Ulla Kriebernegg Knihy

What kind of cultural encounters enhance cultural awareness and intercultural competence in educational contexts? This volume highlights the potential of different types of (inter)cultural encounters for intercultural learning and developing critical (cultural) awareness in education. The book's articles explore the potential of critical reading of classical and other culturally relevant texts, as well as physical or virtual encounters with people from other cultures as part of course activities for the development of intercultural competence. (Series: Intercultural Education / Interkulturelle Padagogik - Vol. 13) [Subject: Education, Cultural Studies]

The linking of age and ill-health is part of a cultural narrative of decline as age is often defined as the absence of good health. Research has shown that we are aged by culture, but we are also culturally made ill when we age. The cultural ambiguity of aging can thus deconstruct negative images of old age as physical decrepitude. This volume investigates the topic of health within the matrix of time and experience by addressing issues such as how our understanding of health influences our notion of agency within a subversive deconstruction of normative age concepts, and what role the notion of health plays in such an interaction.

The binary construction of »young« and »old«, which is based on a biogerontological model of aging as decline, can be redefined as the ambiguity of aging from a cultural studies perspective. This concept enables an analysis of the social functions of images of aging with the aim of providing a basis for interdisciplinary exchange on gerontological research. The articles in this publication conceive the relationship between living and aging as a productive antagonism which focuses on the interplay between continuity and change as a marker of life course identity: aging and growing older are processes which cannot be reduced to the chronology of years but which are shaped by the individual's interaction with the changing circumstances of life.

Comparing apples and oranges – frequently, this is what we do when we talk about similarities and differences regarding higher education in the United States and Europe. Based on the assumption that higher education policy texts are cultural texts to be interpreted, this book deconstructs four US American cultural narratives within higher education (co-opetition, the frontier myth, McDonaldization, and the narrative of security), and compares these to discourses prevailing in Europe. Disputing the prevalent claim that both the recent European higher education transformation initiative, the Bologna Process, and the establishment of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) have had absolutely no impact on US institutions of higher learning, this study proves that cultural narratives in the last decade have strongly determined political and structural developments in higher education on both sides of the Atlantic. This book therefore adds another facet to the transatlantic dialogue on higher education by providing a cultural critical perspective, including the Foucauldian theory of governmentality as well as aspects of postcolonial theory.