Category: Applied ICD

Iván Fernández Anaya as an Example of Applied Intercultural Dialogue

http://www.ivan-fernandez.com/

An interaction between Spanish and Kenyan athletes in December 2012 made a major splash in the news a month later (reaching the English language press only after it was widely reported in the Spanish language press). The story is still circulating on social media today. While not typically presented as an example of intercultural dialogue, it is an interesting model for what can happen when members of different cultural groups meet. The story is included here for those who have not yet heard about it. For those who have, it would be interesting to hear similar examples from other contexts – feel free to either reply with a comment, or send an email suggesting a related story to post.

“. . .on December 2 [2012], Spanish athlete Iván Fernández Anaya was competing in a cross-country race in Burlada, Navarre. He was running second, some distance behind race leader Abel Mutai – bronze medalist in the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the London Olympics. As they entered the finishing straight, he saw the Kenyan runner – the certain winner of the race – mistakenly pull up about 10 meters before the finish, thinking he had already crossed the line. Fernández Anaya quickly caught up with him, but instead of exploiting Mutai’s mistake to speed past and claim an unlikely victory, he stayed behind and, using gestures, guided the Kenyan to the line and let him cross first.”
    Source: Arribas, Carlos. (19 December 2012). Honesty of the long-distance runner. [Madrid].

“In the weeks that followed, Fernandez saw his story gain momentum outside the Spanish media. He gained thousands of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and once again saw an opportunity to do something kind. The athlete put the green shirt and red shorts he wore for the race up for auction on eBay with the intention of donating all proceeds to the Red Cross, an organization he described as “one of the hardest working worldwide.”
His website lauded the organization’s dedication to promoting peace and international cooperation, as well as mutual respect and understanding among all the world’s people. . . The winning bid was €560.”
    Source: Internet swoons for Spanish runner who helped competitor win. (January 2013). CBC News [Canada].

Additional coverage:
Huffington Post
USA Today
Vancouver Sun

Mediating Violent Conflict Course

Mediating Violent Conflict
May 11-15, 2015

Participants will:
*Understand the role of international mediation in the larger peacebuilding context
*Build competence and confidence for practicing mediation
*Learn skills to facilitate the practice and promotion of third-party engagement in peacemaking in interstate and intrastate conflicts

About the Course: Working in a conflict situation often demands mediation skills, whether you are working at a grassroots level or in state capitals. Mediation is both an art and science, and requires skilled analysis, careful planning, and effective communication. Designed for practitioners working in or on conflict zones, this course will improve participants’ ability to understand the motivations and objectives of the various parties, promote ripeness, develop effective relationships, increase leverage, and strengthen mediation capacity. Participants will practice their skills through simulations, role-play, and case studies.

Instructor: Pamela Aall, Senior Advisor, USIP
Guest speakers: Chester Crocker, William Taylor, George Lopez, Alison Milofsky and Anthony Wanis–St. John.

Working in a conflict situation often demands mediation skills, whether you are working at a grassroots level or in state capitals. Mediation is both an art and science, and requires skilled analysis, careful planning, and effective communication. Designed for practitioners working in or on conflict zones, this course will improve participants’ ability to understand the motivations and objectives of the various parties, promote ripeness, develop effective relationships, increase leverage, and strengthen mediation capacity. Participants will practice their skills through simulations, role-play, and case studies.

To Apply: Please email your resume/CV and a short statement explaining your interest in the course, to the Academy registrar.

Location:
U.S. Institute of Peace
2301 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20037

UNESCO Links Cultural Diversity to Human Rights

© UNESCO

On 31 March, 2015, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova took part in a round table on the theme “Human Rights and the Protection of Cultural Diversity,” held at the University of Geneva, with the participation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, UNESCO Special Envoy for Intercultural Dialogue, Metin Arditi and author, psychoanalyst and university professor, Julia Kristeva.

Bokova emphasized that “cultural diversity is an expression of human rights – the persecution of minorities, religious and ethnic, and the looting and pillage of cultural heritage are part of a deliberate global strategy to eradicate history and memory, the identities and the existence of these peoples and communities, and, through them, the cultural diversity that is our common heritage.”

Arditi highlighted that “the destruction of cultural heritage is but a symptom of the destruction of the Other,” noting that “the West is living through an unprecedented intellectual crisis – we need to restore the humanities at the heart of our societies, as the cradle of ideas and intellectuals for the future. Universities have a historic responsibility here, to prepare society for its own transformation and to help people understand and live together.”

All speakers stressed the importance of teaching about religions through the humanities, as areas of knowledge and understanding, as well as debate and discussion — “in order for beliefs to not become the sole possession of fanatics and extremists.”

The General-Director concluded on the key role of education for global citizenship, as promoted by UNESCO, including education for human rights as the mainstay, stressing the need for cultural literacy and development of intercultural competences to make the most of contemporary multicultural societies and the challenges of living together.

See the original article for further details.

EIUC Venice School of Human Rights (Venice)

European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation (EIUC) is ready to accept applications for the Venice School of Human Rights which will take place in Venice, Lido from 26 June to 4 July 2015. Candidatures will be accepted until 17 May 2015. The topic is “(Dis)Integration through Human Rights: Citizens, Courts, Communities”.

Since 2010 EIUC’s Venice School of Human Rights studies today’s challenges in the field of human rights examining their reasons and possible solutions to deploy. In 5 years more than 500 participants from all over the world have attended the Venice School in the beautiful surrounding of the Monastery of San Nicolò at the Lido of Venice.

The 2015 Venice School is structured in the following three thematic clusters, which will be chosen by the participants when applying:
*Business and Human Rights, 
*Human Rights and New Technologies and 
*Human Rights and Gender Issues.

This year the Venice School for Human Rights will be opened by two prestigious lecturers:
Maria Virginia Bras Gomes, member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and Senior Social Policy Adviser in the Ministry of Solidarity and Social Security of Portugal.

Albie Sachs, South African activist and former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa under appointment by Nelson Mandela

Furthermore its international faculty includes prestigious lectures in human rights such as Stefano Rodotà, former President of the Italian Data Protection Commission and of the European Group on Data Protection and Emilio De Capitani, Executive Director of the Fundamental Rights European Experts Group. See full list of lecturers here.

The Venice School is designed for postgraduates from all areas of the social sciences and humanities and for practitioners who want to address the topics proposed from a multi-disciplinary approach that will be useful in further engagements in their respective field of work. The lectures will be held in English.

Link between Climate Change and Conflict in Syria

“There is evidence that the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.”

Source:
Colin P. Kelley, Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane, Richard Seager and Yochanan Kushnir.  2015. Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published ahead of print March 2, 2015, doi:10.1073/pnas.1421533112.

Abstract:
“Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend. Precipitation changes in Syria are linked to rising mean sea-level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean, which also shows a long-term trend. There has been also a long-term warming trend in the Eastern Mediterranean, adding to the drawdown of soil moisture. No natural cause is apparent for these trends, whereas the observed drying and warming are consistent with model studies of the response to increases in greenhouse gases. Furthermore, model studies show an increasingly drier and hotter future mean climate for the Eastern Mediterranean. Analyses of observations and model simulations indicate that a drought of the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought, which is implicated in the current conflict, has become more than twice as likely as a consequence of human interference in the climate system.”

Discussion:
Fountain, Henry. (2 March 2015). Researchers link Syrian conflict to a drought made worse by climate change. New York Times.

Comments?

A month of tolerance in Belgian schools

Belgium’s response to intolerance is one example of applied intercultural dialogue:

“After the attacks in Paris and in Copenhagen, Belgium launches “the month of tolerance”, the Francophone Education Minister Joelle Milquet said. She announced that during the month of March there will be an intensification of the initiatives aiming to promote intercultural dialogue in the schools of Wallonia and Brussels. External partners, including journalists, along with lawyers and the Movement against Racism, Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia, will support teachers in activities aimed at promoting dialogue of young students on democracy, terrorism, freedom of expression and intolerance. An initiative that through videos, documentaries, theater and more will try to inform students on the  current events by spreading the values of intercultural and interreligious dialogue.”

Original publication: Battista, Paola. (24 February 2015). A month of tolerance in Belgian schools.

Applied ICD: 3-D Printers and Prosthetic Hands from the US to South Africa

Sometimes the most extraordinary intercultural collaborations result from contacts made through social media. The following story started through a connection made through YouTube, between an artist in the US and a carpenter in South Africa, using the latest technology (3-D printers) to create a prosthetic hand.

“A former school supplies salesmen and special effects artist, Ivan Owen in December 2011 shared a video on YouTube of a giant puppet hand that he had made. That video was seen by Richard Van As, a carpenter in South Africa who had cut off some of his fingers with a table saw. He asked Mr. Owen to help devise a prosthesis, and over two years, the pair came up with a workable design. A 3-D printer, they figured, would make the prosthesis cheap and easy to produce. When Mr. Van As learned of a boy in South Africa who also needed a prosthetic hand, they made one for him, too. The idea caught on.”

Mroz, Jacqueline. (February 16, 2015). Hand of a superhero. New York Times.

State of the art prosthetics cost a lot, and children grow so quickly that often people decide they just aren’t feasible. e-Nable has changed that by matching technology and volunteers to over 1000 recipients, many children, in dozens of countries to date.

Multilingual Signs and Intercultural Pedagogy

When visiting Macau, I was surprised by seeing trilingual street signs (Chinese, Portuguese and English), a rare phenomenon in the US. A recent article in ELT Journal by Chiou-Ian Chern and Karen Dooley documents how such signs can serve as a resource to language teachers and learners. They conclude: “Environmental print . . . has become a useful, if politically complex, resource for learning English in contexts where language teachers once lamented the paucity of English input outside the classroom.” (p. 122).

Chern, C.-I., & Dooley, K. (2014). Learning English by walking down the street. ELT Journal, 68(2), 113-123. Available from: http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/68/2/113.full

(The full article is available to download for free as I write this, though that may temporary.)

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Yang Liu Graphic Designs: East Meets West

Academics tend to discuss cultural differences in words. Designers show them visually. Yang Liu grew up in China, but then moved to Germany, becoming a designer. One of her projects, East meets West, consists of a series of comparisons of Chinese vs. German assumptions based on  her own experiences.

Her designs have been exhibited in both China and Germany, as well as being widely available on the internet. For further information, see her own website, or one of the many articles describing her work, including these:

Aw, Jean. (2007). Interview with Yang Liu- 11.13.07. NOTCOT.

Saleme, Shawn. (2013). East Meets West : An Infographic Portrait by Yang Liu. Visual News.

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Clothing as a Tool of Intercultural Dialogue: New Zealand and India

New Zealand fashion students recreate modern-day wear from traditional Indian silk saris

In a unique celebration joining New Zealand and Indian cultures, 15 New Zealand Fashion Tech students won Prime Minister’s Scholarships for Asia, covering travel to the Bannari Amman Institute of Technology in India to participate in a five week Apparel and Textile Practicum. Students earned the awards by creating garments made from traditional Indian sari fabrics. The inaugural Resene Designer Selection showcased the hand-crafted silk from Southern India made especially for their garments. Four of the NZ students were Maori. The goal was to take students outside the classroom and give them an international and applied perspective.

Further information about this project is available in a New Zealand journal article entitled “A pattern for success” published in Educator Review, and in an Indian newspaper article entitled “Indian silk, New Zealand patterns”. Continuing descriptions by the students of their experiences are also available on their university’s website.