Fully showing up when talking about inclusion
There was a pleasing symmetry to it: after I wrote my last blogpost about how a physical space can get in the way of meaningful discussion, now I got the chance to experience the opposite. We organised a policy event last Thursday in partnership with the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, and held it in the “Timber Hall” inside the embassy. A circular room with wood-panelled walls and a high glass ceiling that feels a bit like a church — it is a simply beautiful space. And just being there served to inspire and elevate the conversation.
The architecture was, I think, a contributing factor the thing that made the event a success — namely, that the participants were able to engage with each other and with the conversation in a deep and personal way.
The subject we had chosen was how to get more refugees and newcomers into the tech industry, and how civic tech projects can help do this. Our participants — a mix of civic tech people, policy experts, and, importantly, newcomers aspiring to a career in tech — brought together different perspectives on this question. But the most remarkable part, and what came through most strongly in the feedback at the end, was that the participants weren’t talking only from the expertise furnished by their day jobs. They were able to bring their whole selves into the discussion.
There were lots of examples, often small things. A Syrian and a German talked together about the experience of having one’s name translated into other languages. Another participant described how achieving success in the tech industry had driven him to engage in creating opportunities for others. I stepped briefly out of the moderating role to reflect on my own experiences as a (west-European, white) immigrant to Germany, occasionally bewildered by cultural norms, and how this experience was partly similar to, and partly very different from, that of a refugee from Syria.
Shaping a constructive dialogue about migration and integration depends in large part in navigating the interplay between these two levels: the subjective and personal perspective versus the more objective role that’s conferred by job or status.
Each person in that Timber Hall had a ‘professional’ perspective on the challenges of inclusion and integration. But these are also deeply and intractably personal issues. Every person in the hall (not to mention every person on the street outside) also has their own relationship to questions about identity and belonging, culture and change, solidarity and community, forged in part out of their biographies and family histories.
In some settings, one of these perspectives is magnified at the expense of the other. On the one hand, there’s an argument sometimes implicit in the more radical incarnations of ‘identity politics’ that what a person can credibly talk about is exclusively tied to their background, circumstances, and privilege. On the other hand, more formal structures, including parts of academia and bureaucracies of various kinds, focus blindly on ‘credentials’, staking a claim to ideals of objectivity (even though this is often delusional).
Both extremes contain an important truth, but both are also partial. We need to create spaces which can accommodate both perspectives. When we’re working on matters as fundamentally human as migration and inclusion, our discourse and our approaches must be complex and nuanced enough to reflect the complexity and richness of a human being.
