THE FERGUSON CENTRE FOR
AFRICAN AND ASIAN STUDIES
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THE FERGUSON CENTRE FOR |
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Roehampton Conference Abstracts 5. Unrike H. Meinhof and Nadia Kiwan (Southampton University,
UK): Ulrike Meinhof is Professor of German and Cultural Studies. She was the Coordinator of an EU 5th Framework Project on “Discursive Construction of Identities in European Border Communities” (2000-2003), and is Coordinator of another EU 5th Framework Project on “Changing City Spaces: New Challenges to Cultural Policy in Europe” (2002-2005). Her numerous publications include the following: Living (with) Borders. Identity Discourses on East-West Borders in Europe (2002, edited with 3 co-authored chapters), Intertextuality and the Media (2000, edited with Smith), World in Common: Television Discourse in a Changing World (1999, with Richardson), Language Learning in the Age of Satellite Television (1998). Nadia Kiwan is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow attached to the EU 5th Framework Project on “Changing City Spaces: New Challenges to Cultural Policy in Europe”. She completed a PhD in French and Sociology in June 2003 at the University of Bristol and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, on the construction of identity and the challenges of collective action amongst young people of North African origin in Paris. The much quoted concept of 'Cultural diversity' in public rhetoric and
its equivalent in French, German, Italian, and to a lesser extent in Serbian
and Slovenian, is often evoked as either a synonym to, or an advance on
the similarly omnipresent term of 'multiculturalism'. In many different
contexts where metropolitan (as well as national) cultural policy engages
with the relationship between people of different cultural backgrounds
in our European cities, these terms seem to suggest a progressive, non-racist
agenda of interconnectedness beyond the national frame. However, when
examined in more detail within the linguistic and pragmatic context of
policy documentation and speech these terms become ambivalent, difficult
to pin down, as well as contradictory. In French for example, the term
cultural diversity in cultural policy circles has traditionally been understood
to refer to France’s so-called cultural exception in relation to
the ‘Anglo-Saxon’-led homogenisation of cultural industries.
In our paper we will explore in detail some of the linguistic and pragmatic
contexts of these terms and their semantic fields in policy documents
and interviews with policy makers in the different European cities of
our research. This will allow us to throw light on the different implications
and self-understandings of the politics of cultural diversity in Europe
today.
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