Dr. Ashley Simpson was invited to give a seminar at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in Room 606 of Red Tile Building on May 17, 2018. His topic was on “Your interculturality, my interculturality: why the dichotomy？”.
Dr. Ashley Simpson, School of Foreign Studies, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, specializes in Intercultural Education and Intercultural Communication, Discourse theories and methods, and, Critical approaches to Democracy and Human Rights. Simpson’s recent publications include; Simpson, A., & Dervin, F. 2017. ‘Speaking from the stomach? Ventriloquised ethnocentrisms about Finnish education’. Educational practice and theory. 39(1). 5-29., Simpson, A., & Dervin, F. 2017. ‘Democracy in education: An omnipresent yet distant Other’. Palgrave communications. 3(24). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-017-0012-5., and, Simpson, A. 2018. ‘Democracy as othering within Finnish Education’. International Journal of Bias, Identity, and Diversities in Education. 3(2). 77-93.
In the seminar Dr. Simpson spoke about the polysemic notion of intercultural research showing how different ideologies and discourses influence how the intercultural is understood and performed. Dr. Simpson argued the case for focusing on the concept of interculturality, rather than the intercultural, in showing how the intercultural can be manipulated against newcomers and migrants in the European examples he gave.
Dr. Simpson proposed that one possible way research on interculturality can be developed, in combatting misuses and abuses of the intercultural, is through combining dialogical approaches to discourse and communication with an ontology of interculturality. At the end of the seminar, Dr. Simpson had interactions with the audience.
Dr. Simpson’s seminar was thought-provoking and inciteful for researchers and teachers from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
(From Dr. Ashley Simpson)