Inspired by the 7th International Conference on the Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence organized by CERCLL in 2020, CERCLL Co-Directors Dr. Beatrice Dupuy and Dr. Chantelle Warner have edited a special issue of Intercultural Communication Education entitled Intercultural communicative competence and mobility: Perspectives on virtual, physical, and critical dimensions (ICE Volume 4, Issue 1, April 2021). Many of the authors whose work is published within this volume have been presenters at the Intercultural Competence Conference and at other professional development events offered by CERCLL, and some are directors of CERCLL research projects and authors of resources published CERCLL’s website.
In this Special Issue, Dupuy and Warner write that their motivation for the volume was “born out of a sense that the relationship between mobility and intercultural communication education was due for some critical attention. Even as the social phenomena collectively shorthanded as globalization have enabled participation in dispersed communities and markets, they have also laid bare in many ways the inequities that persist (see Dasli & Diaz, 2016; Sorrells, 2016; Stein, 2019); and yet, the educational and economic benefits of physical and virtual exchanges and time spent abroad are almost uniformly lauded.” The volume reflects the “need for frameworks and methodologies that recognize the socioeconomic, political, identitarian, and ideological divides that shape the dynamic landscapes of intercultural communication and the opportunities disparate individuals have to move through and take up space within them.”
As the world begins to reopen and to claw its way out of the shutdowns caused by the pandemic, this Special Issue is “an intervention and a reminder to use these ‘abnormal’ times as an opportunity to reflect, to grapple with the inequities and unsustainable practices that characterize many existing international mobility processes (cf, Diaz et al., 2021), and to use this to pave the way for new normals within intercultural communication education.”
See the introduction by Dupuy and Warner for a summary of the volume and each chapter it contains. All are available free of charge under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.
Contributions to this issue include the following articles:
Introduction to the Special Issue – Intercultural communicative competence and mobility: Perspectives on virtual, physical, and critical dimensions, by Beatrice Dupuy and Chantelle Warner
Roadblocks to intercultural mobility: Indigenous students’ journeys in Colombian universities, by José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia and Manuela Wagner
Intercultural education in times of restricted travel: Lessons from the Gaza Strip, by Maria Garzia Imperiale
Multiracial Chinese American women studying abroad in China: The intersectionality of gender, race, and language learning, by Wenhao Diao and Yi Wang
At the crossroads: Rethinking study abroad students’ social networking and intercultural communication in the age of globalization, by Irwin Compiegne
Shaping the teaching and learning of intercultural communication through virtual mobility, by Theresa Catalano and Andrea Muñoz-Barriga
Should Standard Arabic have “the lion’s share?”: Teacher ideologies in L2 Arabic through the lens of pedagogical translanguaging, by Mahmoud Azaz and Yousra Abourehab
Reframing and hospicing mobility in higher education: Challenges and possibilities, by Adriana Raquel Diaz, Marisa Cordella, Samantha Dispray, Barbara E. Hanna, and Anna Mikhaylova