Intercultural Communication and Meta-Consciousness in the New Paradigm
March 26-27, 2025. Milan, Italy. Milton J. Bennett, Ph.D.
The old knowledge paradigms of modernity and post-modernity have run their course. Like all paradigms, they allowed the construction of realities that eventually obsolesced them. Intercultural communication, founded in post-modern relativism, is on the verge of obsolescence unless it can reframe itself in the new quantum constructivist paradigm. This course clearly explicates the new paradigm and shows how interculturalists can use it to guide the development of an intercultural consciousness relevant to current social reality.
The first day of this two-day course will explore the idea of knowledge paradigms in a very practical and accessible way, with a focus on recent developments in the application of quantum thinking to everyday experience (including, of course, intercultural experience). The second day will focus on how a coherent understanding of the new paradigm can be used by interculturalists to reframe intercultural communication as the exercise of meta-consciousness (self-reflexive agency), and it will suggest how that approach can be successfully presented to clients in corporate, academic, and social service contexts.
This course (or an equivalent) is a pre-requisite for the IDRAcademy course Embodied Culture and recommended (but not required) as preparation for the course Perceptual Constructivism and Differentness.
Embodied Culture: Discovering the Feeling of Self and Other in Cultural Context
March 28-29, 2025. Milan, Italy. Prof.ssa Ida Castiglioni, Ph.D.
While the idea of “culture” is an abstraction, the actual experience we have of culture is a very concrete one: it is, in the words of Humberto Maturana “the praxis of living of a coordinated group of people.” Whatever kind of group it is – national, ethnic, professional, etc. – coordination depends on people having a shared experience of everyday life. Like all organisms, human beings experience life via their bodily senses, both literally and, through language, metaphorically. So, to understand the actual experience of culture, we need to tap into that embodiment of our individual and collective sensory experience.
Culture frames experience in a particular way so that we give meaning, attribute value, and feel emotion in resonance with other members of our group(s). As we become more conscious of constructing cultural identity, how aware are we that it is inscribed in our body? By increasing our awareness of cultural embodiment, this course will show how ethnocentrism can be counteracted more effectively and how multicultural identity can be achieved more deliberately. For business applications, it will suggest more productive alternatives to the commonly used teamwork approaches, and for social applications it will suggest more viable alternatives to traditional prejudice reduction efforts. Overall, the course will activate this long journey of discovery that leads to incorporating intercultural consciousness into one’s praxis of living.