In a global world, the social practices in which we are involved interact with different cultures and purposes. In the context of the initial teacher training, we aimed to develop an educational practice in first grade with the purpose of promoting the development of the student from the knowledge of the other. In this sense, the educational practice was based on a STEAM approach (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts/Humanities, and Mathematics) that allowed to observe (Cape Verde and its culture), reflect (the stories, the fashion), act (create fashion with new patterns that express the Cape Verdean culture), and intervene (simulation of model change and the possibility of selling new patterns). It involved a second-grade class in Portugal and a first- grade class in Cape Verde (35 children from 6 to 7 years old). This is a case study, qualitative in nature, which valued participant observation for the collection of information. The data were treated according to Bardin (Análise de conteúdo. Edições 70, 1977). The discussion of results shows the benefits of the project “Connected Reading and Entrepreneurship” in the development of alterity and the construction of STEAM learning scenarios in formative processes of social innovation. It is intended to contribute to the discussion of an open school that learns with the other to foster the development of personal, social, and emotional capacities in the student and, in this way, promote the articulation between theory and practice considering changes in social reality.

The focus of the present volume is to research about the experiences of othered receivers. It develops within an overarching concern about the multiple conditions of reception that derive from communication processes framed by the concept of Otherness.

In contemporary multipolar political and cultural environments, we are witnessing the intensification of discourses that emphasize irreducible differences between “us” and “them.” This scenario is further amplified by online social media and both explicit and implicit hate speech. By examining the intersections of strategic silence and activism for social change within the field of human rights, this chapter establishes connections between strategic communication and communication for development and social change. To understand how different forms of insubordinate silences are articulated in the communication practices of human rights activists, an ethnographic study was conducted over six months (from January to June 2021) with two Portuguese human rights organizations. The findings demonstrate how ‘keeping silent’ can serve as a critical practice for social change, offering alternative ways of being, acting, resisting, and disrupting. Silence assumes a strategic role in human rights activism when its power, impacts, and meanings in everyday decisions and interactions are recognized, allowing it to transcend the rigid boundaries between speech and silence.

The need for the message sender to take the Other into account is of paramount importance in every communicative process. Only by establishing some sort of proximity—if only a transitory one—between sender and receiver can we expect a positive outcome to arise from such an interaction. The ability to anticipate and comply with the horizon of expectations of the Other is a requirement of the message’s source, who will expect the same attitude on the part of the receiver. As messages go back and forth and the relative positions within the communicative process alternate, it becomes obvious that meanings are intended by the source but, perhaps even more so, stem from the Other’s reading and interpretation of the same message. Therefore, deliberately trying to adjust our worldview in order to look at things through someone else’s eyes makes full sense within a communicational mindset. The more we are able to empathize and reciprocate in this process, the better it will succeed. In the case of advertising discourse, due to its nature and to the circumstances that surround it, this need becomes even more pressing. Advertising messages are carefully prepared at the source before they ever reach their audience. Ideally, they will be perceived by the audience as having stemmed from a sender who fully identifies with their needs, interests, values, social, and cultural beliefs. If it wants to have any credibility, advertising messages should erode the boundaries between source and receiver, thus blurring, as much as possible, the idea that a specific worldview is being forcibly imposed on the Other. Therefore, especially in contemporary ads, there is a definite trend that shapes the content and the form of the message around the perceived expectations and presuppositions of the Other, so that it will be perceived as natural, organic, and perfectly aligned with their needs and concerns. Receivers, in the case of successful brands, will even reciprocate and assume, themselves, the role of co-producers of advertising contents, contributing to the telling of the brand’s cohesive and coherent story.

Before colonial encounters devised ways to create ‘the other’ out of Indigenous populations, we were other to them. Indigenous populations of the Americas greeted European newcomers using rites of hospitality perfected through time and enacted for all those who were other to them. The state of Otherness was not exclusionary or related to cognition of a power imbalance but was bracketed by the difference embedded in ‘not us, the people.’ But Otherness constituted a space of impending danger particularly as an encounter lingered, because time required the incorporation of the Other into the social fabric of the group, albeit in a liminal state. Based on archival and ethnographic evidence, this chapter explores several narratives of first encounters with colonizers and the immediate aftermath of such encounters probing into strategies and tactics of accommodation and social integration of newcomers.

The year 2023 marks the centenary of the birth of the Macao writer Henrique de Senna Fernandes. Author of varied work, especially novels and short stories, this text focuses mainly on his book Nam Van—Contos de Macau [Nam Van—Short Stories from Macao] (1978). Our text intends to highlight the identity multiplicity of the subjects, symbolically reflected in the speeches of the narrator and the characters, as well as the relationship between self and hetero-image, questioning the identity hybridity of the characters in the stories, in a relationship with history and space. The theoretical framework and methodology used will be that of literary imagology with a focus on characters, narrators, and space, in order to uncover forms of cultural and identity representations. This text will therefore focus on the following topics: 1. Henrique de Senna Fernandes in the panorama of Macao literature in Portuguese: for a brief review of the literature; 2. Images from the East; 2.1. Processes of Self-Other relations (“mania,” “phobia,” and “philia” (Pageaux, From Image to Imaginary. In Á. M. Machado & D.-H. Pageaux (eds.), From Comparative Literature to Literature Theory [Da Literatura Comparada à Teoria da Literatura]. Presença, 48–66, 2001)); 2.2. Identity construction processes; 2.3. Affirmation of identity (essentially cultural and historical). It will be concluded that the various identity relationships between Self-Other in Nam Van—Contos de Macau reflect the collective imagination of a time and society, presenting a pyramidal quaternary structure that exposes a relationship of social and imagery power between (i) Westerners at the top, (ii) Macanese, (iii) Chinese from Macao, and (iv) Chinese from Mainland China at the bottom.

Contemporary societies are dominated by the discourse of the risk which refers to potential threats associated to feelings of insecurity, uncertainty, and fear, introduced by modernization itself (Beck, Risk society. Towards a new modernity. Sage, 1992, p. 21) and instigated by the mass media. The concept of risk can, however, connote other dimensions. Austen (The social construction of risk by young people. Health, Risk & Society, 11(5), 451–470, 2009, p. 452) states that “now risk taking is much more diverse, not centred on survival but pleasure and the relief of boredom. In this sense risk taking is now regarded as fun, a way of coping with the increased instabilities and uncertainties of living at risk”. The author highlights that young people in the new millennium face a wider scope of uncertainties (being at risk) and choices (risk taking) on how to run their lives. On the one hand, they are regarded as autonomous and knowledgeable and, on the other, as dependent and passive (p. 452). Theoretical frameworks about risk have been influencing many discourses (economic, technological, political…) and social groups, an example being young people’s risk management (Cieslik & Pollock, Introduction: Studying young people in late modernity. In M. Cieslik & G. Pollock (Eds.), Young people in risk society: The restructuring of youth identities and transitions in late modernity. Routledge Revivals, 2002/2018). This chapter aims at carrying out a critical analysis of perceptions of risk associated to the negative dimension of fear and insecurity, which is widely accepted. It, thus, searches for elements that can give answers to the question how do young people perceive risk?, to determine appropriations anchored in the life of the Other, the young, as an example of a specific context. In terms of methodology, the chapter adopts a qualitative approach to research as action that places creative intervention (photography, graphic representation, writing) at the centre of empirical observation, as a form of expressing worldviews. The research sample includes a group of young people and is examined to understand how the concept of risk can suggest different appropriations and how artistic intervention can promote individuals’ awareness of their participant voices.

Foucault, mostly recognized by his contributions on power, is less regarded as a thinker of otherness and especially as a thinker of the other to power, i.e., that which cannot be reduced to power. By proposing a reading of power relations that seem to preclude any possible way out from them, Foucault becomes an essential author for approaches to alterity that neither essentialize nor romanticize the other as a way of escaping power. While commentators, such as Deleuze, consider that the last Foucault of the ethical period, i.e., of the techniques of the self, is the one in which the question of the other acquires a relevance that seemed to be absent in previous works, we argue that the question of alterity is a theme that appears very early on in his genealogical and even archaeological incursions. We propose a reading of the techniques of the self based on these initial approaches by Foucault to the theme of alterity to show that Foucault manages to think of an other to power, a power that neither reduces alterity nor is reduced to it, by making alterity an essay, an attempt, something to be done, and carried out by the subject on herself. By taking essentiality away from otherness, including the essentiality of not having an essence, i.e., of being something that essentially escapes or that cannot be objectified, Foucault opens the way to an other to power because not even the other appears as an absolute, from which a power of otherness would emerge instead of an other to power.

Exaiphnes is the word employed by Socrates to designate the very instant when he declares to have just had a clever thought (Plato, Cratylus 399a). The present chapter borrows this Platonic expression regarding the exact moment when a significant understanding comes to mind and focuses on Exekias’s amphora depicting Achilles slaying Penthesileia with the aim of discussing how this representation captures the sudden emerging of otherness. Achilles’s massive black shape stands in a strong opposition to the whiteness of the falling Amazon’s skin, suggesting fragility, although this is a convention to denote women. On the other hand, Penthesileia’s garment allude to nature and the wild. The leopard’s skin is fastened at her waist, descending from her torso down to her thighs. The queen’s body communicates the impression of duality through oppositons between female features and wild animal attributes, the latter being further echoed in the indication of a hissing serpent emerging from her helmet. Such marks of untamedness are subdued by the Amazon’s fatal wound under the sharp point of Achilles’s spear, as indicated by the splashes of red ink, signalling blood. This is significant because Penthesileia is killed like a wild animal, in that she gets caught by surprise as she turns to defend herself but meets her death instead. Significantly, the opposite side of the vase depicts Dionysus and his son Oinopion performing a ritual, whilst both sides are connected by spirals, expanding the manifold faces of otherness. Our guiding question in this chapter will be twofold: firstly, ‘to what extent do these depictions contribute to the understanding of Heraclitus fragment 123, Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ, nature loves to be self-concealing?’ And, furthermore, ‘how do these representations reflect on the semantics of ἀλήθεια, truth or authenticity?’

What is, or what has to be, the meaning of ‘otherness’ in the present century? This question is one often posed in volumes concerned with the theme of ‘otherness’, revealing the atemporality of this topic; it is always current, and a source of cross-reflexions, involving different cultures. In the Collins and Cambridge dictionaries we read as follows:

The aim of this chapter is to explore the reconstructive processes of the other through poetic composition. In Nox, Carson engenders the other—her brother Michael—by constituting a book that reveals a vision (as a hypothesis) possible to be recovered from fragments. This chapter figure establishes itself not only as a phásma, but also as a portrait that is drawn with the coordinates inscribed in the book—through the verb or the image, or even through the very spatiality of the object itself and the reading process, seeking to answer the question that guides the work: who were you?

This chapter proposes an interpretation of ethics and politics based on an intersection of the notions of difference and otherness. Assuming that the subject is always constituted intersubjectively—that is, through the other—authors such as Sartre and Levinas established a necessary relationship between subjectivity, responsibility, and ethics. On the other hand, the subject is also, by definition, a performative agent, an actor, and this phenomenological dimension tends to emancipate the subject from the seriousness of the real, as well as from the wide (ethical) contracts of social reality. This does not mean that there cannot be realism within the scope of a subjectivity that has escaped ethics. In the context of the arts, the ethical and aesthetic dimensions, although essentially distinct, both feed off the same interplay between subjectivity and realism, even though the realistic character of aesthetic authenticity (which lives on singularities) is very different from the realistic character of ethics (which moves towards consensus and universality). The aesthetic experience expressed in art makes use of difference and dissent (understood here in the sense proposed by Jacques Rancière), but this political dimension should not be confused with the ethical dimension that governs art lobbies.

This chapter seeks to ascertain to what extent media, especially local media, is portraying refugees in that “time of the outside” and what are its main implications. Based on the idea that media reinforces representations that collaborate in reproducing processes of invisibility and discrimination of people holding the status of refugees, the text provides a view about the ways media may be a more powerful means for generating time coevalness, which is important for refugee people to experience a sense of continuousness in their lives, through obliging to dislocate in abrupt manners from their home countries. The methodology includes a literature review on time and migration, along with a content analysis of articles on refugees published in two reputable local newspapers, Diário do Minho and Correio do Minho, covering the Northern region of Portugal, with a focus on the Braga District from January 2017 to June 30, 2023.

In mid-2023, the number of people who were forced to flee due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, or other events that seriously disturbed public order reached a staggering milestone of over 110 million, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Additionally, the global refugee population reached a record high of over 36 million. UNHCR further predicts that by the end of 2024, there will be over 130 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, including nearly 63 million internally displaced people due to conflict and violence. In such an unequaled era of global movement, the stories encompassing refugees, migrants, and displaced individuals have become essential in shaping public perceptions, policy decisions, and societal attitudes.