Bücher von Neriko Musha Doerr

Investigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj A iA ek's notion of fetish and Walter Benjamin's notion of the optical unconscious to offer newer concepts: "e;tinted glasses"e;, through which we see the world; "e;unit-thinking"e;, which renders the world as consisting of discrete units; and "e;coherants"e;, which help fragmented experiences cohere into something intelligible. Examining experiences at a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone, as well as in college classrooms, this book reveals the workings of unit-thinking and fetishism in diverse contexts and explores possibilities for social change.

How does language or culture come to be standardized to the degree that it is considered 'homogeneous'? How does teaching language relate to such standardization processes? How can teaching be mindful of the standardization processes that potentially involve power relations? Focusing on the case of Japanese, which is often viewed as homogenous in terms of language and culture, this volume explores these questions in a wide range of contexts: the notions of translation and modernity, the ideologies of the standardization of regional dialects in Japan, current practices in college Japanese-as-a- Foreign-Language classrooms in the United States, discourses in journals of Japanese language education, and classroom practices in nursery and primary schools in Japan. This volume's investigation of standardization processes of Japanese language and culture addresses the intersections of theoretical and practical concerns of researchers and educators that are often overlooked.

Written for study abroad practitioners, this book approaches key study abroad concepts - such as "culture", "native speaker", and "immersion" - from a number of theoretical perspectives, and considers study abroad not as an encounter with cultural others, but as an occasion to analyze constructions of "differences" in daily life.