COMR2010- Cultural Diversity: A Personal Perspective - Importance of Cultural Awareness & Intercultural Competence - Cultural Diverse Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Task

1. Reflect upon, identify and articulate the importance of cultural awareness and understanding of intercultural competence 
2. Explain and apply a range of theories needed to  successfully live together in a culturally diverse  world. 
3. Identify and apply skills in mindfulness and critical  reflection and awareness that supports your own  development of intercultural competence. 
4. Communicate orally and in writing an awareness  and understanding of intercultural competence.

Context: 
Reflective writing is evidence of reflective thinking, and is a process where you can learn from your  experiences. In particular, the reflective journal assessment in this subject supports you to explore  and articulate your intercultural learning and its relevance to your personal, social and professional  life.  
Instructions: 
You will complete three reflective journal entries for this subject addressing the prompt (topic) given  by your lecturer for each of the reflections. 
For each journal entry, write at least 1000 words, drawing specifically from the subject’s learning esources.For each journal entry, you are required to: 
• Write a reflective piece that highlights your learning arising from your engagement with the  subject’s resources and learning activities. 
• Effectively communicate your ideas and perspectives to demonstrate your learning  . 
• Articulate the significance of your learning (why it matters). 
• Identify how you can use your learning, especially in relation to personal, social and  professional contexts: How will my learning influence my future behaviour or practices? 

The Culture
In this book I will present culture and intercultural communication as movable concepts with fluid and negotiable boundaries. While national structures are important and influential in framing our lives, they do not confine or explain some very important aspects of our cultural behaviour. The book will explore the possibility of sig. nificant underlying universal processes which provide people from all cultural backgrounds with the potential to dialogue with and transcend national structures, to cross boundaries and contribute to and enrich cultural practices wherever they find them. This cosmo politan potential may well have always been there, but it is becoming increasingly evident within a globalized world. 

There is, however, another side. Theories of culture are also employed by social groups to construct ideological imaginations both of them selves and others. I will argue that this takes place in everyday life and in the academy, and that current common and established theo ries of culture are ideological in nature. This relationship with ideol ogy is complex, for it may also be argued that constructing imagined theories of culture is an innate part of the way in which to be is at the same time an artefact of their cultural make-up. Investigating the relationship between culture and ideology is therefore not simply to untangle fact from fiction but also to understand more deeply the workings of culture itself. 

The concept of discourse is used as an instrument of analysis throughout the book. It is at the level of discourse that individuals are able to negotiate, make sense of and practice culture; and it is within this process that imaginations about culture are generated and ideol ogy is both experienced and manufactured. It is from an interroga tion of the discourses of and about culture that the book builds a new 'grammar of culture and suggests its implications for understand ing a cosmopolitan world. 

The relationship between ideology and culture cannot, however, be left as an aspect of how culture works. Ideological imaginations of culture very often lead to the demonization of a particular foreign Other. While it is very clear that this Othering happens at all levels of national and international life everywhere in the world, I shall focus on the Western imagination for three reasons. First, Intercultural Communication and Ideology the majority of the established theories of culture within the academy derive from Western sources. Second, the West is the major driving force in current globalpolitics, operating from a position of politi cal, economic and cultural dominance in relation to the rest of the world, and these theories of culture impact on the desire to export 'democracy and somehow 'improve the imagined culturally defi cient non-West. While people are Othered in all walks of life, the global politics which is dominated by the West permanently posi tions large parts of the world. Significant here is Kumaravadivelu's (2007b) statement that a major feature of the 20th century was the West defining the rest of the world - a state of affairs which I feel still continues, and which is (has been) embedded in history to the extent that it is very hard to undo.
 
Third, Western theories of culture also demonstrate a high degree of denial of ideology. In the academy there is a powerful emphasis on the scientific neutrality of theories of culture, and in recent years the sub-discipline of intercultural communication has claimed to move away from Othering. In society generally there is the major irony that the West claims a high degree of awareness and under standing. Hence the primary research question which the book seeks to answer – how is it possible that, in such a climate of sensitivity towards people from other cultural backgrounds, there is still such a lack of awareness and understanding? 

To address these issues I will adopt a critical cosmopolitan approach in which common perceptions of culture are recognised as being ide ological and constructed by political interest. While there will be a postmodern orientation, in appreciating that the many established 'truths' about culture are in fact socially constructed, there will also be an acknowledgement of cultural realism in that there is a cul tural truth which is hidden by these ideological constructions. This will be supported by empirical investigation involving interviews with 32 informants from a wide range of national locations across the world and with reconstructed ethnographic accounts and evidence from the media and literary fiction. This fits with the critical cos mopolitan view that there are unrecognised cultural realities which have been pushed to the margins by Western definitions, and that it is therefore from the margins that we must learn the real nature of culture (Hall, 1991b). 

At a practical level, the success of intercultural communication will not be modelled around awareness of and sensitivity to the essen tially different behaviours and values of the other culture', but around the employment of the ability to read culture which derives from underlying universal cultural processes. The discussion of culture and intercultural communication is difficult at all times. The approach taken in this book is further prob lematized by the insurmountable dangers of falling into the same trap of overgeneralization and Othering that is being addressed. The terminology - 'the West' and 'the non-West', 'Centre' and 'Periphery - which any discussion of global Othering has to employ, is clumsy and creates a seductive ease which could paper over the complexity that I am trying to represent. It is hoped, however, that the neces sary sense of complexity will be rectified in the breadth of examples and issues posed. 

In this chapter I will rehearse some of the major themes which underpin a critical discussion of culture. The discussion of essen tialism and non-essentialism will be traced back to established theories of national cultural difference and how they have been sustained in current views within the academy. The familiar themes of individualism and collectivism will be critiqued as basic icons of an idealized Self and a demonized Other, to be interrogated further throughout the book. The critical cosmopolitan approach, which recognises the influence of ideology and the marginalization of non-Western cultural realities, will then be introduced to counter these discussions. 

Chapter 2 will present the interpretivist methodology for a critical intercultural awareness which supports the critical cosmopolitan approach and enables a non-aligned reading of culture. The concept of critical reading and categories of cultural action will be intro duced, to form the basis of cultural awareness tasks throughout the book. Chapter 3 will make the first reference to my major data set of interviews and use them to establish a cultural complexity which begins with the individual and presents a cross-cutting dialogue with national structures. This picture of culture will be aligned with the social action theory of Max Weber and set in contrast to the structural-functionalism of Emile Durkheim which has been the basis of established essentialist thinking.

This COMR2010 - Cultural Diverse Assignment has been solved by our Cultural Diverse Experts at My Uni Paper. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.

Be it a used or new solution, the quality of the work submitted by our assignment Experts remains unhampered. You may continue to expect the same or even better quality with the used and new assignment solution files respectively. There’s one thing to be noticed that you could choose one between the two and acquire an HD either way. You could choose a new assignment solution file to get yourself an exclusive, plagiarism (with free Turnitin file), expert quality assignment or order an old solution file that was considered worthy of the highest distinction.