Project 2020-2023: 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.
Project 2017-2019: Re-Learning to Be Human for Global Times: The Role of Intercultural Encounters
This is an interactive project developed by RVP Iasi Center under the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy.
This project will investigate the role played by intercultural encounters in shaping the global world and in possibly redefining what it means to be human for present and future times. It will particularly focus on encounters with foreign people and artifacts and the resulting experience and knowledge.
The project will bring together people from diverse cultural and spiritual environments who are interested in and able to reflect on the role played by intercultural encounters in their own lives, in their source communities and in the world in general.
It will provide its members and participants with the opportunity to meet in a welcoming online and offline environment and discuss freely, starting from their own background and experiences and building on their academic interests in order to produce new knowledge.
Thus the project aims to facilitate intercultural encounters, invite reflection on the experience and promote research on the phenomenon using the multidisciplinary tools of the humanities.
Project activities include debates, workshops, conferences and publications on the following indicative topics:
Reviewing cultural identities in global times
Re-presenting cultural and spiritual artifacts
Old and new borders in a globalized world
A phenomenology of intercultural encounters
Encounters of spiritual practices
Acquiring and valuing intercultural knowledge
Humanism(s) in global times
Academia as a site of intercultural encounters
RVP Iasi Center 