This article explores email dialogue between students from the University of Guanajuato and the University of Leeds who shared critical incidents from their personal experience and travels. While the students struggled with essentialism in their exchanges, they retained a willingness to critique specific local cultural practices and challenged…

Despite some recent criticism, the idea of language interpreting in anthropological (among others) field research seems still firmly rooted in classical anthropology where the interpreter was an obstacle and necessary evil rather than aid. We surveyed anthropologists conducting field research in Arab League countries to describe their practices…

This study utilises the 'small story' approach to investigate metaphor in mobile students' narratives of intercultural experience. Metaphor in narrative is seen as a dynamic, discursive, and sociocognitive phenomenon. The narrative accounts presented in this paper derive from interviews conducted for mobility project evaluation. The participants…

The study examines second language identities constructed in small stories around intercultural communication. It presents a detailed narrated-event and narrating-event analysis of small stories narrated by an Iranian user of English as a second language (ESL). The analysis suggests that small stories can become a site where second language…

This paper examines the intersection of one form of contemporary mobility, i.e. lifestyle mobility, with the ELT industry. It draws on the discursive analysis of a small corpus of life story data produced by native English language teachers of different ages residing in Barcelona. Through their own personal and professional accounts and…

Language difference is an intrinsic aspect of any kind of mobility and especially of tourism, the world's allegedly largest industry which develops around a myriad of multilingual and multicultural places. However, multilingualism and the intense intermingling of languages characterizing tourist sites are considered a potentially chaos-creating…

The assumption that each culture has its own distinctive identity has been generally accepted in the discussion of cultural identities. Quite often identity formation is not perceived as a dynamic and interactive ongoing process that engages other cultures and involves change in its responses to different challenges at different times. I will…

Since the rise of the Internet, the act of border crossing has become a pursuit that must necessarily be conceptualized in both real and virtual terms. By using theories connected to virtual communities, new technologies, fan cultures and tourism, this paper seeks to show that the culturally productive activities of a transnational virtual…

The writings of Indians in English provide a rich ground to explore the ways in which travellers and migrants from India to England relate to the realities of the place and to their place in it. Language and the literary education that characterised English education in India during colonial times play an important role in the construction of…

Through an analysis of three settler narratives about new lives in Spain, Stewart (1999), Kerr (2000) and Lambert (2000), the paper explores three elements of these intercultural narratives that contribute to the formation of the settler's new sociocultural identity: the physical environment, explorations of the other through signs of the…

The paper discusses different approaches to foreign culture in the works of four Balkan writers: Ismail Kadare, Milorad Pavi, Yordan Radichkov and Jadranka Vladova in the context of the works of the English traveller, Edith Durham. It studies the specific function of travel and exploration and the use of different languages (dictionaries) as a…