Chapter 4: Imagistic Thinking and Worldmaking

While the first three chapters of the thesis dealt with discourses and their analysis, so with what is said, this last chapter now addresses the question of the unsaid – yet experienced and performed – through an analysis of the images that circulated during Seminar meetings, mainly verbal and mental images. This last manuscript brings to the forefront the importance of imagery, imagination, and affects in intercultural training. It also emphasizes the centrality of the body with respect to training and to clinical and psychosocial work in intercultural contexts, as even when we just speak, we do so with our socially differentiated bodies. The writing style employed, that dwells on details of an ethnographic scene, also reveals the importance of the lived experience of the researcher when conducting qualitative research. These findings demonstrate that through the production and encounter of a certain type of images – what I propose to call living images – the trainees’ orientations towards cultural differences can be transformed from an essentialist and colonial view (what Bennett (1986, 1993), would qualify as “denial”, “defense”, and “minimization” ethnocentric orientations, as discussed in Chapter 3) to a more critical perspective that seeks to create a more just and inclusive world. This production of alternative images during Transcultural Seminars have the particularity of avoiding the reiteration of institutionalized violence by not dwelling on ethnoracial stereotypes or blunt clinical diagnoses – or what I propose to call dead images. These living images that are at times produced during Transcultural Seminars are images with a Barthian punctum, that is a detail that attracts our attention, interrupts us, and stimulates our imagination to explore other directions and dimensions.