with me too.My dream has come true and I’m in Australia doing a PhD and teaching English part-time at my university’s language institute, where most of the students are Chinese. I told the first class I taught here that I was from Iran and I received cold, “Aha”s. So, I have decided not to reveal it any more. In the last session, after students insisted on knowing where I was from, I asked them to guess. Among their conjectures, I ended up being French. They seemed content enough. And I felt happy to be a non-native English speaker from a country associated with the “Centre” rather than “Periphery”. So, I can be French. That’s fine. My English is good enough and I speak enough French, but also there’s my semi-Caucasian look and above all, my gained confidence. I performed a French identity and it worked. I chose to fit in that role, under those circumstances because I had an “imagining” of the students’ expectations/imaginaries and I was happy with that identity, too. I exerted “identity agency” (Hitlin & Elder, 2007) to perform who I desired to be at that particular situation. Luckily, my students didn’t know much about France, or the French, and didn’t question my story. But I asked myself: why am I trying to distance myself from my Iranian identity anyway? Why should a comment like, “Oh, you look so different! You can pass for Australian. You had a Middle-Eastern look before. But now, the hair, the clothing, the look …” make me so happy?

Western Union Remittances Service, 2017 But not everyone would believe my origin-story lie. Sometimes, I was still Iranian. When my Bangladeshi friend left Australia, she still had some money to be refunded to her, and I offered to receive it for her and transfer it to her through Western Union. It’s easy, she assured me. And so, on a Thursday, I lined up at the Post Office in my suburb with my passport and the cash. But while a WU transfer was easy for her, it was impossible for me. “You cannot transfer the money because you are from Iran,” the Post Office assistant told me. She typed in some words/numbers to the computer and then told me, “The transfer is not possible for someone holding an Iranian passport.” I looked

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around and wished that no one in the queue heard that. My cheeks turned red. Then she

asked,

Are you an Australian citizen?

No.

ASSISTANT: Maybe we can try your driving licence.

ASSISTANT: ELLIE:

My trembling, confused hands dived into my purse to find my Australian driving licence

that I had got as another sign of independence. I was feeling the weight of the people in

the queue staring at me by now. I handed over my New South Wales driver’s licence.

Thank you. Let’s try this.

[Making a prayer sign with my hands] I hope this works.

ASSISTANT: ELLIE:

I hear the keyboard keys clicking and feel sweat dripping down my spine.

No, this doesn’t work, either.

[Asking naively] But what is the problem?

ASSISTANT: Well, WU doesn’t work with Iran, because of the sanctions, you know? I’m

sorry. Next, please. ASSISTANT: ELLIE:

I felt so embarrassed and confused; I did not know what to say. I thanked the assistant and left with sweaty palms, lots of humiliation, and so much fury. I came out of the Post Office without looking at anyone in the queue behind me, fearing someone might recognise me and feel my shame. Then I burst into tears. All I knew was: it was not fair. Later, a Vietnamese friend did the transfer for our mutual Bangladeshi friend. It took her five minutes. It is amazing how a person’s nationality can limit their potential. I was born in Iran and I currently hold an Iranian passport, and this denies me opportunities. In Iran, I was denied many things because I am a woman, and in the wider world I am denied things because I am Iranian. Neither category – Iranian or woman – was my choice, of course.

The other side of the coin In Iran, there is plenty of discrimination against women, and in the “West”, there is plenty of discrimination against Iranians. Nevertheless, I do not consider myself unlucky. In fact, I acknowledge the multi-faceted, intersectional nature of the privilege I have enjoyed in my life. I was born into a family where my parents were teachers and school principals. Education is highly valued in my family, and I had the opportunity and resources not only to go to school but also to pursue higher degrees. In addition, my proficiency in English (and some in Turkish and French, too!) opened doors. Beyond helping me win my schol­ arship, my English proficiency has earned me a living in Iran but also in

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Australia, teaching ESL. This is because my dad enrolled me in extra-curricular English classes since I was a child. Last but not least: I eventually divorced my Iranian husband and, since coming to Australia, I have remarried, and my new husband is an Australian citizen. This means that Australian permanent residency is much easier for me than it is for so many other international students, many of whom worry about how to stay on in Australia after they finish their studies. For me, in contrast, the path to Australian citizenship is much clearer. And obtaining an Australian passport will eventually solve most of my visa problems, such as when I attend conferences in Europe and have to fill out reams of visa paper­ work. (An Aussie passport would also let me send money via Western Union, of course!)

Coffee shop, Sydney, 2019 A friend calls me, sounding upset and I agree to see her in an hour at a café. We buy coffee, settle down, and speak in Persian. This is a translation: What is wrong, Niloo?

You know we have been looking for jobs, but in vain. There seems to be no job for

me or my husband. I finished my PhD five months ago. My husband was made redun­ dant in his casual job two months ago. A casual job, you know? Not an engineering position, in his field. It’s shameful.

ELLIE:

NILOO:

Niloo is about to cry. I take her hand in mine and squeeze it gently. I know it must be hard for you, but it’s going to be fine. We have chosen to immi­ grate and we need to stay strong. NILOO: [Impatiently] I know, I know … but it does not end there … my husband needs to study for his English exam too. We need it to get a PR [Permanent Residence]. We came here in the hope of a better life, but now? What if we can’t do it? What if we are forced to return [to Iran]? ELLIE:

Niloo is sobbing now, tears streaming down her cheeks. Why were we born in Iran? Why did they make the revolution happen? I am tired, so far from my family, all alone here, jobless. And my visa expires soon.

NILLO:

I point out to Niloo that she has her husband, she is not alone – imagine actually being here all alone, without our husbands? And she sobs, imagining. And, I tell her, her husband has hope for his visa – their visa – because of his engineering degree and the English certificate. I lift her chin and smile and open my eyes wide and she smiles back at me, a little. But I am speaking from a position of great privilege – my Australian hus­ band and my own easy pathway to PR – and Niloo and I both know it.

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Concluding remarks Power relations, imaginaries of places, the politics of identity: these themes have permeated my story. Social imaginaries of place are deeply held and deeply political, and if you are an Iranian woman – like me – you may come to see yourself as lesser. This may be a construction, but it has the power to grip and seize and injure. Bringing an awareness of these larger, structural issues of power to individual stor­ ies is important. It can be revolutionary. Back in Iran, I was escaping an unhappy marriage and the ensuing “divorcee” identity; I did this through luck and education. But there is a belief in Iran that “once your daughter is divorced, you need to watch her more carefully”. I had heard this a lot since I mentioned getting divorced. And so my story could have been so different. Maybe if I had not been in an unfulfilling relationship, I would still be in Iran now, working in a language insti­ tute or at a university, speaking my mother tongue, and sharing the difficulties as well as the sweet moments with my dear ones. Perhaps, without my divorce, I would not have pushed as hard to escape and Australia might have remained “the land of kangaroos”, nothing else. Instead, here I am in Sydney, in the final throes of my PhD, with a new, two-member family (my second husband and I). Soon, I will be Dr Elham Zakeri, Australian citizen. Society will see me differently, but underneath the layers of constructed meaning, I am still myself.

References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Vol. 1). Minne­ apolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foltz, R. C. (2016). Iran in world history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, A. (2010). Writing the reflexive self: An autoethnography of alcoholism and the impact of psychotherapy culture. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 17, 577–582. Hatam, N. (2017). Why Iranian women are wearing white on Wednesdays. Accessed 25/ 06/2019 from: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-40218711 Hitlin, S., & Elder, G. H. (2007). Time, self, and the curiously abstract concept of agency. Sociological Theory, 25(2), 170–191. Holliday, A. (2009). English as a lingua franca, ‘Non-native speakers’ and cosmopolitan realities. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), English as an international language: Perspectives and peda­ gogical issues (pp. 21–33). Bristol and Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters. Rizvi, F. (2011). Beyond the social imaginary of ‘clash of civilizations’? Educational Philoso­ phy and Theory, 43(3), 225–235. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Taylor, C. (2002). Modern social imaginaries. Public Culture, 14(1), 91–124.

17

DE-CHINESE AND RE-CHINESE Negotiating identity Ying (Ingrid) Wang

An immigrant In the last two decades, significant numbers of people from increasingly varied backgrounds have immigrated to New Zealand for a multitude of purposes. New migrants often face challenges in reformulating their identities in their new country. The process of integrating into the host country’s culture involves compromising expectations, losing one’s own culture and customs, suffering from discrimination, and possibly learning a new language and new cultural norms. This process can be complex and often stressful. Identity formation is a dynamic, multi-layered process which is ideologically and socially constructed (Liu, McCreanor, Mclntosh & Teaiwa, 2006). In October 2002, I was still living in my hometown, a city called Hangzhou in China. I was highly stressed about the long hours I was working on a number of projects as an interior architect, so I applied for a student visa to New Zealand – a country I had never really known much about. When my offer to study there came through I was filled with excitement, tempered with some anxiety. I bought a one-way flight ticket as soon as I could, organised my luggage under my parents’ worried gaze and came to New Zealand alone with­ out knowing a single person in the country. I was one of the new Chinese migrants who benefited from New Zealand’s “open door” policy, established in 1987 with a view of migration as a means for economic benefit (Ip, 1995; Liu, 2010). After the initial excitement of being in a new country, I soon realised the challenges I faced in terms of cultural, linguistic, social, and political adjustment in this foreign land. In the early years after my arrival, my life changed dramatically and my sense of identity was badly shaken. I was struggling as the only Asian international stu­ dent in my design programme. I was also very confused. My beliefs from my

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upbringing and education in a communist country were challenged after dis­ covering how much information had been hidden by the authoritarian regime. I was shocked and disappointed by the reality of being a Chinese new graduate in the job market in New Zealand, a time when I regularly encountered dis­ crimination. I became depressed from being used as cheap labour in my first design job, and later, anxious about my expectations for a career in my first aca­ demic job. I was destroyed by the grief of losing my sense of myself in this society. After fighting with depression and the grief of losing the old me, I engaged in arts-based research exploring my identity. I was reborn as a wounded researcher and became the first registered immigrant Chinese clinical arts therapist in New Zealand. Later, when I was working with other recent immigrants as a therapist, I realised that my challenges and struggles as a new generation Chinese immi­ grant were not unique. I came to see the therapeutic process with my clients as a mirror of my own identity displacement experience. This study aims to under­ stand the identity formation journey of a Chinese immigrant therapist through an arts-based autoethnographic framework.

De-Chinese It was a hot and sticky day. Everyone in the meeting room seemed impatient because of the stifling weather. Around the meeting table, I was the only Asian face among my Pā kehā (descendant of European settler) colleagues. I sat as straight as I could and put my notebook in front of me carefully. I was always careful, and always worked harder than I should. I knew it was not easy for an immigrant to have an academic job. As a minority, I tried my best to fit in within my work environment. In this meeting, I realised however hard I tried, I just could not fit in. One of the agenda items for this meeting was about stu­ dent feedback. My manager looked at me and said: “A student made a complaint about your accent and the student did not come to your class enough because he was unable to understand your accent.” At that moment in that meeting room, I wished I was not Chinese. I could not hear my colleagues’ conversations because I was still reeling in shock and shame triggered by this comment from my manager. While their conversation in the meeting faded into the background, I replayed the comment in my mind over and over again. I knew which student it was. I wanted to explain that he was the only one not coming to my class enough and he did not go to his other classes often either. I wanted to use my other students’ comments about my teaching to defend myself. However, I said nothing. I knew my Chinese accent would make my explanation or argument powerless and pointless. I dreamed of having perfect English with a local accent. I even wished I had not learned Chinese in the first place so no one would laugh at my accent. In the early years of my immigration, I was afraid to make phone calls to the bank or power company as I had several unpleasant experiences – I could almost imagine the thunder between the call

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centre workers’ eyebrows through their stern, impatient voices. I studied hard and tried hard to improve my spoken English. But the more I tried the more disap­ pointed I was. I found I could never get rid of my accent. I needed to “shut up” (Figure 17.1) In that meeting room, my accent covered my mouth. I did not want to de-Chinese myself but I felt I had to. I have tried to remem­ ber when I started to “de-Chinese” myself in order to fit in within my adopted land. I could not remember the exact time, but I could remember why. When I had just graduated from my Master of Design degree, I tried to find an architec­ tural design job in Wellington. I prepared my portfolio and CV carefully and pro­ duced a nice portfolio book. I sent my job application to a number of architectural companies who advertised suitable positions. I was pretty confident as I had years of work experience and strong computer rendering skills, but after several weeks I had no response from any of these companies. One of my Chinese friends asked me if I put my English name on my application. I said I did not have an English name. He suggested that I choose an English name and put it on my CV. Feeling somewhat dubious, I decided on an English name for myself and put my new English name on my CV and application. To my surprise, within a week I was offered interviews by several companies. I have witnessed many of my Chinese immigrant friends adopt Western names for a number of reasons. For me, it was the pressure to change my name to fit in, in this case in order to find a job.

FIGURE 17.1

Shut up, Ying (Ingrid) Wang, 2016 (String on canvas).

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My Chinese name, Ying (缨), has a special symbolic representation in Chinese language, essentially meaning standing out. Chinese names are very personal and have complex meanings, unlike the simple etymological underpinnings of many European names; therefore, the relationships between identity and names with Chinese names are different from those of European names (Edwards, 2008). In a Chinese person’s name, there are the hopes of the parents and references to per­ ceived characteristics and personality which are tied to one’s personal identity (Sigelman & Shaffer, 1995). Personal names in China are usually chosen by parents or grandparents with a great deal of care (Edwards, 2008). However, as a result of the difficulty I experienced trying to find work in New Zealand using my ethnic first name, I had to give up that part of my personal identity. I had the opportun­ ity to change my last name when I married my husband, who is of European des­ cent, but I was not willing to. Somehow, I wanted to de-Chinese myself to fit in, but I did not want to disconnect from my identity by losing my ethnic name entirely. I have always struggled to connect with my adopted English first name. For quite a while, when people called me by my English name, I did not respond as I did not feel that I owned that name. When I first started publishing my aca­ demic articles, I did not know which name to put on. If I only put my English name on, I did not feel I owned the article. If I put my Chinese name on, I knew quite a few of my professional colleagues would not know I was the author. After a while, I started to use brackets: Ingrid (Ying) or Ying (Ingrid). I had trouble deciding which name should go first: my Chinese birth name or my adopted Eng­ lish name. I kept changing the order. I never felt fully comfortable with my adopted English name, so I kept my Chinese birth name when I applied for New Zealand citizenship with no way of knowing what struggles I could face because of this decision. I have had to keep explaining to work colleagues and clients about how I use my adopted English name for my professional identity, and my birth name for legal documents. From my struggle to settle with my names, I realised more and more that the battle I have with my names represents my battle with my identities: should I de-Chinese or re-Chinese? For some years, I only read English books because I wanted to write in Eng­ lish professionally. I only watched English movies because I wanted to mimic a perfect English accent regardless of whether it was British or American. I see my process of de-Chinesing myself as echoing other Chinese immigrants’ experiences. Through an autoethnographic lens, Yee (2016) narrates her life experience in New Zealand as a young girl who was educated to be more like a New Zealander by prevailing Pā kehā society norms – Weet-Bix for breakfast, lamb chops for “tea”, rugby for entertainment and barbeques for the weekend – to be more like a Pā kehā . Yee’s life experience in New Zealand as “Chinese” also diminished her identity because of her differentness and strangeness to Pā kehā society. She states: “we grew up believing that being Chinese was a matter of shame” and “we were raised to be quiet, law-abiding, self-sufficient, hardworking and respectful of authority” (Yee, 2016, p. 15). I de-Chinese myself in order to be invisible instead of being different and strange.

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I wanted to be more Pā kehā so I disconnected from my Chinese identity pur­ posefully. I kept away from Chinese art practice even though I learnt Chinese ink painting and calligraphy when I was a young child. I painted in Western art mediums such as oil and watercolour with subjects which might be more acceptable to Western audiences. I even forced myself to eat more cheese in order to develop a Western sense of taste. I was shamelessly de-Chinesing myself in order to be more Westernised. I was craving acceptance as an equal in a Western society. Soon, I found I was the only Chinese person in many situ­ ations – the only Chinese person working for a high-profile architecture com­ pany, the only Chinese lecturer in the design school; the only Chinese person on the street I lived on; the only Chinese face in the conference I attended. Ironically, despite how much I wanted to fit in, I was always standing out as the only Chinese person in the crowd. The notion of “home” for immigrants is based on the concept of an emo­ tional place of sense of belonging (L. S. Liu, 2014). Lack of the sense of belong­ ing in a host country, usually presenting as “being different” or “not belonging”, leads to “cultural homelessness” (Navarrete & Jenkins, 2011). The

FIGURE 17.2

Flooded, Ying (Ingrid) Wang, 2016 (Oil on board).

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process of migration has critical emotional impacts on “a space of comfort and cultural fit” (Butcher, 2010). For a long time on my immigration journey, I could not find a place of comfort and cultural fit. I could not find a sense of belonging as a Chinese immigrant. In that meeting room, the reality finally hit me hard – however much I tried to de-Chinese myself, I felt I would always be singled out as a Chinese person. In this foreign land, I cannot be the same as others because I am who I am. My shunning of my Chinese identity had come at a cost. I was totally lost. I did not know who I was. Disconnecting from and burying my Chinese identity made me depressed and unwell. I was like a tree that had cut its own roots deeply. Without my roots, I could not grow and be strong and healthy. My suppressed Chinese self was crying inside of me – asking, “Why did you forget me?” (See Figure 17.2) I struggled with my work­ load because I pushed myself too hard trying not to be singled out as a Chinese person. I was burnt out.

Flooded I was sitting in my office alone Pressed between narrow, high brick walls With just a tiny window Endless piles of assignments for marking And a stack of unfinished papers I cannot look behind me to make sense of A strange sound From the almost opaque high window Who is calling me Calling to break through the false reality I was sitting in my office alone My tears flooded out Destroyed by my foolish aspirations Imprisoned in the fake identity Somehow Still inspired by my willingness to change Ying (Ingrid) Wang In my little office, the weight of all my frustrations finally broke my resolve and I cried. And yet somehow, I could feel in that dark and depressing little room, something/someone was calling me – a strong but gentle hand was trying to help me get out of the darkness and depression.

Re-Chinese Art saved me from that little office. When I was depressed, my GP prescribed pink coloured anti-depressants for me. Looking at the little pill in my hand,

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I refused to accept it. I could not rely on this pink pill to change chemicals in my mind in order to make me better. That pink pill was trying to tell me that I needed to treat the chemical imbalance in my brain rather than looking for the real causes of my depression (Hari, 2018). However, what really was imbalanced in me was the Chineseness within myself, in my life as a Chinese immigrant living in the Western culture of New Zealand. Living in Western culture as an immigrant, I had become disconnected from my root culture and I was isolated in my adopted culture. The disconnection, loneliness and grief made me depressed. In the depths of depression, it was like walking in a dark forest and I needed a light to guide me out. I decided to open my heart to what I had forgotten. I entered the spaces of art-making willingly to engage with realisations and awakening moments (Green, 1980). “A certain attitude” is required from me, “if the sound and the light are to become available to consciousness” (Green, 1980, p. 316). This certain attitude was in the ancient Chinese philosophical thinking of Taoism – “a willingness to let something be” (Levine, 2015, p. 17). “Wu-wei” (no-action) is not about doing nothing but being present and living experience fully without determined goals (Levine, 2015). I did not know what I was looking for, I even did not know what I had forgotten. I trusted the process, the process of finding unknown and unexpected possibilities. In the little studio in my garden, I could see the trees changing colours through different seasons. I like to listen to music and make art, especially on rainy days. It was spring, the trees I looked out on from my studio window appeared tender and green in the rain. I closed my eyes listening to the rain­ drops on the leaves. With my eyes closed, I saw an image in my mind: I was walking in a bamboo forest in my hometown, Hangzhou. The rain gently washed the dirt off the bamboo leaves. The smell in my nostrils was of the wet soil where the juvenile bamboo shoots were hidden. Everything around me, in my imagination, was so gentle and comfortable. In the next second, in my imagination, I was on a bridge. I had walked across the six bridges of West Lake in my hometown so many times, but it was so blurry in my mind. I wanted to keep the comforting image, but it was fading. In my studio, I tried to capture this warmness and comfort in my art-making. I poured some ink out in a bowl. Then, I closed my eyes and let my fingers feel the coldness of the ink. With my eyes closed, I started to smell something very pleasant and familiar – the smell of the ink. When I was a young child, I learnt Chin­ ese calligraphy and brush painting; one of the important lessons of calligraphy is how to make Chinese ink from an ink stick and ink stone, as every callig­ raphist and artist has their preferences for the thickness of the ink by reducing or increasing the time spent grinding the ink stick on the ink stone. My desire for using ink became stronger. Responding to my desire to use ink, and keep­ ing the comforting image in my mind, I started painting, with water and ink, on that rainy day (see Figure 17.3).

De-Chinese and re-Chinese

FIGURE 17.3

169

Bridges in the rain, Ying (Ingrid) Wang, 2017 (Ink and watercolour on

paper).

It is raining again I am quietly listening to the rain The sound of rain seems familiar In a dim vision I see my hometown The six bridges That long dyke around the lake And that soft rain I am walking on the bridges again I am pushing the bike which I miss On my eighteen-year-old face Raindrops dampen my cheek It is raining again I am quietly listening to the rain The sound of rain reminds me I was once singing my mother’s song In that soft rain Ying (Ingrid) Wang The sound of the rain and the temperature of the air relaxed me. With a bamboo brush in hand, I started singing my mother’s song in my mother-tongue. While

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singing that song, I remembered how beautiful-sounding my language is. As the smell of the ink wafted into my nostrils, I remembered how much I loved to prac­ tice writing Chinese in ink. I realised the empowering comfort of my mothertongue. Connecting to the memory of singing my mother’s song, I remembered what I had forgotten – my Chineseness inside me. Without the Chinese part of me, I cannot be myself. Li, Hodgetts and Ho (2010) research the place-based identity connections between physical place and daily practice through exploring domestic gardening activities among elderly Chinese immigrants in New Zealand. Through this study, the vegetable beds in these old Chinese migrants’ gardens are memory beds, especially when they grow seeds from China: “thus the roots of a garden spread out through time and space providing grafts between the past, present and future” (Li, Hodgetts & Ho, 2010, p. 789). I do not have a vegetable bed at my home, but now I have an art-making table with my ink, bamboo brush, rice paper and stamps with my Chinese name on them. My art-making table can be compared to the vegetable beds for the older Chinese immigrants in New Zealand; I plant seeds from my Chineseness in my art, and let them grow stronger in my art and in my heart. In the dark forest, art-making showed me the way to get out. I picked up again many things I once wanted to give up. I painted in Chinese ink again. I practiced calligraphy by copying ancient Chinese philosophy books. I went to Chinese res­ taurants looking for my comfort food. I watched Chinese programmes to learn social facts about contemporary China. As an immigrant, my identity formation is associated with everyday encounters with “different people, ideas, languages, and cultural norms” (Wang, 2016, p. 132). Immersing myself in my forgotten Chinese culture as part of everyday life in my adopted culture has reconnected me to the Chineseness in me. I am as a tree, I re-grow. As my roots grow deeper I become stronger through the process of re-Chinesing myself. I used my re-Chinesing pro­ cess as part of my Master’s research in clinical arts therapy, and became the first registered Chinese arts therapist in my programme. Through arts and my efforts to re-Chinese myself, my Chineseness was reborn in me. Re-connecting with my Chineseness in my adopted land has made me proud of the Chinese part in me. In conferences, I have joked about my Chinese accent, and injected it into academic topics. Through my audiences’ laughter and tears, I have sensed their empathy and acceptance of my Chinese accent and my Chineseness. I have used my accent scar as a therapeutic tool while working as an arts therapist with immigrant and international students. By sharing my shame, scars and growth, my clients and I learn to re-Chinese together for recovery. When I was working with clients from other cultural backgrounds such as Pā kehā and Mā ori, I did not hide my Chineseness, but introduced many elem­ ents of Chinese wisdom into my clients’ recovery journeys. In my clients’ eyes, I saw their curiosity and appreciation. At home, I am proud of my Chinese identity and teach my children to speak Chinese and embrace Chinese culture

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by celebrating Chinese festivals. In my children’s smiles, I see their pride and joy. In my art, I find my voice through Chinese arts mediums and use my arts to inspire other immigrants who are sharing this de-Chinese and re-Chinese journey. Through my arts, I see myself.

Third space between de-Chinese and re-Chinese I am an immigrant living between my root culture and host culture, between de-Chinese and re-Chinese, constantly undergoing transformation within the hybrid identity formation process. In this adopted land, I am a member of a cultural minority struggling within the negotiation of my identity formation. Bhabha’s concept of third space (Bhabha, 1994) and Turner’s concept of lim­ inality (Turner, 1967) provide the theoretical ground for me to study the complicated and endless transformations occurring within immigrant identities. Bhabha (1994) argues that hybridity between neither and nor is valuable for transformation between cultural differences. As an immigrant and arts-based researcher, art-making supports me to be in the in-betweenness. The deChinese and re-Chinese processes keep coming back into this liminal space as a way for me to negotiate and understand my identity formation journey in the adopted land. There are tensions between my de-Chinese and re-Chinese processes. I deChinese to be more adopted in my host culture, and re-Chinese to be more alert to my root culture. Between survival and the desire for being who I am, I often find myself experiencing moments of panic and tension between the cul­ tural differences, in the process of negotiating and transforming (Bhabha, 1994). Developing from Turner’s liminality, Bhabha’s in-between concept as a changeable third space responds to immigrants’ everyday experiences of dealing with changeable elements such as language barriers, culture shock and discrimin­ ation within the host culture (Kalua, 2009). My de-Chinese and re-Chinese pro­ cesses represent the ambiguous in-betweenness of the transformative nature of my identity formation as the results of my negotiation with my daily encounters with people and my surroundings. Hongyu Wang, in her book The call from the stranger on a journey home, seeks her identity in a third space which she called home. Wang (2004) states “home itself can be a third space … in which the self and the stranger transform each other … embracing the conflicting double” (p. 9). Wang (2004) uses third space to answer the question of her own identity as a hybrid Chinese-American facing issues from leaving her country for overseas and then attempting to return. In her journey of exploring her identity, Wang (2004) found that her identity has become “not either, not both, more than either, than both” (p. 1). In my own immigration journey, I was looking for home or a sense of belonging in my adopted land through my de-Chinese and re-Chinese process where my identity becomes a changeable partial rather than a fixed whole. Art-making captures the changeable partial identity formation moments and transfers them into

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observable fragments of who I am becoming in visual or poetic languages where I can observe and reflect on my identity formation process. Similarly, in New Zealand, Chinese immigrants in modern times develop and maintain a hybrid identity (Ip, 2006). Different from immigrants earlier in the country’s history who could be very isolated, Chinese New Zealanders in modern times have much more accessibility to maintain/renew their root culture while they live in the host culture through digital technology and transnational movement. Research about Chinese New Zealanders’ identities, therefore, becomes more fluid and complex. In the history of Chinese migra­ tion to New Zealand, early Chinese New Zealanders’ own identities were supressed, but in modern times, new Chinese New Zealanders are more will­ ing to be visible in the identity discussion among other diverse cultures. Bhabha’s third space theory provides an extended and protracted site for the discussion between old and new Chinese New Zealanders’ identities and where “both past and future can work together to create a new outlook” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 219). My de-Chinese and re-Chinese processes in the third space provide a new perspective on the hybridity of my identity as an immigrant.

Conclusion Every immigration journey is different, but every journey shares the struggles, discrimination, challenges and pain of travelling between root culture and adopted culture. Experiencing culture shock, many of us choose to be silent and invisible in order to fit in and survive. My de-Chinese process was my attempt to adapt my differences to my host country. I learnt in my de-Chinese process that I cannot give up those differences to be like those in my host culture. I learnt in my re-Chinese process that many of my differences are valuable for me to be who I am in this host culture. Through my de-Chinese process, I could not get rid of the shameful and powerless feelings of being different. However, in my re-Chinese process, I can embrace the differences, accept them, live with them, and be proud of them. The de-Chinese and re-Chinese processes do not come in timely order. They come and go in a spiral developmental process of twisting and reforming the self. It is the ongoing negotiation and transformation process of my identity for­ mation. Being in-between, or hybrid, is an opportunity to embrace new possi­ bilities, and a new way of looking at myself. Although being liminal is often accompanied by panic and anxiety, it is also the driving engine for new growth and transformation. Looking back on my immigration experience, how I transformed by being between Chineseness and Westernness, I get closer and closer to the point where I can settle who I am. However, there is no absolute correct single answer in liminality. The real me is the spectrum in between the de-Chinese and re-Chinese.

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References Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York and London: Routledge. Butcher, M. (2010). From “fish out of water” to “fitting in”: The challenge of re-placing home in a mobile world. Population, Space and Place, 16(1), 23–36. doi:10.1002/psp.575. Edwards, R. (2008). What’s in a name: Chinese learners and the practice of adopting “Eng­ lish” names. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 19(1), 90–103. Green, M. (1980). Aesthetics and the experience of the arts: Towards transformations. The High School Journal, 63(8), 316–322. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/40365004 Hari, J. (2018). Lost connections: Uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solu­ tions. New York: Bloomsbury. Ip, M. (1995). Chinese New Zealanders: Old settlers and new immigrants. In W. Greif (Ed.), Immigration and national identity in New Zealand: One people, two peoples, many peoples? (pp. 161–199). Palmerston North: The Dunmore Press Ltd. Ip, M. (2006). Returnees and transnationals: Evolving identities of Chinese (PRC) immigrants in New Zealand. Journal of Population Studies, 33(33), 61–102. Kalua, F. (2009). Homi Bhabha’s third space and African identity. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 21(1), 23–32. doi:10.1080/13696810902986417. Levine, S.K. (2015). The Tao of Poiesis: Expressive arts therapy and taoist philosophy. Creative Arts in Education and Therapy, 1(1), 15–25. Li, W.W., Hodgetts, D., & Ho, E. (2010). Gardens, transitions and identity reconstruction among older Chinese immigrants to New Zealand. Journal of Health Psychology, 15(5), 786–796. doi:10.1177/1359105310368179. Liu, J.H., McCreanor, T., Mclntosh, T., & Teaiwa, T. (2006). New Zealand identities and destinations. Wellington: Victoria Unversity Press. Liu, L. (2010). Home on the move : New Chinese immigrants to New Zealand as transnationals. Retrieved from https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/handle/2292/6976 Liu, L.S. (2014). A search for a place to call home: Negotiation of home, identity and senses of belonging among new migrants from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to New Zea­ land. Emotion, Space and Society, 10(1), 18–26. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2013.01.002. Navarrete, V., & Jenkins, S.R. (2011). Cultural homelessness, multiminority status, ethnic identity development, and self esteem. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 35(6), 791–804. doi:10.1016/j.ijintrel.2011.04.006. Sigelman, C.K., & Shaffer, D.R. (1995). Life-span human development (2nd ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company. Turner, V.W. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca and London: Cor­ nell University Press. Wang, B. (2016). Emotions and home-making: Performing cosmopolitan sociability among first generation new Chinese migrants in New Zealand. Asian and Pacific Migra­ tion Journal, 25(2), 130–147. doi:10.1177/0117196816639058. Wang, H. (2004). The call from the stranger on a journey home. New York: Peter Lang Publising. Yee, G. (2016). Speaking as a settler Chinese woman in Aotearoa New Zealand: An “utterly charming picture of oriental womanhood”. HECATE: A Women’s Interdisciplin­ ary Journal, 42(1), 7–31.

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“WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?” BETWEEN TWO CULTURES Gesthimani Moysidou

“Where are you from?” This is a simple question with a one-word answer for most people. But for me: not so much. I’m always unsure how I should respond. My worry is not about the ghost of a question – but where are you really from? – that may lurk behind the seemingly innocent origins question. It’s not that. Instead, I wonder: which answer do I give, the short one or the long one? I was born in Greece to a Greek father and German mother. I grew up bilin­ gual, hearing German from my mother and Greek from my father from as early as I can remember. I started German lessons from a very young age, as my par­ ents wanted me to learn to read and write the language, too. My mother once told me that after my return from my first visit to Germany at three years old, having been with my grandmother for a month, I had forgotten how to speak Greek. I don’t remember this at all, but I believe this family legend of my small self, the chameleon. I had a typically Greek childhood: playing in the street with my friends after school, spending Easter in my father’s childhood village with our big extended family, and enjoying long summers of sun and sea. At the same time, we spent almost every Christmas in Germany with our family there, and the times we spent Christmas in Greece, we would still celebrate the German way. My German grandmother visited us annually, staying for over a month and bringing a small suitcase full of chocolate, to my father’s dismay. My mother often cooked German recipes; if you have never tried Kassler mit Sauerkraut, you are missing out. In my mind as a child, then, Greece was home, and Germany was a warm, fuzzy feeling of love, family, and chocolate. Germany was a kind of a second, faraway home. However, as I grew up, this simple and seamless connection in my mind between my two cultures began to change. Anyone who knows anything about the shared history of my two countries in the recent and not so recent past1

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might venture a guess about some of the issues I have faced with this particular combination of nationalities. In Greece, Germany has a rather “marked” status: perhaps occupier, perhaps bully. And in Germany, Greece conjures up an array of meanings that aren’t always the nicest, either: perhaps freeloader, perhaps troublemaker. Throughout the years I found myself having to justify one coun­ try’s actions to people of the other. Both ways. I was the unofficial representa­ tive of Germany in Greece, and vice versa. During my childhood in Greece, I would get the odd “Heil Hitler” comment or Nazi salute. In some cases, this was a “joke”; in others, it was used to enrage me. And it worked. In school, we learned how horribly the Greeks had suffered during the Nazi occupation, and I knew I didn’t want to be associated with Nazis – and by extension Germans – in any way. My mother tried to explain the situation in Germany at the time, and about the many Germans who were not Nazi supporters, but this did not help me. “Germany” was talked into being in specific ways, and I bore the brunt of it. I never viewed it as discrimination, though. When I learned the term “micro­ aggression”, I could finally define what it I had faced throughout these years. Growing up in Greece, I had seen my friends from former Soviet countries facing actual discrimination, and I knew that my experiences were not comparable to what they went through. In a way, I believed, this was due to a level of awareness of the fact that Germany was a powerful, rich nation compared to Greece. And racism, discrimination, prejudice are much more commonly directed towards the less powerful and the vulnerable: people who cannot easily defend themselves. So, I never allowed myself to feel discriminated against by the mean things some chil­ dren said, although their comments still hurt. And while the taunting eventually stopped, the generalised sense of my imagined Germanness – my stereotypical dif­ ference – persisted. Even now, some of my Greek friends account for my personal­ ity traits with an all-purpose nod to my German heritage. I do not like littering, and they’ll say, “Oh, you’re so German!” I have difficulty breaking the rules, and they’ll say, “Don’t be so German!” I get angry, and they’ll say, “Uh-oh, her German side is coming out!” Naturally, I began to ask myself, “Am I so very German?” After all, I’d always felt a bit out of place in Greece. For this reason, after completing my undergraduate degree, I moved to Germany to do a Master’s. I wanted to figure out whether I would feel more at home in Germany than I felt in Greece. Maybe I was “so very German” after all. Maybe, at last, I would fit in seamlessly somewhere, finding something like home. Of course, this wasn’t to be. Just as I’d felt “not Greek enough” in Greece, in Germany, I came to feel “not German enough”. Having grown up in a culture so different from Germany’s, of course I did not completely fit in. I was proud of my German language skills and my perfect German accent, but paradoxically the latter – my native-like accent – caused problems with the former: my com­ municative competence. My contact with German up to that point had com­ prised only speaking with my mother and my communications with the

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German side of my family. This is to say that I had not often had day-to-day contact with German speakers my own age, and I still had trouble understanding my classmates’ slang, quick speech, cultural references, and jokes. But my accent suggested otherwise; it suggested native-like fluency. With big groups of Ger­ mans, I’d preface our interactions with a seemingly modest, “My German’s not that great,” which was true. And yet, the fact that my accent sounded like a native German speaker made my warnings seem like false modesty. People spoke fast and joked around me, assuming I understood. How many times can you ask, “What?” After the initial, “Can you repeat that?” and, “I didn’t get that,” I simply laughed along, having no idea what I was laughing at. I felt very uncomfortable in these situations. Yang, Noels and Saumure (2006) show that self-confidence in a language is a significant factor in facilitating intercultural contact while allowing self-expression and identity negotiation. But my inability to keep up with the conversations and jokes – and to express myself – negatively impacted my confidence. While, deep inside, I knew that the issue was only one of language skills, I could not help but worry that I would look unintelli­ gent to those I was with. So, I just laughed and nodded along. And after a while, I reduced my contact with Germans. Instead, during my two years in Germany, I felt much more at home with my fellow-international friends. The small city in which we studied was cultur­ ally quite homogenous, with most university programmes offered only in German. Accordingly, most of the students there were German locals. Thus, as a smallish cohort of non-local students, we stuck together. We all came from countries that are sometimes negatively stereotyped in different ways: Turkey, the USA, North Macedonia, Romania, Syria, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria. As a result, we were able to joke together, self-deprecatingly playing with imagined national stereotypes without offending each other or being offended. It was, sur­ prisingly, a freeing feeling. My friends and I understood what it was like to be “othered,” and were able to make light of the situation as a defence mechanism. After all, self-deprecating humour is a commonly used way to take control of your own narrative (Bell, 2007). By then, also, there was this: my English language skills had become better than my German, so I was more comfortable and confident using humour in English. Perhaps there was this, too: no one mistook me for a native English speaker. Instead, English was our shared language, belonging equally to all of us and none of us. In this way, we laughed, in English, to facilitate the develop­ ment of solidarity among us. So much laughter. Humour has been shown effect­ ive for building solidarity, particularly among women (Hay, 2000) and in cementing friendships (Westcott and Vazquez Maggio, 2016), and this was pre­ cisely what it did for us, our motely band of “internationals” on a German uni­ versity campus. But what I did not realise then was that my internal struggles and questions of identity would soon be forcibly externalised. I had moved to Germany during the global financial crisis, and none of us yet had any inkling of just how

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difficult these years would be for Greece.2 The question, “How are things back home?” was one I came to be faced with more and more in Germany. The Greek crisis was in the news, and I was Greek, and therefore I was asked. The question was usually accompanied by a concerned facial expression, the sincerity of which I always had to ascertain. But I could handle that. What I could not handle as easily, though, was the pity that I often saw in people’s faces. Pitying Greece. Looking down on Greece? Pitying me? Looking down on me? During the oral defence of a paper during my studies, a German professor informed me after the process was over that he had originally planned to give me a lower grade, but the Danish external examiner had suggested a higher grade, and he had acquiesced. Telling me about this negotiation, he added that he’d thought to himself, “It’s always good to help a Greek person.” With this utterance, he gave me a conspiratorial smile, as if we were in on this together. I sighed. Great. There went my pride in my “good” grade. I smiled and thanked him, but I felt a knot in my stomach. For years, I did not share this story with anyone, feeling ashamed and guilty about getting a grade I thought I did not deserve. A pity grade. A “help-the-Greeks” grade. Gradually, though, I distanced myself from that moment, realising it was not about me, but that the gesture and the statement were, if anything, more for his benefit than mine. He did not have to tell me that he initially had a different grade in mind, nor the justification of his change of heart. So, why did he tell me? Was he virtue­ signalling? Was he seeking the gratitude of the underprivileged “other” – as he perceived Greeks and, by extension, me – through his dubious act of “charity”? Pursuing admiration and approval of others for an altruistic act makes the act egoistical (Alexander, 1987 in Coghlan & Fennell, 2009). And regardless of his intentions, his comment hurt my pride and my confidence. Was his momentary pride worth that? Slowly, with the financial crisis intensifying and its extent becoming more apparent, I became the unofficial representative of my country, Greece, to my other country, Germany. As Greeks were rioting on the nightly television news, I was asked to explain myself. My homeland. My people. Those angry Greeks. Across the street from my apartment there was a convenience store that I frequented, and the clerk was usually friendly; we were on nodding terms. One day, though, as I stopped by, he showed me the front page of a newspaper with its damning picture: Greek protesters were burning the German flag and a picture of Angela Merkel. Agitated, the store clerk demanded an explanation from me. Of course, I had no idea who these people doing the burning were; I was not even in the country at the time. And yet, here I was, expected to justify the situation. That newspaper front page was not an isolated incident. Thanks to the “cul­ turisation” of the financial crisis (Mylonas, 2012) – as shown by various scholars, the German media presented the crisis as a “Greek crisis” – an anti-Greek senti­ ment emerged within the German social imaginary. Greece, more than the other crisis-stricken Southern European countries, was popularly constructed as

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the source and cause of the problems (e.g. Bickes, Otten & Weymann, 2014), with concomitant effects for Greeks, like me, residing in Germany. At the same time, and in part as a result, an increasingly hostile attitude towards Germany emerged in Greece, intensified by sensationalist media coverage and populist political narrative. These attributed the suffering of the Greeks mainly to the actions of Germany (Michailidou, 2017). Whenever I went to Greece for the holidays, I was therefore interrogated by friends and acquaintances. “What are they saying about us?” and “What do you think?” and “How do you reply to them?” and “How can you even live there?” Many Germans blamed the Greeks for the crisis, and many Greeks blamed the Germans. And there I was, right in the middle of all this animosity, faced with an unspoken question implied by both sides’ narratives: “Which side are you on?” Neither. Both. I don’t know. Leave me alone. *** Who was I? What was I? Was I Greek (but not Greek enough?) Was I German (but not German enough?) Both? Neither? Not enough of either, certainly. I was always the other. In Greece, I was the privileged “other”, always following the rules, not allowing people to litter in front of me, being quiet, but so very “German” if I ever got angry. Of course, I went the extra mile: defending Greece, justifying my own Greekness, proving that I did, indeed, “belong” there. But did I? Or was I more German, one of them, on the side of the people who “forced the austerity measures on us”?3 But if I was German, was I German enough? (Or was I still Greek, as in the convenience store, where I was asked to explain the rioting and the burning of German national symbols.) In Germany, I was the poor “other” in need of charity and pity, fleeing the financial crisis, despite the fact that I had moved there as a student and not as an economic migrant. Or was I the lazy “other” who had created a whole big mess in Europe by drinking ouzo and dancing syrtaki while breaking plates rather than working, and now complaining about the consequences?4 And yet, paradoxically, I was still seen as the optimum person to provide a full socio-economic analysis of the complexities of Greek fiscal policy. The absurdity would have been funny if it hadn’t been so hurtful. After completing my studies in Germany, with two degrees and three fluent languages on my CV, I returned to Greece, naively thinking I would easily find work. But I had underestimated the severity of the financial crisis, ending up having to work as a waitress again – a job I had done for years before I went to Germany, and with which had a love-hate relationship – while volunteering my time at a research centre. For months, I applied for jobs in my areas of study, passion, knowledge, and interest: migration research, refugee issues, immigration

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policy. No replies. I widened my search: any type of social research. Nothing. I became desperate, wanting to leave again. I couldn’t find meaningful work and I didn’t belong. I was in Greece, at “home”, but I was a changed person. I felt Greece pushing me away. So, next, I applied to jobs all over Europe, anything I could find: call centres, hostels, anything. Again, though: nothing. Next, I thought laterally: “What is the one industry that will survive in Greece for years to come, despite the crisis?” “Tourism,” I answered myself. “But how do I get into working in tourism?” I planned to study again then come back and find a job in a hotel, or with a tour operator, or something similar. This was not even close to what I wanted to do with my life, but I had given up on that dream. Now, I just needed something resembling a career path. For survival, I would have to be content with doing something I did not necessarily enjoy, just like most other Greeks of my generation. Now, therefore, I was indeed becoming an immigrant out of necessity rather than a freewheeling student on a journey of self-discovery. And I was not alone. From the beginning of the crisis in 2008 to 2017 almost half a million Greeks left Greece (Eurostat, 2019), a high proportion from a country of ten million citizens. Many emigrants were educated, with studies reporting that 75% of those leaving held university degrees (Labrianidis & Pratsinakis, 2014). I applied for another Master’s degree in Edinburgh, this time in Tourism and Hospitality Management. I was accepted, and within a few months I left Greece again. By now on my third degree, I was a good student, and quickly one of my Professors suggested I apply for a PhD. My idea of PhD studies was quite exaggerated at the time, and I did not believe it was something I was capable of. I initially rejected the idea, but even­ tually decided to apply. The interview, I felt, went horribly, and I cried as soon as I exited the room. A few weeks later, though, during a trip in the Scottish Highlands and at a rare moment of cellphone service, I checked my emails. I had been accepted. So, my plans changed again. Now, instead of going back to Greece to work in a hotel, I had to come to terms with more years of study­ ing and also the fact that I would live in this cold country – Scotland – for few more years. I would be well into my thirties by the time I finished. What did that mean for my future? My plans? (What plans though? The back-up plans that I did not really want for my life?) There I was: half-Greek, half-German, and living in Scotland for at least three or four more years. In Edinburgh, though, I was neither half-Scottish nor “not Scottish enough”. Now, I was an actual foreigner. Half-Greek, half-German, but full foreigner. I was not half of anything anymore. I was full. Full foreigner. And I realised that it was okay. It is okay. The people I met in Scotland were open to cultural difference, curious about it, embracing of it. Edinburgh is a cosmopolitan city, and I made friends from all over the world. Most were the same as me: foreigners. Naturally, I have my

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group of Greek friends here, too. It is always easier to speak your own language, and I have been lucky enough to find amazing Greek people in my five years in Edinburgh. But I also have close friends from England, India, Mauritius, the USA, France, Spain and, of course, Scotland. My mother always said she admired my ability to find friends wherever I went, and I feel she was right. I guess if there is one thing I do well it is connecting with people. And those people – the ones you are surrounded by – can feel like a kind of home. They understand what you feel because they feel it too. But most importantly our dif­ ferences are not viewed negatively; they are celebrated. Here, with friends from around the world, I have participated in Diwali celebrations, Catalan book fairs, and Thanksgiving meals. I was the bridesmaid at my Indian friend’s wedding, and I danced ceilidh at my Scottish friend’s wedding. This is the fullest I have ever felt. Not belonging is my way of belonging. My feeling of belonging, my home, is not any more connected to a country or an ethnicity. Abdelmonem (2012) shows that the feeling of “home” is often associ­ ated to a certain feeling of comfort and security, a subjective notion for each individual, connected to a space, location, or even a community of people. Having tried for so many years to find a place where I would be accepted because I was “x” enough, I realise that here I have found somewhere where people are accepted for being outsiders. However, while I love my life in Edinburgh, I think there is still something thor­ oughly Greek about me. I am struggling to live without much sunshine. So, while I may have found my home, my “place”, for now, I will keep trying to find my forever home, if there is such a thing. Somewhere with sunshine. Probably not Greece, or not yet at least. I do think I will eventually return, but it is not the time yet. At this stage, just having finished my PhD, my future is open. I am happy to keep moving around the world to find it. For now, I want to keep enjoying this feeling of being a full foreigner. But somewhere with more sun, please.

Notes 1 Greece was occupied by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944. It is estimated that Greece suffered between 300,000 and 800,000 military and civilian casualties throughout these years but also deaths resulting from widespread famine and the persecution of the Greek Jewish population, 80% of whom were murdered. Nazi occupation also resulted in financial collapse in Greece, not least as monthly “loans” were demanded from the Greek government in 1942–1944 to pay for the maintenance costs of the German army in Greece and also to fund further military activity in the Mediterranean, including delivering food from a starving Greece to Rommel’s “Afrika-Korps”. In early 1945, in the final days of the Third Reich, a group of high-ranking German economists calculated this “German debt (Reich­ sschuld) to the Greek state” to amount to 476m Reichsmarks, which would be roughly €11bn today (Hille, 2018). The long-term impact of these never-repaid “loans” prolonged the effects of the German occupation of Greece even after Nazi troops withdrew. 2 The financial crisis started in Greece in late 2009 following the global recession of 2007–2008. Years of fiscal mismanagement, false governmental data reporting, and over­

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lending to the country by its creditors led to a huge public debt. Greece was forced to adopt strict austerity measures to repay its debts, which led to massively increased tax­ ation, high rates of poverty, unemployment, and a resultant humanitarian crisis. As Greece is a member of the Eurozone, it was unable to use fiscal currency-manipulation measures to alleviate the situation (such as devaluation). Germany was accused of being too stringent and inflexible over Eurozone fiscal policies, which could have been used to help the Southern European states’ recessions. Germany arguably benefitted from the crisis, through increased inbound investment and increased exports, due to the Euro’s relative loss of value against trading partners’ currencies. This led to tensions between Greece and Germany, with thousands of German tourists cancelling their holidays to Greece, and Greeks demanding the repayment of historical, wartime loans. 3 I am aware this is a gross misrepresentation of reality, but the complexity of the pro­ cesses that led to the austerity measures being imposed on Greece was boiled down to a simplified version in the public narrative: it was all Germany’s fault. 4 This is, of course, a telling caricature of how the German media reduced and belittled Greece during the financial crisis.

References Abdelmonem, M.G. (2012). Responsive homes of old Cairo: Learning from the past, feed­ ing in the future. Hospitality & Society, 2(3), 251–271. Bell, N.D. (2007). Safe territory? The humorous narratives of bilingual women. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 40(2–3), 199–225. Bickes, H., Otten, T., & Weymann, L.C. (2014). The financial crisis in the German and English press: Metaphorical structures in the media coverage on Greece, Spain and Italy. Discourse & Society, 25(4), 424–445. Coghlan, A., & Fennell, D. (2009). Myth or substance: An examination of altruism as the basis of volunteer tourism. Annals of Leisure Research, 12(3–4), 377–402. Eurostat. (2019). Emigration by age group, sex and citizenship. Retrieved from: http:// appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=migr_emi1ctz&lang=en Hay, J. (2000). Functions of humor in the conversations of men and women. Journal of Prag­ matics, 32(6), 709–742. Hille, P. (2018, 10th October). Nazis’ stolen ‘loan’ from Greek bank: Will Germany pay it back? Deutsche Welle (dw.com/en). Accessed from: www.dw.com/en/nazis-stolen­ loan-from-greek-bank-will-germany-pay-it-back/a-18224874 Labrianidis, L., & Pratsinakis, M. (2014). Outward migration from Greece during the crisis, Final Report. Project funded by the National Bank of Greece through the London School of Eco­ nomic’s Hellenic Observatory. Michailidou, A. (2017). ‘The Germans are back’: Euroscepticism and anti-Germanism in crisis-stricken Greece. National Identities, 19(1), 91–108. Mylonas, Y. (2012). Media and the economic crisis of the EU: The ‘culturalization’of a systemic crisis and Bild-Zeitung’s framing of Greece. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 10(2), 646–671. Westcott, H., & Vazquez Maggio, M.L. (2016). Friendship, humour and non-native lan­ guage: Emotions and experiences of professional migrants to Australia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(3), 503–518. Yang, R.P.J., Noels, K.A., & Saumure, K.D. (2006). Multiple routes to cross-cultural adap­ tation for international students: Mapping the paths between self-construals, English lan­ guage confidence, and adjustment. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 30(4), 487–506.

Conclusion

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LEARNING, CRITIQUING, EMERGING Phiona Stanley, Michelle Bishop, Madhavi (Maddy) Manchi, Davina Delesclefs, Elham Zakeri, and Alana Bryant

Phiona I’ve worked in intercultural education for a long time, first in English lan­ guage teaching and then in intercultural education more broadly. A few years ago, I started thinking about the issues of decolonising scholarship and educa­ tional ‘inclusion’ in more meaningful ways than is currently done in ‘the industry’, a critique I put forward in Chapter 1. Originally, I’d planned to write about these ideas in a sole-authored book, discussing this and that in a scholarly, essay-like way. (Very comfortable. Much coffee. Cats napping on my desk.) But then three things happened to shift my direction, with the result that I’ve now had the considerable privilege of working with some incredibly sharp emerging scholars in the process of putting together this edited book. What changed? Well, first, I saw Nanette, Hannah Gadsby’s (2018) paradigm­ changing Netflix show (reader: if you haven’t seen it, please stop reading and go watch it. Seriously, go now. I’ll wait). Gadsby makes a powerful critique of Picasso’s cubism. Yes, he broke ground by showing myriad perspectives. But they were all his own perspectives. Such hubris. And I realised that this was what a monograph would have done in this space, too. The world doesn’t need more of that. Then there was this: for many years, I’d been mentoring emerging autoethno­ graphers through my supervision of postgraduate student researchers, first in Sydney, Australia and then in Edinburgh, Scotland (and if you’re wondering why many of the contributors have a Sydney or an Edinburgh connection, this is why). This was good and rewarding, and some did really beautiful things with their writing. But after graduation, their essays sat in a drawer, and it felt like such a waste. In the meantime, I’d also met some incredibly talented emerging scholars around the qualitative methods conference circuit. So – and this is

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the second thing – I wanted to make these emerging scholars’ perspectives more widely available. These two purposes came together neatly: a book of emerging scholars’ perspectives on the issues of intercultural education. But then a third purpose emerged. As I brought together all these fascinating people whose ideas excited me, I realised that many of them were writing into a vacuum, without much of an autoethnographic world around them. Many of the conversations we had early on were about this, and I realised that a third thing was needed: making community. The book has also therefore been about that, which is why – throughout the writing process – the collaborators have shared and read drafts and come together in conversations (in Chapters 3, 6, 10, and also the present chapter). And so here we all are, talking about these ideas and putting the book together, together. I wonder who will pick up this book. Will readers dip in and out, or will they read it through, cover to cover, like a novel? I know I’ve read it in lots of different ways in the process of receiving, editing, and re-reading the chapters as they came in. (And Isma’s still makes me cry, every time!) But these chapters also, mainly, make me think. Do they make you think, too? What has been your take-away? What are you thinking of differently, as a result of reading our words? What are you doing differently in your practice, if anything? Here’s what stands out for me. Davina’s chapter on the ‘English Only’ policy is profound and shocking because both the policy itself and the monolingual users of English so heavily invested in it serve as such a stark reminder of how power works, still, in ‘intercultural’ education. Elham’s chapter, too, makes note of this policy, and it bothers me to see that this practice reaches all the way from Australia to Iran and back again, not least in light of Philipson’s (1992) seminal, book-length critique of linguistic imperialism over a quarter of a century ago. The message seems to be that the centre-west (or monolingual native Eng­ lish speakers? Or White people? Or those with normative lives?) know better. Perhaps: are better. This is why Michelle’s chapter on the grubby history of eugenics in educational psychology – and in particular its positioning of Austra­ lian Aboriginal people – is so disturbing, because the same suggestion is there, too. Michelle writes of being silenced, marginalised, and Othered, just as Ying (Ingrid) does in her powerful artwork Shut up (in Chapter 17). Then Madhavi (Maddy) echoes the same ideas as they link to race in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch Massacre, Anqi and Isma speak to the exclusion and margin­ alisation of ‘Asian students’ in the centre-west academy, and Hyejeong speaks back to the question of what a legitimate user and ‘owner’ of English looks like in her Singaporean context. These chapters, together, paint a powerful and dis­ tressing picture of the erasures, the silencing, and the lingua-cultural essentialism that go on in the name of ‘intercultural’ education around the world. For me, then, one take-away is that ‘intercultural learning’ may be no such thing. Instead, it often seems to reify pre-existing power relations in which one ‘cul­ ture’ dominates. Alana’s chapter is explicit about this, as is Tara’s, and I wriggled in my chair as I read their accounts of their own unearned privilege in Cambo­ dia and Brazil.

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But the chapters also speak to innovative and creative ways to question, resist, recast, and push back against strictures and structures, and it is import­ ant to note that none of the chapters is about victimhood. All are about grap­ pling, in different ways, with the ‘intercultural’. All are about resistance. Matthew’s chapter is perhaps the most extreme in this, and his nomadology echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) essay on the threat posed to the estab­ lished order of those on the outside who refuse to conform to its normative ways of living (in Matthew’s case, by becoming Homo consumerensis: buying stuff, and filling a suburban house with it). Gesthimani (Mania), Jinyang, and Ying (Ingrid), too, trouble established notions of ‘national’ identities, discuss­ ing complex national and linguistic identity negotiations at both the macro level – in Germany and Greece – and the micro level, through and beyond the linguistic-landscape of the ‘Chinese’ suburb of Kingsford in Sydney, Aus­ tralia. This discussion is then extended by Martha, whose essay on religious identities is also about agency, position-taking, and identity negotiation. A second take-away, for me, is therefore complexity and resistance: all the chapters speak back to power. All are about ‘queering’ normative ways of being, seeing, and doing within ‘the intercultural’ (after Ahmed’s notion of queer as relating to the adverse, the oblique, and the crossing; 2006). But this is just what resonates for me. What about you?

Michelle I think there is a deafening thread interwoven across the chapters, one that has been hinted at or named in opaque ways. But never made explicit. It feels a bit dirty and dangerous to write: White supremacy. There, I said it. Whiteness has had the most effective marketing campaign for centuries. Built upon genocide, slavery and theft, and self-proclamations of ‘rightness’, the power of Whiteness continues to wield its way into people’s aspirations under the pretence of ‘edu­ cation’. Yet, while glossy advertising beckons ‘foreign’ students to study in the West and find benefit from the advantages of Whiteness, admission as insider is seldom granted, even when assimilation is desired. The parameters of Whiteness are already pre-determined. What is also disturbing is the way White supremacy is deployed as a lure, shiny and bright, to hook students and in doing so, profit enormously economically, socially, culturally, linguistically. Securing the vantage point at the top of the racial hierarchy. It makes me wonder why there is still such a strong tendency to want to align oneself with the codes of Whiteness. Yeah, ‘fitting in’ and being recog­ nised. That’s fair. But is it possible? Is it worth it? What are we being asked/ forced to give up? There is such beauty in the complexity of our cultural locations, and how this informs the way we see the world. I’m thinking of Ying (Ingrid) Wang’s chapter and her joy at bringing Chinese wisdom into her professional life. How this should be encouraged.

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The lingering messages from this book leave me feeling optimistic about the deep future, that there’s a momentum building of dissatisfaction with White supremacy and the true cost this has to ‘Others’. But also, from those who may be ‘White’ but do not conform to values of ‘Whiteness’. This is an exciting time to listen to Country, Ancestors and Knowledge, to relish in a different way to see and exist in the world.

Madhavi (Maddy) As I sat to write these words, my mind repeatedly returned to a question I asked my undergraduate Sociology professor: how is it that countries listed under the concepts of modernity, westernisation and development happen to be almost identical? Why are a handful of these nation-states the golden measure? I hadn’t grasped fully the magnitude of colonisation at that point. My professor didn’t quite have an answer, and my classmates deemed me the pesky student who asked too many questions. This book, for me, is us asking that same question in different ways. If we are ‘marginalised’ then this is us using, nay claiming, the margins to trouble the boundaries of intercultural education. As Phiona said earlier, these are not narratives of victimhood. On the contrary, I feel quite like that pesky student again, a trickster, whose work in said margins allows for the ‘incorpor­ ation of the outsider, a levelling of hierarchy, a reversal of statuses’ (BabcockAbrahams, 1975: 153). As Babcock (cited in Nazarea, 2005: 14) writes, tricksters provide ‘the margins of mess’ necessary to explore alternatives to the present system and to contemplate change.

Davina If had to choose one term to describe the essence of this book, it would be (dis) connections. All the chapters talk to me about individuals working through con­ nection with themselves, their assigned identities, and the world around them. There are clear connections and recurring themes between chapters but, at the same time, I have been reminded how locked we can be in our own paradigms, hindering our ability to truly connect or understand the lives of others. Michelle’s deeply evocative and eye-opening chapter (Chapter 2) left me acutely aware of our differences. Her strong connection to her heritage and her depictions of lived experiences of attributed inferiority were so alien to my lived experiences. It reminded me of the time my daughter asked her brother, ‘What’s it like to be a boy?’ to which he replied, ‘I don’t know, what’s it like to be a girl?’ And then they just looked at each other in silence, unsure how to answer. How can you respond when you have no way of understanding any other state of being? Reflecting on potential metaphors for intercultural education, the hall of mirrors keeps popping into my mind. My experience of writing my chapter (Chapter 9), collaborating with Hyejeong (in Chapter 10), and reading chapters by other con­ tributors was similar to a hall of mirrors. We all see ourselves and others through

Learning, critiquing, emerging

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our own paradigms. We may gaze at the same mirror, our own or the person next to us, but a slightly different angle will distort the images we each see. As a result, we unknowingly see different ‘reflections’, warped in the seeing. If this is my experience from contributing to and reading chapters of this book, how much more amplified is it in the broader world of intercultural education? I wonder.

Elham As I write, I am now a casual (sessional; precarious; ‘zero-hours’; adjunct) ‘lecturer’/‘teacher’ at a college in Sydney, Australia. This is my first job after finishing my PhD, and it reminds me of my conversations with Maddy (in Chapter 6) about the casualisation of academia (Connell, 2015) and how she has been grappling with different casual jobs since her arrival in New Zea­ land. Having always worked since I turned eighteen, and while, honestly, I was not expecting to be employed as a lecturer the day I graduated, I nevertheless feel that being a casual academic is to be the ‘ugly duckling’. The odd one out. No office space is allocated to casuals; there is no maternity leave payment and no guarantee of ongoing work. I’m in limbo. I wonder: what will happen next? As discrimination against non-Western, non-White users of English may not be as pressing as climate change, I am assuming the pace of change will be slow. But books like the one you are holding are part of the change-making process. I’m hopeful. But I’ve also been thinking about the cohort I’m teaching now: students from a ‘developing’ country, coming to Australia to get their Bachelors’ degrees. Their English proficiency is barely sufficient and yet here they are: full feepaying international students, ‘cash-cows’ (ABC Four Corners, 2019). Were they lured by the cachet of an Australian degree? And/or is this a way for them to immigrate? Most are doing paid work all their waking hours, to compensate for Sydney’s high cost of living, and some fall asleep in class. When and where is the intercultural learning happening for them? The smiling faces on the pos­ ters advertising my college belie the realities that I see in class. Thus, my first take-away from this book is more questions, more pondering. My second is more awareness. I agree with Phiona that the authors in this book don’t speak from ‘victim’ perspectives, and that we all resist in different ways. But discrimination still hurts. As a person who has experienced and con­ tinues to feel the difference as a person in the margins – in the category of ‘them’, not ‘us’ – I am practicing more caution in my everyday encounters not to perpetuate the dominant paradigms set up by those in power.

Alana Intercultural education, language education, academia altogether – I keep coming back to the purpose of all of this. The power of language to create con­ nections – isn’t that the reason for what we do? Isn’t that what we’re trying to

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elucidate, to instil, to live? And yet, as Davina said, ‘How can you respond when you have no way of understanding any other state of being?’ Sometimes (a lot of the time), it seems that language falls short. Language teachers and lan­ guage learners know this intimately, and yet we persist, in new ways, in beauti­ ful and searching ways (Ying (Ingrid)’s art comes to mind) that pick up the threads and twist them together into these stories. Through the telling of these stories, leaning into the unique strength of autoethnography to diminish the space between studier and studied, we simply (ha!) seek to understand and to be understood. But none of this is simple, or comfortable. It can be threatening down to the foundations. I can liken it to this: I remember very clearly, my first day of yoga teacher training, my soon-to-be mentor addressing our group in a fatalistic, deadpan voice, ‘Yoga will ruin your life.’ I didn’t really understand what he meant then, but I am starting to now. Yoga, in its truest form (which unfortu­ nately has nothing to do with your leggings), forces you to hold a mirror up to your Self and shine a light on all the dark places until you feel like your world is upside down. I’ve found the process of engaging with critical autoethnography to be similar. In reading (and writing) these stories, I have felt discomfort, unease, curiosity, joy, and so much more that my language can’t seem to account for. I’ve felt anger at the seemingly casual injustices rife through each chapter, buoyancy at a story coming to resolution, and the ickiness of my com­ plicity in upholding the White supremacy that Michelle most aptly named. I hold all of these things within me, side by side, just as they are within you, the reader. Sitting with them is hard, but it is necessary, in order to effectively practice the resistance that flows throughout this book. Critical autoethnogra­ phy, like yoga, will ruin your life – but what comes after that is so much better.

References ABC Four Corners. (2019). Cash cows. [video file]. www.abc.net.au/4corners/cash-cows/ 11084858 Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Babcock-Abrahams, B. (1975). “A tolerated margin of mess”: The trickster and his tales reconsidered. Journal of the Folklore Institute, 11(3), 147–186. Connell, R. (2015). The knowledge economy and university workers. Australian Universities Review, 57(2), 91–95. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986). Nomadology: The war machine. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Gadsby, H. (2018). Nanette. [video file]. www.netflix.com/gb/title/80233611 Nazarea, V.D. (2005). Heirloom seeds and their keepers: Marginality and memory in the conserva­ tion of biological diversity. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

INDEX

academic writing 46, 53, 69–70, 96–98, 129, 139 accent 42, 45, 55, 69, 71, 75, 84, 100, 115, 122, 163, 165, 170, 175–176 Aboriginality – see Indigenous Ahmed, Sara 125–126, 130, 187 alcohol 104 alienation 13, 144–150 anxiety 42, 44, 51, 61, 69, 72–75, 162, 172 Arabic 86, 133–134 authenticity 13, 134, 146, 151–152 autoethnography – ethics in 61, 97, 127–128; writing of 7–11, 21–23, 35, 38–39, 58, 60–62, 98–99, 130, 143, 153, 185–186, 188–189 axiology 5, 25–28 backpacker tourism 76–78, 102, 105, 145–147 Bhabha, Homi 8, 20, 171–172 bilingualism 65, 82, 85–89, 174 Bourdieu, Pierre 52, 56, 105, 111, 129 British Council 3–6, 131 casualization of workforce (in higher education) – see higher education CELTA (teaching qualification) 84 centre/periphery 6, 41, 87, 102, 153–158 CET (English exam) 66–67 Chinese language 69, 73–74, 89–90, 92, 110–117, 162–172 Chinese students 42, 65–69, 73–74, 80, 89–90, 92, 110–117, 158

Christchurch massacre (2019) 57 Closing the Gap (campaign, Australia) 20, 24 cognate 84 colonization of the consciousness (Fanon) 26, 125 colonizing discourses 5–10, 20–29, 34–37, 53, 57, 102, 105, 125, 146, 185–188 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) 45, 67, 84–86 confidence 46, 49, 55, 57, 69–72, 75–76, 89, 92, 96, 116, 158, 164, 176–177 cosmopolitanism 15, 126, 144–150 cultural safety 27, 40, 55, 111 deaf and dumb English 67 Deleuze, Gilles 145, 187 digital nomads 143 domestic labour 129 educational psychology 19–29 ELT: English Language Teaching 13, 48–49, 65–70, 74–79, 82, 84–92, 101–108, 131–134, 147–150, 155–158, 186 (See also TESOL: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) embodiment 6, 14, 27, 34, 43, 51, 57, 100–109, 111, 125–127, 129–130, 145–147, 154 emotional labour 21, 28, 34–35, 40–48, 55, 60–61, 144, 166–168 enfleshed knowledge (Spry) 107 English names – see naming

192

Index

English-only policy 84–94, 156

English proficiency levels 4, 43–45, 65–70,

73–74, 115–116, 127, 153, 160, 176

epistemic violence 19–41

eugenics 23–26

face (saving face; giving face) 45, 73, 92

farm work 76–78, 121–126

foreigner talk 71

French language 84–86, 88–89, 91–92,

95–96, 113–115, 158–159 Galeano, Eduardo 125

Global Financial Crisis (GFC; 2007–2008)

146, 176–180

grammar 48, 66–69, 84, 87–89, 96–99, 106

Greece 174–180

grief 163–168

Guatemala 145–146

higher education – casualization of workforce 6, 12, 51, 55–56, 160, 189

hijab (headscarf) 133, 155

homesickness 48, 142

hyphenated identity 13, 52, 76–83,

162–173, 174–178 IELTS (English exam) 4, 12, 45–46, 68–70, 87

imposter syndrome 55, 95–99, 126

Indigenous education/Indigenous students

19–41 Indigenous methodologies 21–23, 27–28, 33–41

Indonesian students 42–45, 48

intelligence testing 24, 26, 40

international and Indigenous students –

university/destination choice 42, 68–70,

79, 110–114, 150, 160; friendships and

allies 5, 44–48, 53, 72–74, 79, 113–116,

148–150, 158–160, 164, 175–180;

engagement/feelings in class 9, 13,

19–20, 25–28, 34, 42, 44–48, 70–77,

88–89, 91–92, 97, 100, 133–134, 156,

158, 163, 176, 189

linguistic imperialism 87, 91, 102, 186

linguistic landscape 110–111, 114

Master’s degree 4, 19, 22–25, 46, 67–69,

89–90, 95–96, 102, 132, 136, 139–140,

150–151, 164, 175, 179

memory 9, 13, 61, 69, 103, 106, 110,

153, 170

mobility 5–6, 10, 53–54, 82, 112, 143,

146–148, 151

monolingualism 13, 86–97, 90–91, 186

Moscow University 8

naming (adopting an “English” name/ choosing names) 78–81, 86, 164–165 native and non-native users of English

13, 79, 93, 95–99, 146–148, 163–164,

176, 186

‘nomad’ (nomadicity/nomadology) 14,

142–143, 151, 187

PhD 12, 15, 51–57, 95–96, 110–111, 113,

136, 140, 156–158, 160, 179–180, 189

politeness 73, 77–78 power 5–7, 10, 20–23, 28, 35, 40, 61,

86–93, 97–99, 130, 146, 155, 161,

170–172, 175, 185–189

precarity – see higher education, casualization of workforce racism 8, 12, 27–28, 36, 39–41, 57, 72,

125–126, 175

road status 105

social imaginaries 110–111, 145,

153–161, 177

TESOL: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages 13, 47–49, 65–70, 74–79, 84–96; (see also ELT English Language Teaching) volunteer work 49, 100–109, 178

Korea, North 76–78; South 76–83, 98,

147–150

Korean language 113, 149

White Australia Policy 81–82 Whiteness 19–20, 34–36, 39–41, 81,

97–102, 104–107, 122–129, 133, 143,

146–147, 186–187

worldliness – see cosmopolitanism

language status 70, 85–86, 88, 92, 97–99,

107, 126, 147, 155, 175, 188

Yemen 131–135