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. This book will provide a valuable resource for practitioners and scholars of intercultural relations working in the fields of cultural geography, anthropology, cultural studies, and migration studies.

Staging Cultural Encounters tells stories about performances of cultural encounter and cultural exchange during the US tour of the Algerian theater troupe Istijmam Culturelle in 2016. Jane E. Goodman follows the Algerian theater troupe as they prepare for and then tour the U.S. under the auspices of the Center Stage program, sponsored by the US State Department to promote cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. The title of the play Istijmam produced was translated as "Apples," written by Abdelkader Alloula, a renowned Algerian playwright, director, and actor who was assassinated in 1994. Goodman take readers on tour with the actors as they move from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. to the large state universities of New Hampshire and Indiana, and from a tiny community theater in small-town New England to the stage of the avant-garde La MaMa Theater in New York City. Staging Cultural Encounters takes up conundrums of cross-cultural encounter, challenges in translation, and audience reception, offering a frank account of the encounters with American audiences and the successes and disappointments of the experience of exchange.

Working in cities from Liverpool and Glasgow to Paris and New York, the interventionist artist transforms ordinary urban spaces, disrupting everyday life in ways that reinvent the way we encounter and experience art and compelling people to act and think differently about the world around them. Providing incisive new insights into the work and life of the artist,Cultural Hijack examines how these artists use the city as a playground, a stage, or an instrument for unsanctioned artworks, informal creative practices, activist interventions, and political actions. Drawing on a series of essays, personal testimonies, and original interviews from artists such as Tatsuro Bashi, BGL, Gelitin, Michael Rakowitz, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, this illuminating work enlarges our understanding of the creative process and how artists are developing new weapons in the arsenal of critical resistance, both emancipating and expanding the spaces of artistic and cultural production.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

Essays that suggest new ways of understanding the role that US actors and agencies have played in Latin America." - publisher.