In the last paragraph of my last blog about material culture, I say ‘so-labelled “other cultures”’ because this phrase can too easily mean ‘those foreigners’ who are ‘not like us’. As well as encouraging prejudice, this is missing a huge opportunity. Seeing the connection there between small material cultural practices, …
After listening to a research student presentation about how the smells of freshly baked confectionary in a shop on Britain help her make sense of children in a school in China making and talking about festive food items, I think again about what I witnessed in a café in Canterbury. …
ChatGPT is a good but naïve research assistant. It can search for all sorts of things and can catch the essence of huge amounts of material. But there are key things you know that it doesn’t. So there are things that you need to check and ask it to do …
After telling my students that writing the data chapter or section should be the easiest part because they have all the material that they need – the data that they’ve collected and already analysed, I think again. I find myself sitting in the library staring at the screen at the …
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 …