Aikido Communication | Doctoral Research
I worked as an academic assistant at Ghent University (Belgium) from 2019 to 2024. I taught English business communication and did doctoral (PhD) research that joined two quite different domains:
- aikido as a source domain
- intercultural communication as a target domain
Intercultural communication
A professional person who wants to learn about intercultural communication often ends up in a comparison between countries, cultures and nations. This may be useful and interesting. It is, however, not enough as preparation for intercultural interaction. There is still a need for training courses that offer more than the cognitive transfer of country comparisons.
Aikido
Aikido is a martial art that deals with attacks in a counterintuitive, unexpected way. Successful aikido interaction typically consists of the following principles:
- We do not do harm to anyone.
- We have a tranquil and open attitude.
- We tune our behaviour to the other person(s).
- We co-create a new common ground towards a noble outcome.
Aikido communication
Judging by aikido's principles, there are many similarities between successful aikido interaction and successful intercultural interaction. To investigate this in-depth and scientifically, I interviewed twenty aikido experts in 2020. The findings fed a pedagogical framework for intercultural business communication training. Such a pedagogy relies on physical movements so as to discover the meaning of aikido through body and mind, i.e. embodied pedagogy. The most important research question:
How does intercultural business communication training benefit from aikido as an embodied pedagogy?
A mixed-methods study, i.e. qualitative and quantitative, investigated aikido-based intercultural business communication training.
