Multilingual Online Academic Collaborations as Resistance

Crossing Impassable Borders

Edited by Giovanna Fassetta, Nazmi Al-Masri, Alison Phipps

Publication date:

07 August 2020

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781788929592

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.

Prologue: Collaborating Under Siege: A Whatsapp Tale

Introduction: Alison Phipps, Giovanna Fassetta And Nazmi Al Masri: Can You ‘Here’ Me? Editors’ Reflections on Online Collaborations Between the Gaza Strip and the Global North

Part 1. English as an Additional Language and Online Technologies

Chapter 1. Bill Guariento: Engineers Operating Multilingually: Reflections on Four Years of Glasgow-Gaza Pre-Sessional English Telecollaboration

Chapter 2. Sanaa Abou-Dagga: Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) Internationalization Endeavours at the Level of Postgraduate Programmes

Chapter 3. Gary Motteram, Nazmi Al-Masri, Heba Hamouda, and Shaiffadzillah Omarali: Exploring Mobile Support for English Language Teachers in a Context of Conflict: Syrian Refugee Teachers in Jordan

Part 2. Finding Motivation for Language Learning in a Situation of Forced Immobility

Chapter 4. Abedrabu Abu Alyan: Motivational Strategies and Online Technologies: Are Palestinian EFL University Students in the Gaza Strip Empowered to be Bilingual?

Chapter 5. Anna Rolinska, Bill Guariento, Ghadeer Abo Uda and Ongkarn Nakprada: ‘Really Talking’ to Gaza: From Active to Transformative Learning in Distributed Environments and Under Highly Pressured Conditions

Part 3. Palestine and the Arabic Language

Chapter 6. Giovanna Fassetta, Nazmi Al-Masri, Mariam Attia And Alison Phipps: Gaza Teaches Arabic Online: Opportunities, Challenges and Ways Forward

Chapter 7. Maria Grazia Imperiale: (In)Articulability of Pain and Trauma: Idioms of Distress in the Gaza Strip

Part 4. Making Connections

Chapter 8. Ahmed S. Muhaisen: The Experience of The Islamic University of Gaza in Cross-Border Academic Collaboration: T-MEDA Project as a Case Study

Chapter 9. Chantelle Warner and David Gramling: From the Kitchen to Gaza: Networked Places and the Collaborative Imagination

Afterword: Alison Phipps: “I Am Here”: Savouring the ‘Selfie Moments’

List of Contributors (in Alphabetical Order)

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.