For Romanian speakers BIP is the onomatopoeic representation of a digitally produced call for attention from our smart phones. However, in English it may have numerous other meanings as, for example, Blended Intensive Programme. Which is a programme under the larger ERASMUS+ umbrella. A BIP is made up of “short, intensive programmes that use innovative ways of learning and teaching, including the use of online cooperation”.
The Department of Modern Languages and Business Communication in our university organized such a BIP aiming at improving academic communication with a focus on the latest developments in the digital age and networking. More details on the programme are here.
What I am going to highlight here, however, are the things that are not usually seen, but without which no programme can come into existence and also the interactions that go beyond the usual bureaucratic ticking of activities on an evaluation form.
What I mean is that beyond the institutions and departments involved there is usually an engine, a power force, to drive such programmes into existence, to make them happen in a meaningful way, to draw people together and show them the benefits of participating in such events. This power force is in this case Professor Laura Mureșan to whom we all have to be grateful for her extraordinary energy and commitment to make things come into being in professional and relevant ways to all the participants. Besides our university, the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, the organizer of the BIP, the following universities were partners in this BIP: University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain; University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland; University of Technology and Economics (UTH), Warsaw, Poland and University of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia.
I was happy to be invited by Laura to share my experience of digital communication with the rest of the participants. I accepted and I almost immediately regretted it having seen the range of topics and expertise that the programme rallied during this week. And particularly since my presentation came after that of Professor Carmen Pérez-Llantada who offered us a state-of-the-art review of Digital Genres and Practices in which she gave us an accurate survey of the theoretical issues in the field as well as of the pedagogical implications that they incur.
Well, as it very often happens personal inputs, especially our anxieties and even struggles, are usually appreciated because they show we all have to deal with trial and error, impostor syndrome and almost nothing comes easy in research and in teaching. I therefore ended up being happy for participating in this worthwhile event, seeing my former colleagues and meeting new people. The joy of participation and listening to other researchers’ endeavours is so important to our own development. This is why I always like to learn about what happens in the world around me.
As very often in this type of situations I am amazed at the humility of the really great iconic figures of a field of study, such as applied linguistics, and the discipline and good conference manners that they have. Carmen Pérez-Llantada is such an extraordinary person who generously encourages people (young or not so young) to approach the field and to advance the construction of knowledge in our D VUCA-D times. It is both a great opportunity and a pleasure to listen to her sense making of a world that seems crazy, of the creative ways researchers generate and communicate knowledge, how they build new identities and how they evaluate research and pedagogical outputs. It is also a great learning experience to listen and reflect on the wise questions she raises.
I translated this story into Romanian. You can find it here as published in English by The Market for Ideas. And you will find it under a separate post in Romanian as well.
“According to FR3 television, (and every other news outlet that covered the story), 30,000 people in France are 100 or older — and the number is rising, more quickly than expected. There are thirty times more centenarians than in 1970.
We’re ahead of Spain and Italy (in total numbers), partly because we have one of the largest populations in Europe, but also “because life expectancy among women is particularly high.” Remember Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days?
Having a large number of centenarians is not the same as having a longer average life expectancy. But France has both. What can we learn from the French about living longer? (…)
Walking is easy to do in large cities with good public transportation. Our boulangerie is at the end of the block, easily accessible for early morning runs to get fresh bread. Ditto for everything else we need, including a couple of grocery stores, a dry cleaner, and a hair salon.
I walk everywhere or take public transportation. I drive so infrequently in France that it always makes me a little nervous when I do.
According to the statistics, just slightly more than half of people over the age of 100 live in facilities. In the population of those who don’t, 33 percent live alone, 12 percent live with another person (typically, their children), and four percent live as couples.”
If you want more details read the article. It’s really good and … fun. And it probably also explains why the French don’t want to work for more years.
Articol scris de o americancă mutată în Franța pentru a-și urma chemarea inimii.
“Potrivit televiziunii FR3 (sau al a oricărui alt canal care a transmis știrea), 30.000 de oameni din Franța au 100 de ani sau mai mult. Iar numărul lor crește mai repede decât ne așteptam. Sunt de treizeci de ori mai mulți oameni de vârstă centenară decât în 1970.
Suntem înaintea Spaniei și Italiei (ca cifră absolută), parțial pentru că avem una dintre cele mai mari populații din Europa, dar și „pentru că speranța de viață în rândul femeilor este deosebit de mare”. Vă amintiți de Jeanne Louise Calment, care a murit în 1997 la vârsta de 122 de ani și 164 de zile? (…)
Un număr mare de persoane centenare nu este același lucru cu o speranță medie de viață mai mare. Dar Franța le are pe amândouă. Ce putem învăța de la francezi despre cum să trăim mai mult? …
Mersul pe jos este ușor în orașele mari cu transport public bun. Brutăria noastră se află la capătul blocului, ușor accesibilă pentru alergările de dimineață devreme pentru a cumpăra pâine proaspătă. La fel și pentru tot ceea ce avem nevoie, inclusiv câteva magazine alimentare, o curățătorie chimică și un salon de coafură.
Merg pe jos peste tot sau folosesc transportul în comun. Conduc atât de rar în Franța încât întotdeauna sunt puțin nervoasă când o fac.
Potrivit statisticilor, doar puțin mai mult de jumătate dintre persoanele cu vârsta peste 100 de ani locuiesc în cămine pentru vârstnici. Dintre cei care trăiesc neinstituționalizat, 33% trăiesc singuri, 12% trăiesc cu o altă persoană (de obicei, copiii lor) și 4% trăiesc în cuplu.”
Daca vrei mai multe detalii, citeste articolul. Este foarte bun și… distractiv. Și probabil explică de ce francezii nu vor să lucreze mai mulți ani.
What research areas some cultures have: the influence of humor and/or smiling on organizational efficiency! Over here (in Bucharest, Romania) we think that too much smiling shows hypocrisy, lip-service, you name it. And humor? That also depends. Why? On what? Long story.
This piece of research done by two Stanford academics involved over 1.4 million people, in 166 countries. The question was easy: “Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?” The answers? At age 16, 18, or 20, people generally said “yes”. At 23, the answer changed to “no”—and people don’t start laughing again until they retire.
OMG!!! The research question became: how would the work world change for the better if people smiled more?
Some answers:
leaders with a sense of humor—good, amazing or just plain—are 27 % more motivating and inspiring.
the employees of the above leaders are 15 % more engaged and their teams are twice as creative as measured by having them solve a creativity challenge.
one of their studies showed that a simple, light hearted line to the end of a sales pitch can get you an 18 % higher price point.
Simple, isn’t it?!! Actually, it’s much more complicated. Culture, culture, culture. They even wrote a book about it.
Ce domenii de cercetare există în unele culturi: influența umorului și/sau zâmbetului asupra eficienței organizaționale! Aici (în București, România) credem că prea mult zâmbet demonstrează ipocrizie, vorbe și nu fapte, orice altceva în sensul ăsta. Și umorul? Depinde. De ce? De cine? Poveste lungă.
Această cercetare realizată de două doamne, cadre didactice de la Universitatea Stanford, s-a realizat pe 1,4 milioane de oameni din 166 de țări. Întrebarea a fost ușoară: „Ai zâmbit sau ai râs mult ieri?” Raspunsurile? La 16, 18 sau 20 de ani, oamenii au spus în general „da”. La 23 de ani, răspunsul s-a schimbat în „nu” – iar oamenii nu încep să râdă din nou până când se pensionează.
NU POT SĂ CRED!!! Întrebarea pentru cercetare s-a transformat în: cum s-ar schimba lumea muncii în mai bine dacă oamenii ar zâmbi mai mult?
Câteva răspunsuri:
• liderii cu simțul umorului — bun, uimitor sau simplu — au o capacitate cu 27 % mai mare de a fi motivanți și inspiratori față de cei fără această trăsătură.
• angajații liderilor de mai sus sunt cu 15 % mai implicați, iar echipele lor sunt de două ori mai creative când rezolvă o problemă presupunând creativitate.
• unul dintre studiile celor două cercetătoare a arătat că o poantă simplă folosită la sfârșitul unui mesaj de vânzare sau al unei reclama poate aduce un preț cu 18 % mai mare.
Simplu, nu-i așa?!! Nu chiar. De fapt, este mult mai complicat. Cultura locală este foarte importantă. De asta au și scris o carte despre asta.
This is based on the article The Other Monuments Men by Matthew Wills. Euro-centrism, in other words a tendency to interpret the world through the eyes of European or Anglo-American values and, therefore, prizing those more than the rest, has been long around for various reasons. It is still clearly very much so today – if we only look around us. Hollywood is doing its share for leveling (and sanitizing) our views.
Asia has its own problems, but they do not count, do they? Not even in culture and arts.
As the article shows “The American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas was the civilian component of the Monuments Men operation.” How did it work? Twenty-three experts handled European country reports; only three experts handled Asia. And of those, Langdon Warner, responsible for China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand, made some “professionally and ethically questionable actions”. Says who? An American academic from George Washington University. True she’s of Korean descendants.
In the image above you can see the nine royal seals of the Korean Empire and Joseon Dynasty which had been repatriated to Seoul, South Korea, by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) in 2014 on the occasion of President Obama’s visit.
Cristine Kim, with a PhD from Harvard and an interest in Asian Studies and research focusing on national identity, material culture, and political movements, evaluates the US ‘Monuments Men’ operations in Korea. Kim underlines some sad truths: imperialist attitudes, perceptions of Korean culture as backward compared to the Japanese one, for example, political sensibilities of the time including the US interest in maintaining the national interests of its newest ally – all this contributed mainly to the preservation of Japan’s cultural patrimony and the development of modern society.
Sounds familiar? It should, history never repeats itself mechanically. But those who know it may have a déjà vu of the future. For more and amazing details, not that we couldn’t imagine them, read the article.
As I was saying – the decision to go to Iran was unexpected even for myself. I like to I travel, but since the pandemic has slowed down our travelling impulses, I try to remind myself how today we can travel virtually very well with the help of the internet. And even though I don’t have the technology that allows me to immerse myself in a certain virtual reality, I can still travel comfortably almost anywhere in the world without leaving my favourite place at home where I feel relaxed and comfy. Actually, there are places difficult to reach except virtually. I don’t necessarily mean the bottom of the oceans or the heights of the Himalayas or the outer space. There are places, which for different reasons, are not accessible to us. Opportunity, excessive costs, we’re not all in the same league with Elon Musk, can be some disincentives.
But, lo and behold, the stars aligned and the algorithm tracking me sent me the unrefusable offer and … the decision was made. I’m going to Iran. Why? Probably because, since over one decade ago, I have been looking to the world that exists beyond Europe, whether Central, Eastern or Western, and I wonder how we came to the point of looking at this huge and so diverse world only through our cultural glasses which are so narrow and distorting?! Did I say cultural? Is ideology part of culture? Or is it vice versa? It is a simple question, and yet the answers are multiple and not easy to give. At least not here, in this column where I want to get, I hope, to tell you about 1001 nights of fairy tales chosen and told by a woman to a powerful ruler whose life and death decision she thus influenced. Hey, what am I doing here? Have I put on the glasses of a very fashionable ideology now? Whether we call it feminism or gender studies or gender balance or intersectional feminism doesn’t really matter. We all know the reality I am referring to.
Let me return to fairy tales. Everybody knows that “1001 nights” is a collection of Arabian stories! Why then bring it up in an account of Iran or Persia? Of course, we live in an area of the world where Bucharest is often confused with Budapest, and of course that irritates us in various degrees; and we usually think of the Middle East, with one truly exceptional exception, as inhabited by Arabs. And that leaves us more or less indifferent. Who cares anyway? Maybe most of us don’t, but what about those who live there?
I remember my Persian students who, very politely, were trying to tell us that they are not Arabs. Yeah, but you speak a Semitic language and you write with characters that look very much like the Arab ones. “Not at all”, they would answer patiently. “We speak an Indo-European language, quite different from Arabic. True in Iran we use the Arabic cursive script which is particularly ornamental. And just as true is that we highly appreciate the art of calligraphy.”
True indeed. I was impressed by the patience and discipline with which they work or should I rather say they painstakingly create works of great delicacy and fineness – words I no longer hear nowadays except probably in book titles such as “The Painstaking Chronophage/ Migălosul cronofag” by Adrian Săhlean [1] the excellent translator of Eminescu into a fresh and intelligible English. The Persians took the art of calligraphy to an extraordinary refinement and their constant respect for and inclination towards literature, especially towards poetry preserved Persian making it intelligible even today.
The truth is that things are never simple: either to explain or to grasp. As a teacher I have known this for a very long time. And I also know how frustrating it is for everyone involved in the learning process to discover that there aren’t always simple, clear and universally applicable rules. “But I want to know the rule” many learners would say, especially those who come from the exact sciences. The rule and possibly some exceptions. But what do we do when there is a rule and multiple exceptions, as in learning English and not only. Let me, however, come back to “1001 nights” one of the charming books of our childhood. I am particularly thinking of the 1001 nights: Arabic fairy tales retold by Eusebiu Camilar, which came out at Tineretului Publishing House in 1956.
Today the stories of 1001 nights are no longer told by Scheherazade, but by Hollywood and Walt Disney, or even by various local film industries that have the power, and the budgets, to look at the stories of Scheherazade and Shahriar from multiple angles, and many of those who watch them most likely don’t even know that those stories started to be told probably in the 8th century and travelled over huge territories, from India through the Middle East to Turkey.
As in other similar situations, there are many voices that claim their primacy over the collection of fairy tales. Ulrich Marzolph, Professor and specialist in Islamic studies and Persian narrative tradition at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, believes that the general public thinks of the book as a collection of Persian, Arabic and Indian folk tales collected and transcribed into Arabic about a thousand years ago [2]. Despite this popular perception, Marzolph believes, based on documents, that the stories were first written in middle Persian known as Pahlavi. Their transcription took place between the 8th and 13th centuries and only later were they translated into Arabic.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica [3] says about the same thing, underlining the diversity of the contributions to the widely read collection of fairy tales. The person who wrote the article from The Encyclopaedia Britannica considers that although the names of the main characters are Iranian, the frame of the story seems to be Indian and most of the other names are Arabic. And, of course, the style of stories and other elements of internal analysis of the text lead to the same conclusions: multiple, uncertain authorship.
Britannica also tells us that the first known reference to the tales is a fragment from the 9th century. Incidentally, Britannica also agrees that the Persians were the first to mention the legendary collections of stories from Iran, India and Greece called in those times “One thousand nights”. In 987 Abū ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAbdūs al-Jahshiyārī began to write down a collection of 1,000 Arabic, Iranian, Greek and other folktales, but died leaving only 480 written.
And this is how we realize that “A thousand and one…”, with its various titles, is only a way to indicate a large number. This was an age with no obsessions related to the accuracy of numbers. Subsequently, after the West began to translate the fairy tales into French and later into English, the number was interpreted literally. And more stories and fairy tales were added.
But who cares about these details today? From the wonderful collection, most of those formed in the Western culture (is this use of terms about to become an oxymoron?) remember, at best, the stories about Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sindbad who did not even exist in the original corpus. Is that really how things are today?
To check whether young people know about the 1001 stories and taking advantage of a written exam that I had with my students from Applied Modern Languages in the ASE I made a small experiment. I asked the students to write at the end of their papers what they knew about Scheherazade.
‘Who?’
‘Do you want me to write it down?”
‘Yes, please. Yes.’
I did as asked.
‘And if we don’t know anything?’
‘If you really don’t know anything, write: Scheherazade – I don’t know.’
I was really looking forward to the end of the exam to see the results. All I could do on the spot was to verify whether they answered the question or not. The vast majority had. The outcome?
Out of the 43 students present in the exam room, twenty answered they “didn’t know/heard/or even ???”. Twelve gave me various correct options. And I also had a separate category, eleven answers, with some very interesting explanations. I considered these 11 responses as positive, although you will notice below that some prove otherwise, but they have the merit of being extremely hilarious. Therefore, out of 43 respondents, 20 did not know who Scheherazade was, and 23 did give some sort of correct answers from which we can conclude that they probably know.
So what? For me this situation clearly represents the loss of a cultural reference system that deepens the gap of lack of communication not necessarily between generations, but between those who “know” and those who “don’t know”. I forgot to mention that my students did not have access to the Internet, which partially explains the results. Over the years I have sadly discovered that many young people no longer know proverbs or other classical cultural references. Of course, there are those who respond after discreetly consulting their friend Google. But when you don’t have access to a friend?
And here are the “special” answers that I can’t resist sharing with you: Scheherazade is a poem; a wise woman – a doctor; a story – a revolt; a sonorous name, but I don’t remember the context; a Persian sultana/queen; a character/a female character; cinema. And most remarkable for its ingenuity and comic: Scheherazade is an organizational model stylized inorganizations for their better performance. It is probably relevant to mention that the end of semester test during which this mini-quiz took place is called “People and organizations”.
The most elaborate answer was from one of the students with a clear and declared interest in literature in general and poetry in particular. “Scheherazade is a name that seems to represent the quintessence of Orientalism. Being a made (not born) ‘Eurocentrist’, I can almost hear Edward Said criticizing and dismantling my claim. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the name of a soap opera watched by my grandmothers. I know however, in the spirit of René Guénon, that the true essence of Orientalism is another one.”
The results of the ad hoc quiz given to my students can be interpreted in many ways, but I’m not interested in those interpretations here. Especially when some of those who answered “don’t know” are people with advanced soft and professional skills they consider to be their priority at the moment.
I’m thinking however about the importance the Eastern world, and yes, we are right at its gates not having the guts or the will to enter, grants to history, culture, literature and especially poetry as pillars of classical culture. Over here, we are satisfied with adopting culture as a social and mainly organizational binder; culture theorized by Hall, Hofstede et co. often not knowing even them or their works.
I was wondering upon reading an article in The Economist [4] about what happens when algorithms become so advanced that they cannot be distinguished from human writers? The answers are very exciting, but about them next time.
I had this incredibly rich experience of teaching at the summer school of the Ostrava University. I taught the module of Creativity from the overall theme „Entrepreneurship and Creativity for All”.
I was a tiny bit apprehensive about how the course will go. I always am at the beginning of a new course. Not only because a group of international students is more difficult to work with than the students of your own university whose general group profile you probably know, even if you don’t know them personally. I was also worried about what to chose, how much to select from the increasing heap of materials and research about creativity in today’s troubled world. And, mainly, what kind of practical activities in which they will easily engage and find meaningful?
Those enrolled were people mostly from arts study programs, rather different from my regular business students. I knew that well in advance because the organizers had been very professional: kept me updated on all issues, sent me the brochure with „Who’s who in the summer school” with pictures and a brief self-presentation of the students. True, not all who have signed up really showed up! But this was actually an asset: we were a group of 14 people who worked better and easier together.
The students were from all over the world and could participate in the summer school thanks to the Erasmus+ programme. Some of them where from Czechia; and also from China, Russia, Koreea, Indonesia and Taiwan. And me, from Romania. Quite an interesting mix of cultures.
The building where we had our classes.
I could write a book about all the things we did and discussed about. Maybe in the future. Now I’d like only to look at the students and how incredibly open, dynamic and ready to learn they were. Yeah, I know, I know – they were sometimes late (overslept or other absolutely valid reasons), sometimes drawn into their own worlds. All in all, however, they were aware of the need for mindfulness and ready to share their own concerns and preoccupations with the group.
So, I’ll share in this post the beginning and the end of the course. I’ll do it using pictures and the student’s own words. There will, obviously, be no names. No connections between the pictures and the words. And to put your concerns at ease I have their consent to put pictures on Facebook, which means I can publish them here as well.
At the end of a long day of presenting projects
At the beginning of the course we did some warming up activities to get to know each other and to test our own creative vein. What can you do with and from a cabbage? And what have we learnt about one another? The participants had to give their feedback the next day in the form they found easier for them. Here are some: a poem, some ppts, a poster, word reports.
Feedback to first day together
And here are some pictures with people actually delivering their feedback.
I was really, really impressed by the final presentations. The thinking and the actual work that has been put into them under such brief time. And mainly the discussions that each presentation raised, irrespective of the medium in which it was created. As if it were a real life project, advice was given, concerns raised, solutions sought. I hated myself every time I had to stop people. Time has no mercy.
We also had some incredible outings. So much fun, getting to know each other from other perspectives as well. We had a pub quiz (and yes the winners got the prizes, but we were all enriched by the evening), we went to visit one of the most creative heritage sites that I have ever seen – Dolni oblast Vitkovice. And we unleashed our creativity at the Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava at a great workshop where children didn’t mind mixing with us.
Five days? Really? It seems as if we traveled among various universes. As one of the students said – as in 500 years.
Maybe I’ll have to write a book in the end. Not to lose the richness of the experience we had. Tell others, and myself, how important it is to go out into the world and meet new people, particularly from other cultures, hopefully people against whom you maybe prejudiced and they show you that you have to move on in your assumptions because the world has moved on. And we are all now so different.
Great ideas come and go easily. That’s why we have the impression that we are so creative. But we are not. In fact we are only imaginative, dreamers at best. Only few people have the strength, the discipline and, yes, the education to follow their ideas and turn them into reality. Natalia Irina Roman is one of those people and on her way to strike gold. Or, if not, at least to complete her Ph.D. in an impressive manner.
A great idea presented in 90 seconds under the classic format of the elevator pitch. A wonderful presenter, great idea, amazing content, so connected to our everyday life and commuter worries. As we are most of us commuters – one way or the other. Natalia is a gifted presenter, but she is also very much aware of the need to prepare. Which makes her a hard worker.
Who is Natalia Irina Roman? She is a space-maker and a visual artist, a woman of great imagination and the strength to apply her ideas. More about her here.
And you can find her idea of a great and useful project here. Presented in 90 seconds at the Bauhaus University Weimar.
I told Natalia that her project reminded me of another one called Poems on the Underground. But while talking more with her I realised that they are so different both in scope and in the space they use. And yet, they are both challenging for the comfort of today’s people. Keeping our eyes glued to a screen makes us miss the serendipitous encounters that we can only find through our own experiences and on our own journeys.
It has always been my strong belief that the world is much more than Europe or any other part in our close proximity wherever we may happen to be living. Being in education, I have always tried to live, as much as possible, by the beliefs I have. In other words, do what I say. Not at all easy, particularly in this age of fake news, post truth, etc. etc. And yet, since what we call internationalization/globalization should refer to the world, and not only to certain selected parts of it, I started to look at what is beyond my immediate proximity.
Let me, please, give you some idea what I’m going to say in the next few minutes: I will talk about the importance of languages and culture in international understanding or rather misunderstanding, I will tell you, from my own experience what type of knowledge the general public has about Asia. I’ll tell you about my personal perceptions about Asia accompanied by many questions to which I do not have answers except the need for more and better education.
So, since this event is also under the auspices of the 120th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Romania and Iran I would like to mention that two months ago I made a three weeks trip to Iran. What is so special about it? First, Iran is not a preferred tourist destination for Romanians, let alone Romanian women. We were a group of 6 women led by our tour guide, the 7th woman. Second, there are so many stereotypes and simply distorted facts about Iran not only in Romania, but pretty much around the Western world.
We started from Tehran, flew down to the island of Qeshm, came back by ferry to the continent and were driven by our local guide and driver, Muhamad, through the Kalut Desert, spent a memorable night at the Maymand Guesthouse, which means caves, we were more than impressed by the traditional city of Yazd, amazed by Shiraz, Persepolis and Necropolis, had an incredibly amazing time in the Zagros Mountains where we spent a night with the local people, the Bakhtiaris, and then through Esfahan and Kashan back to Tehran and home. And since I cannot explain briefly the great cultural impact Iran/Persia had on myself and my fellow travellers, I have decided to write a series of articles that are being published in Romanian and will, hopefully, be a book in Romanian and in English by the end of this year.
Iran is not the first or only exotic destination to which I travelled and have written about.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have totally changed the way we look at the world and interact with it. Let me please point out some discrepancies between what we want/are told to believe about European and US exceptionalism and the rest of the world:
Demographically, more than 50% of the world’s population lives now in Asia.
From among the world’s 30 megacities, 21 are at present in Asia and even there, according to UN data, shifts are happening fast, so by 2030 Delhi will overtake Tokyo as the world’s largest city.
In terms of economic data – well it all depends on what we read and who does the statistics. Even so, and even after the Ukraine conflict affects the global GDP a report of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs shows that almost all regions in the world are affected by high inflation except for East Asia and South Asia. In other words, the Asians, rich, crazy rich, not so rich or even those downright poor, continue to have an impressive effect on the world trade, especially through their purchasing power. And the references to economic sanctions today have been clear.
Issues of identity and culture are common in today’s world, Asian and non-Asian. We know they are important, we academics study the issues and … with all due respect, politicians do whatever they think they need to do. Will things really change in the coming world? What will the new normal look like? Is Asia a sustainable hub of the megatrends that are already changing our world/s? And if so, which part of Asia? Japan, China and India have long been in the forefront of large and fast-growing economies. Vietnam, the Philippines and Bangladesh have left behind some European economies (the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland). Is Europe playing its cards right or is it left behind or even worse suffer consequences? Is technology going to be a dream come true for most people or just another nightmare? Will we be able to work in mixed teams with robots and AI? Based on whose culture? And who will lead? And … who are we?
In what language do we speak about Asia, or about the Middle East for that matter? Obviously in English. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. But we miss a lot of the culture and deep meanings that speaking a language reveals.
Fuzzy geographies, fluid terminology and a general lack of education are the common enemies against solving conflicts. People operate more and more with cliches and stereotypes because it is easier and more comfortable. But is it good? And for whom?
What can be done? Education, education, more education.
Encourage students to think critically and creatively, expressing themselves, not only reproducing and echoing our own thoughts and ideas
Stress importance of life-long learning, not degrees grabbing
Encourage students (ourselves and our colleagues as well) to read books, not only articles
Encourage and reward patience, hard work and discipline
Role model more humility than arrogance
Politeness, courtesy, etiquette and netiquette, civility
Introduce diversity in our classes through case studies, business models that are not only mainstream or coming from the Anglo-Saxon traditions, but also from Asia and other parts of the world
How do we look at women? And what do we see? In paintings or even in real life? Or do we really see them? Our invisibility is still incredibly strong in spite of some progress made in certain parts of the world.
These are some of the questions that Mary Bevan’s book raises and the answers are often challenging and therefore thought-provoking. Our answers obviously depend on the historical context, on the fate of the painters and, yes, on the eyes of the beholder. Remember?! Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
Mary Bevan tells us the stories of women in some of the paintings she chose – for various reasons. The book she wrote is “Escaping the Frame. Women in Famous Pictures tell their Stories”. It was published in 2021.
It is a small, beautifully crafted book to carry with you around, maybe when you walk in a park and sit down for a rest, maybe in your own house to read in its various corners. For me it’s a book to come back to. It’s not a thriller you cannot put down. It’s a book that makes you reflect, that engages you, that makes you want to come back to it, to draw up the paintings on Google, to decide whether Mary Bevan’s interpretation is in agreement with what you yourself think or not.
I love the cover: a pink background, what else when you choose women for your reflections, with an ornate gilded frame which shows us a black void from which the title emerges trying to escape the frame indeed and reach out to us. On the front cover, the frame encloses the blackness of women’s still little-known history and on the back cover the same frame shows us the rationale behind the book.
The text is minimalist though it sends the reader on her or his own journey of rich discoveries and helps us escape the frames of our own prejudices. The book is written under the form of monologues of the women painted by famous male painters or by women artists who have been disadvantaged in the world of men. Mary Bevan wants to give them the voice they have been denied as objectified characters in a men’s world. And she does so with great empathy and cultural sensitivity as well as with a skilful selection of the women trying to break out of the frame of silence and their painters’ gaze across six centuries. Only two of the twenty-two monologues of the book are spoken by men. Both men are either imaginary or unknown which is in some way ironical and in another some sort of late justice for the many women muted by society.
Women’s invisibility in Sylvia Pankhurst’s watercolour and in Martha Rosler’s pop art collage.
Sylvia Pankhurst, Hanna Pauli, Martha Rosler and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale are the women artists that Mary Bevan has chosen to stand out and show us women painted by women.
It’s through true literary craftsmanship that such a miniature book offers such a wealth of information and discussion points. Its multiple layers send the readers to explore not only the actual paintings, but also the whole world of commentaries, lectures and videos that are connected to them.
Mary Bevan’s book is a book to keep and a book to give – as a gift.
