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Prompted by Muslim children reporting their fear of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy, this thesis develops a Critical Realist approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) to describe the violent discourse of 'radicalisation' and 'extremism' (RadEx) from which PREVENT has emerged. RadEx describes the increase in the usage of 'radicalisation' and 'extremism' in British political discourse since the 1970s and how the words became progressively synonymous with violence between 2009 and 2014. It is theorised that RadEx not only suppresses dissent, but also has the capacity to promote violence. The analysis of parliamentary texts shows that RadEx has emerged from earlier colonialist discourses and the loss of parliamentary calculus, a genre of parliamentary discourse that moderated oppressive policy by the threat that it might solicit the emergence of 'radicalisation' and 'extremism'. Aligned with Laclau and Mouffe's socialist strategy, parliamentary calculus led left-wing politicians to embrace opposition and to use parliamentary calculus and the threat of coming to power to moderate the policy of the ruling party. New Labour's aspiration to be in power is shown to have been an abandonment of this previous socialist strategy and to have undermined parliamentary calculus. The discursive change that this precipitates in relation to RadEx is theorised in the semiotic helix. As well as contributing to an understanding of the emergence of RadEx, the semiotic helix also contributes to understanding of discursive change over time more generally. Both Dialectical Critical Realism and metaReality are used to explore how RadEx might be surmounted and it is theorised that the Government's recent expansion of counter-extremism strategy can and should be contested.

This thesis investigates Asian students who left their country to study in Japanese universities. Generally, Asian students who are studying in Western countries tend to be regarded as having an affluent family background and as belonging to an elite group who are equipped with plurilingual skills. Their affluence and elite social backgrounds are due to the fact that some Asian countries have achieved rapid economic growth in the wave of the neoliberal era in Asia which began at the turn of the millennium (Park, Hill, & Saito, 2012). At the same time, however, it is said that these Asian students tend to lack cultural openness, that they are often ignorant of inequality, and that in addition to being from an elite, they are in their character elitist. Therefore, they are referred to as "students of the new global elite" (Vandrick, 2011, p. 160) or as neoliberal "global cosmopolitans" (Bhabha, 1994). However, such a view is not well-founded in non-Western contexts. Hence, the aim of this study is to understand whether, how, and to what extent they have been influenced by neoliberal discourses in the development of their plurilingualism and to investigate their behavior as cosmopolitans. Drawing on the notions of vernacular cosmopolitanism (Werbner, 2006, 2008) including its family concepts of cosmopolitanism, this study challenges the popularized idea of global (neoliberal) cosmopolitanism. The study documents the life stories of six participants. A narrative-oriented approach to data collection was employed, and thematic analysis was conducted. The findings show that the notion of neoliberal cosmopolitanism is contested by the intercultural thoughts and actions of vernacular cosmopolitans. At the same time, the fact that their attitude toward English was also partially influenced by neoliberal discourses was made evident by this study. The findings also reveal that the notion of vernacular cosmopolitanism focuses too much on agency, the ability or will to act of individuals, while it neglects structural pressures, power relations, ideologies and discourses that construct subjectivity. Based on the findings, the thesis concludes with an exploration of the relationship between power, agency and subjectivity which draws upon Allen (2002) and Foucault (1982) in order to point to a critical perspective on the notion of vernacular cosmopolitanism as a way forward. Finally, for the future studies, this thesis proposes a cosmopolitan pedagogy.

This thesis aims to sketch the contours of a vision that moves beyond the dominant paradigm or worldview that underlies and governs modernity (and postmodernity). It does so by drawing on the remarkable leap in human consciousness that occurred during the Axial Age and on a cross-fertilization of what are arguably the three most comprehensive integrative metatheories available today: Complex thought, integral theory and critical realism – i.e. a complex integral realism. Its evolutionary / developmental perspective sees both the Axial Age and European modernity as different expressions of the same underlying mental / rational structure of consciousness, the first in a more balanced and ‘efficient’ manifestation, the second unbalanced and ‘deficient’. Axial Age thought involved a both a ‘standing back and looking within and beyond’, a process captured in its three breakthrough domains of cognition, ethics and spirituality. European modernity, on the other hand, entailed a more exclusively cognitive ‘standing back’ and lacked a balancing ‘looking within and beyond’. Tendencies intrinsic to the mental structure first appeared in axial Greece as the seeds of four biases – analytical over dialectical, epistemology over ontology, presence over absence and exterior over interior – which were later accentuated by its distorted expression in European modernity. By deploying the three integrative metatheories, it recounts the consolidation of these biases in modernity, the challenges to them and their underlying paradigm / structure throughout the 20th century, and the remedies provided by the three integrative philosophies – remedies that have paved the way for a new vision. The thesis then outlines some of the contours of a ‘new axial vision’ that is appropriate for the 21st century, one that integrates the best of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity and that is embedded within a complex integral realist framework. It includes sketches of a ‘new axial cosmology’ and an updated version of the three axial breakthrough domains.

The thesis is concerned with a problematization of the field of intercultural communication. Philosophical inquiry is employed in this thesis to examine intercultural communication from the perspective of existing critical intercultural frameworks, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of cultural difference and the acquisition of communicative competence. In proposing this philosophical approach, the thesis reconfigures the relationship between self and other in dialogic terms, and it repositions intercultural communication from the current emphasis on business and language learning to a reappraisal of the role of dialogue in dealing with intercultural conflicts in multicultural societies. Beginning with a critique of the philosophical presuppositions of communicative competence, the thesis proposes an ethical approach to communication based on the philosophy of Levinas. The thesis suggests a contrasting reading of Kantian autonomy of the individual and Levinasian heteronomy. The former is identified as the source of functionalist competence frameworks, while the latter underpins a notion of ethical engagement and dialogic commitment between individuals belonging to different cultural backgrounds. The thesis eschews essentialist attributions of cultural difference in interaction with the other, and reconfigures intercultural communication within a wider philosophical discourse defined by the ethics of alterity, or thinking about the other. This theoretical stance is achieved in the thesis through a productive confrontation between Levinas and other philosophers who have engaged critically with the notion of alterity, such as Žižek, Badiou and Ricoeur. These theoretical strands are woven together to produce an immanent critique of the field of intercultural communication. This approach offers a conceptualisation of intercultural communication that emphasises ethical engagement with others and the importance of open-ended dialogue, as opposed to a search for a closure of understanding in ideals of universal tolerance. Thus, this thesis acknowledges complexity, contingency and the power relations embedded in communication as constituent of interculturality.