Diversity in Germany

I’ve just returned from the SIETAR Forum 2010 in Bonn. SIETAR, as regular readers of this blog will know, is the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research. This year, the focus was on the topic of diversity, which was discussed in a wide range of workshops and presentations over three days.

Keynote speakers included a leading expert on diversity management, Hans Jablonski, whom we interviewed in Business Spotlight back in 2006.

Silke Helfrich provided a fascinating insight into the "commons": creating prosperity through sharing rather than competing. The topic has attracted media attention since the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics to Elinor Ostrom last year. Some recently published research on this approach can be downloaded here.

Perhaps the most memorable speech was by Beatrice Achaleke, the founder of the Black European Women’s Council. She's originally from Cameroon, but has lived in Austria for many years. Her talk was spiced with anecdotes about her private life, like the time she was told at the passport control at Vienna airport that she didn’t look very Austrian. She replied that she couldn’t help it if the Austrian state sells Austrian nationality and that actually it cost her a lot of money. When she asked the audience who was a migrant, I suddenly wondered what that word really meant and whether I was a migrant too.

As is often the case, the most interesting thing for me was the chance to talk to a professionally and nationally diverse group of people and exchange ideas on intercultural issues.