This paper continues a reflection begun at the Summer Institute of Intercultural Communication in the summer of 1997 and continued at the first meeting of the International Academy for Intercultural Research in March of 1998. One of the purposes of this paper is to reflect on the papers in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations (IJIR) and other venues which have been submitted, accepted, and published in terms of what they say about the field of intercultural relations. A second purpose is to engage in dialogue between a researcher whose main focus has been the efficacy of intercultural training and a practitioner who has spent most of her career, not in education, training or research per se, but in overlapping other areas of practice, working as an agent of social change at both policy and project levels. This paper will be an act of constructing a congruent dialogue, smoothing out what Carole Archer (1996) calls the 'culture bumps' along the way. From this joint reflection, we try to peer into the future and suggest the areas that would seem to be of particular import for the study of intercultural relations.