The “olden days” of diversity training started with “the other.” It assumed a majority culture norm, and defined everyone else in contrast to the norm. “This group behaves this way. This group behaves that way.”
 The anthropological approach gives each group ‘hegemony,’ the power to exist in its own right. It recognizes the inherent value that [...]

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Have you ever been in a position at work where you are working your tail off and all you hear is criticism from those around you?  As explained by a sympathetic friend to me once, “it’s like the idea of a moving target.  If everyone else is sitting around doing nothing, you running by gives [...]

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Doesn’t everyone have that one friend who doesn’t dress up for Halloween, but likes to come up with ways to describe his/her costume anyway, as in “I’m dressed as a pedestrian.”
At first I declared I was dressed Brazilian, after deciding not to change my shirt in response to my 8 year old’s announcement that “I did [...]

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I never realized how “American” I was until I had to do business in Brazil a number of year’s ago.  After sitting through a nearly two hour lunch and then retreating for a ‘cafezhinho’ (shot glass sized cup of delicious, syrupy sweet, strong coffee) with still no mention of the business about which we had [...]

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Dillon and I were driving home the other night and I was excitedly telling him about a band called “Sax in the City” of all sax players that would be playing at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival that took place on Saturday.  Dillon had just started taking saxophone lessons last week.  “It’s a group of like 8 [...]

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Obama’s school visit this week is very reminiscent of a program we have in Chicago, called the Black Star Project–the project is all about black male adults serving as role models for black children.  In fact, that’s Secrectary of Education Arne Duncan in the photo above in 2008 in Chicago, participating in the Million Father [...]

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 Here are two resources that go well beyond the two-dimensional, US construct of diversity:  Global Voices–which “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online,” and the book “A Stranger Among Us:  Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection,” edited by Stacy Bierlein (the book I picked up at a recent event at ThinkArt Salon, an [...]

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 I am admittedly a woman of action.  I see something broken, and I want to fix it.  In the annals of ‘how to lists’ advising employees to get noticed, there’s the advice if you see a problem have at least one suggestion solution to present to the boss before you go in and speak to [...]

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In setting up a web-presence for your company via social media, there’s an obvious time money continuum:  Either you’ll spend oodles of time creating profiles, links, etc. at low or no cost to you, or you can save time and pay someone else to do it.  Basically, when one goes up, the other goes down. 
I’ve [...]

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After much whining during our trip to see family in Brazil last week, my eight year old son announced that he was behaving badly because “everyone here is being mean to me.”  Knowing that nothing could be further from the truth, I immediately went from being (annoyed) mother to ethnographer:  This was culture shock…a gut reaction [...]

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