This page of the Mobile Worlds website provides features throughout the project duration. This may include films, books, people, songs, plants, animals, a mode of transport, or anything else really. Please note that these features are about inspiring to think about a given topic related to third cultures and/or sustainable mobility, not about idealizing any person, book, film etc. Please feel free to leave suggestions for future features in the comments below! Latest posts on top.

Feature #8: “Den Heilige Kua”, and its author, Roseane dos Reis

Roseane dos Reis is an actress, artist, critical thinker, mother, Brazilian resident in Norway, who has created the theatre performance “Den Heilige Kua – Om å føde ein nordmann” (The Holy Cow – About giving birth to a Norwegian), with its debut on 8 March 2024 (see the poster of the performance above, with its design by Patricia Cavidades, and a photo of Roseane below).

I quote a part of the performance’s description (translated from Norwegian with online help):

“The smell of freshly brewed coffee greets the audience at the door. This is a poetic, humorous and informal story about a birth that becomes a metamorphosis. And a tribute to everything one can discover about oneself and others over a good cup of coffee!

While she tells the story of her first birth, the narrator becomes a cow, Audhumbla, the primal cow in Norse mythology. The story challenges stereotypical ideas about the foreign wife and mother, highlights several understandings of equality from an immigrant’s point of view, and invites the audience to a critical reflection on feminism and integration. It is about motherhood and maternity care, about community and equality, about identity, feminism and integration.”

To create this performance, Roseane conducted interviews with Norwegian and immigrant women, and reflected on her own experience giving birth for the first time in Norway as an immigrant. She intertwines this with Norwegian mythology and various other mythologies that she traced back in relation to her own ancestors, in India, Italy, the Netherlands, and Brazil, among others, and especially in relation to women and rituals, such as around drinking coffee. This blend of input conveys the complexity of emotions and socio-political circumstances in such a simultaneously simple and powerful way! As one audience member cited on the performance’s page puts it:

“It was like we felt the warmth from the poolside in Brazil. We heard grandma talking to the parrot. We were the ones who travelled from country to country and faced new challenges, good and bad. In the meeting with the maternity ward, we were the ones who sat there without dignity, without respect and understanding for our bodies and our child who was about to come. And when the child came, it was ours! My words only stretch to fantastic, gripping, moving and absolutely worth seeing.” (Lil’Gorilla Theatre Company, translated from Norwegian for this post)

For some impressions of the performance, Roseane shared some professional photographs from it, some by Kata Pasztor and others by Andre Nesheim, as you can see indicated specifically in the credits per photo. I’m very thankful for being able to share these here with the MobileWorlds readers in the gallery below!

Denne bildekrusellen krever javaskript.

I only had the opportunity to see a small part of the performance, and the privilege to hear Roseane speak about the process of preparing and creating the performance, during a Master Class on Aesthetics and Creativity at HVL, in Bergen, Norway, and was truly touched. I subsequently interviewed her for this feature and ended up having a beautiful conversation about third cultures with her – a theme that resonated with her experiences as well.

I want to go into a bit more detail about what thoughts the piece, and Roseane’s background, triggered for me in relation to third cultures as I interpret them for this project. Among other aspects, Roseane recounts the story of giving birth in Norway, as a Brazilian (with multiple other roots). She had attempted assimilation in Norway, but in this moment suddenly noticed the importance of being seen as all of herself, as more than what she dared to show and present to Norwegians around her normally. For instance, her name, Roseane, being difficult to pronounce in Norwegian, she had been naming herself Ane, and now she was, needed to be, Roseane, on the papers, and in her experience. In the moment of giving birth, and of connecting to her child, she felt the need to connect to her family’s cultures – which were Brazilian, as well as mixed from various places around the world, – and as she rejected assimilation, she felt exclusive behaviours surround her in response. As she chose to demand things for the sake of herself and her baby, rather than just taking what was given, harsher social relations suddenly surfaced. At the same time, all this gave her renewed strength.

This highlights an important aspect that migration scholars often point to: key life changes – such as giving birth, but also finding a life-partner, changing schools, deciding to settle in a particular new home, etc. – are often triggers for a shifting relation to our identities. They are moments where some cultural aspect that had always been in the background, suddenly asks for attention. If such a moment triggers a migrant to go from a process of local assimilation to one of stronger identification with another country, or rejection of a local culture, this will likely generate a big shift in how the migrant is perceived by others. This does not need to result in tension, but if it does, it can reveal larger issues of cultural prejudices and have great impact on the migrant’s life and of those close to them. In the case of a birth, there is also the added element of the child’s inevitable relation to their country of birth, as well as the cultures their parents bring to their lives. All this can also be a moment of true reflection on third cultures – which parts of which cultures am I now resonating with, and why? What is something new I’ve found within myself, which I want to carve out, use to reshape who I am? Who does this allow me to relate more to, or less, and how? When children are involved: which cultural aspects do I wish to pass on to them, and which parts of the “other than me” will they adopt, how can I relate with this? Perhaps these are questions that individuals and societies could ask themselves a little more frequently, without the context of extreme shifts. Perhaps that is the power of engaging conceptually with third cultures: allowing and acknowledging shifts in cultural understandings, gradually, and in tandem with others.

These last points are not mentioned by Roseane herself, but they were themes that came up in me as I heard her story and about her art. This is the true power of such people and performances, it seems to me, to trigger deep thoughts in others, but allowing the receiving person’s experiences and backgrounds to add shape and colour to what is taken from the performance. Thus, again, third cultures can emerge and enrich imaginaries, and hopefully, also wider debates. And Roseane’s work confirms again how much art more generally and theatre and particular can help process and transmit such thinking.

I highly recommend all readers of this post to check out and follow Roseane’s work, via this Linktree: https://linktr.ee/roseanereis, and her instagram.

Feature #7: Ode to the Slow Cooker

The past months have been a bit quiet, as some may have noticed. This is because we have been slow cooking all the input we’ve gathered during this time, via workshops, reading, conferences and courses.

It is telling for the state of academic work today, that a few months without reaching out actively to an audience feels almost like a crime. Though we did reach out – for example via a post on the Migrant Knowledge blog in December, entitled “Third Cultures – The (Cursed) Gold of Migrants?”. But social media and this website have been rather quiet as we let the vast input thus far settle into shapes that can be shared and make an impact.

Like food in a slow cooker, ideas need time to slowly warm up and gain strength and flavour. Or, using another metaphor closer to the heart of Mobile Worlds, ideas need time to take root, before they can take flight. Our silence implies no less work, but rather an effort of concentration on the essentials, and the meshing of ideas from various sources.

In line with this, we share a little “Ode to the Slow Cooker” as this new feature, and look forward to sharing the – hopefully “delicious”! – results, and perhaps even some recipes you could use for inspiration for your own work.

Ode to the Slow Cooker

by Kim C. v. Schönfeld 

Gathering the raw ingredients
Choosing carefully, quietly
I place them in layers,
Add some spices,
And close your lid.

I add some heat
And I know you will take your time.
I burst with curiosity
Of the effect that will emerge
As layers merge and unmake
To make something new, united.

Yet I cannot speed you up.
You have your time.
You need your time.
The delicious mesh would never emerge,
If I sped you up.

Thank you,
For taking your time.

– brain, please learn from this.

Feature #6: Spirit Bird, by Xavier Rudd

This feature brings “Spirit Bird”, by Xavier Rudd to you. See the video below:

You can also find the lyrics her.

Songs will have a different meaning for every listener, and that is part of their strength. In great part, then, I want to feature this song simply to allow readers to find their own connection to it, their own interpretation. Art – and I consider music and song a form of art – always leaves room for interpretation, as probably every other form of communication also would benefit from doing. Part of the motivation of this feature is then also to call attention to the multiple interpretations that terminologies like “third cultures”, “mobility” and “thinking otherwise”, among other core concepts of the Mobile Worlds project, inevitably have. And to see this as a positive thing, as often the meaning we take from a concept is the one we need. Nevertheless, it is also necessary to be careful here, as misunderstandings arising from different interpretations can be problematic. So in moments when it is important to align understandings better (even if they are never exactly the same) providing definitions and reformulations and space for debate on what a topic means can be crucial. This is also what the workshops in the Mobile Worlds project, combined with mobile interviews, help to do: using various ways of communicating can help to better align thinking on a given subject.

But as for “Spirit Bird”, the song I feature here, I would like to share parts of what this song means to me, and how I think it relates to the theme of Mobile Worlds. To me, Spirit Bird is about the unfairness and irrevocability of colonial damages to indigenous peoples, at the same time as it is about finding hope and strength despite adversity. I think it is about intergenerational awareness, beyond our lifetimes both into the past and into the future. I feel it is also about the pain inflicted on the world when it is faced with greed and egoism and carelessness. For Mobile Worlds these themes inspire me to consider the futures we imagine here in intergenerational and caring way, and brings attention to the need to allow and acknowledge pain and adversity, while also not shrinking away from acting in favour of those norms and values that we do not wish to let go of. The song reminds me that cultures have important unique norms and values that should be treasured in their diversity, while at the same time some destructive cultural traits do require challenging.

In a context in which, in Germany, a wave of right-wing “partying” is happening with extremely racist song lyrics to which young people and people of various ages dance, and in which all over the world right-wing ideologies seem on the rise (there is so much more to say here), it feels important to highlight the power of song for other directions, other thoughts. And also to ask ourselves, in the spirit of Mobile Worlds, what these anti-migration slogans and politics are doing to perceptions of acceptable mobilities, and the mobility of cultures – within ourselves and across borders. Perhaps the Spirit Bird can help call to the humanity in us?

Feature #5: “The Cognitive Dissonance Crisis” – The podcast episode that had me connecting cognitive dissonance, (third) cultures, and thinking otherwise

Rachel Donald’s podcast Planet:Critical is extremely inspiring and has got me thinking on many topics. Sometimes revolutionizing what I thought I knew or what I never knew. But sometimes perhaps not so much leading me to think otherwise, but certainly more deeply and with more grounding than some of the intuitive “knowledge” I feel I’ve gained over time but couldn’t always quite make a claim on. And it’s given me more of a sense of community around common thoughts and goals – planetary justice among humans and more-than-humans, the power of art, the necessity of creative imagination, the mesh of hope and hopelessness vis-à-vis today’s world.. – while also allowing an embracing of confusion and uncertainty that come with better or different forms of understanding and the utterly daunting future that seems to be before us. So, thank you Rachel (so much)! And to all others: go listen & read her work!

One specific episode of Planet:Critical so far has made me feel the explicit urge to feature it in relation to Mobile Worlds: the one on Cognitive Dissonance, with Sarah Stein Lubrano (who has her own website+blog, which I also recommend!). This is because one of the messages of the episode is that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) cultures (see also this book on the acronym) have a tendency to focus on the construction of a “self” and this process makes it very difficult– if not impossible – for dialogue to actually lead to anyone “changing their minds” (my PhD thesis explored and confirmed this lack of change effect in dialogue as well, from the perspective and context of social learning in planning). As Sarah describes it, individuals from WEIRD countries tend to be so focused on creating and then defending the “self” in its consistency, that debating a topic with others will make them defensive of their “self” rather than open to change their minds about a given topic, as this would require a change or shift in the “self”. This rings very true, and fits with a lot of experiences I’ve had (even in countries that are perhaps not quite so “WEIRD” but have been quite assimilated in this respect through colonization and globalization, at least in their more mainstream or dominant cultures). So, it made me question: is it thus a mistake to concern ourselves so much with the extent to which we identify with one or another – or a third – culture? Let me delve into this a little deeper.

If WEIRD countries are “weird” (ie odd or strange or particular) in the way they focus on the sense of self, which is in fact culturally constructed, then one could say that constructing a “self” based on a given culture is not very fruitful, but also that constructing the “self” from various cultures might be equally futile. After all, should we not just stop trying to determine how that self is defined and rather allow this to flow according to context, the people we are with, where we are, what we are trying to achieve? Probably, yes. Yet, to get to such a flowing understanding of the self, perhaps thinking in terms of “third cultures” is precisely one way we can unlearn the habit of constructing a fixed “self” based on a given fixed culture? Letting go of the defining power of a given culture might help to perhaps even reach a stage in which any “self” would be at least less “fixed”.¹

This seems to resonate also with the following quote from the podcast (around min 38, said by Sarah): “a lot of the political contradictions that we encounter in the world challenge not just our sense of who we are as good people, but also our sense of what on earth we should be doing next.” Perhaps this applies not only to political contradictions but contradictions more generally. Awareness and embracing of diverse cultures within the self and in close surroundings can be a very important way to come into contact with contradictions. The so-called “third-culture-kids” are often used to those contradictions, and likely so are people who come into contact with various cultures regularly without having to travel far. If there is less of an us-them dichotomy between cultures (like a myself versus the world logic), can this make it easier to experience this diversity less from a competitive or defensive logic?

In her own search of what might help people change their minds, Sarah Stein Lubrano suggests – among other things – that action is key. In other words, getting people into positions of doing something different from their usual ways might be the key to thinking otherwise. As she says, “thinking is most often a secondary result of doing” (min 42). Although Mobile Worlds might put a little more faith in (re)thinking the self and in debating, this learning and changing by doing view is why we have chosen to use creative and artistic methods, hands-on and unconventional creation, during the workshops and interviews – to hopefully help people (us) use introspection and unusual activities and debate and multi-sensorial and multi-generational action to reach understanding and imagination that they (we) might otherwise find much harder to find. We emphasize the use of these methods across generations because we wish to challenge the idea that working with our hands, accepting “imperfections” (based on what definition, anyway?), and making something that reflects some part of us or our thoughts, is something done only in childhood. I don’t even know who is insulting whom in those assumptions about what is done and not done at certain ages, but I think it’s past time we leave them behind…

There are so many more themes Sarah Stein Lubrano brings up in this podcast that are key, and so related to Mobile Worlds. Not least the role of social infrastructure in creating unexpected encounters that lead to doing differently and thinking differently. Or the role of judgement in the process of changing our minds. This only to say: go listen to the podcast, because if you thought the above was interesting, that was only the tip of the iceberg. Let alone if you delve deeper into both Sarah’s and Rachel’s work. Go there, and enjoy, and support them if you can!

¹ There are important consequences of this at the level of ethics, if nothing is entirely fixed in terms of norms and values that we tend to largely allow cultures to define. But this certainly seems worth exploring.