As I take the public footpath across the golf-course near my home in Canterbury I encounter ‘Chinese’ golfers. I feel a warmth and just enough cultural knowledge to make eye contact and wave and shout ‘good shot’. I feel I can do this from my experience of students, colleagues and …
The concept of ‘high-context cultures’ has been dominant in intercultural communication studies and training since the 1960s with the work of E.T. Hall. They are framed as ‘outside the West’, where powerful tradition is thought to diminish the need to be explicit, resulting in ‘indirect’ communication. They are associated with …
There are two playlists that help me to write: ‘Iranian’ and ‘Arab’ music. They relate to the 17 years of my 20s and 30s in Iran, Syria and Egypt, and important relationships that have sustained long after. They invoke for me the distinct rhythms and critical humanity that I experienced …
When I begin to read Marjan Kamali’s description of going to primary school in downtown Tehran, Iran, in 1950, I’m transported into an immediately familiar world. So how can this be when, for me, it’s in another continent and in ‘the East’ – and at a time remote from today’s …