Last week, I had an intriguing conversation in the breakout room of the Japan Intercultural Institute’s Learning Circle. Together with international colleagues, we were discussing how to better enable our participants in online intercultural trainings to learn and to connect with each other. My colleague from Japan mentioned that her biggest challenge was the silences in breakout rooms. I was surprised. That was a phenomenon I do not know from my Western nor my international mixed groups.

Recently I have noticed renewed interest in the role of empathy in Intercultural and Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) work. And that makes sense because in these uncertain and turbulent times, looking at a situation from the point of view of another person is an essential requisite to understand each other. Yet empathy in itself seems quite a complex phenomenon when we dive into it. Empathy can arise automatically and can be supportive for understanding the other person’s perspective, but unfortunately not always so.

In recent months, the Covid-19 measures have forced us to become effective in the digital world. For many organizations and individuals this was a steep learning curve: working from home, homeschooling, online training, etc. The transition was sometimes achieved in just a few days. As the first wave of online working and learning is behind us, we all have become aware that we will continue to work this way for a long time to come. That is why I invite you in this inspiration mail to take a deeper look at the effectiveness of online learning interventions, especially intercultural learning.

We are in the middle of a mind-blowing crisis.

Many of you will be working from home, which may at times feel like the eye of the storm.

Many of you will be working from home, in frequent online exchange with international partners to manage the implications of the pandemic in your work area. We hope that you, your family and friends are all well.

The mind as crucial factor
Years ago I got intrigued by the relations between culture, mind and brain. At the ‘Sietar Deutschland 2012 Forum’ new research on cultural neuroscience was presented and that evoked huge discussions amongst the audience. As interculturalists we understood something about the impact of culture on the brain by watching photos of fMRI scans comparing Chinese and North-American persons in various experimental settings. We also got a glimpse of the interrelationship between brain and culture, but many of us couldn’t really grasp the core and stayed behind with a lot of questions.

A year later at the Sietar Europe Congress in Tallinn I attended Joseph Shaules’ seminar on ‘Applying Cultural Neuroscience to Intercultural Training and Education’. That session was eye-opening in the sense that he introduced the ‘mind’ as crucial additional factor in the interrelationship between brain and culture. A factor that until today is often overseen or underestimated.

May I invite you to join my journey into brain, mind and culture in this blog?

About not-knowing, never understanding why and letting go

I remember well that as Master students in Cultural Anthropology, we devoured Nigel Barley’s book The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut* right before doing our own fieldwork.

As a young anthropologist Barley traveled to Cameroon in 1981 to conduct a field study on the until then relatively unknown Dowayo peoples.