This year’s AFoI theme is “Make or Break”.
I’ve joined the Program Development Group for the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. The Festival is scheduled for October this year, and carries the theme “Make or Break”. For more information and to make a donation or suggest a partnership, please go to the website.
Today I joined in with Welcome to Australia to run a pilot forum aimed at testing whether migrant communities are in fact willing to participate in intercultural problem-solving. Guess what? They are!
Here’s the write-up of the event on Australian Policy Online:
On 27 November 2015, the MnM Centre partnered with Welcome to Australia to hold an Older Migrants Forum. The forum was chaired by Mohammad Al-Khafaji, Chief Executive Officer: Welcome to Australia, with group discussions facilitated by Dr Amrita Malhi, MnM Centre Research Fellow, and Leah Marrone from Welcome to Australia.
The forum was devised as a pilot project aimed at testing the value of intercultural discussions between established migrant communities (in this case, mainly represented by post-WWII Greek and Italian migrants) and members of new and emerging communities (comprising migrants from Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Egypt).
I went along to the Bersih rally in Adelaide, where I got this shot of South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon working a megaphone before the crowd. Picture: Amrita Malhi
Front cover of program brochure for InterculturAdelaide. Picture: Nazia Ejaz.
Today, I hosted a major public event called InterculturAdelaide. The event introduction that I wrote for the brochure is below, along with my welcome to participants.
Introduction
InterculturAdelaide is a major public policy summit and action research project. It aims to bring together scholars, policymakers and other stakeholders to consider the idea of “interculturality”—broadly defined as a set of cultural skills supporting openness and adaptivity. The day’s proceedings will encompass issues related to Australia’s own diverse population, and to Australia’s international relationships across the Asian region.