Sociocultural environments prompt us to notice and mark certain differences over others. This book investigates five paradoxes in the discourses and practices around such differences: the paradox of mixing, standardization, narrative, proximity, and tolerance. Drawing on the notion of unit thinking, it explores how perceived differences emerge fluidly in specific contexts. Through critical analyses of race studies, language education, global education/study abroad, and volunteer/service wo...

This book offers alternative theoretical approaches and pedagogies that challenge the worldview that divides things/people into bounded categories/units perceived to be internally homogeneous, what it calls “unit thinking” built on the nation-state ideology. Unit thinking is problematic not only because it is inaccurate but also because it encourages an imposition of the “ideal model” (e.g., the standard language) onto people and a hierarchization based on their proximity to the “ideal” (e...

Investigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fetish and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to offer newer concepts: “tinted glasses”, through which we see the world; “unit-thinking”, which renders the world as consisting of discrete units; and “coherants”, which help fragmented experiences cohere into something intelligible. Examining experiences at a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone...

Written for study abroad practitioners, this book introduces theoretical understandings of key study abroad terms including “the global/national,” “culture,” “native speaker,” “immersion,” and “host society.” Building theories on these notions with perspectives from cultural anthropology, political science, educational studies, linguistics, and narrative studies, it suggests ways to incorporate them in study abroad practices. Through attention to daily activities via the concept of immersi...

What happens when a group of people see things that others do not and begin acting accordingly? The Augmented Reality of Pokémon GO: Chronotopes, Moral Panic, and Other Complexities explores this question by examining what happened after Pokémon GO, a smartphone augmented reality game, was released in July, 2016. The game overlaid the world of Pokémon onto the “real” physical world, drawing 30 million players in the first two weeks. Pokémon GO has created new ways of sensing the environmen...

“Incompetence” is not an objective state lacking competence nor a kind of deficiency that needs to be filled. Rather, it is a constructed state that is productive, working in tandem with its opposite, “competence.” Perception of incompetence/competence works as what Michel Foucault (1977) calls a technology of “normalization” that pushes individuals to aspire to follow a shared norm, while hierarchically differentiating individuals according to their proximity to the aspired norm. The noti...

With contributions from anthropologists and cultural theorists, Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experienceexamines the culture and cultural implications of student travel. Drawing on rich case studies from the Arctic to Africa, Asia to the Americas, this impressive array of experts focuses on the challenges and ethical implications of student engagement, service and volunteering, immersion, research in the field, local community engagement, and crafting a new generation of a...

What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and ho...