Cross-cultural Encounters

Abstract

The paper researches how cross-cultural experiences resulting from encounters trigger reflections that can lead to cultural and personal self-awareness which ultimately influences the perception of oneself. Given the increased global mobility, those encounters between socio-cultural backgrounds are more frequent every day which has an effect on the formation of "transnational identities". There are multiple factors that come into play when those encounters take place and which were considered in the reflective approach to those experiences. The method used to approach the project is autoethnography and the main gathering of empirical data, which is in coherence with the intrinsic subjectivity of each researcher, was a five day trip to North Macedonia. The analysis departs from the individual reflection of the experiences, based on the field notes and journals, structured under four main topics and each divided into micro reflections and meta discussions. The theoretical framework under which the reflections were considered is constructed from different theories in the social psychology domain. The narrative reflections are a combination of those theories and methodologies in form of journals. The aim of the project is to get an understanding through self-reflection of how the sociocultural environments affect the behaviour, perception and feelings. The results of the analysis were that the reflection is an ongoing open-ended process in which, the narrations will establish routines of meaning-makings that will potentially condition the future experiences. The pre-wired embodiments influence the positioning one assumes due to the complex response. This process is influenced and influenced the individual subjective and meaning-making patterns that stem from the individual sociocultural background and are represented in form of narrations.