Kinka Gerke-Unger(’86) speaks about Intercultural Mediation
Kinka Gerke-Unger, former Cosmopolitan-Scholarship recipient, Economic and Political Specialist at the U.S. Consulate Frankfurt will speak about her experience as intercultural mediator.
Kinka Gerke-Unger studied at Jamestown-College with a Cosmopolitan Club scholarship from 1984-86. She graduated with a BA in History and Political Sciences summa cum laude and departmental honors before studying political sciences and economics in Frankfurt and Göttingen.
After a research position at the Peace Research Institute focusing on transatlantic relations and US trade policy, she worked for one year for the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee in Washington, D.C. on a broad range of issues (foreign policy, defense, economic policy).
From 1999 to 2004 she was economic specialist and program manager for the German Agency for Technical Cooperation, advising and managing numerous WTO accession and EU approximation projects mostly in the Caucasus region.
After obtaining her PhD in international relations, Kinka joined the U.S. Consulate in 2009, where she has been responsible for reporting on the monetary policy and financial sector regulation or in short “European crisis reporting.”
A key task of her current job is to facilitate the interaction and understanding between U.S. government officials with German and European interlocutors.
The task of an intercultural mediator requires her to be sufficiently part of the given culture to understand and explain it, yet at the same time gives her the more distanced perspective and critical view of an outsider.
