April 5
Bridging Diversity: Symposium
Location: Grude, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Location: Grude, Bosnia and Herzegovina
OBJECTIVE: Engage youth from three ethnicities in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the dialogue with international experts and stakeholders
KEY STAKEHOLDERS: Youth from all three ethnicities (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian), government officials, representatives from international organizations, students, educators and policymakers.
Professor Dr. Mückler highlighted the potential of cultural diversity when seeing it as an enrichment and not as a threat to society.
“Cultural diversity is essential to humanity,” Mückler claims. To foster cultural diversity, “we need platforms to talk to each other – such as this symposium organized by ICDO –, even better: we need to eat and to drink with each other, as we did today, to benefit from cultural diversity.”
Academic Zepic defined six main obstacles of bridging the gap in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s divided society and presented a constructive outline on how to overcome those.
Dr. Löwstedt emphasized the positive impact of cultural diversity:
“The more cultural diversity, the better for society. It increases cultural wealth by adding to it.”
Media can play both a positive and a negative role for cultural diversity: Media enhances communication, but at the moment, media is not culturally diverse and functions often as vehicles for cultural imperialism. We must be critical of cultural imperialism, bias, and fake news and we must raise our voices protest because “it is not only up to the media but also to us to make a difference“.
Symposium Participants:
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The students had the possibility to learn more about changes that can improve the domestic position of cultural diversity through legal and other means.
ICDO organized workshops in Violeta and Grafotisak factories in order to see the scope of work and how local companies managed to work on a global level. Thanks to their expertise they work all over the world and retaining local talent.
The goal of the workshops was to familiarize participants with the possibilities in their own country in order to have a better idea bout their future development.