It’s amazing the ability a story has to convey complex concepts, data, and emotions. My highlight from Day 1 were the stories shared by presenters and participants on their intercultural experiences and practice.
In Fiona Citkin’s session, Transformational Diversity at Work: How Intercultural Competencies Can Help Organizations to Survive and Thrive, it was interesting to hear how her identity as a native Ukrainian has presented both challenges and opportunities to her in the diversity and intercultural field. Even as an experienced interculturalist with a Ph.D, she's been discriminated against just because of her accent. To illustrate the challenges practitioners may face, she told a story of how a client, referred to her company by a colleague, specifically requested for someone without a foreign accent to do a training on diversity. Though shocked, she honored their request by sending a native "USian" speaker to do the training. I could particularly relate to this story because I also have a non-US accent.
In Lara Logan’s keynote session, the 60 Minutes video on Staff Sgt. Giunta’s Medal of Honor and the stories she told were powerful media. By using the video to tell a story, it helped me see the mental, physical, and emotional states of US soldiers on the battlefield in a new light. Statistics are important and sometimes necessary, but I doubt I would have been able to understand the severity of the situation as much as I did if she had just spewed out figures of dying and injured soldiers. By putting a name, face, and narrative on her reporting, I was transformed into the realities of the foreign soldiers and locals.
We may sometimes find it hard to wrap our minds around numbers, but we all communicate through the universal medium of stories. Thank you for a great Day 1, IMI. Now I'm eagerly waiting for Day 2!
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