Sean
Golden was an invited keynote speaker at the IALIC 2016 annual conference - Bridging
across languages and cultures in everyday lives. New roles for changing
scenarios-- held in Barcelona on 25-27 November 2016.
Abstract
Curricula and theoretical frameworks for political
science courses in the Euroamerican context are dominated by a limited number of
paradigms that tend to become “paradogmas” that reflect an unquestioned or
unproblematised Eurocentric or Euroamerican bias. They lack intellectual and
theoretical diversity. A geopolitical power shift has occurred, but the
paradigms that dominate Euroamerican political theory have not shifted.
In the West Jürgen Habermas has attempted to counter
both instrumental rationalism and postmodernism by calling for the construction
of a communicative rationality or civic discourse that would allow all parties
to agree on certain basic principles and procedures in order to promote mutual
understanding and mutual acceptance of agreements.
As the geopolitical tectonic plates shift, alternative
discourses emerge, based on non-Euroamerican principles and procedures. In the
new discourse of a resurgent China, references to ancient Confucian texts rub
shoulders with Maoist slogans and slang from the Internet. Old established
slogans and keywords are being given new meanings. Unless we learn and
understand these new meanings we could misinterpret what is being said, and be
misinterpreted.
In order to better understand the innovations under
way we need to develop a better understanding of the issues, the policies, the paradigms
and the discourse that are being constructed. This requires better knowledge of
the Chinese language and
culture and first-hand knowledge of the policies being
carried out. It also requires more collaborative efforts to promote and build better
mutual and common knowledge and understanding, perhaps along the lines of the EUNIC’s
Europe-China Cultural Compass or the Dictionary
of Untranslatables (Cassin, 2014).
Mutual respect requires mutual knowledge in order to
construct a common and consensual multicultural civic discourse that could lead
to meaningful cooperation.
