From intersubjectivity to interculturalism in digital learning environments

The paper presents the work of the research program “Studies on
Intermediality as Intercultural Mediation” a joint international venture that seeks
to provide blended-learning -both online and in-classroom- methodologies for the
development of interculturalism and associated emotional empathic responses
through the study of art and literary fiction.1
Technological development is consistent with human desire to draw on
previous information and experiences in order to apply acquired knowledge to
present life conditions and, furthermore, make improvements for the future.
Therefore, it is logical that human agentive consciousness has been directed
towards encouraging action at a distance by all possible means. The evolution in
media technologies bears witness to this fact.
This paper explores the paradoxes behind the growing emphasis on spatial
metaphors during the 20th-century and a dynamic concept of space as the site of
relational constructions where forms and structural patterns become formations
constructed in interaction, and where the limit or border becomes a constitutive
feature, immanently connected with the possibility of its transgression. The paper
contends that the development of mass media communication, and particularly the
digital turn, has dramatically impacted on topographical spaces, both sociocultural and individual, and that the emphasis on „inter‟ perspectives, hybridism,
ambiguities, differences and meta-cognitive articulations of awareness of limits
and their symbolic representations, and the desire either to transgress limits or to
articulate „in-between‟, intercultural „third spaces‟, etc. are symptomatic of
structural problems at the spatial-temporal interface of culture and its
representations. Finally, the paper brings into attention research on the
neuroscientific basis of intersubjectivity in order to point out the material basis of
human knowledge and cognition and its relationship to the archiving of historical
memory and information transfer through education. It also offers and brief
introduction to the dynamics of SIIM.