De Baets, G. A., & Van Praet, E. (2021).

The potential of aikido as a means to improve intercultural

encounters and communication. Sociolinguistics Symposium, 23rd, Abstracts. Presented at the 23rd
Sociolinguistics Symposium, Hong Kong (online).

Abstract | The potential of aikido as a means to improve intercultural encounters and communication
Greet Angèle De Baets

Keywords: interculturalism, aikido, nonviolence, martial arts, sociolinguistics

In today’s deeply divided times, intercultural understanding is suffering: “unscrupulous media and politicians
stoke ethnic and racial fear for their personal gain” and “ever more barriers between people […] are being put
up and fortified” (Piller, 2017: 202).
To contribute to bridging cultures, some communication training methods have used the Japanese martial art of
aikido as a model. This paper reports on a benchmarking study to identify how aikido generates principles for
intercultural training that tackle the importance of non-violent communication (Rosenberg, 2015). The goal is to
obtain a blend of inside (emic) and outside (etic) views (Keesing, 1991) on aikido’s self-defence technique and
aikido’s philosophy of peace and non-violence (Brawdy, 2001).
The benchmarking study takes a two-pronged approach, integrating a qualitative and a quantitative
methodology. Firstly, it relies on semi-structured interviews with key aikido experts. All informants are recruited
by means of purposive and convenience sampling. The sample is homogeneous in knowledge and expertise,
heterogeneous in geographical spread (Etikan, 2016). Relying on Nvivo software, we perform a content analysis
of the interview data, coding the data into categories to make the main inferences. Secondly, we validate the key
findings from the qualitative analysis by means of a large-scale survey of communities of aikido practitioners.

Brawdy, P. (2001) Exploring Human Kindness through the Pedagogy of Aikido. Annual Meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, Seattle.
Etikan, I., Musa S.A. and Alkassim, R.S. (2016) Comparison of Convenience Sampling and Purposive Sampling.
American Journal of Theoretical and Applied Statistics. Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 1-4.
Keesing, R.M. and Strathern, A.J. (1991) Cultural Anthropology: A contemporary perspective. Fort Worth (TX):
Harcourt Brace & Company.
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: A critical introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
Rosenberg, M. (2015). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 3rd edition, Encinitas, California:
PuddleDancer Press.