The Meaningfulness of Intercultural Encounters across Boundaries
The new RVP Iași Center Project continues our research under The Role of Intercultural Encounters in Relearning to be Human project (2017-2019). This project will bring together scholars with various cultural and spiritual backgrounds, from all over the world, to reflect on the meaningful role played by intercultural encounters in crossing borders and boundaries.
Thus, the MIEB project will facilitate intercultural encounters, invite reflections on this kind of experience and promote research on the phenomenon using the multidisciplinary tools of the humanities.
Rationale:
• The cultural encounter with the other can remain a simple everyday fact or can be full of meaning. When do those intercultural experiences occur which enrich the understanding of oneself and the other? What enables a new opening, a special kind of experience? • The intercultural meeting is the one that establishes and creates, it brings a kind of novelty that was not and could not be anticipated • The cultural encounter can be creative insofar as it establishes something that is beyond one and the other, but also belongs to one and the other, it is the establishment of a new interspace.
Proposed research topics include:
• Conditions for meaningful intercultural encounters
• Reviewing cultural identities in global times/global crises
• Re-presenting cultural and spiritual artifacts
• Old and new borders and boundaries in a globalized world
• Encounters of spiritual practices
• Acquiring and valuing intercultural knowledge
Activities: The MIEB project hosted an excellent Seminar in 2020 and is preparing for the 2021 Conference in October. Other activities will include workshops and online/onsite lectures and meetings.
RVP Iasi Center 