Fundamentals of intercultural communication

“The many factors that divide us are actually much more superficial then those we share. Despite all of the things that differentiate us – race, language, religion, gender, wealth and so on – we are all equal concerning our fundamental humanity”. Dalai Lama

It is more important to concentrate on what unites humanity rather then divides. All of the imagined customs, religion, language, cultures, were all invented by us, humans, to differentiate ourselves from each other, but also to make it easier for ourselves to make sense of our complex world. They are all models, artificial paradigms that direct people through life.

By studying intercultural communication, we can help reduce xenophobia that exists across cultures. We also share inter-nationally and inter-culturally our love for beauty and love.  By using our existing international language of love and beauty (i.e. art, music) it can provide us with a common ground to establish an understanding across cultures. Humans are incredible creatures. They share similar values everywhere, but name them differently.

Xenophobia is defined as “an unreasonable Fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange. It comes from the Greek words ξένος (xenos), meaning “stranger,” “foreigner,” and φόβος (phobos), meaning “fear.”

Comments from Paulo Coelho’s blog:

“Life means adventure, change, things that not everybody has the courage to face and accept. When one sees someone who is unfamiliar, a subconscious fear springs up” (Ruth)

“Xenophobia isn’t just the fear of strangers, it’s being afraid of what happens between different generations. Most people are afraid of today, they prefer to live in the past. My country (Russia) is an excellent example of this”. (Dasha)

“Here in Denmark we have a festival that lasts about a week and attracts 100,000 strangers to celebrate life, share common interests and learn from the differences. People embrace for no reason except being on the same path, they sing and get drunk together. When the festival is over, a strange atmosphere takes over the town again, and strangers are once more seen as a threat”. (Warrior of Running Water)

“People in my country (Poland) lived through the tyranny of Hitler and the Soviet oppression, and they don’t seem to have learned anything. It terrifies me to see people who experienced the horrors of Nazism behaving the same way today, avoiding everything that is unknown or different. The worst of it all is that they use religion to justify their acts, arguing that all those who aren’t Christians should be banished from society. This blind faith is worse than having no faith at all”. (Radek)

The definition of home.

What is home? For some it is a house, for others - people.  For others it is where them and their loved ones are. No mater where in the world, no matter what cultures they are endorsed into. As long as they have their close ones next to them, they are at home.

Home for us is where we feel free, where we feel needed, where we feel the belonging. Home can be anywhere where there is a feeling of warmth and genuinity from people who surround us. We want a place where we can be accepted the way we are and do not have to constantly prove ourselves. We want a place with occasional sad faces, we don’t want to be only surrounded by fake smiles. We want to be able to read into people’s minds, their worries, try to understand them, try to help them.

We want a place where we can have time to care about other people. We also want a decent level of life, we want some certainty in the future where we see a good future for our next generation. We want to be living in communities where there is a sharing of values, where people have a common goal to pursue. Decent life does not cost much, if we construct it in a clever way, it can cost nothing. Money were invented by us people anyway, as a product of exchange. It can be replaced by the sharing of knowledge and capabilities.

We can all feel home wherever we are.

The beauty of silence

Silence of the north teaches you that the eyes can see until there is nothing to see, and the ears can hear even there is nothing to listen to, and we can understand when we cease to understand at all.

One of the major reasons why I love Scandinavia is because of its peace and quite. But cold temperatures do not mean that people are. It is often noted by others outside Scandinavia that Northerners are more difficult to approach. This is not true, it just takes longer to get to know them. They take relationships much more seriously than many other nations an cultures.

Love for quietness is very common for northerners. It means that the tacit communication in the environment with the people or even in absence of the people has meanings and messages. An important point is to never lose your sense of humor – whatever happens we should not stop to laugh at ourselves. 

Question everything. Search for meaning.

We search for the meaning in everything we do. Otherwise what is the point one might ask. Stop. Think. Do we question ourselves why we are having hundreds of friends, do we question why we go out and have fun every so often. What is ‘fun’ anyway. Are they occasional moments of our life when we displace ourselves from our boring everyday existence and get lost in a drunken couple of hours. Why not invest some time and energy in building up on a life that we dont want to escape from. Why do not let our hobbies, our passions become our way of making a living? What if we create a life we love and do not want to escape from. Where we can be in the moment, be happy.

When we find that inner strength, the knowing we have inside of ourselves, life seem much easier, and simpler. What is the point of overanalysing, over thinking anyway? Whatever in meant to be, will happen. All we have to do, is do our best, make ourselves happy by pushing our limitations, not forgetting that they are as subjective as anything else in this world. Humans are incredible creatures; they are capable of at least ten times more of what they think they are. Believe in oneself and everyone else will believe in us.

Of course, it is never that easy. Being an individual is difficult when we are tied to social environments. We have family, our close ones are sometimes in need of our help, they need us to share their unfortunes, ills and downs. Stay creative with own thoughts during these moments, not letting them drown us. Invest our time and energy, showing our compassion, and seeing it as a positive. When helping others, we consequently make ourselves stronger, receive that extra energy, extra push to hold on to our personal believes and our dreams. By helping others and caring about what is going on around us in the world, does not let us concentrate too much on our personal problems, that can only push us to the bottom and will make others around us weaker. For the sake of the loved ones around us, stay strong.

The importance of Art Education

Researching into Art and its importance of giving it a significant placement within our societies.

Personal perspective:

The more we travel the more capabilities we have to absorb and critically overlook our world with its people and surroundings. We grow, we learn, we get wiser, but it does not become easier, rather the opposite, to understand this world, humanity in general. Traveling the world and speaking several languages does not solve any problems and cannot contribute to the magic formula of gaining the control over the world structure. It raises even more questions instead, seeing all the complexities of human soul, you cannot but wonder about its similarities, as well is it predictabilities. You become overly self-critical as you recognize some of flaws in yourself, seeing yourself from many perspective sets you in a difficult position of occasional over analysis, which sometimes is critical to our happiness and careless existence. But as much as you would have wanted to turn the clocks backwards and go back to simplicity and childish view of the world, it is impossible. You want to climb more to fill in all the gaps, to get all your questions answered. The biggest challenge in this case is to start moving in the opposite direction: to learn how to stop, relax, embrace yourself in the moment and meditate. Another solution is to stop caring about your own fulfillment, which is very much propagandised by many western societies, but rather start caring about others, which might save yourself a soul and sanity. Such journey can be difficult and it easy to get lost among endless opportunities and ideas.

Here comes the importance of creativity and art. Vision of the world as something that is based on principles, grids and models is rather abstract and to be honest, rather depressing thought. Any creative act, be it traveling, attending an art exhibition, or having a stimulating and challenging conversation, let us start re-evaluating our personal ambitions, dreams, challenges acquired perspectives, values and principles. Art and ‘creative act’ keep our motivation on the high, without letting us to get bored by accepting our life routines. 

Art also challenges our materialistic values. The importance of family and love is evident and yet many people in the western world tend to forget this simple truth. What one might call ‘simple’ life, is one of the richest in reality. What can be more important that being in the company of people who you know care about you, love you in any way. What can be more valuable then a walk or a chat to a person whose words you know will stay with you and become part of your soul forever. All things material age, people die, but their souls, their love and their creations live on. So isn’t it the most valuable thing in the world? Art helps societies, communities and younger generations to find this spiritual connection through creative exercises. Some might argue that this is an overly simplistic, or maybe overly spiritualistic way of looking at things, that we need economic growth, we need stimuli to keep the humanity grow and develop and this is also very right. I believe that everyone chooses how to balance their lives, which consequently creates a balance on the bigger scale in this world between people of all kinds – sky walkers, dreamers, thinkers, painters, high climbers, money and power grabbers. In the ideal world everyone has this balance within one selves, where we have place for love, care, our children, our work, our passions and hobbies. But it is difficult to achieve in the society where arrogance and money serve as main stimuli. We need to rethink. We need to invest more in non-material things, such as education, art, sustainability and communities.  

Creative Engagements with Visual Culture, Communicative Knowing, Citizenship and

Contemporary Visual Art Education

Kathryn Grushka, University of Newcastle

Article discusses why it is important to develop students’ capacities to engage creatively with learning in environments that provide opportunities for thoughtful participatory understanding about self as a citizen of the world, or as a member of one’s national or local community.

Abstract

New learning in a global society gives attention to the need for learners to engage in constructive, meaningful and transformative processes which have communicative relevance to themselves. It acknowledges the need for cultural sustainability, and the vital role cultural engagement, particularly visual culture plays in development of values and the transferring of belief systems.

Visual art making acknowledges previous learning, personal meaningmaking, the real world and audience while providing authentic learning experiences. It presents as a platform for critical self-reflection and a space to facilitate the ongoing mediation of society, cultural values and citizenship. An examination of visual art curriculum, 5 years of Higher School Certificate art works in NSW and student reflections reveal a rich imagery of how student artists use their art making to affirm their consciousness about the world and self through creative engagement and communicative knowing and is presented as a legitimate site for the negotiation of ones subjectivities and life worlds

Literature Review on Design Research

Book: Fractal market analysis: applying chaos theory to investment and economics. By Edgar E. Peters
p.12

We have not yet defined the term fractual. No precise definition actually exists. Even mathematics, the most concise of all languages, has trouble describing a fractual. It is similar to the question posed bt Deep Thought in The Hirchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Deep Thought is a supercomputer created by a superrace to answer "The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." Deep Thought gives an answer (the answer is '42'), but no one knows how to pose the question so the answer can be understood.

[...] In real life, the self-similarity is 'qualitative'; that is, the object or process is similar at different scales, spatial or temporal, statistically. Each scale resembles the other scales, but is not identical. Individual branches of a tree are qualitatively self-similar to the other branches, but each branch is also unique. this self-similar property makes the fractual scale-invariant: it takes a characteristic scale from which the others derive.

p.17
FRACTUAL MARKET ANALYSIS
The book deals with the issue of conflict between randomness and determination (reworded). On the one hand, there are markets analysts who feel that the market is perfectly deterministic; on the other hand, there is a group who feel that the market is completely random. We will see that there is a possibility that both are right to a limited extent. But what comed out of these partial truths is quite different from the outcome either group experts.

A MESSAGE FOR ALL OF HUMANITY Inspirational speech by Charlie Chaplin

I'm sorry. But I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible - Jew, Gentile, Black Man, White.

We all want to help one another - human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone - the way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate. Has goosed us into misery and bloodshed.

We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.

More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life would be violent and all will be lost.

The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together - the very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world. Millions of despairing men, women and little children; victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

For those who can hear me I say - do not despair - the misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed. The bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictator's die. And the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers - don't give yourselves to brutes! Men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives - tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel. Who drill you, dives you, treat you like cattle, use you as canon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men. Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate. Only the unloved hate. The unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty!

In the seventeenth chapter of St. Lucas it is written, the kingdom of God is within man - not one man, not a group of men, but in all men - in you! You the people have the power - the power to create machines, to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. And in the name of democracy, let us use that power, let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world; a decent world, that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security.

By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill their promise. They never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world. To do away with national barriers. To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason. A world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness. Soldiers in the name of democracy, let us all unite!