Material Interculturality: Making Sense with Everyday Objects

This book shows how objects can create new linguistic and cultural orders, spotlighting the ways in which everyday collections help make the world anew by rearranging its materiality and how multilingual speakers make meanings without words.

Adopting an innovative approach to intercultural research drawing on work from visual and multisensorial ethnography, Ros i Solé critically reflects on what we know as interculturality by going beyond the verbal and the more-than-human to understand languages and cultures. This book expands the meaning of interculturality by seeing it as the result of the relations between people, places, and materiality. Using everyday multilingual artefacts such as clothes, cookie-cutters, LPs, books, and pens, it presents a new semiotic multilingual landscape where the intercultural is closely connected to the ground, and it is felt, rehearsed, and re-enacted through the stories and the memories contained in multilingual objects.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, multilingualism, language education, and applied linguistics.

Cristina Ros i Solé is Senior Lecturer in Language, Culture and Learning in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.