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Mosaics of Cultural Identity: Mundializing the Self on the Arena of Education

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Deep Experiencing

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Psychology ((BRIEFSPCDS))

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Abstract

The advancing process of globalization (mundialization) sets up new conditions for individuals, living in rapidly changing societies, to organize personal perceptions of cultural identity. This exploratory study is based on qualitative questionnaires with 14 young adults either from Senegal or from France and from different educational levels; and on a focus group with three participants linked differently to both national cultures. The aim of the current study is to discover the dialogical processes within the respondents’ self-reflections that coordinate the relations between local and global I-position and the effect school education has on this. It was found that school influences the participants’ perspectives on globalization, particularly the Senegalese’s ones, towards more local awareness and critics of global political structures, like neo-colonialism. In general, young people are aware of globalization influences, but also integrate some elements of different origin in their everyday life, so that these elements become invisible in a coherent mosaic of cultural identity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    France colonialized Senegal , so that school language and systems show certain similarities up to today. I decided to conduct this study with participants having grown up in Thies, Angers and Rouen. In Thiès, Senegal I have lived during part of my youth, I learned Wolof, and I spent 3 years with the Senegalese diaspora in Luxembourg. To Angers I went for a student exchange and only in Rouen, another city in West of France , I have never been. I was in constant exchange about this study with Senegalese persons. Nevertheless, the reader of this paper has to keep in mind the limitations (see empirical analysis).

  2. 2.

    The pictures in the ornament band of this chapter (taken by myself) show these fabrics.

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Acknowledgments

Earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 9th International Conference on Dialogical Self, Lublin, September 9th, 2016 at the symposium New Voices in the Dialogical Self. The support by the INSIDE Unit of University of Luxembourg is gratefully acknowledged. I thank Jaan Valsiner for his valuable assistance and insights during the whole project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Larissa Haunhorst

  2. University of Neuchatel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Larissa Haunhorst

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  1. Larissa Haunhorst
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Correspondence to Larissa Haunhorst .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Olga V. Lehmann

  2. Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Jaan Valsiner

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Haunhorst, L. (2017). Mosaics of Cultural Identity: Mundializing the Self on the Arena of Education. In: Lehmann, O., Valsiner, J. (eds) Deep Experiencing. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68693-6_2

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