2026 Theme: Intercultural Competence in a Rapidly Changing World: Supporting Sustainable Futures for All
February 27 – March 1, 2026
A Hybrid Event in Tucson, Arizona, and Online
Featuring experts in Intercultural Competence from across the U.S. and internationally, the Intercultural Competence Conference (ICC) is for K-16 educators and students in fields related to Foreign Languages, Social Sciences/Studies and the Humanities, and for others involved in government, NGOs, and the private sector who are interested in seeing and interpreting relationships between cultures. This biennial event brings together researchers and practitioners across languages, levels, and settings to discuss and share research, theory, and best practices, and to foster meaningful professional dialog on issues related to the development and assessment of Intercultural Competence, especially in a foreign or second language.
2026 plenary presentations:
- Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (University of Victoria, Canada), When Intercultural Competence Isn’t Enough: Hospicing Modernity and the Limits of Translation
- Irina Golubeva (University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA), Intercultural Communication in Action: Exploring Conflict Styles and Fostering Empathy through Virtual Exchange
- Ricardo Romhild (University of Passau, Germany), Building Cultures of Hope: On the Transformative Power of Critical Hope and Eco-cosmopolitanism in Cultural Learning
In 2015, 191 United Nations (UN) member states adopted the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their targets to improve life on our shared planet by 2030. Goal 4 calls for quality education for all, and Target 4.7 calls for increased education in two key areas: global citizenship and sustainable development, which have recently received increased attention in language education.
In the Call for Proposals, we asked: What role might intercultural communicative language education play in promoting a more sustainable world for all? What might an intercultural communicative language education for a more sustainable world look like? What might be the implications for teachers and learners of moving towards intercultural communicative language education for sustainability?
With these issues and questions in mind, CERCLL invited educators to reflect on how they could re-envision what they teach and how they teach it to meaningfully address these crises with the goal of building a sustainable world for all. Proposals were accepted for papers (in-person and virtual), symposia (in-person and virtual), posters (virtual) and workshops (in-person and virtual). The submission deadline was August 11, 2025.
Stay tuned for more information about the content of the 10th iteration of the ICC conference taking place in 2026!
ICC 2026 is hosted by the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL) and co-sponsored by the College of Humanities at The University of Arizona, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) Program, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences , Arizona International, UArizona Center for East Asian Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, and Center for Middle Eastern Studies, all at The University of Arizona; and by CALPER-Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at Pennsylvania State University, the Center for Advanced Research on Language (CARLA) at the University of Minnesota, Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon, and the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.