In this article, I, following Kim (2008Kim ( , 2015, explore the concept 'intercultural personhood'. To do so, I use creative-arts methods to enable students' meaningmakings about 'who I am' in their intercultural experience. Based upon the imaginative arts-mediated meaning-makings of four students at a culturallydiverse UK university, I provide a conceptualisation of intercultural personhood as: a personalised hybrid construct of change and exchange which is negotiated through multipolarised tensions of being. This conceptualisation liberates the conception of individuals from essentialist and reductionist identifications. It extends Kim's discussion of 'intercultural personhood' by a) avoiding a selfother orientation, and b) foregrounding the aspect of 'personhood'. This conceptualisation recognises that a person constructs their 'self' through the reciprocal relativity of exchange, and exists in the fluidity of living and their agency for negotiation. Their deliberate living and negotiation stretch across the multipolarised tensions/dilemmas of normal humanities, revolving around the fragile core of self-existence. My conceptual exploration about intercultural personhood provides a step towards the operationalisation of non-essentialist thinking in understanding individuals and their experiences for intercultural research.

No abstract

Imagination, as an essential aspect of human nature, is fundamental to all ways of thinking. However, this powerful faculty is usually overlooked or marginalised in educational research. In the article, I explore imagination as a methodological source for researchers to generate expansive, purposeful, fluid, and developmental knowledge about the subjective realities constructed by individuals as meaning-makers. To do so, I illustrate how I use two variations of painting (i.e. cartoon-and freestyle-painting) to facilitate such an imaginative space for understanding students' meaning-making about intercultural experience. Imagination, as facilitated through the subjective, transformative space of arts methods, can extend the epistemological and methodological possibilities of knowledge for educational research. It provides a post-qualitative methodology which can be particularly useful for enabling conceptually-abstract and structurally-complex knowledge that may not be expressible or interrogatable in a coherent way through traditional research methods in education.

No abstract

Mindfulness, or 念 (niàn) in Chinese, is a concept and set of related practices which have both ancient Eastern roots and current popularity (especially in the West). It provides a fascinating example of intercultural knowledge-work involving a complex set of conceptual migrations through time and space, across languages and cultures, and within domains and disciplines. We first review the vitality of the concept as used in Western disciplines (chiefly intercultural communication and psychotherapy), noting how the Eastern origins are mentioned but not fully discussed. We then review the ancient origins in Eastern religious and philosophical thinking concluding with an account of the development of the term in the East until recent times. As we discuss next, when these differing arenas of use and development interact, understandings become contested and issues of privilege vis-á-vis knowledge sources can be seen. These complexities raise questions about authenticity versus translation with regard to the differing uses made of the concept in the different arenas. Learning from the reviews of the differing understandings of this concept and the sometimes fraught interactions between them, we propose that scholars and practitioners working in our highly interconnected era, adopt an intercultural ethic to regulate and guide such knowledge-work.