Listening is one of the most underrated and undervalued skills. But when it comes to cross-cultural communication, it's absolutely critical. If you are having a moment of misunderstanding or miscommunication with someone else, the only...

Image Source: Damien Kuhn (Unsplash) Australia Day (26 January) always causes a bit of controversy. We love our country, but we've also got some dark, awful moments in our history - and even in the...

Hard to get a good photo in lecture theatre...or at least that's my excuse! I couldn't really fit these into my last blog post, but I wanted to mention them anyways. They are completely random,...

On 17 September I attended a public lecture at Macquarie University by Professor Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission. It was an education - not only from the facts I learnt about...

In this series I want to explore both the positive and the negative sides of voluntourism. Today is a focus on the positive - how voluntourism works to build bridges between cultures. Source: http://www.discprofiles4u.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DiSC-Assessment-Test.jpg For...

The ol' "Us Versus Them" theory is one of the oldest in the book...of Modern History and Politics anyway :-) If you do these subjects at university you are bound to come across this concept...

I'm currently working on a training session that I'll be running in a couple of weeks. I've been asked to specifically talk about appreciating cultural diversity. So I've started compiling a list of what the...

Lately in the news there have been many negative stories about different cultures colliding. For example, the American beauty pageant winner who was accused of not being American enough because of her Indian heritage. Or...

This morning I came across this article:http://www.news.com.au/sport/cricket/cricketer-fawad-ahmed-unfazed-by-shirt-sponsor-furore-says-team-mate/story-fndpt0dy-1226714507326To me, it highlights one of the biggest tensions that comes from a person moving from one culture to another. How much of their original identity do they keep?...