Online Intercultural Dialogues – A Participatory Enquiry

Dear Colleagues and Friends

This is an invitation to join us in our fifth Generative Dialogue of our Culture Dialogues Circle

In our previous meeting we have explored our different understanding of Culture itself, follow by our understanding of how our home cultures have moulded some ways in which we grew up and developed a way of looking into our surrounding and the world at large.

In our third meeting, we shared and identified ways and situations we were faced with when interacting with persons of different cultures, some of which made us become clearly aware of how a certain circumstance could be lived in notably differing ways .

Our fourth encounter allowed us to make deeper contact with how much our culture is a central building block of our identity and our ways of appearing in the world in daily life. We also discovered how we may influence, and be influenced by our surroundings in accordance to our acceptance or resistance of culturally ingrained behaviors and attitudes, not only in ourselves but also in our fellow human beings.

In this coming Fifth encounter, we expect to continue exploring culturally influenced identities and how they move us, yet also how the perspectives we hold may take us to disagree in several degrees of depth and strength.

We also hope to get to deeper understand what happens to us with the eventual friction that disagreement might generate and how we are able to handle that friction or not.

Do we manifest ourselves in the ways we would like, or do we rather restrain ourselves for the sake of the expectation of harmony and assumptions that we would turn non dialogical if we expressed disagreement or opposition ?

How much do our ideas of civility, or our relation to political correctness in communication, influence our thoughts, beliefs and attitudes in Dialogue ?

We expect this encounter to become a very rich awareness creating exploration, and warmly invite you to join us on Tuesday May 12th from 4.00 pm to 6.00 pm GMT.

We look forward to seeing you !

Kind Regards

Thomas Köttner and Peter Garrett