Encountering the 'Other'

?Everything we have learnt from this world is contextualized and even reality per se?
David N. Tshimba

The experience I personally had in the midst of summer of the year 2009 in Birmingham now seems to have brought to me a deeper desire to change as well as a greater fear to enroll into that change at the same time. It really is quite difficult for me to fully explain how these two contrasting realities have come about within me; however, there is still in some way an alternative to juxtapose these two opposing feelings through the mechanism of challenge-opportunity.

The 2009 International Summer School on Religion and Public Life (ISSRPL) had a focus on the theme, The Language of Neighborhood and Practices of Public Life. Interestingly enough, the School was held in Birmingham, U.K. Birmingham- the second largest city of Great Britain and home to many different ethnic groups and religious communities, including Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jewish and numerable Christian denominations- really was a genuine case study for such a focus. In a city as culturally diverse as Birmingham, understanding the global connections of local neighborhoods to publics that have radically different visions of what community can mean is critical to coexistence between communities.

The neighborhoods of Birmingham are concentrations of multi-linguistic and culturally diverse traditions, differing conceptions of communal order, and contested ideas of who- and what- defines the symbolic and physical space of the neighborhood.

Much as we all got new insights into our understandings of community and learnt to live with difference, the greatest challenge- I think- experienced by participants in exploring the practices of public life in the neighborhood of Birmingham was not only about seeing the other and seeing the other see us, but most importantly learning to see ourselves view the other.