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Cultural work with refugees has a long history. It is a contentious area.\ud Instrumental approaches to cultural work with refugees raise significant\ud issues. This briefing outlines the contentions, provides a theoretical basis\ud for the work, gives leading examples of cultural work with refugees,\ud including work that promotes intercultural understanding and work that\ud promotes fear. It outlines key findings and recommendations, which\ud have a substantial focus on ethical engagement, aesthetic importance\ud and societal wellbeing.

This chapter argues that Scotland has achieved a high level of maturity in the multilingual policy debate across the UK, connected to devolved policies of education and of linguistic inclusion, and to its indigenous language policies. Its policies of integration for refugees and asylum seekers have included an ever increasing focus on languages as essential to the provision of bonds and bridges for integration and for the hosting of refugees. Listening to refugee-background residents of Scotland, policymakers and groups in civil society have become aware of their own ‘stinginess with languages’. The chapter argues that lessons need to be learned from those contexts worldwide which operate different models of multilingualism. And policymaking itself needs new language. In Scotland, language policies are emerging that are shifting the discourses, even if we are all ‘beginners’ in the practices of ‘language plenty’.

THE GAZE OF THE WEST AND FRAMINGS OF THE EAST, SHANTA NAIR-VENUGOPAL (ED.) (2012) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, XV + 264 pp. ISBN: 978-0-230-30292-1, h/bk, £66.00

This is the text of a keynote speech delivered at the Sexual Harassment in Higher Education conference at Goldsmiths on December 2nd 2015. Content note for sexually violent language and descriptions of traumatic experiences.

The body is a site of impassioned, fraught and complex debate in the West today. In one political moment, left-wingers, academics and feminists have defended powerful men accused of sex crimes, positioned topless pictures in the tabloids as empowering, and opposed them for sexualizing breasts and undermining their ‘natural’ function. At the same time they have been criticized by extreme-right groups for ignoring honour killings and other ‘culture-based’ forms of violence against women. How can we make sense of this varied terrain?\ud \ud In this important and challenging new book, Alison Phipps constructs a political sociology of women’s bodies around key debates: sexual violence, gender and Islam, sex work and motherhood. Her analysis uncovers dubious rhetorics and paradoxical allegiances, and contextualizes these within the powerful coalition of neoliberal and neoconservative frameworks. She explores how ‘feminism’ can be caricatured and vilified at both ends of the political spectrum, arguing that Western feminisms are now faced with complex problems of positioning in a world where gender often comes second to other political priorities.\ud \ud This book provides a welcome investigation into Western politics around women’s bodies, and will be particularly useful to scholars and upper-level students of sociology, political science, gender studies and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in how bodies become politicized.

This PhD thesis develops a Brechtian research pedagogy for intercultural education. Taking its lead from progressive intercultural educators and researchers who conceptualise intercultural experiences as being "radically embodied", this thesis is underpinned by a concept of culture as fluid and constantly "in the making". In order to give ethical and pedagogical consideration to such a performative view of culture, Brechtian thinking and theatre practice is employed and translated into the intercultural education research space. Placing Brechtian Verfremdung – "estrangement" - at the heart of methodology, such research pedagogy works from within the precarity of intercultural spaces. Based on an immanent ethics that emerges from and shapes within the relationships built in the research space, the researcher's role is that of the facilitator and co-producer of data. A Brechtian research pedagogy is thus considered a mode of production; one that does not conceptually presuppose ethics and pedagogy, but considers them as "becoming" and integrated within its methods.