Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1
organized in language-groups (Berberian, Arab, Urdu and Turkish),
each group chose a woman who would take the task of translating to
the others. Also the women gathered and discussed the questions
they would like to discuss at the meeting and decided who should be
the questioner.
Context
Within the frame of Fakhras Women’s Club 2 dialogue meetings are
arranged.
The groups of citizens who will participate are migrant women from
different countries and of different age. Some of them are members
of Fakhras Club, others are women whom we contact through a
personal network of migrant women with Pakistan, Arab, Berberian,
Turkish and Kurdish background. These networks have contacts to
other women from the local areas and they contact these women to
invite them to participate in two meetings, where two politicians will
be invited. The women got informed of the agenda, which includes
social political and immigrant political topics and which also will be a
2
try of methods to support the dialogue across the cultural borders.
Key Outcomes:
Even with 5-6 different languages it was no problem to handle this:
- The quick-translation in the groups functioned well
- The groups showed respect to the chairwoman of the meeting
- The speakers followed our guide: Speak slowly, not too long
sentences, and make pauses.
- The atmosphere at the meetings was in general friendly, which
meant, that several of the women dared – without help from
translator – to take the word and ask questions.
At the first meeting there was an attentive contact between the
participants, which f.i. meant that the politician took position on the
questions or the problems that were presented to her. And vice versa
At the second meeting the contact changed through the meeting,
from being engaged at the beginning to be a bit aggressive.
Aims
Our aim has been to learn the consequences of different cultures, i.e.
languages and how to cope with these when having a dialogue
between migrant citizens and politicians on social political issues.
Problems encountered
At the second meeting the atmosphere changed during the discussion
between the mayor and the citizens. The citizens had questions –
some of them raised with a bit of anger about different social issues,
like:
3
- Why do I have to participate in job training in order to receive
welfare money, when even my young son cannot get a job - and I
am old?
- The municipal stopped to give me welfare money even though I
was ill, why?
- Why did the municipal stop to give our Club money. We did a
good job?
When answering the citizens the mayor used a euphemism –
repeatedly – and this was:
“Look at this glass of water. You can look at it as half empty or as
half full. I suggest you look at it as half full – look at your life this
way, so you don’t look at the problems all the time” – and thereby
he did not take position of the questions and the contact between
him and the women lost quality.
Problem:
We experienced, that our method was not efficient to meet the more
complex problems, as when the participants decline contact and
thereby decline to establish a meeting with each other.
We asked:
How to understand the mayor’s speaking of the glass of water?
How to understand the hint of anger in the tone of some of the
women?
Another answer could be, that the mayor interpretate the women’s
attitude as a matter of culture and not as a matter of a social issue.
4
-There is room for all cultures at the same space and at the same
time.
Progress made
We now have a new experience concerning our method: It has
revealed that the strongest marker of culture, the language, is a
barrier of understanding that we easily can overcome with a simple
method using simple tools and thereby make a frame that can
support the participation of language-minorities.
But we have also experienced another type of cultural barriers: That
of Culturalism.
The weaknesses of our practice were that it did not help us to meet
the more complex problems of Culturalism.