Illustration of ai ki by Alexandra Vansteenland Bodies and minds meet, leaving me weak in the knees, harmonising life. This haiku echoes the many faces of love. My love for aikido taught me about all kinds of love. Interestingly, love in Japanese is ai. It is a homonym, a word that sounds like ai in aikido, 合 as in 合気道, but does not look like it: 愛. | Excerpt from the author’s doctoral dissertation : p. v. |
Considering that many intercultural misunderstandings, whether innocent or not, have their origins in inequality and not just difference (Blommaert, 2005, p. 77), the need to achieve a goal together, even if only for strategic purposes in the military, diplomacy, and business, has often led to results. The results are generally an effort of either cooperation or competition; similar processes take place in everyday micro-level intercultural encounters. When an intercultural interaction leads to an effective — and preferably appropriate — outcome (Deardorff 2006, 256), it is indeed at least because the interlocutors have a goal they want to achieve. Intercultural interaction ‘does not just happen’ (Deardorff 2009, xiii). Kecskes (2018) explained that intercultural communication relies more on emergent common ground, because of the limited availability of core common ground resulting from little or no mutual prior experience. Co-construction, which is the co-creation of emergent common g...