The eighth biennial International conference on the Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence (ICC) will focus upon the theme of Decentering Mobility in Intercultural Education: Engagement, Equity, and Access.
A hybrid event, January 27-30, 2022, in Tucson, Arizona, and online.
Plenary Speakers:
Uju Anya, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Maria Dasli, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Jennifer Pipitone, College of Mount Saint Vincent, USA
Call for Proposals
As movement between physical and virtual spaces has become increasingly ubiquitous in people’s private and work lives over the past few decades, more people experience the world as deeply interconnected. Patterns of mass migration, economic globalization, and the widespread availability of networked media have meant that even local contexts are shaped by transnational flows of capital, knowledge, practices, and modes of communication (see Block & Cameron, 2002; Douglas Fir Group, 2016). The mobile reality of contemporary life has fueled educational imperatives for intercultural learning, typically with the stated goal of equipping students with the abilities and dispositions they will require to fully participate in an increasingly globalized society; however, as communication, meaning making, and culture have become deterritorialized and decontextualized (see Kramsch & Hua, 2016), interculturality has revealed itself as more complex than the ability to mediate across cultural differences.
In the educational contexts where intercultural thinking and doing is most often taught, e.g., in second and foreign language classrooms and in international study or work contexts, it is often embedded within commodifying discourses of mobility, which emphasize the economic benefits of intercultural communication in a global marketplace. However, even as the social phenomena collectively shorthanded as globalization have enabled participation in dispersed communities and markets, they have also laid bare the inequities that persist (see Diaz et al, forthcoming; Dasli & Diaz, 2016; Sorrells, 2016; Stein, 2019). Thus, there is a need for frameworks and methodologies that recognize the digital, economic, and hierarchical divides that shape the dynamic landscapes of intercultural communication and the ways in which various individuals move through and take up space within them.
The 2022 ICC conference will focus on the ways in which intercultural communication and the teaching and learning thereof have been shaped through mobility – both virtual and physical. Of particular interest are contributions that address how the changing state of intercultural communication has been shaped by a world that is simultaneously more and less mobile, for example, due to differences in access among learners or to changing circumstances, such as the current global health crisis.
Authors will consider the following questions as they prepare their abstracts:
- What are the potentials and pitfalls of current models, concepts, and frameworks for intercultural learning? In what ways is mobility potentially romanticized or reified within them? What kinds of learning and learning outcomes do different ways of thinking about mobility privilege and encourage?
- In what ways have the kinds of virtual mobility enabled by digital technology impacted intercultural communication and the teaching thereof? How might we revisit and rethink more analog forms of virtual mobility, such as those afforded through literature, visual art, and film, in dialogue with those experiences through new media including networked communication platforms, social networking sites and virtual reality? How do forms of virtual and physical mobility intersect in the actual experiences of learners?
- How can educators best be prepared to support intercultural communication in virtual or physical mobile experiences? What findings and new directions does current research offer us for answering this question?
Authors will be asked to choose from among the following strands:
- Theory and approaches
- Assessment
- Curriculum design and instruction
- Policy and institutional initiatives
- Exchanges (physical and virtual)
- Service/Community learning
- Professional development of educators
Proposals for papers, symposia, roundtable discussions, posters, and workshops must be submitted online. Further details about the form of these presentations and additional proposal submission guidelines are in the full CFP: https://icc.arizona.edu/2022cfp/.
Extended Submission Deadline: June 21st, 2021.
During the submission process, authors will indicate whether they would like to present their work in person or virtually. Given the changing context of the pandemic, the conference organizers will contact prospective presenters about the final form of their presentation when acceptance status notifications are sent, by September 3rd, 2021; the organizers will consider authors’ preferences, but cannot guarantee that they will be honored. Presenters will need to confirm attendance by October 16, 2021. Please note that these dates are tentative, and may change later, according to the status of the pandemic in late summer/early Fall.
For other information about the conference, visit the ICC website: http://icc.arizona.edu.
This eighth iteration of the Intercultural Competence conference is organized by the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL), a Title VI Language Resource Center at the University of Arizona.
Questions? Please contact CERCLL at cercll@email.arizona.edu, +1 (520) 626-8071.