Multilingual Online Academic Collaborations as Resistance

Crossing Impassable Borders

Alison Phipps editor Giovanna Fassetta editor Nazmi Al-Masri editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Multilingual Matters

Published:7th Aug '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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Multilingual Online Academic Collaborations as Resistance cover

Reveals the importance of online tools and languages to engage across borders when these borders are impassable

This book details online collaborations between universities in Europe, the USA and Palestine. The chapters recount the challenges and successes of online collaborations which promote academic connections and conversations with the Gaza Strip (Palestine) and forge relationships between individuals, institutions and cultures.

This book details online academic collaborations between universities in Europe, the USA and Palestine. The chapters recount the challenges and successes of online collaborations which promote academic connections and conversations with the Gaza Strip, despite a continuing blockade imposed on Gaza since 2007, and forge relationships between individuals, institutions and cultures. The chapters examine, from different perspectives, what happens when languages and the internet facilitate encounters, and the fundamental importance this has as a form of defiance and of resistance to the physical confinement experienced by Palestinian academics, students and the general population of Gaza. They highlight the limitations of multilingual and intercultural encounters when they are deprived of the sensory proximity of face-to-face situations and what is lost in the translation of languages, practices and experiences from the ‘real’ to the ‘virtual’ world.

This book is open access under a CC BY NC ND licence.

This book documents and enacts a creative improvisation that challenges, resists and connects. Produced by powerful academic online collaborators, it opens a window into the cultural resilience that stubbornly co-created curious academic bridges in spite of the impassable borders. This book offers a rare and valuable opportunity to learn from and about resilient education and scholarly innovation in areas torn by war, like the Gaza Strip. It challenges us to rethink our remits of possibility.

* Khawla Badwan, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK *

The book opens a discussion on what it means to collaborate through the internet when one of the two partners is living in a situation of forced closure. The collected stories of collaboration are not only stories of resistance and resilience, but narratives of innovation and openness. They represent an immense source of inspiration for the whole Mediterranean community and beyond, and examples of equitable and sustainable international academic collaboration.

* Marcello Scalisi, UNIMED - Mediterranean Universities Uni

ISBN: 9781788929592

Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 15mm

Weight: 483g

224 pages