From small cultures to the varicultural flow

This chapter will present the small-culture approach as a deCentred methodology for putting aside the dominant and essentialist separated cultures model and its colonising origins in naïve positivism and structural-functionalist sociology. The example of two so-labelled “home” and “international” students will demonstrate how, through the everyday process of small culture formation on the go, they find, in the varicultural flow within which cultures are constructed, the threads of hybridity necessary to put aside essentialist “us”–“them” blocks. This process is enabled by a series of disruptions which push them to take creative social action in combatting both the global and institutional Othering and preculturing forces that persistently and disruptively act against them. This also involves them in critiquing the nature of their social action and, through recognising its situated relationality, distancing it from the Western, “flag-waving” grand narrative of methodological individualism. This example connects with the wider global disruption of Othering, prejudice and discrimination.