by Marybeth Gasman, Ph.d All you have to do is spend a few minutes on social media and it becomes very obvious we have a hard time talking with each other when we disagree, especially during these volatile times. In our conversations, we often fail to listen to the nuance in arguments, we jump to…

One such barrier is ethnocentrism. Any intercultural interaction will be influenced by an individual’s ethnocentrism, or the belief that one’s culture (“in-group”) is superior to another’s culture (“out-group”).   All humans are to some extent ethnocentric, falling somewhere on a scale between “low” and “high” ethnocentricity.  High or low levels of ethnocentricity influence an individual’s ability to…

In this episode of the Varying Viewpoints podcast series, Marybeth Gasman, Executive Director at the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, and Justice, spoke with Camille Z. Charles, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg, Professor in the Social Sciences in the Departments of Sociology and Africana Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, Camille discusses…

I still remember my tears from high school. Sometimes, even though it is decades later, they still come out on my pillow. I cringe as I think about the pain so many young people are experiencing today, often with many fewer safe-places and outlets to mitigate the abuse.  “As the social life of young people has moved…