This chapter presents findings from a study of quality work in validation (recognition of prior learning) in three cases in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. The quality work is based on a Nordic model for quality in validation and the study has an interactive approach.

‘Becoming’ is used in this interdisciplinary work as an emergent, iterative concept of professional identity formation. The conceptual framework of ‘becoming’, as well as the arguments in the book are intended to encourage professionals—and those engaged in their education—to reflect on what it means to be a ‘professional’ in the twenty-first century, an era dominated by the discourses of globalisation, ‘new mangerialism’, multiculturalism and deprofessionalisation. We live in a world where not only scholars, but also a better educated client base informed by technological innovations, have issued unprecedented challenges to the traditional professional ideal. The once paradigmatic identity of the superiority of the Anglo-American professional, grounded in an exclusive knowledge-base and an altruistic ‘public-service’ principle, are no longer tenable.

The book will generate dialogue about the nature of professionalism through a multidisciplinary lens in chapters on medicine, nursing and teaching and in reference to social work, the clergy and engineering. Here, becoming a professional is a lifelong, extended process that constructs an individual’s professional identity through formal education, workplace interactions and popular culture. It advocates the ‘ongoing’ modality of developing a professional self throughout one’s professional life. What emerges from this work is a concept of becoming a professional that is quite different from the isolated, rugged, individualistic approach to traditional professional practice as represented in popular culture. It is a book for the reflective professional.

Human resources are the social capital of a firm or business, based on trust as well as on expertise, values, and cultural diversity. This calls for cross-cultural knowledge — an understanding of gender issues and individual differences in the social capital of the firm and society. The dialogue between women entrepreneurship and social capital theory/ research strengthens the fragmented voice of women entrepreneurship, providing the landscape for women entrepreneurs as creators of, and created by, social capital. It indicates how women entrepreneurs appear to have a special position in forming, developing, and reorganizing the social capital in the business world. This book explores social capital in the multiple relationships between gender, management, and entrepreneurship. Twenty-six researchers, representing a variety of disciplines from different parts of the world, provide findings on diverse aspects of the dialogue between women entrepreneurship and social capital. As a consequence, the central concepts — social capital, entrepreneurship, and gender — are given a variety of meanings. Women entrepreneurs and business owners — regardless of their cultural context, branch, and education — provide interesting ideas to the global debate on equality and social capital.

The number of doctorates being awarded around the world has almost doubled over the last ten years. The authors contribute to a previously under-represented focus of theorising the emerging practices of doctoral education & the shape of change in this arena.

The overarching research problem addressed in this chapter is the relationship between professional/higher education and professional work. The chapter will discuss the relevance of university education for professional practice with a particular focus on professional identity formation and formation of professional responsibility. We deiscuss how different professional programs and their traditions and culturs shape different curricula structures that have an impact on students professional identity formation and transition to work. We will also discuss ecperiences with and learning of professional responsibility in the web of commitments within educational settings and how new multiple expectations emerge and lead to new learning experiencies when entering work life. The argument of the chapter is based on the rationale and findings from an extensive international research program, conducted between 2001-2008.

A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource.The number of doctorates being awarded around the world has almost doubled over the last ten years, propelling it from a small elite enterprise into a large and ever growing international market. Within the context of increasing numbers of doctoral students this book examines the new doctorate environment and the challenges it is starting to face. Drawing on research from around the world the individual authors contribute to a previously under-represented focus of theorising the emerging practices of doctoral education and the shape of change in this arena. Key aspects, expertly discussed by contributors from the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, China, South Africa, Sweden and Denmark include: (1) the changing nature of doctoral education; (2) the need for systematic and principled accounts of doctoral pedagogies; (3) the importance of disciplinary specificity; (4) the relationship between pedagogy and knowledge generation; and (5) issues of transdisciplinarity. "Reshaping Doctoral Education" provides rich accounts of traditional and more innovative pedagogical practices within a range of doctoral systems in different disciplines, professional fields and geographical locations, providing the reader with a trustworthy and scholarly platform from which to design the doctoral experience. It will prove an essential resource for anyone involved in doctorate studies, whether as students, supervisors, researchers, administrators, teachers or mentors. After an introduction, this book is divided into three parts. Part I, Old Basics/New Basics?, contains the following: (2) Framing Doctoral Pedagogy As Design and Action, Susan Danby and Alison Lee; (3) Writing as Craft and Practice in the Doctoral Curriculum (Claire Aitchison and Anthony Pare); (4) Learning from the Literature: Some Pedagogies (David Boote); (5) "Team" Supervision: New Positionings in Doctoral Education Pedagogies (Catherine Manathunga); (6) The Seminar as Enacted Doctoral Pedagogy (Madeleine Abrandt Dahlgren and Anna Bjuremark); (7) Taking a Break: Doctoral Summer Schools as Transformative Pedagogies (Miriam Zukas and Linda Lundgaard Andersen); and (8) "What's Going on Here?" The Pedagogy of a Data Analysis Session (Harris, J., Theobald, M., Danby, S., Reynolds, E., Rintel, E.S., and Members The Transcript Analysis Group (Tag)). Part II, Disciplinary and Transdisciplinary Pedagogies, contains the following: (9) Designing (In) the PhD in Architecture: Knowledge, Discipline, Pedagogy (Charles Rice and Linda Matthews); (10) Pedagogies for Creativity in Science Doctorates (Liezel Frick); (11) Creative Tensions: Negotiating the Multiple Dimensions of a Transdisciplinary Doctorate (Juliet Willetts, Cynthia Mitchell, Ku mi Absurdity and Dena Fame; (12) Cognitive Apprenticeship: The Making of a Scientist (Barbara J. Gabey's and Alina Bletch); and (13) Pedagogies of Industry Partnership (Barbara Adkins, Jennifer Summer ville, Susan Dan by and Judy Matthews). Part III, Inter-National and Intercultural Pedagogical Spaces, contains the following: (14) The Graduate School in the Sky: Emerging Pedagogies for An International Network for Doctoral Education and Research (Madeleine Brandt-Walgreen, Sofia Nostrum, Garnet Grossman and Alison Lee); (15) Ignorance and Pedagogies of Generative Equality: Internationalizing Australian Doctoral Education Programs and Pedagogies through Engaging Chinese Theoretical Tools (Michael Sing and Fang Chen); and (16) Expanding Pedagogical Boundaries: Indigenous Students Undertaking Doctoral Education (Liz McKinley and Barbara Grant). [Foreword by Erica McWilliam.]

Series editors abstract:

A key goal of this book series is to contribute to discussions about and processes for improving the enactment of occupational capacities through professional practice- based experiences. A related goal is associated with understanding and enhancing the contributions that different kinds of experiences can make to the formation and continuity of those occupational practices. The volumes in this series have contrib- uted a range of perspectives, approaches and outcomes to these discussions. This volume continues that tradition through considerations of how simulation-based activities can contribute to enhancing occupational practices in which working and learning progresses inter- and intra-professionally within healthcare settings. The procedural concern here is to enhance patient safety through improving the quality of collaborative working and learning by healthcare workers. The conceptual concern here is to understand how such working and learning can be understood more fully as a process of interdependence amongst practitioners, and how such co- working and learning progresses, in what ways and for what outcomes. Added here are the ways in which technology comes to mediate and support that process. Perhaps only through such considerations, focused empirical work and detailed analysis will our understanding of human capacities, their enactment and evaluation transcend from either wholly individualised or wholly socialised accounts.

The sections comprising this book are drawn from a large collaborative study hosted by three institutions that have longer and solid traditions of making contribu- tions to understanding the development of professional capacities through interpro- fessional practices (i.e. Linkoping), dedicated focuses on improving healthcare practices (Karolinska) and the use of technology in working and learning (Gothenburg). These collaborations have been informed and enriched by contribu- tors from other institutions who bring explanatory concepts. The attempt to utilise, accommodate and optimise these different contributions is exercised within the organisation of the sections of the book and chapters within it, highlighted by a process of dual considerations and separate commentaries. Each of these sections provides an overview, statements about procedural matters (e.g. how to conduct inquiries or how to analyse data), proposing and advancing particular explanatory accounts, and also offering perspectives on how educational or work practice might be enhanced. This structuring is particularly helpful as it provides focused consid- erations of particular phenomena (e.g. team-based approaches to simulation, use of video recordings, doing simulations) through description, analysis and commentary.

In these ways, this volume offers contributions to discussions about the goals for, processes of and outcomes of professional and practice-based learning in a manner that is highly consistent with the ambitions of this book series.

Varje dag går en miljon elever och lärare till arbete i den svenska skolan. De allra flesta arbetar engagerat och når goda resultat. Eleverna lär sig, med stöd från sina lärare, läsa, skriva och räkna. De skaffar sig kunskap om sociala och naturvetenskapliga fenomen. De utvecklar kreativitet och estetisk kompetens. Naturligtvis finns både elever och lärare som upplever svårigheter i detta arbete, men de allra flesta får uppleva att arbetet fortskrider på önskat sätt. Den här boken handlar om elevernas och lärarnas arbete i klassrummet när det gäller skolans primära uppgift; att ge möjlighet till lärande och utveckling. Den handlar om arbetet med grundläggande färdigheter och lärande, om läraren som arbetsledare och ansvarig för val av arbetsformer, läxor, möblering liksom deras arbete med värdefrågor, genusfrågor och konfliktlösning. Den handlar också om lärares inbördes samarbete. Kort sagt en bok som handlar om lärarens breda uppdrag. Boken är skriven av forskare som alla arbetar med lärarutbildning och som själva har erfarenheter från arbete i skolan.

This article describes students’ involvement and interest in exchange programmes in Swedish higher education. Law and Engineering bachelor’s programmes were chosen to exemplify an over-represented and under-represented group respectively in terms of international mobility in this context. The study combines interview and survey data. The author argues that the different institutional practices in educational programmes impact on students’ experienced involvement in exchange studies.

Students are on the move. An increasing number of students move abroad for education, both as part of exchange programs and as “free movers”. In the field of higher education, increasing the international mobility of the student population has been a top priority. Studying abroad is often described as valuable educational and cultural experiences. In addition to the educational merits, cultural experiences and personal development, it is also argued that internationally mobile students are set to enjoy an advantage in employability and mobility in a supposed future international and intercultural labour market. Increasing demands have been placed on universities as social institutions to produce internationally mobile professionals.

Evaluations of exchange programmes, for example ERASMUS, show that there may be some truth to the claim that international education provides an advantage in the labour market. However, the results of the studies are often cautiously positive.  

While the discussion of international education and mobility is attracting more and more attention, it is often pointed out that it is difficult to define “international education”, and that it is better understood as aspects of transnational work. 

This paper investigates how international education is translated and performed by Swedish educational programs. It deals with questions such as what makes a student internationally mobile and what it means for an educator to teach an international education and provide students and graduates with international competences. The empirical materials are interviews with teachers in Swedish higher education, working in three different international fields: a PhD with teaching experiences in courses in an international master program, a director of studies in international master program with additional experience in a national program and a director of studies in a national program with an international focus. 

Drawing upon the sociomaterial perspective on mobility and education, the paper aims at tracing the different entities that enable student and graduate mobility and in which way international educations are performed. The paper discusses various entities such as policy documents, degrees, language, incoming and outgoing students as well as the labor market, and how they contribute to create a space for anticipation and limits of “international education” and “international mobility”. 

Drawing upon Actor network theory (ANT), the paper discusses the issue of agency in simulation training in medical education. Data is generated through observing technology-enhanced simulations in health care education where a mid-fidelity simulator (SimMan) is used. In the teaching session described in the paper, the students work and learn together in a-30 minutes emergency simulation with the SimMan as a patient called Sofia. The paper illustrates different examples of how the SimMan transforms from a "mannequin" and a "piece of technology" to a "female patient Sofia" as an effect of an assemblage of heterogeneous actors and how rapidly the transformation reverses back to a "mannequin", "piece of technology" when the assemblage fails to hold together. By drawing upon ANT, the paper argues that agency is not just a capacity of the students and teachers, but in webs of relations of human actors, materials, a scenario, techniques and the mannequin.

This paper take an actor-network theory perspective on the use of medical simulators in professional education as a means of training students in medical education and nursing in handling acute emergency situations in health care.  The main aim of the study is to investigate what activities are performed in what material arrangements in a full cycle of simulation, i.e  the briefing, the simulation in the emergency room, the observations in the control room and the debriefing and what knowing is produced as an effect of these arrangements.

 The use of simulators has become a common teaching strategy in medical education. An ageing population, declining financial resources and lack of trained health care personnel are global trends that call for changing the system of health care practice as well as for professional education in the sector.  To build more effective health services, professionals are required to work more collaboratively and in partnership with health care consumers (WHO 2008; 2010). Recently, leading medical experts have also criticised the training of health personnel for not adequately preparing for cooperation and inter-professional communication (Frenk et al, 2010). In health care, this concern situations demanding effective communication for making prompt decisions that are of critical importance in emergency situations. Training of students and professionals by means of full-scale simulators is a response to accommodate for these needs.  Education in simulation-based environments is seen to offer opportunities to address the needs for training interprofessional collaboration by focusing on communication, situation awareness, decision making and coping with stress (Arafeh et al 2010; Östergaard et al,2011). Cook et al has shown in a meta analysis of more than 600 research articles, that in comparison with no intervention, technology-enhanced simulation is consistently associated with large effects for outcomes of knowledge, skills, and behaviors but moderate effects for patient-related outcomes (Cook et al 2011). A majority of the studies are effect studies with quantitative designs. The authors argue that there is a need for rigorous, theory based qualitative studies in order to clarify how and when to effectively use technology enhanced simulations in the training of health care professionals.

 The present study draws upon Actor-network theory (Latour, 2005).  This perspective which situates materiality as a part of the social practices, provides theoretical tools for observation and discussion of the relation between the material assemblages and human actors. Observations of full-scale simulations of acute trauma handling in the emergency room with ten groups of medical and nursing students make up the data for analysis. Preliminary findings indicate that the different locations and material arrangements of the simulation cycle produce different kinds of knowing and learning than the intended curriculum objectives. The findings can contribute to the theoretical knowledge of how to design simulation-based medical education.

This qualitative study aims to address the identified gap in literature concerning  the lack of rigorous, theory-based, qualitative studies to clarify how and when to effectively use simulations to train health care professionals (Cook, et al, 2011). By drawing upon actor-network theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005) an approach that situates materiality as a part of the social practices, and provides theoretical tools for observation and discussion of the relation between the material assemblages and human actors, we have investigated how learning takes place during a simulation-based medical training. Knowing and learning, according to ANT, are not simply cognitive or social phenomena, but are seen as emerging as effects of the socio-material networks gathered together and being performed into being in particular locations (Law, 2004; Rimpiläinen, 2011).  In this study we have focussed on observing the socio-material arrangements that emerged in three locations involved in the simulation – the simulation room, the observation room and the reflection room - and analysing what kinds of knowing and learning they have produced through which socio-material arrangements. Data for analysis consists of observations of full-scale simulations of acute trauma handling in the emergency room with ten groups of medical and nursing students.  Preliminary findings indicate that the different locations and material arrangements of the simulation cycle produce different kinds of knowing and learning from the intended curriculum objectives. The findings can contribute to the theoretical knowledge of how to design simulation-based medical education.

Våra dagliga liv och olika verksamheter är omöjliga utan det materiella. Det sociala livet består inte enbart av relationer mellan människor utan också av relationer mellan människor och det materiella. Aktör-nätverksteorin (ANT) handlar om samspel mellan människor och det materiella, och konsekvenser av dessa relationer.

Syftet med att delta i utbildning är att lära, men lärande kan inbegripa många olika fenomen och förklaras på olika sätt. Hur kan man förstå vuxnas lärande? Det är frågan vi ställer oss i detta kapitel.  

This study is based on observations of the design process of a virtual patient (VP), which aimed to facilitate interprofessional learning. By following the design process of this particular VP, this study aimed to trace how different practices and the knowledge within these practices were enacted as a VP and to understand the design team's difficulties and challenges. Drawing upon actor-network theory (ANT), the study demonstrates how technology and various practices in healthcare and education were enrolled to build the VP and the different translations that took place during the process. We discuss the results by reflecting on the intertwined relationship among the different enactments of a patient in the different professional practices, the enactment of pedagogical intentions and the role of technology in the design process.

This article aims to review the pedagogical research on simulation training in voca-tional education and training (VET) and to discuss the emerging teaching practice from a socio-material perspective on learning and practice. Literature reviews on research into simulation training with pedagogical interests show that there are three main themes: 1) the effect of technology-enhanced simulation training, 2) the fidelity and authenticity of simulation and learning, and 3) pedagogical consideration and under-pinnings. The article draws on a sociomaterial perspective on learning and practice to problematise and discuss the findings of previous research. This theoretical perspec-tive makes it possible to discuss how technology, educational practice and social rela-tions are intertwined and precondition each other.

Through the lens of sociomaterial theory, the article discusses how the introduction of the new technologies brings about changes and expectations of what can be learned, how the teaching practices are enacted and how this affects the relationship between teachers and students.

It is argued that the use of high-fdelity simulators is educationally efective, since students are able to work more independently and can better control their learning. Therefore, simulations can be used as a teaching method to facilitate and ease teachers’ work situations. This raises questions as to whether teachers’ professional bodies are a bounded physicality, or whether we can understand teachers’ professional bodies in practice in terms of enactments? This article analyses and discusses the enactment of VET teachers’ professional bodies in the context of vocational and simulation-based training. The empirical material is based on ethnographic observations in three classes in two diferent vocational education programmes at two upper secondary schools in Sweden. Three diferent cases are presented and analysed as examples of how VET teachers’ professional bodies are enacted. Guided by a practice theory perspective (Schatzki, T. R. Social practices: a Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social (1996), Schatzki, T. R. The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change (2002), Schatzki, T. R. & Natter, W. Sociocultural bodies, bodies sociopolitical. In T. R.Schatzki & W. Natter (Eds.), The social and political body (1996), the study shows that VET teachers’ professional bodies are enacted in multiples, distributed, and delegated in an interplay between the teachers, the students, the simulator, and its material set-up. In these enactments of professional bodies, VET teachers embody both a teacher identity and a previous vocational identity, which they perform simultaneously depending on the educational situation.

The study aims to understand what makes a 'successful simulation', one that follows the planned sequence of events embedded in the simulated scenario, thus producing the intended learning path and learning outcomes for the participating students. The study is based on observations of 15 full-scale simulation sessions of acute trauma handling during inter-professional training of medical and nursing students. The study shows that the briefing preceding the simulation frames the students' emergent actions during the scenario by demarcating 'possibilities' and 'impossibilities' for actions during the exercise. This in turn defines what actions are 'appropriate' and 'inappropriate' when the scenario is enacted. The simulation exercises are emergent and co-constituted by the diverse participating, socio-material actors. The extent to which this socio-material assemblage manages to produce and maintain the enactment of the patient during the simulation signifies the success or failure of the intended learning path of the exercise.

This qualitative study focuses on how knowings and learning take place in full-scale simulation training of medical and nursing students, by drawing upon actor-network theory (ANT). ANT situates materiality as a part of the social practic-es. Knowing and learning, according to ANT, are not simply cognitive or social phenomena, but are seen as emerging as effects of the relation between material assemblages and human actors being performed into being in particular locations. Data consists of observations of simulations performed by ten groups of students. The analysis focuses on the emerging knowings in the socio-material—arrangements of three locations involved in the simulation—the simulation room, the observation room and the reflection room. The findings indicate that medical knowing, affective knowing and communicative knowing are produced in different ways in the different locations and material arrangements of the simulation cycle.

In this thesis I discuss workplace learning during international assignments in a variety of work sectors. In addition to normal adjustments to a new workplace, foreign language acquisition and cultural adaptation are necessary. By collecting and analyzing narratives of a group of Swedish professionals with international work assignments, I have found some regularities and variations of workplace learning as well as some significant effects that these assignments had on their identity. Recommendations are given to providers of preparatory courses for international work assignments as well as sending organizations and employers.

The main finding is that workplace learning for international workers follows a trajectory starting already long before departure and continues throughout different phases of the assignment. It also has effects on work life after the return to one’s home culture. The learning resulting from the work assignment affected all areas of life (not only work life) and contributed towards an intercultural identity. This kind of assignment often included networking with several organizations and groups of people of varying nationalities. Instead of working towards becoming full members of one work community, the participants in this study often found themselves in the peripheries of multiple ones. This peripheral albeit influential situation provided many opportunities for learning, both for the individual and the groups they work with. In this way, these international workers have the potential to be agents of change and development in all work communities they relate to. 

Sveriges mest älskade björn har blivit medelålders. I femtio år har Rune Andréassons lille nalle i blå hängselbyxor och toppluva predikat vänlighet och vikten att stå upp mot orättvisor. Inte sällan med det prestationshöjande preparatet ”Dunderhonung” innanför pälsen. Serien har varit en framgångssaga från det första strecket.

Academic courses on interculturality have become a rapidly growing discipline in the West, where supranational bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO promote intercultural education as a path towards improved global cultural relations. Through interviews with students who completed a university course on interculturality, this essay investigates the tenets of interculturality and problematises whether this discourse merely reproduces a classificatory logic embedded in modernity that insists on differences among cultures. The argument put forward is that in the analysed context, interculturality tends to reproduce the very colonial ideas that it seeks to oppose. In doing so, interculturality reinforces the collective ‘we’ as the location of modernity by deciding who is culturally different and who is in a position that must be bridged to the mainstream by engaging in intercultural dialogue.

The present article focuses on problematizing the European Union’s claim that intercultural dialogue constitutes an advocated method of talking through cultural boundaries based on mutual empathy and non-domination. More precisely, the aim is to analyze who is being constructed as counterparts of the intercultural dialogue through the discourse produced by the EU. To answer the question, European policy documents on intercultural dialogue are analyzed drawing on a postcolonial perspective. As an interpretation, the EU appropriates historical symbols and colonial figures of thought to authorize its current objectives. Within the realm of the EU, Europeans are portrayed as having an a priori historical existence, while the ones excluded from this notion are evoked to demonstrate its difference in comparison to the European one. The results show that subjects not considered as Europeans serve as markers of the multicultural present of the space. Thus, intercultural dialogue seems to consolidate differences between European and Other - the ‘We’ and ‘Them’ in the dialogue - rather than, as in line with its purpose, bringing subjects together.

At the centre of Decolonising Intercultural Education is a simple yet fundamental question: is it possible to learn from the Other? This book argues that many recent efforts to theorise interculturality restrict themselves to a variety of interpretations within a Western framework of knowledge, which does not necessarily account for the epistemological diversity of the world.

The book suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, framed not in terms of cultural differences, but in terms of colonial difference. It brings analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad into the picture and explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook, seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.

Decolonising Intercultural Education will be of interest to educational practitioners, researchers and postgraduate students in in the areas of education, postcolonial studies, Latin American studies and social sciences.

The thrust of this essay is to study how interculturality, as a path to decolonization, is being articulated and understood among indigenous alliances in the Andean region of Latin America. Empirically, the analysis is based upon interviews with students and teachers from local academic courses on interculturality in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Although interculturality and intercultural education are common features also in Western educational rhetoric, the imposition to learn from indigenous movements have failed to attract any substantial interest in the West (cf. Deere & Leon 2003; Patrinos 2000). To illustrate this further, Robert Young (2012) argues that indigenous struggles seldom are regarded as a central issue even within postcolonial studies, a disjunction related to the use among indigenous movements of paradigms not easily translated to the Western theories and presuppositions commonly used in this scholarship (Young 2012). Given this picture, there are strong reasons for engaging seriously in a discussion about the proposition for interculturality to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary – modernity, progress, salvation – as it lingers on in official memory; and there are also good reasons to problematize the universalizing claims that have characterized Western philosophy in the implicitly assumed epistemological hierarchies.

In this paper, I will focus specifically on visions of decolonization in terms of retrieved languages, reinscribed histories, production of knowledge; beginning the essay with an elaboration of the logic of domination as rooted in the modern/colonial world – here referred to as coloniality. Shortly thereafter, with reference points drawn from the work of Walter Mignolo and his notion of delinking, I introduce the theoretical backdrop that guides my analysis. In the major part of the paper, I develop an argument for interculturality to be understood as inter-epistemic based on knowledge produced beyond the discursive order of Western educational systems.

If the production of knowledge in Latin America has long been subject to imperial designs and disseminated through educational systems, recent interventions —from liberation theology, popular education, participatory action research, alternative communication and critical literacy to postcolonial critique and decolonial options—have sought to shift the geography of reason. The central question to be addressed is how, in times of historical ruptures, political reconstructions and epistemic formations, the production of paradigms rooted in ‘other’ logics, cosmologies and realities may renegotiate and redefine concepts of education, learning and knowledge.

The present article focuses on problematizing the European Union’s claim that intercultural dialogue cons- titutes an advocated method of talking through cultural boundaries based on mutual empathy and non-do- mination. More precisely, the aim is to analyze who is being constructed as counterparts of the intercultural dialogue through the discourse produced by the EU. To answer the question, European policy documents on intercultural dialogue are analyzed drawing on a postcolonial perspective. As an interpretation, the EU appropriates historical symbols and colonial figures of thought to authorize its current objectives. Within the realm of the EU, Europeans are portrayed as having an a priori historical existence, while the ones excluded from this notion are evoked to demonstrate its difference in comparison to the European one. The results show that subjects not considered as Europeans serve as markers of the multicultural present of the space. Thus, intercultural dialogue seems to consolidate differences between European and Other – the ‘We’ and ‘Them’ in the dialogue – rather than, as in line with its purpose, bringing subjects together.

Ville Ranta’s homepage offers links to two distinct comics blogs: one in Finnish, one in French. These choices are logical. Few other Nordic cartoonists have embraced the French comics scene with the same persistence as Ranta. In the autobiographical wing of his body of work, three books from a catalog of many more, Ranta expresses a constant longing for France. In the first two memoirs—2006's Papa est un peu fatigué ("Daddy’s a Little Bit Tired") and 2014's La Jérusalem du pauvre ("The Poor Man’s Jerusalem")—which focus on his struggles to balance an artistic career with family life, this theme serves predominately as a sidetrack. Ranta satisfies his yearning for France with the familiar accoutrements of a young Francophile: red wine, Serge Gainsbourg records and Breton striped shirts. But he also visits French comics festivals and attends drawing retreats in Paris. The third book, published in French by Edition Rackham in 2021, is fully devoted to his dream of making a name on the French comics scene. Succès, mode d’emploi ("Success: A User Manual"), known in Finnish by the even bolder title “How I Conquered France,” documents a challenging journey from humiliating experiences courting arrogant publishers and their broken promises to collaborating with Lewis Trondheim and having a book accepted into the Official Selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2011.

An increasing number of educational policies, academic studies, and university courses today propagate ‘interculturality’ as a method for approaching ‘the Other’ and reconciling universal values and cultural specificities. Based on a thorough discussion of Europe’s colonial past and the hierarchies of knowledge that colonialism established, this dissertation interrogates the definitions of intercultural knowledge put forth by EU policy discourse, academic textbooks on interculturality, and students who have completed a university course on the subject. Taking a decolonial approach that makes its central concern the ways in which differences are formed and sustained through references to cultural identities, this study shows that interculturality, as defined in these texts, runs the risk of affirming a singular European outlook on the world, and of elevating this outlook into a universal law. Contrary to its selfproclaimed goal of learning from the Other, interculturality may in fact contribute to the repression of the Other by silencing those who are already muted. The dissertation suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, which is not framed in terms of cultural differences but in terms of colonial difference. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad, which derives from the struggles for public and political recognition among indigenous social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. By bringing interculturalidad into the picture, with its roots in the particular and with strong reverberations of the historical experience of colonialism, this study explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook. In this way, the dissertation argues that an emancipation from colonial legacies requires that we start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.