Dublin, Sep 2008

Hi everybody!

I came back from Dublin two days ago.

Wonderful capital, great people, good pubs, live Irish music every night, pints of Guinness.......but unortunarely a rainy weather. I cannot have everything, I suppose!

I spent a week in Dublin to make research for my thesis. I consulted many books of the Berkeley library inside the Trinity college. It was amazing! The atmosphere of the college is completely different compared to Italian Universities.

After three days, all spent in doing photocopies, I visited the town: Temple Bar, the Castle, the National Museum, the National Library, Christ Church, St. Patrick Cathedral, St. Stephen Green, Oscar Wilde's house, the Guinness storehouse. I also visited a little seaside village and fortunately there there were few tourists. I enjoyed a little bit the real heart of Irland. There were only me and the seals swimming near the lighthouse.

Great experience!

Intercultural competence ICC

Now it's time to reflect upon this exciting intercultural experience we have had in the past two months: in other words our skype exchange.

Assessing myself is not an easy task. It needs a lot of awareness and objectivity. However, I feel that I gained some new competences. During this period I felt myself like a sponge, but this experience was not merely an exchange of information, it was more like a dive into a new culture. I improved my writing and reading skills, thanks to our wiki page project, and my listening too. Sometimes our American peer spoke fast and so it was a good training for us.

What I appreciated most of our exchange is the fact that it aroused my curiosity about various aspects of the other culture: music, movies, politics, immigration, university life, etc. I learnt how to be more well disposed towards other cultures. I realized that my opinions are influenced by my culture and that people of other cultures may have different opinions. I'm able to accept these differences and I'm always curious to know different points of view. For example I feel not offended if what the majority of foreigners know about Italy is mafia. I know this is merely a stereotype. I had many stereotypes about Americans too and during the exchange I tried to understand if they are true. For example one of the first things I asked to my American peer was: 'Is your life in the university campus as we see it on tv and movies?'. Of course not. So, I think I became more conscious of my own perspective and I think that my position is a good one because I can help people, who don't have the same awerness, to approach and understand other cultures.

I also developed my ability of changing perspective. I mean, during the course I started to look at my culture from American perspective. I realized that after we discussed about politics (Italian and American) I started to see Italian politics from a different point of view. I think American and foreigners are more objective about our politics than we are. If we read some foreigners newspapers the world seems to go in the opposite direction compared to Italian politics.

I also learnt how to discover new information and new aspects of the other culture for myself. First of all I use Web 2.0 tools like del.icio.us and then I try to compare my information with my foreigner peer to have a more informal exchange of opinions.

The most interesting thing about the wiki project was that we had the possibility to choose as a group a topic and to develop it exchanging opinions, ideas, sources, etc. This aspect of working in groups was fantastic, it makes me appreciate more and more our course.

To give you an idea of my self assessment have a look to this link.

I want to tank you all my peers (American and Italian) and our teacher because I had the opportunity to make this unforgettable experience.

I want to conclude my post with a quotation taken from our wiki page:
'In short someone with some degree of intercultural competence is someone who is able to see relationships between different cultures - both internal and external to a society - and is able to mediate, that is interpret each in terms of the other, either for themselves or for other people. It is also someone who has a critical or analytical understanding of (parts of) their own and other cultures - someone who is conscious of their own perspective, of the way in which their thinking is culturally determined, rather than believing that their understanding and perspective is natural'.

Skype 5 Final Project

Second step of our final project:
Choose the topic for your final project together with your American peer and your Italian peers.

It seemed to me a quite simple task but it turned out to be a very difficult decision to come to. The group are changed and now I’m with Alberto, Alice, Martina and Kelsey. You couldn’t imagine how difficult it was to choose a topic on which everybody agree. We started with Alberto’s proposal to develop the idea of ‘American dream’. Fantastic, exciting! Everybody agree…wow! No, not everybody. Our teacher was very doubtful about this topic because it has little to do with Italian culture. After half an hour of talk we had to start again our discussion in order to find a new topic, but this time things were more difficult. We discussed about immigration, music, health care but none of these topics was really appealing. In the end we chose to compare American college university life with Italian college life. I noticed that there is at least another group that will develop our topic but I think we will compare different aspects of American and Italian college life. We decided to focus on funny aspects like papiri, feste di laurea, goliardia etc.
This Skype session was really packed, but it worked as well. So, we decided to continue to talk in five each week. Probably next time we have to give Kelsey more chances to speak in Italian. I think she felt a bit overwhelmed by Italian people talking in English and she didn’t practice Italian to much this time. We decided to use del.icio.us to exchange useful websites and to use our blogs and our wiki page to communicate.

Immigration

The current law that governs immigration in Italy is called ‘Legge Bossi-Fini’; once known as ‘Testo Unico’ and then ‘Legge Turco-Napolitano’. All these names depend on the various changes made by different governments to the original law. You can find a clear summary of that law in the article of La Repubblica. If you want more information you can also visit the web site of the Italian ‘Ministero dell’Interno’ or this link to wikipedia, which is very clear. At the end of 2006 the immigrants who lived regularly in Italy were 3.000.000, 5% of the Italian population (59.131.000 ca). Most of the immigrants come from Albania, Romania, Morocco, Cina and Ucraina. All these countries are outside the European Union.

In Italy immigration is a quite recent phenomenon compared to other countries. We appear very distrustful of foreigners but not of all of them; especially of those people coming from east Europe. We tend to associate them with criminals. Our behaviour is probably connected with what we read on newspapers, but I think there’s something else which is connected with the difficulty to accept a new multi-cultural society. We are not ready. Not yet. The only explanation I can find is that, as I said before, immigration in Italy is a recent phenomenon. We are not born in a mixed culture like the US and we haven’t been educated to live within cultural diversities. I’m also convinced of the fact that Italy tends to have a very short memory. We don’t remember that in 1920s our country was a land of emigration and we as Italians have been for a long time emigrants.

Skype 4

This time we talked with Kelsey. Unfortunately during the weekend we didn’t have the possibility to skype at home as I had anticipated in my previous Skype post. This week we talked about coming election in America and Italy again. Our American peers created a wonderful and very accurate wiki page about both Italian and American candidates with the basic points of their platforms, their strategies of communication, their key words, speeches and gestures and so on. We had a look to this wiki page and then we thought about the issues we would like to know more about.

These are the questions thought by our group with both the answers that Brian Albanese gave to Alessia and those that Kelsey gave to me and Alberto:

Group 2:

1. Compared to the two Italian political programs, don't you think that the American ones completely differ from each other?

Brian told us that our assumption was not groundless at all and that the party system in the Unites States is a bit too extreme. Nowadays, it has really become hard to choose between the two main parties and there are no intermediate positions available. Hilary's and Obama's political programs are of course much more similar to one another but if we go and read Mc Cain's, we will find out that his objectives are completely different (especially with reference to the issue of the war in Iraq). So, it is very difficult to feel truly represented by any of the two main parties because they're so extreme and the opinions that people in America have formed on certain issues may be completely different from the ones of the main candidates. He thinks that here in Italy maybe we can have much more choices given the amount of little parties and intermediate positions. (Alessia)

2. Do you think that the question of the troops on Iraq could affect your vote more than other issues such as 'health care' and environmental concerns?

Actually, the issue of the war in Iraq DOES play a fundamental role in the next political elections and of course the fact that Americans have to decide if they are against or in favor of the war is deemed to have an effect on their vote for one of the two parties; in other words, if you are against you are more likely to vote for Hilary or Obama, if you're in favor you would rather prefer Mc Cain (I've put it in a rather simple way but of course things may also be a bit more complicated). Anyway, Brian is keen to point out that environmental problems actually represent a very pressing issue too! Maybe, (to us) it was not clear enough, but many countries in America are nowadays really trying to take the right steps in order to solve the problem of global warming, to reduce gas emissions and to find alternative energy resources, which should be cleaner but also cheaper. (Alessia)

Kelsey said that the problem of American troops on Iraq is a fundamental point of this electoral campaign. People feel this issue as more important even of other issues such as health care or environmental proposals. Talking about the war on Iraq Alberto noticed how American soldiers are very young and if on one hand he was shocked of this fact, on the other for Kelsey this thing was quite normal and provoked no particular reactions.

3. Do you think that Clinton's and Obama's campaigns are more concerned with gender and race than mere political issues?

The possibility to have a Black leader or a woman as president is surely a great achievement for America. According to Brian, both of them can really give something more to politics because they can offer different perspectives on a large number of issues. Unfortunately, there has also been a lot of brainwashing from TV and that has contributed to turn the elections in a sort of gender or race struggle. Hence, many people still ask themselves whether these two candidates may have enough experience to rule the country, overlooking the great changes that their election can eventually cause. (Alessia)

Kelsey said that Clinton’s and Obama’s electoral campaigns are not concerned with gender and race. The only difference she noticed is that Obama is younger than Clinton and he could give a different and new image to the U.S.A..

Final Project

This week we are going to talk about our final project. I think that working in group could be a very funny experience but we have to find a topic on which everybody agree. I suppose we’re not obliged to choose among the cultural aspects on which we focused in class. We can drew our attention to a wider range of aspects.

Among the topics we discussed in class and with the Americans, the one I appreciated most is ‘immigration’. As Alessia said we can compare American and Italian immigration policies. Our two cultures had and have a completely different approach towards immigrants. It would be interesting to focus our attention on immigration laws, on how strict are the controls on immigration etc. I think things are changing rapidly in those years thanks to globalisation and new countries joining the European Union. So as a consequence of those facts are controls on immigration more flexible? Or we have to deal with the fear of terrorism and crimes? How do people react to this situation?

Skype 3

This time I talked with Michelle Mercogliano. She has Italian origins; her father arrived in America when he was 7 years old. She has come to Italy several times to visit her relatives in Naples.

We talked about American and Italian voting systems. We realised that unfortunately Michelle, like a lot of other young American people of her age, does not know much about this topic. She is 18 years old and she is going to vote for the first time in November. She thinks that in her country there is a proportional system but she doesn't know that there is also another voting system used in other countries of the US.

Then we talked about the Italian politics. Michelle didn't understand why Italians seem to 'hate' Berlusconi, but they continue to vote him. She got this impression after watching Nanni Moretti's movie 'Il Caimano'. I explained her that in Italy we don't vote directly for the Prime Minister. We elect the members of the Parliament and then it's the President of the Republic who choose the right person among the Magiority. Or at least this is what our system is supposed to be.

This morning I also received an e-mail from Kelsey Taylor, the American peer with whom I talked during my first Skype exchange. She apologized because the last two times she was absent and she asked to Skype together during this week end. Probably we are going to talk togethr on Saturday. I appreciate a lot her way of showing her interest in our Skype exchange.