Mediterranean Heritage in Transit - (Mis)representations via English

It is mainly within and around Mediterranean itineraries that the European Union seeks its in/tangible cultural heritage. It aims to develop reflective societies, where knowledge can be created in connection with peoples’ heritage, in keeping with its strategic research agenda. In the same years as the McDonaldization/Starbuckization of society (Ritzer 1993; 2008), aspects of Mediterranean cultures have both survived and flourished beyond their natural boundaries, frequently acquiring new connotations/meanings through the medium of communication in English. Through diverse awareness-raising initiatives, it encourages peoples to repossess and safeguard their own unique, ‘indigenous’ cultures. The focus is on “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces […] – that communities recognize as part of their cultural heritage” . In this arena of contemporary cultural heritage, this volume brings together many different strands of analysis, helping to shed light on the complex and multifaceted phenomena that constitute the vibrant socio-semiotic landscape of the Mediterranean. The latter, in fact, can be seen both as the possible unifying referent of diverse physical and anthropic environments, and as a metonymic embodiment of contemporary social and lingua-cultural paradigm shifts. Such issues have been investigated across a wide range of (transdisciplinary) theoretical analytical frameworks, and also from an educational perspective. Mediterranean Heritage in transit views this vibrant scenario from a dynamic cross-cultural perspective, and investigates the domains of identities and stereotypes, advertising, films, myths and festivals, landscapes, fluid knowledge and new technologies, culture-bound terms, migrating words and food.The book also includes worksheets for each chapter with proposed activities for university students who may be engaged in analyzing webpages, reading and producing tourist brochures, studying subtitling techniques in TV series and comparing multi-language subtitles and dubbing, or replicating experiments, such as implementing a sociolinguistic survey after the design of specific research questions. All these activities are designed to put best practices into effect by enhancing the reading and learning experience and encouraging self-study and self-evaluation in keeping with the theoretical strands proposed in the chapters, thus incorporating research into classroom procedures. The assumption is that a sound method can be successfully reproduced in other contexts: teachers and researchers will be able to transfer their experiences to other contexts, for example by adopting the chapters’ analytical frameworks, methods and contents in other social, linguistic and cultural contexts. The volume’s principle value, then, can be found in its double design: the chapters can and should be read as research papers and can be utilized both as sources for structuring activities in a range of different classes, and as materials for self-study. The underlying rationale of the book lies in the attempt to bring to the fore the prominent role of English in representing the Mediterranean heritage, although it is a non-Mediterranean language. At the same time it attempts to bridge the gap between academic research and class practice at the university level.