Lise Paulsen Galal – författare

Setting up cultural encounters is a widespread intervention strategy employed to diffuse conflicts and manage difficulties related to diversity. These organised cultural encounters bring together people of different backgrounds in order to promote peaceful coexistence and inclusion. These transformative aims relate to the participants but are often also expected to spill over into the society, community or context addressed by the encounter.

As a category, ‘Organised Cultural Encounters’ draws together a variety of activities and events such as multicultural festivals, dialogue initiatives, diversity training and inclusion projects – activities that are generally not considered to be of the same kind. Most of the existing literature on these types of encounters is instrumental and has an overall emphasis on evaluations in terms of outcome or success rate. This book goes beyond evaluations, and the contributors pose and debate theoretical and methodological questions and analyse the practices and performativities of particular encounters. Taken together, it makes an important contribution to the theorisation and analysis of intercultural relations and negotiations.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Setting up cultural encounters is a widespread intervention strategy employed to diffuse conflicts and manage difficulties related to diversity. These organised cultural encounters bring together people of different backgrounds in order to promote peaceful coexistence and inclusion. These transformative aims relate to the participants but are often also expected to spill over into the society, community or context addressed by the encounter.

As a category, ‘Organised Cultural Encounters’ draws together a variety of activities and events such as multicultural festivals, dialogue initiatives, diversity training and inclusion projects – activities that are generally not considered to be of the same kind. Most of the existing literature on these types of encounters is instrumental and has an overall emphasis on evaluations in terms of outcome or success rate. This book goes beyond evaluations, and the contributors pose and debate theoretical and methodological questions and analyse the practices and performativities of particular encounters. Taken together, it makes an important contribution to the theorisation and analysis of intercultural relations and negotiations.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

This book explores a particular genre of intervention into cultural difference, used across the globe. Organised cultural encounters is an umbrella concept referring to face-to-face encounters that are organised across a wide variety of social arenas in order to manage and/or transform problems  perceived to stem from cultural difference.  

The authors base their focus on empirical contexts either located in Denmark or related to a Danish organisation, investigating interfaith work, training sessions in diversity management, volunteer tourism, a youth diversity project called the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, and a community dance project. Through different theoretical approaches, and careful analyses of the micro-level practices occurring within the time-space of specific encounters, Galal and Hvenegård-Lassen demonstrate how both the interactions and their outcomes are considerably more complex – and contradictory – than evaluative and instrumental accounts of success or failure may capture.