A while ago I was leading a seminar on intercultural issues with a group of masters students in migration studies. They were particularly diverse with backgrounds from across the world. I showed them a photograph that I had taken myself of a café in downtown old Tehran, Iran. In the …
What would be the conditions for it to be OK to congratulate someone on their English on first encounter? I don’t somehow think it’s enough that they might be just someone one meets in a country where English isn’t … and as soon as I begin to write this sentence …
This blog is partly from the common memory of what happens so often in doctoral vivas, when examiners say ‘why didn’t you explain that in your thesis?’ But it also comes from lots of situations when people just don’t tell you what you need to know. I was talking to …
Following my last blog, how should we write about data? There’s a chapter on this in my qualitative research book, plus another chapter on writer voice. Here though are some thoughts about basic principles. I’m writing about qualitative data; but I have also heard examiners make it clear that they …
Getting writing done seems often to be a major problem for postgraduate researchers. A common scenario is that half way through the programme excellent progress has been made – large parts of literature review and methodology chapters written, most of the data collected and analysed, and perhaps a third of …
Finalising the text in your book or your thesis in a global manner, making sure everything is clear and fits together, is a very important task. My co-author and I have just spent three days working on the final draft of our book. Our aim was to make every part …
I met with my co-author a few weeks ago to take a good look at the draft text of our book. We had already 45,000 words of the 50,000 target; but a pile of interviews, analyses, discussions of theory, reconstructed ethnographic accounts, interesting though all of them were, was really …
An interesting example of what we might call ‘cultural difference’ is the man coming into the café where I am sitting in Canterbury who orders an espresso at the counter, stirs in the sugar with particular panache and then drinks the coffee there and then without sitting down, and leaves. …
I recently went to a conference in Venice. Walking through the narrow streets for the business of getting to and from the conference site drew my attention again to walking rhythms. Where they were major routes for tourists I found I was bumping into people, they were stopping in front …
This is the last section, page 179, from the new edition of my book, Understanding intercultural communication: negotiating a grammar of culture. It should be coming out in the New Year. Safa is a character from one of my reconstructed ethnographic narratives; and I think that what she has been …