ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we look at the transformations of meaning that may take place in an intercultural supervisory space where supervisor and supervisee/s and/or the client/s may be of different cultures, skin colours, and/or ethnicities. We will look at the role of language in acknowledging, valuing, and working with and through intercultural differences, articulating the untranslatable, voicing the unspeakable, and interpreting narratives from different cultural perspectives.
We will think about how mirroring cultural differences may throw light on hitherto unseen but felt facets of experience and bring hidden, buried details of their/her/histories into relief.
Using examples from our experience in intercultural supervisory dyads and groups, and in monocultural dyads with intercultural clients, we will look at the role of the supervisor in naming cultural and linguistic differences and acknowledging the problems and importance of struggling with understandings in order to facilitate the communication and translation of experience through and into meaning-full relationship.
We will propose that it is essential to work interculturally to enable the creation of a mutually constructed and inhabited, safe-enough space in supervision, as in therapy, in which issues of power and privilege, and their historic preconception and current dynamic, can be explored and made sense of.
