In this show, we are going to immerse you in the “culture of barber shops” which means you can expect to meet rough guys with motorcycles, full beards, dirty boots and, of course, a beer can in their hands.
First, we will listen to Tomi, perhaps the happiest barber in Australia, who shares his daily life as an employee in Scumbags Barbershop. Rashad, our exchange student from Azerbaijan is our second guest and will tell us his points of view about the barbershop culture. And finally, we will go listen to Tomi again, and this time he will tell us about the Scumbags philosophy.
I’m sitting here in Denmark after having attended the annual IATEFL conference in Liverpool in the UK. There are always people from all over the world at this conference, which is one of the biggest gatherings of teachers of English as a foreign language in the world and this year was no exception.
One really nice surprise for me was to meet up with We’am Hamdan who I had recently worked with virtually. I love working online but it’s always nice to meet people face to face and We’am had travelled a long way from Palestine to be in Liverpool where she was leading a session for the IATEFL Global Issues special interest group. We’am was talking about a really interesting and universal topic so we have decided to devote this whole show to it.
Thanks to Katie Stewart who contacted us about an interesting initiative she had heard of and which means that for the first time on Absolutely Intercultural we’ll be hearing about make-up and how that differs across cultures.
And we’ll also be going to China to find out more about the universal social monitoring that you read so much about.
Happy New Year! In this show, we are going to go back to shows 70 and 74 in 2008 and 2009 when I talked to Signe Møller here in Denmark about a new charity she had just set up.
This show, 234, is ten years later, so why am I re-visiting Signe’s charity 100% to the children? Because I bumped into a stall for her charity at a local Christmas market last November and I was curious to find out how this one-woman organisation was doing.
In this show, which could carry the sub-title “absolutely boquerones” we are going to focus on the culture of Málaga in Spain. And Boquerones is the typical fish grilled over open fire on the beaches of Málaga, but it is also the nickname for the inhabitants of Malaga. First, we will listen to Julian talking about his experience in Malaga, Spain, as he is doing a Semester abroad at our partner University, Universidad de Málaga. Juanjo, an Erasmus Student from Spain, who is currently studying a semester at RheinAhrCampus in Germany, will talk about the differences he noticed in the educational systems of Spain and Germany. And finally, we will listen to Trish, who is originally from Ireland but lived in various different countries and now lives in Málaga, will share with us why she decided to live in Spain.
What is a virtual exchange? Maybe not what you think. We’ll be digging deeper into that in this special edition of Absolutely Intercultural coming to you from Denmark. My name’s Anne Fox and this is show 232. Today’s show is mainly about promoting dialogue between different groups of people. So what is dialogue? And can you tell the difference between dialogue and, for example, debate?
In this show, you will hear about the grocery shop in India and believe me you will be surprised how different it is from European grocery shopping. Hari Gautham Somasundaram Dr. Arvind Sivaramakrishnan and Dr. TJ Kamalanabhan will talk about their own experience grocery shopping in India. In India, you need to go shopping early in the morning to get the best fruits and vegetables from the stalls. Hari, who is a student, tells us that he prefers going to the supermarket rather than the market or buying fruit from trollies in the street. Dr. Arvind, on the other hand, will talk about the challenges of grocery shopping in Indian markets.
Grocery shopping is a regular activity in our every-day culture. However, there seem to be different cultural aspects in our weekly shopping. At first, we will listen to Beate and Kati talking about the two opposite but equally strong movements in Germany: have you banned meat from your diet or do you buy big portions for your weekend BBQ? Javier from Spain reports how grocery shopping has changed through the generations in Spain. And finally, we will listen to Professor Scott Henderson from Canada, who talks about how the diverse cultures in Canada influence the choice of produce in supermarkets and how they differ from European supermarktes.
I have been curious about how you come to work in the intercultural field and have continued my conversations with people who are doing it. One thing I realise now after talking to several people is that there are many ways into an intercultural career.
Here for example is Dawn who was based in Ethiopia and formed Broads Abroad, a support group for expatriate women, based on the conversations that used to happen after the Zumba lessons she started giving.
And Franklin Yartey, a professor of intercultural communication at Dubuque University, Iowa, worked as PR manager of a dance school in his native Ghana before ending up in the US to continue his education.
And once you are doing it, it seems that intercultural work is its own reward as Joe Kearns describes!
So this show is the second in our series on how to get into the Intercultural field. Thanks to everyone who agreed to participate.
Another thing I noticed about today’s contributors is that they all had a connection with Africa, two with Ethiopia and one with Ghana. Listen to find out which is which.
In the show today I decided to contact three people who would describe themselves as intercultural trainers in order to find out more about what that entails and how they came to do this work. Predictably we ended up talking about much more than this so we will start with Lucy Fogarty, an Irish trainer based in London who has developed training that is based on cartoons. Why images I asked her?
Then I talked to Lisa La Valle Finan in the US who had a word of warning for the young.
And finally I talked to Brett Parry, an Aussie based in the US who was able to answer the question, what do you do on a Monday morning and much else besides.
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