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GLOBAL DIVERSITIES

Organised Cultural
Encounters
Practices of Transformation
Lise Paulsen Galal
Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen

mpimmg
 Global Diversities

Series Editors
Steven Vertovec
Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and
Ethnic Diversity
Göttingen, Germany

Peter van der Veer

Department of Religious Diversity
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and
Ethnic Diversity
Göttingen, Germany

Ayelet Shachar
Department of Ethics, Law, and Politics
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and
Ethnic Diversity
Göttingen, Germany
Over the past decade, the concept of ‘diversity’ has gained a leading place
in academic thought, business practice, politics and public policy across
the world. However, local conditions and meanings of ‘diversity’ are
highly dissimilar and changing. For these reasons, deeper and more com-
parative understandings of pertinent concepts, processes and phenomena
are in great demand. This series will examine multiple forms and configu-
rations of diversity, how these have been conceived, imagined, and repre-
sented, how they have been or could be regulated or governed, how
different processes of inter-ethnic or inter-religious encounter unfold,
how conflicts arise and how political solutions are negotiated and prac-
ticed, and what truly convivial societies might actually look like. By com-
paratively examining a range of conditions, processes and cases revealing
the contemporary meanings and dynamics of ‘diversity’, this series will be
a key resource for students and professional social scientists. It will repre-
sent a landmark within a field that has become, and will continue to be,
one of the foremost topics of global concern throughout the twenty-­first
century. Reflecting this multi-disciplinary field, the series will include
works from Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Law, Geography
and Religious Studies. While drawing on an international field of schol-
arship, the series will include works by current and former staff members,
by visiting fellows and from events of the Max Planck Institute for the
Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Relevant manuscripts submitted
from outside the Max Planck Institute network will also be considered.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15009
 Lise Paulsen Galal
Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen

Organised Cultural
Encounters
Practices of Transformation
Lise Paulsen Galal Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen
Department of Communication and Arts Department of Communication and Arts
Roskilde University Roskilde University
Roskilde, Denmark Roskilde, Denmark

ISSN 2662-2580     ISSN 2662-2599 (electronic)

Global Diversities
ISBN 978-3-030-42885-3    ISBN 978-3-030-42886-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42886-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
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 Preface

The ideas and perspectives developed in Organised Cultural Encounters:

Practices of Transformation are the result of insights harvested from a col-
laborative research project on organised cultural encounters. The field-
work that forms the basis for the analyses in this book was conducted in
different domains: interfaith dialogue work (fieldwork by Lise Paulsen
Galal); a youth diversity project called the Cultural Encounters
Ambassadors (fieldwork by Helle Bach Riis); training activities related to
diversity management (fieldwork by Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen); volun-
teer tourism (fieldwork by Lene Bull Christiansen); and a community
dance project (fieldwork by Rasmus Præstmann Hansen).
Besides the two authors, the other project members have contributed
to this book with research data and through discussions during the proj-
ect period. Lene has also been involved in the structuring of the volume
through her participation in the writing of the book proposal. Thanks to
all of them for inspiring and generous collaboration.
Even though the performance incentives of the neoliberal university
are heavily individualised, research in our view is always a dialogical
accomplishment, and in that sense the collaborative nature of our research
project is not unusual. What is perhaps less common is that this book
refers to and analyses fieldnotes and interviews produced by all five
research participants. This means that, in addition to analysing our own
and each other’s material, we—the authors of this book—have also had
v
vi Preface

access not only to the publications of the other participants but also to
their “raw material”. This, of course, implies that we as authors need to
adhere to the same ethical responsibilities towards the research partici-
pants as the fieldworkers have done—both in terms of formal ethics and
ethics in practice (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004).
It also means that it is necessary to consider the ethics associated with
analysing—and writing about—data material not produced by oneself,
which also implies laying some kind of claim to that material. In the
book, we have adopted a politics of citation that aims to acknowledge the
contributions of all the participants in the research project. However, the
analyses and their merits and flaws are our responsibility. Where possible,
we have supported the analysis of our co-researchers’ data by drawing on
their writings on their own case material, but still with our analytical
focus in mind.
It is, however, not a straightforward venture to analyse other people’s
fieldnotes and interviews. Reflecting upon the fieldwork related to his
doctoral research into urban politics and responses to asylum, Jonathan
Darling underlines:

The need to consider more carefully the ways in which fieldwork produces
more than simply “data”, narratives or notes to be analysed and repre-
sented. Fieldwork produces sensibilities and dispositions, it alters individu-
als and may orientate them differently towards others. […] sensitivity to
context is never a final or full accomplishment. Context and positionality
are always shifting beneath our feet as research develops, […]. As such,
fieldwork demands the continual acknowledgement that the accounts we
produce are incomplete reflections of a “here and now” never to be repeated.
(Darling, 2014, p. 211).

This “more than data” can, of course, be partly recorded in fieldnotes.

But the embodied sensations and collective atmospheres that linger in the
memory, and at least partly take you back to a given situation, will not be
evoked in the same way in a co-reader. When Kirsten writes in her field-
notes that she was overwhelmed by an acute sensation of discomfort, Lise
can of course take this into account as something that occurred—but for
her it does not linger as a mood. And when Lise describes how she often
 Preface vii

feels “high” after participating in an interfaith encounter, this sensation

does not emanate from the fieldnotes, and neither does it capture Kirsten
in any straightforward way. During the joint writing process, the authors
have had the opportunity to continually correct each other’s writings in a
different way than the rest of the research group. This will probably also
manifest itself in the book, in that the analyses based on each author’s
own fieldwork come across as richer.

Roskilde, Denmark Lise Paulsen Galal

Roskilde, Denmark  Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen

References
Darling, J. (2014). Emotions, encounters and expectations: The uncertain ethics
of ‘the field’. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 6(2), 201–212.
Guillemin, M., & Gillam, L. (2004). Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically impor-
tant moments” in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 10(2), 261–280.
 Acknowledgements

This book would not exist without the willingness of the organisers and
participants at the various organised cultural encounters to allow us to
participate and observe, as well as to conduct both formal and informal
interviews. Huge thanks to all of them.
Research is always a collaborative process, which moves along through
conversations in all kinds of formal and informal settings. We express our
warmest appreciation to all of the numerous people, from near and far,
who have helped our project move on by asking difficult questions, mak-
ing insightful comments, and listening patiently. We have also benefitted
from patience over the last few busy months spent on finishing this book,
when other collaborative research activities and writing projects have not
proceeded quite as smoothly as they might have done.
We thank Karen Risager, Ann Phoenix, and Sverre Raffnsøe, who have
contributed with valuable input at different points during the process of
refining our perspectives and arguments. Thanks to Mette Buchardt, Louise
Tranekjær, Birgitte Schepelern Johansen, Jette Kofoed, and Dorthe Staunæs
who each contributed with comments on one of the chapters during the final
stage of writing, helping us to fine-tune our arguments and perspectives.
Finally, thanks to the Independent Research Fund Denmark, which
funded the research project “The Organised Cultural Encounter”
that ran from September 2013 to December 2017, with funding ID
DFF-1319-00093.
ix
 Contents

1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters  1

2 Tracing the Ideas of Organised Cultural Encounters 27

3 Guided Interactions: Scripting at Work 59

4 Orchestrated Turnarounds: Between Chaos and Order105

5 Walking, Dancing, and Listening: Affect and Encounters149

6 A Risky Business189

Index217

xi
 List of Boxes

Box 3.1 Training Courses for Municipal Integration Workers 65

Box 3.2 The Dialogue Pilot Course 71
Box 3.3 The Cultural Encounters Ambassadors 79
Box 3.4 Organizer Against Discrimination 81
Box 3.5 Global Citizenship Training 93
Box 4.1 Danish–Arab Interfaith Dialogue Programme 112
Box 4.2 Heavenly Days 124
Box 5.1 Community Dance 164
Box 5.2 Faith in Harmony 177

xiii
 1
Introduction:
Organised Cultural Encounters

How do we live with (cultural) difference? Or perhaps: how can we deal

with all the conflicts in our contemporary world that are perceived to be
associated with cultural difference? “We don’t want to, take it away”
seems to be the preeminent political answer of governments, as well as a
prominent trend of “public opinion” across the world, or more specifi-
cally: the geopolitical West of this world. This book is about a particular
genre of intervention—which we call organised cultural encounters—
into encounters with difference. It is a genre that seeks to establish a posi-
tive answer to the first question by working on, or dealing with, the
conflictual breaking points addressed in the second. This genre of inter-
vention can be found across the globe, but in this book we explore how
it plays out in contexts that are either located in Denmark or related to a
Danish organisation. In that limited sense, the book is also about
Denmark.
In Denmark, as elsewhere, over the last 30 years or so cultural differ-
ence has become an increasingly heated political topic, to a large extent
through its association with immigration. In particular, the presence of
newcomers from countries deemed culturally alien and religiously differ-
ent have sparked an almost excessive interest in how to support

© The Author(s) 2020 1

L. P. Galal, K. Hvenegård-Lassen, Organised Cultural Encounters, Global Diversities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42886-0_1
2 L. P. Galal and K. Hvenegård-Lassen

cohesiveness, integration, co-existence, and so on; in other words, how

can we mould the perceived threat of disorder, disintegration, and con-
flict into its opposite? While this was predominantly formulated in a lan-
guage of inclusion during the last decades of the twentieth century, the
language of exclusion has gradually taken over during the current century.
Policies at both national and local levels have increasingly defined and
addressed problem areas in openly racialised terms. These include immi-
gration and border control, gang crime, religious extremism and terror-
ism, labour-force marginalisation, ethnic and social “ghettos”, Muslim
head coverings (the hijab and the niqab—the latter mostly called the
“burka”), and honour-based violence (cf. Brochmann & Hagelund,
2012; Jensen, Vitus, & Schmidt, 2018; Keskinen, Skaptadóttir, &
Toivanen, 2019; Keskinen, Tuori, Irni, & Mulinari, 2016).
As well as being prioritised areas of government policies, these issues
have also been taken up by civil society activists and associations who
concentrate their efforts—often economically or ideologically supported
by a neoliberal policy focus on civil society—at the interpersonal and
community level as the primary locus of transformation (Martikainen,
2016). Drawing on ideas about social integration and co-existence, some
of these efforts belong to the genre of organised cultural encounters, in
which the problems associated with cultural difference are addressed
through programmes that seek to foster good—or meaningful—encoun-
ters (Valentine, 2008). These programmes rest on particular problem for-
mulations, such as in the following descriptions by two Danish
associations that organise dialogue meetings (a youth and a faith-based
organisation, respectively):

Dialogue is necessary in a modern world characterised by contrast and

change. This is a world where we meet each other, want to cooperate—and
indeed have to do so, across borders, cultures, viewpoints and motivations.
Dialogue can help overcome prejudice and create understanding of other
people’s perspectives. It can show us new ways of perceiving the world. And
it can expand our horizons. Dialogue enables reaching across an abyss of
difference, as long as we see and recognise each other for what we are: dif-
ferent yet all human beings in the same world. (Helde, 2012, p. 10)
 1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters 3

• We cooperate with partners in Scandinavia, Asia, Africa and the

Middle East—and have a long history of gathering people across reli-
gious beliefs and cultural affiliations.
• We practice dialogue to achieve mutual understanding, solve conflicts
or avoid the conflicts from even arise.
• We do dialogue workshops in educational institutions, among civil
society activist and in the religious sphere. We therefore meet people
on many levels—from young people studying theology to high pro-
filed religious leaders in for example the large-scale project Syrian
Leaders. (Dialogue toolbox, n.d.)

Thus, the “abyss of difference” is a problem that can be overcome through

encounters and dialogue. This genre of intervention that works, in its
broadest definition, through the organisation of face-to-face encounters,
is adopted across a wide variety of social relations that are deemed in need
of support, reparation, or transformation. Occurring across different
social fields, examples include: interfaith activities, cultural exchange pro-
grammes, reconciliation projects, community cohesion initiatives, and
projects associated with the inclusion of immigrants (Christiansen, Galal,
& Hvenegård-Lassen, 2017). Each subscribes to their own definition of
the problem, the purpose, and particular techniques of intervention, but
they all rest on a definition of something “bad” that exists before the
encounter, which is then worked on in the here-and-now of that encoun-
ter, to be effected after the encounter through a desired transformation of
or among the participants. We have adopted the umbrella term “organ-
ised cultural encounters” to cover this broad range of intervention strate-
gies. Considered as social practices, they share features, but they also
differ, and in the research literature they are mostly dealt with through
other classifications.1 We are not arguing that the gathering together of
these intervention practices under the headline “organised cultural
encounters” is more accurate than other classifications. We do argue,
however, that this conceptualisation allows us to approach old or
comparatively well-known phenomena in new ways.
The term “organised cultural encounters” was coined during a
collaborative research project2 involving fieldwork in five contexts in
4 L. P. Galal and K. Hvenegård-Lassen

which encounters between people who are perceived to be culturally dif-

ferent were organised in order to produce “positive” effects. That is:
attempts at creating a transformative space in which what are defined as
the negative outcomes of cultural encounters in everyday life (e.g. preju-
dice, stereotypes, and conflicts) can be overcome and replaced by such
aspects as understanding, communality, and peace. These five studies
which are located in different social domains, all related to Denmark,
form the empirical backbone of the analyses in this book.3
Across these studies and domains, we are curious about the performa-
tivity and practices of organised cultural encounters and their relation to
the wider contexts within which they are played out. Our attention is
directed towards what is (re)produced (e.g. positions, relations, differ-
ence, sameness, affect, knowledge) within these social spaces and how.
This priority implies that we are circumventing the normative question of
how change may best be enacted or how encounters may ideally achieve
this aim. Given that organised cultural encounters are intervention strat-
egies, and thus purposefully orchestrated events, it is not surprising that
they are often studied through evaluative approaches that aim to establish
“best practice” models through measuring the outcome in terms of suc-
cess or failure (for examples, see Agergaard, 2011; Agrawal & Barratt,
2014; Fotel & Andersen, 2003; Kozlovic, 2003; Laurence, 2014). Seen
from our perspective, the problem with these studies is that what actually
happens becomes subsumed under what ought to have happened. This is
a widespread tendency within the field of education, where intercultural
education programmes (some of which could be conceptualised as organ-
ised cultural encounters), as well as research into these, predominantly
work through developmental models (Perry & Southwell, 2011). These
models conceptualise intercultural competence in individual terms, and
research often aims to promote the spread of “best practice” cases. With
respect to the programmes, this means that both aims and practices tend
to become instrumental: a way of securing the current (power) state of
affairs through different means (cf. Schoorman & Bogotch, 2010). David
Coulby argues that

the theorisation of intercultural education […] is not simply a matter of

normative exhortation, of spotting good practice in one area and helping
 1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters 5

to implement it in another. It involves the reconceptualization of what

schools and universities have done in the past and what they are capable of
doing in the present and the future. (Coulby, 2006, p. 246; see also: Dixson
& Rousseau Anderson, 2018).

Organised cultural encounters cannot be analysed through the lens of

everyday practices alone. The fact that the kind of encounters we study
are purposefully organised, or, as we describe in detail in Chap. 3, scripted,
means that, if not determined by their organisers, practices are at least
partly (in)formed by their intervention models. Consequently, we
approach the practices that play out in the time-space of an organised
cultural encounter as entanglements of everyday practices and practices
that are encouraged by their organisers. In this way, we take into account
the orchestrated character of these encounters, at the same time as we
avoid the temptation (and mistake) to explain practices as the direct out-
come of the organisers’ scripts.
Avoiding normativity, in the sense described above, does not mean
that we are uninterested in the transformative potential of encounters. In
our readings, we prioritise critical analyses of how practices, techniques,
scripts, emplacements, and so on are entangled in a field of power rela-
tions, which tends to be more or less comprehensively downplayed
(whether intentionally or not) by organisers, that is, a mode of critique
that, reading with Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick (2003), could be called para-
noid. But we also, in a more affirmative or reparative mode of critique
(ibid.), seek out the moments across our data material when something
new seems to be opened up (intentionally or not), something that is not
seamlessly embedded in the prevailing power relations. Importantly,
however, newness is not in itself good or bad in a normative sense.
In the remaining pages of this introduction, we sketch out an overall
approach to organised cultural encounters that, in its flexibility, has
guided our readings. In very general terms, our approach draws on post-
colonial perspectives and a view of social practice as performative, and is
developed further and in different directions in the ensuing chapters. We
stated above that we are interested in the performativity and practices of
organised cultural encounters and their relation to the wider contexts in
which they are embedded. In the next section, we theorise these wider
6 L. P. Galal and K. Hvenegård-Lassen

contexts in terms of “contact zones”, after which we turn to an initial

sketch of the central concept of encounters and the way that concept can
be related to the contact zone. Informed by the framing through the con-
tact zone and encounters, we have paid particular attention to chaos and
order, and the distribution of risk and safety within the encounters we
have studied. In the following section, we expand upon this analytical
approach. The introduction closes with an overview of the book.

 rganised Cultural Encounters:

O
Interventions into the Contact Zone
Borrowing from Mary Louise Pratt (1991, 2008), we conceptualise
organised cultural encounters—as a first step—as interventions into the
contact zone. According to Pratt, contact zones are

social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often
in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism,
slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world
today. (Pratt, 1991, p. 34)

Apart from this, Pratt does not offer a strict definition of the contact
zone. There are, however, several aspects of her work that we find illumi-
nating and important to take on board. In her keynote to the Modern
Language Association (MLA), she argues that, among other things, the
term involves a rethinking of models of community as essentially bounded
entities (1991, p. 37), moving instead towards an understanding of com-
munities as relationally constituted through the continual bordering pro-
cesses negotiated between them. Through the notion of the contact zone,
we turn towards spaces as well as temporalities of contact, and the perfor-
mativity of encounters, as a particular form of contact; that is, towards
encounters as productive of social practice and difference. The latter
implies an ontological perspective on encounters: “species of all kinds,
living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of
encounters”, as Donna Haraway puts it (2008, p. 4).
 1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters 7

Pratt’s approach is not, however, primarily ontological. While her take

may be likened in some respects to the (cybernetic) de-essentialising of
ethnicity and community, of which Frederik Barth (1969) is a strong
proponent, Pratt’s account is historical, since she points towards the
(European) nation state as the model upon which the utopia of an essen-
tially bounded community is built. Thus, contact may be the stuff from
which social and cultural practice and difference emerge in a constitutive
sense, but any actual occurrence of contact takes place within a particular
historical and spatial context, where dominance, and following from this
also meaning, categories, and differences are situated (if not completely
pre-determined) ahead of that contact (Ahmed, 2000).
In Pratt’s work on travel writing, which forms the backdrop for her
coining of the concept of the contact zone, the subjects who meet were,
however, “previously separated by geographical and historical disjunc-
tures” (Pratt, 2008, p. 7). Present-day contact zones are “heirs to” the
histories of contact that precede and condition them. They are spatio-­
temporally located in what Pratt terms the “aftermaths” of “highly asym-
metrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery” (1991, p. 34).
Or, perhaps, this is rather how we choose to employ the notion of the
contact zone, since Pratt is more cautious in the quote above: cultures
often meet in situations characterised by asymmetrical power relations,
such as colonialism and slavery—relations that persist today in many parts
of the world. Less cautiously, we argue that colonialism, imperialism, and
slavery are historically formative of global epistemologies related to what
it means to be human and how cultural difference figures in that equa-
tion (cf. Wynter, 2003). There is a strong tendency towards exceptional-
ism in Denmark, when it comes to the Danish implication in these global
histories and epistemologies, but they are nevertheless formative of the
present. Ann Laura Stoler argues that the aftermaths of colonialism are
considerably more complex than either a reliance on rupture or continu-
ity can capture—the rupture narrative “treats colonial history with clear
temporal and spatial demarcations” (2016, p. 25), while the continuity
stance “insists on a more seamless continuation that pervade the present”
(ibid.). Instead, Stoler argues:
8 L. P. Galal and K. Hvenegård-Lassen

Recharting imperial effects seems to demand another sort of labor on

another scale: one that attends to their partial, distorted, and piecemeal
qualities, to uneven and intangible sedimentations that defy easy access in
the face of the comforting contention that there really is no imperial order
of things. (2016, p. 26)

This also means that “the imperial order of things” plays out differently in
different parts of the world. Like Pratt, Stoler points out the messiness of
imperial relations and governance, and the implications this holds for
how we may analyse these and their effects in the present. Following from
these considerations, we explore the trajectory through which mission has
become transformed or translated in terms of dialogue (see Chap. 2).
Because our point of departure is the contemporary field of interfaith
work in Denmark, this mapping will primarily reflect an archive of domi-
nant voices. But it is nevertheless a mapping that takes us back to encoun-
ters within the imperial contact zone between missionaries and
evangelised, colonised subjects. The outcome of these encounters (among
these, the turn to dialogue) cannot be ascribed to a unilateral dominance
of the missionaries, despite the way in which they were steeped in unequal
power relations. Hence, we do not claim that there is an uncomplicated
and direct line between our globally shared past, as it has been shaped by
imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, and the way in which cultural dif-
ference is lived, governed, and conceptualised in the present. Rather, in
adopting the contact zone as a framework, we place our approach solidly
within a postcolonial framework, where the “post” does not imply that
cultural difference—and racialisation—in the present can be sealed off
from the past; a past that lives on in complicated ways.
The productivity of thinking with the contact zone is related to the
way in which it frames encounters in that zone as messy and unequal as
well as relationally constitutive for the subjects who come into contact
with each other. This co-constitution implies that meaning-making takes
place in and on both sides of the relation, even though the archives only
or overwhelmingly represent the order(ing) of the dominant party (the
coloniser). The contact zone, according to Pratt, is the space of imperial
encounters (2008, p. 8), but, as Helen Wilson points out in a recent
article, Pratt does not elaborate upon the relation between the contact
 1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters 9

zone and encounter (2019, p. 5). Wilson argues that the contact zone
houses multiple forms of contact, relations, and communicative practices
(ibid., p. 7). Encounters, then, are one form of contact out of several oth-
ers. This resonates with Pratt’s borrowing of the notion of contact from
linguistics and, more precisely, the notion of contact languages (pidgin,
creole, etc.). While Pratt argues that contact languages are produced
through the creative grappling that occurs within the contact zone, they
are “commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous and lacking in structure”
(Pratt, 2008, p. 8). Accordingly, the appropriations and negotiations
characteristic of interactions in the contact zone do not correspond to
dominant imaginaries of order, the imaginaries that make their way into
the archive. From this perspective, the contact zone is chaos. Crucial here
is that imaginaries of order, and hence chaos, are not innocent, but rather
tend to be diagnosed from the perspective of the dominant position(s).
Order and chaos are historically constituted and deeply ingrained in the
prevailing power relations. Majorities and minorities are differently posi-
tioned—to minorities, order might be as risky as chaos.
Pratt’s conceptualisation of contact zones does not refer to the kind of
purposefully organised interventions into the contact zone that we call
organised cultural encounters. Pratt does discuss a specific example of an
intervention, however: her teaching of a university course that dealt with
“the Americas and the multiple cultural histories (including European
ones) that have intersected here” (1991, p. 39). In this course, the diverse
students in the classroom all experienced the precarity and historical lega-
cies of both their own and others’ identities and positions. Pratt writes:
“Along with rage, incomprehension, and pain, there were exhilarating
moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wis-
dom—the joys of the contact zone […] No one was excluded, and no
one was safe” (ibid.).

Encounters and Difference

Encounters have become increasingly important as a conceptual device
and an analytical focus for research preoccupied with cultural difference
and diversity (cf. Ahmed, 2000; Amin & Thrift, 2002; Faier & Rofel,
10 L. P. Galal and K. Hvenegård-Lassen

2014; Wise & Velayutham, 2009). We draw inspiration, if selectively,

from across this work. In our framework, encounters are (1) empirical
occurrences that circumscribe practices within a particular time and
space. Even though the events that we classify as organised cultural
encounters might also be categorised differently, they can all be described
in terms of similar empirical elements. Encounters are also (2) ontologi-
cally constitutive or performative, through entangled interactions that
unfold in the present—their thrown-togetherness (Massey, 2005,
p. 149ff). While this implies an orientation towards the future (what is
coming into being through encounters), they cannot, as implied in the
last section, be disassociated from the past. Encounters, then, are both
immediate and mediated. Informed by (1) and (2), adopting encounters
as an analytical focus means that differences are not taken as given; rather,
attention is oriented towards how they emerge and become negotiated
within the spatiotemporal confines of encounters. At the same time, the
negotiations occurring within encounters are (in)formed by the (asym-
metrical) social terrain in which they are embedded. Through our classi-
fication of intervention strategies that are otherwise seen to belong to
different fields in terms of (organised cultural) encounters, we open up an
analytical movement that can work “sideways” across them (Krøijer,
2015). We specify encounters as circumscribed practices, through Erving
Goffman’s (1972) micro-sociological and interactional approach (see
Chap. 3), and, in the next section of this introduction, we specify our
analytical strategy. While we expand upon the temporal aspects of
encounters as well as their performativity throughout this book, in this
section we draw out some initial contours.
In the introduction to Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed, to whose work
we are indebted, and to which we return throughout the book, describes
the temporality and performativity of encounters in the following way:

[E]ncounters between embodied subjects always hesitate between the

domain of the particular—the face to face of this encounter—and the gen-
eral—the framing of the encounter by broader relationships of power and
antagonism. […] Differences, as markers of power, are not determined in
the “space” of the particular or the general, but in the very determination
of their historical relation (a determination that is never complete, as it
involves strange encounters). (2000, pp. 8–9)
 1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters 11

While our formulation of the temporal aspects of encounters given above

would seem to be captured more or less one to one in this quote, when
she moves on from this, Ahmed tips towards the past. Differences, accord-
ing to Ahmed, are constituted through encounters and, therefore, in our
attempts to understand difference and identity, we need to prioritise the
here-and-now of contact within encounters. That priority, however,
meets its limits, because “we must pose the question of historicity, which
is forgotten by the very designation of ‘the encounter’ as such” (ibid.,
p. 9). Following from this, it is the encounter (i.e. not only difference)
that is in itself historically locked into a specific determination of the rela-
tion between the particular and the general. Even though this is not a
complete predetermination, this leaning towards the past (see also Chap.
5) is, if not entirely dominant in Ahmed’s work (see the discussion of
hope in Chap. 6), then a prominent tendency. In this way, it captures or
prioritises the recursive character of social practice: “a practice endures
between and across specific moments of enactment” (Shove, Pantzar, &
Watson, 2012, p. 7). While the constitutive dimension of encounters is
not foreclosed from Ahmed’s perspective, using encounters as interven-
tion strategies—organising cultural encounters—cannot be grounded in
a straightforward trust in performativity or in the potential of face-to-­
face contact. The performativity of encounters is, from Ahmed’s perspec-
tive, most likely re-productive.
Encounters have increasingly been taken up within the discipline of
geography, constituting a new field within that discipline: the geography
of encounters (cf. Askins & Pain, 2011; Darling & Wilson, 2016; Koefoed,
Christensen, & Simonsen, 2017; Swanton, 2010; Valentine, 2013;
Wilson, 2014; Wise, 2016). Within geographies of encounter, a “body of
work… [on] social diversity, urban difference, and prejudice, [has been
produced] which has sought to document how people negotiate differ-
ence in their everyday lives” (Wilson, 2017, p. 451). A large part of this
work has been focused on the city, which is approached as constituted by
encounters involving both human and non-human subjects and materi-
alities, rather than as a more-or-less neutral scene within which encoun-
ters play out (Amin & Thrift, 2002).
Helen Wilson distinguishes between a meeting and an encounter by
arguing that an encounter is a genre of meeting “where difference is
12 L. P. Galal and K. Hvenegård-Lassen

particularly noteworthy or of analytical interest” (2017, p. 455). Based

on her impressive examination of how the “encounter” has been deployed
across the discipline of geography, Wilson

suggest[s] that any conceptualization must accept the impossibility of fully

“capturing” encounters, their potentials and taking-place. Encounters are
mediated, affective, emotive and sensuous, they are about animation, joy
and fear, and both the opening up and closing down of affective capacity.
(2017, pp. 464–465)

While Wilson does not romanticise encounters as a kind of pure poten-

tial, she does emphasise the possibilities of encounters as spaces of trans-
formation, that is, encounters can become “a site of emergent politics and
pedagogy” (2017, p. 456) through destabilisations, ruptures, shock, and
animation. This potential is linked to their ultimate unpredictability
(Wilson, 2017, p. 457). The work within geographies of encounter has
mostly been preoccupied with everyday life, that is, encounters that are
not purposefully and openly orchestrated. There is, however, a body of
work that has taken up encounters as spaces of intervention in ways that
are closer to our work with organised cultural encounters (Askins & Pain,
2011; Koefoed et al., 2017; Lawson & Elwood, 2014; Leitner, 2012;
Matejskova & Leitner, 2011; Mayblin, Valentine, & Andersson, 2016;
Mayblin, Valentine, Kossak, & Schneider, 2015; Valentine, 2008, 2013;
Valentine, Piekut, Winiarska, Harris, & Jackson, 2015; Wilson, 2013,
2017). Gill Valentine (following Ash Amin) even employs the notion of
“purposeful organised group activity” (Valentine, 2008, p. 331), which
shares similarities with our concept of organised cultural encounters.
While we are inspired by and, in many ways, also on the same path as
these geographers, our approach takes a different route in that, despite its
relevance, we bypass the normative question of optimal or meaningful
encounters, which is prioritised in many of these studies.
Going down a slightly different road, we have paid particular attention
to the organisers of encounters and their scripts, and this has implications
for our approach. The primary transformation attempted through organ-
ised cultural encounters concerns the reflexivity and embodied subjectivi-
ties of the participants themselves. Paraphrasing Foucault, organised
 1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters 13

cultural encounters aim at conducting conduct (Foucault, 2003, p. 38)

through micro-procedures or technologies that circulate power and ori-
ent (embodied) subjectivities in particular ways (Foucault, 1991;
Valverde, 1996). From this perspective, the stage of the encounter can be
perceived as a means of pushing the participants towards self-reflexivity
and/or changes in behaviour; in other words, to act upon themselves. To
this purpose, organisers present and activate their script, which is
informed by ideas concerning cultural difference, encounters, and trans-
formation, as illustrated by the two quotes presented at the beginning of
the introduction. This would amount to a pedagogy of encounter, as
Wilson puts it, but while this pedagogy is intentionally adopted and aims
at “positive outcomes”, it relies upon epistemologies of the contact zone,
which, as we show in the chapters that follow, to a large extent emerge as
common sense or naturalised facts.
So, to briefly sum up, we are able to define organised cultural encoun-
ters as purposefully organised in order to intervene in problems that are
seen as caused by or, more weakly in terms of determination, related to
cultural difference. Paradoxically, perhaps, both the problem and the
solution are related to contact and interaction. This is one reason why a
preoccupation with meaningful or good encounters is widespread in the
literature: everyday contact between groups that are seen and/or see each
other as culturally different may have all kinds of outcomes—some of
which may be deemed bad rather than good (Keaten & Soukup, 2009;
Valentine, 2008). We follow Pratt and her account of encounters in the
contact zone as transformative and messy—or rather messy and therefore
transformative. This poses a challenge to organised cultural encounters. If
the transformative potential of encounters is associated with their messi-
ness, then the mess cannot be ironed out, so to speak. The risky character
(“no one is safe”) of encounters emerges forcefully in Pratt’s description
of the affective circulations and intensities among the participants in her
Americas course, referred to above. This also implies a risk that a given
conflict is simply imported into, and reproduced through, an organised
cultural encounter. This is one way in which the risk associated with the
unpredictability of encounters emerges more concretely for organisers
and participants alike. The translation of societal problems into a face-to-­
face interactional scale also involves a translation of questions relating to
14 L. P. Galal and K. Hvenegård-Lassen

chaos and order into questions concerning risk and safety that apply to
the subjects who are present during a given encounter. In terms of our
analysis of specific organised cultural encounters, these meta-reflections
on encounters and contact translate into paying attention to how unpre-
dictability is negotiated and managed through both the organisers’ script
and the interactions among participants.

Working Across Sites

As we have argued above, working with our five empirical studies through
the common lens of organised cultural encounters allows us to analyse
across them. Through this movement across, we are able to produce
interpretations of these intervention practices that would not have been
possible if we had analysed each case in isolation from the others. Since
we are neither adopting a comparative approach in a traditional social
science sense, nor attempting to generalise based on examples, in this sec-
tion we expand more precisely upon how we have made these analyti-
cal moves.
We borrow the notion of “sideways” from Stine Krøijer (2015), who in
turn is inspired by Brian Massumi (2002). Krøijer analyses activist prac-
tices and demonstrates how particular instances of activism (“examples”)
“connect sidewards […], setting things in motion in unexpected direc-
tions” (2015, p. 86). This interpretation is the result of an analytical pro-
cess in which Krøijer follows particular activist strategies around. Rather
than seeing them as an “expression or manifestation of a larger whole or
general rule”, as in a more conventional approach to the analysis of exam-
ples, the example becomes “[a] singular instantiation, serving as an exam-
ple for other actions. Carving a new relation between the particular and
the universal” (Krøijer, 2015, pp. 78–79; see also Højer & Bandak,
2015). Even though, in our material, particular practices and epistemolo-
gies may also “leak sideways into one another” (ibid.), as the two hand-
book quotes on dialogue at the beginning of this chapter indicate, this
leaking is not what we are primarily aiming to explore. Rather, we let
particular practices and logics leak from one example to another. Thus,
we work analytically sideways, approaching the example in one field as
 1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters 15

the basis for setting in motion “particular trains of imagination, or series

of particulars” (Højer & Bandak, 2015, p. 7) in another. Højer and
Bandak argue that the aim of this is not to end up with a universal model,
but to point to series of resemblances (2015, p. 7). In our approach,
resemblances across our fields of study help us to establish an analytical
path that is not only laterally grounded in our data material, but also
continuously developed, both conceptually and theoretically.
One of the paths that we started constructing at an early stage of the
project targets the distribution of chaos and order, which appeared as
either an explicit or an implicit concern across our sites. As hinted in the
preceding sections of the introduction, this also guided our theoretical
emphasis. Since this particular path has become important, when it
comes to the choice of the shifting approaches that each guide their chap-
ter in the book (most prominently, perhaps, our turn to approaches from
ritual studies in Chap. 4), we use this particular analytical path to present
how we have moved sideways in the data material.
One of the recurring concerns that appeared empirically both in the
interviews with organisers and in our observations was that cultural
encounters (or contact) were perceived as being associated with actual or
potential chaos. Thus, in the interfaith work cases, religious differences
were generally seen as causal reasons behind current geopolitical conflicts,
including incidences of terrorism and lack of integration, as well as dis-
crimination and intolerance. In the opening speech at a dialogue meeting
between Danish and Arab religious leaders, the Danish parliamentarian
Karen Klint, for instance, named religion as part of the reason for extrem-
ism (see more about this meeting in Chap. 4). However, she also high-
lighted religion as part of the solution. In other words, in interfaith work,
religious differences are both in need of mending due to their destabilis-
ing effects and, at the same time, a transformative tool within interfaith
encounters. Differences, then, occasion chaos, but could also be a means
for creating peace or order.
This matrix of meaning informs how interfaith encounters are organ-
ised in order to (re)create or constitute order. According to the “Guidelines
for Interfaith Meetings” (Vejledning i religionsmøde [Guidelines for inter-
faith meetings], 2008),4 the encounter with religious traditions other than
the Christian “has become a steadily growing challenge to the Danish
16 L. P. Galal and K. Hvenegård-Lassen

Church”. The Guidelines refer to the 2005 Mohammed cartoon crisis

that made Denmark the target of Muslim protests and anger globally
(Henkel, 2010), but other than that there is no explanation of the sort of
challenges faced by the Church. This suggests that they are seen as self-­
evident. The (potential) chaos that is addressed is global and/or societal,
but in interfaith work it becomes rearticulated on another scale, when
referring to different value systems and views of life that create “mistrust,
insecurity and rift” (Støvring et al., 2010, p. 7). Despite the shift in scale,
interfaith dialogue in itself becomes potentially threatening because,
through their value systems and views of life, participants come to repre-
sent parties in macro-level conflicts. Bringing together people of different
faiths involves encounters with other truths and hence runs the risk of
starting to doubt one’s own: “By opening up oneself, one runs the risk of
becoming rejected, trodden upon or challenged in other ways, thus
afflicting the faith” (Vejledning i religionsmøde [Guidelines for interfaith
meetings], 2008). Macro-level conflicts, then, are rescaled and, conse-
quently, chaos and order are translated into personalised risk and safety,
which in this case become associated with the vulnerable nature of one’s
beliefs and the ambiguity of truth.
The adoption of encounters as a means of transformation lends itself
to this rearticulation of conflicts at a face-to-face interactional scale. As
we have shown, this happens in particular ways during interfaith work—
ways that do not directly translate into the other domains included in our
fieldwork. Thus, our development of an analytical approach does not
strive for universality, but aims to make an analytically effective path that
is useful also in relation to other organised cultural encounters. In this
case, the analytical move relates to questions of chaos and order, and how
these are translated into risk and safety that apply to the subjects who are
present during a given encounter. This movement sideways helps us to
pay attention to the specificities as well as the commonalities of this
dynamic across our cases.
At the policy level of the community dance project, for instance, chaos
is linked to the multicultural reality—the contact zone—of the local
neighbourhood. However, at the practical level, dance routines, tech-
niques, and discipline become a way of creating order without directly
addressing the ethnic or cultural differences of the participants, which,
 1 Introduction: Organised Cultural Encounters 17

according to the political discourse, are in need of transformation. Instead

of working explicitly with cultural difference as a tool for change, the
community dance project uses the discipline and techniques of dance to
create inclusion and thereby transformation. Safety for the participants,
then, is brought about through a logic of the body and body language as
a means of transcending difference (see Chap. 5).
Bringing together these empirically based attentions with Pratt’s argu-
ment about the messiness of (encounters in) the contact zone, we may
say that organised cultural encounters are interventions into the chaos of
the contact zone that aim to transform it in accordance with a more or
less specific imaginary of order. Paradoxically, contact is both the prob-
lem (i.e. the particular version of chaos addressed by an organised cul-
tural encounter) and the solution: In the imaginary of order held by the
organisers, contact holds promise, provided it is orchestrated and enacted
in the right way. As argued above, imaginaries of order, and hence chaos,
are historically constituted and deeply ingrained in the prevailing power
relations. Therefore, the widespread normative evaluations of contact as
meaningful, or not (Lawson & Elwood, 2014, p. 214; Mayblin et al.,
2016, p. 2), raises the question: whose meaning is being used to define?
(Wilson, 2017, pp. 460–461). In relation to our analytical approach,
this means that we pay attention to the particular versions of chaos and
order, as well as the encounter-specific governing of risk and safety, as
distributed. This distribution is associated with both the organisers’
attempts to govern the interactions among participants and how partici-
pants enact their positionalities vis-à-vis each other independently of the
script. Who is at risk in particular encounters, we ask, and for whom is
safety an available affective state? These questions apply to the organis-
ers’ script: what is opened up or closed down through the script? They
also apply to the way in which positions and relations that were histori-
cally sedimented prior to the encounter, and prevalent outside it, seep
into what goes on.
Overlapping with the considerations above, there is another important
distributive aspect related to the analytical emphasis on chaos/order and
risk/safety. Thus, organisers are continually striving to strike a balance
between risk and safety, because they perceive transformation to be asso-
ciated with risk. The amount of risk, on the other hand, needs to be
18 L. P. Galal and K. Hvenegård-Lassen

portioned correctly, otherwise the conflict that the intervention is aimed

at amending may be repeated full scale within the encounter. As we shall
see in the analyses, in encounters that are deemed too safe, risk is intro-
duced by the organisers.
When Helen Wilson argues that destabilisation, ruptures, shock, and
animation can contribute to making encounters “sites of emergent poli-
tics and pedagogy” (2017, p. 456), she is addressing the transformative
potentiality of encounters as related to risk—and to the ontological
unpredictability of encounters. Within the fields of education and peda-
gogy, there is an extended discussion of risk and safety in relation to
processes of learning and, in some cases, related to the notion of “safe
spaces” or “safe houses” (Arao & Clemens, 2013; Canagarajah, 1997;
Holley & Steiner, 2005; Leonardo & Porter, 2010). We address these
debates towards the end of the book (Chap. 6), our main engagement
with chaos/order and risk/safety is, however, informed by ritual studies
(Chap. 4).
By paying attention to how chaos and order are negotiated through the
management and distribution of risk and safety, we are able to shed light
on the transformative potential (whether for better or worse) of encoun-
ters. Or, more precisely, we can examine how this is rationalised and
enacted by organisers and participants (according to the script, or off-­
script). The methods adopted by organisers are designed to enable par-
ticipants to navigate the dangers of the contact zone, and thus deal
appropriately with embodied risk. They attempt to distribute risk and
safety in the encounter as a tool to teach participants how to navigate in
a world of potential chaos. At the same time, real-world encounters are
conditioned by a prior distribution of who is at risk, which, as we shall
see, tends to disappear in organised cultural encounters.

Structure of the Book

The overall framing of organised cultural encounters as interventions into
the contact zone accompany us all through the book as the backdrop to
our analyses and in conjunction with other theoretical perspectives. The
concept of encounters will be more actively developed along the way.
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