The Map and the Territory
For a long time, I studied belonging from the outside.
My doctoral research was built around what I called the intercultural encounter: the moment when two different worlds meet in a classroom, a conversation, or a life and neither remains unchanged. I was fascinated by what happens at that crossing: how people negotiate identity, how they hold on to what they know while slowly making room for what is new, how being genuinely met by another person can shift something that no amount of knowledge ever could. I built pedagogies around that encounter. I wrote about it. I taught it.
And then I moved to the United Kingdom and I became the “Other”.
I was educated and professionally established. But I was also suddenly navigating a “grammar” that was not mine, not just the language, though that too, but the unspoken codes of how things are done here, what is said and what is left unsaid, what counts as warmth and what reads as intrusion. I found myself understanding, intellectually, exactly what was happening to me and still not being able to stop it from happening. The map and the territory, it turned out, are not the same thing. That gap between knowing and living is something I had read about. I had not yet understood it in my body.
What followed was a long, quiet education. I began teaching international postgraduate students - people who had left their countries and their professional identities behind to begin again in a new academic culture. I recognised them. I had stood at a version of the same crossing. I knew what it was to be competent and capable and still feel that the most important question had not yet been asked, to carry a self that did not quite fit anywhere. The questions that began to matter in those rooms were not only academic. They were messier than that, about identity, about how a person shows up when the context keeps shifting, about what happens when the different layers of who someone is do not sit neatly together. It was in the classroom of Inclusive Leadership Practices that I saw what shifts when a person begins to lead from who they actually are, not from who they think the room expects them to be. Something in my attention changed. I was no longer teaching from above the experience. I was inside it.
It was there, with those students, that I recognised something I had been doing for thirty years, with students, with parents, with colleagues, with friends, with family, without ever having a name for it. Sitting with someone in a difficult moment. Asking the question that shifts something. Holding the space until their own answer surfaces. I had been doing it for everyone around me. I was beginning, slowly, to do it for myself.
ALTEA grew from that. The research, then the crossing, then the teaching, then the turning inward, each one the same question, asked from a different depth: what does it take for a person to come home to themselves?
I do not think that is a question that belongs only to people in difficulty. It belongs to anyone who has arrived at a moment when the life they have built, however good, no longer quite fits who they are becoming. That is a threshold. And that is where this work begins.
Much love,
Charis
