Cultural Interfaces in Academic Setting and Beyond

This volume comprises fifteen articles, which share a focus on the issue of culture and culture contact in academia and in academic and professional dialogue. A broad view of culture is adopted as “the distinctive ways of living, thinking and behaving” of any group of people identified with reference to a geographical location, as in, e.g., Finnish culture, a selected prominent feature, as in student culture, or shared interests, values and practices, as in academic culture. Viewed in this way, culture is not only a necessary element of the background against which academic communication takes place but an active component of the ongoing discourse reflected in such features as the terminology used, the repertoire of available genres and their preferred linguistic realisation, epistemic judgments, and the amount and type of evaluative language, to name but a few.