ICPTR

In an overcommunicated society, a borderless communication world, where physical borders have become obsolete in parts of Europe, but where perceptual borders have hardened, the quest for ways to soften cross-cultural unrest has become important and timely. Stereoptypes perpetuate misunderstanding and misconceptions, causing behavioral deseases that feed on prejudice, racism, and xenophobia. Terrorism, growing immigration, and home grown terror -and the why and how of all these and the rest-  have changed people’s behavior towards the others. If stereotypes represent only a minority of negative events and behaviors, what can make the majority “others” get rid of those unrelated yet prevalent steroptypes that are associated to them? Investigating prevalent sterotypes may lead to a sterotype diet. In this case a diet is the process of getting rid of what is useless or harmful, while keeping, augmenting, and even adopting what is useful and representative.

Please check back with us. If you have suggestions or recommendations to help us with understanding issues related to immigration and stereotypes, you may use the “community” thread to communicate with us.

Role of tour guides in promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians is a research project supported by Stenden University. Its goal is to investigate the existing differences and similarities in the interpretive discourse of Israeli and Palestinian tour guides, with the hope of bridging historical, cultural, and geopolitical gaps, hoping to advance pragmatic and progressive recommendations that may contribute to a peaceful coexistance between the two peoples. It is hypothesised that tour guides have different interpretive discourses, thereby distorting the peace ideal of coexistence through their myopic interpretations of cultural and historical tourism sites in the region.

Please check back with us for the results. You may also communicate with us via the “community thread”. Comments and suggestions that can help us understand the complexity of the phenomenon of tour guiding in the region are most welcome.

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It is all about happiness. Although happiness is relative, still, there are those who say that they are happy, and there are those who say they are not. But who are those who are neither happy nor sad? Whenever I think about J.S. Mill’s quote “ask whether I am happy and I cease to be”, I find myself in a state of mind where I am neither happy nor sad. How can I be happy when I know that there are millions of children suffering from curable diseases, who die of starvation, who are trained to use arms, who don’t have the opportunity to go to school, who are stripped of their childhood, who think more about what they are going to eat today than play, who are paying for crimes they have not committed, who would rather die today than think about tomorrow, for today’s miseries never end?

Then how can I be happy? I am happy because my children are fortunate to have the life of a decent human being; but I am sad when I think about the other children of the world. Then, I am Sappy. I know that there are millions of people out there who are sappy, too, and I am happy that they too think about the children of humanity, and that they want for those children what they want for their own children. It is thus through sappiness that we can realise greater happiness. As long as there is injustice to the children of the world, I am sad and so are my children, for I remind them about those children who are children no more, hoping that each one of them will grow up into a good person, eager to help make the less forunate of us happy, too.