ANNA
It started with a bicycle to China
When I was eight, I wrote in my diary:
“I am going to take my bicycle, ride to China, and disappear.”
I obviously had no plan
Travel was not really a thing in my family. My grandfather was the exception. He joined every trip he could, on buses or trains, but never on planes. He was afraid the seven bullets left in his body from the Spanish Civil War might shift around, or that he wouldn’t make it through airport security.
His journeys rarely went beyond Spain. But perhaps he started something.
Or perhaps it was relatives visiting from Argentina and Peru who made me curious about how people could speak the same language and still mean completely different things.
Either way, I became fascinated by different places, people and ways of understanding the world.
And I wanted to know more.
Curiosity became a profession
At 23, I started working in internationalisation. One of my first challenges was a big one: building my university’s first internationalisation strategy from scratch.
That was the beginning of twenty years working across different roles, organisations, countries and perspectives.
I have worked at universities and organisations, in international relations, mobility and partnerships; managed European and international projects; designed Internationalisation at Home initiatives; taught at university; co-designed and co-directed a Master’s programme; and worked with students, academic and professional staff, project teams and organisations across countries and contexts.
And yes, China eventually happened too. At 34, I moved there as Academic Delegate, working with universities and partners in China and across Asia. The bicycle stayed home.
Somewhere along the way, the questions changed
Germany, Czech Republic, Peru, United States, Dominican Republic, India, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, France, Morocco, Mexico, China, Guatemala, Taiwan, Georgia…
The more I experienced and learned, the more interested I became in what sits behind what we see: whose knowledge is valued, which perspectives are missing, how society, cultures (in plural) and education shape us, and what happens when different people and ways of understanding the world meet.
That curiosity took me beyond traditional approaches to intercultural competence and increasingly towards critical interculturality, knowledge, power and epistemologies, including how these play out in relationships between the Global North and Global South.
My academic path followed some of the same questions. I studied Translation and Interpreting, International Conflict Resolution and International Cooperation. My Master’s research took me to Pune, India, where I worked with a community-based collective of women in sex work; the resulting research received the Josep Maria Bernabé Research Prize and was later published by the University of Valencia.
Inside & outside
I spent more than a decade working inside universities and organisations before becoming independent.
That matters to how I work today.
I know what structures, competing priorities, changing resources and everyday organisational life look like from the inside.
Since becoming independent, I have also learned the value of being the person who comes in from outside, asks different questions and sees connections that can be harder to spot when you are immersed in the day-to-day.
Since 2018, I have worked independently with universities, public institutions, organisations and social impact initiatives on internationalisation, intercultural learning, partnerships, capacity building and European and international projects.
Recent work has taken me from designing professional development on critical interculturality and Internationalisation at Home for university staff, to facilitating intercultural learning across European university alliances, developing educational strategies for international organisations, and working with teams and participants in Erasmus+ and other international programmes.
Different projects + Different countries + Different people = No standard formula.
My curiosity is still there
Sometimes I still can’t quite believe that my need to figure things out eventually found its way into my work. But the curiosity is pretty much the same.
I still travel. By plane, train and car, but also from my couch, reading novels from as many cultures as I can or listening to music that makes my brain explode and my emotions expand.
I still write (less than I would like to, but give it time).
I still get excited about ideas and unexpected connections.
And I still find myself looking at things from different angles, trying to understand what I might not be seeing yet.
So perhaps eight-year-old me was onto something after all.
The bicycle never made it to China. I eventually did.
Let’s see where the ride takes me.
Anna
P.S. Despite (and because of) everything, I still believe that a better world is possible.