For full disclosure, I’m a marketing/communications professional who specializes in coaching, workshops and marketing strategies for communicating across lines of difference. So on one hand, I hope that you like my insights, and might want to hire me as an organizational change consultant to integrate diversity into your business culture, or to review or create a multicultural marketing campaign, or even as a writing coach.
But for anyone who knows me, it’s always about meaning and purpose, and particularly about deep analysis to connect the dots to find meaning. (Ubu Roi was making fun of ME!) As a child it was about wondering why some kids were popular, others not. In college it was arts and literature-trying to see how artists, writers and composers were manipulating their means–colors, words or sounds–in similar ways, to understand what was happening in the society at the time. Now it’s bridging the internal and the external, the conscious and the unconscious-what do we consciously learn and what do we absorb from the constant barrage of images from media, television, billboards, the internet. It is anthropology, understanding cultures from their own point of empowerment and expression, and marketing-the 10 second test by which we absorb words and images to define and label everything around us.
What you will find here is:
Advertising/Media Analysis
Entries look at popular ads, movies or images from media that consciously or unconsciously perpetuate stereotypes of groups of people, and exploring how popular media can influence unconscious biases, and ways to avoid offending in multicultural marketing.
Intercultural Communications for Business
Business insights into communicating across lines of difference and ideas for diversity as a catalyst for organizational change, and things that individuals can suggest or introduce into the workplace. (There’s always an adaptation for personal–the phrase “it’s not personal, it’s business” never made sense to me. Of course it’s personal, it’s your life!)
Intercultural Parenting/Family
How can we raise the next generation to be more bias-free? Ideas for intercultural outings, tough conversations about race in language for kids, and seeing racial and cultural identity through the eyes of a child, and reflections from a 20+ year intercultural marriage.
The dots I’m hoping to connect? Barack Obama as President and the 70% high school dropout rate for students of color; diversity training by law and an actual change in economic disparities and access to resources among diverse groups; intercultural communications as a business strategy, and a synthesis of diversity and inclusion as a way of being.
And, of course, I’m yearning for meaning. A hope that in finding the intersection of professional and personal, of conscious and subconscious, of equal and human rights and continuing segregation and access to resources, that there’s a way to tie it back to social evolution, less prejudice, and a more just, creative and prosperous world for all.
