{call for proposal}Decentering Mobility in Intercultural Education: Engagement, Equity, and Access

Call for Proposals

Decentering Mobility in Intercultural Education: Engagement, Equity, and Access

The Eighth International Conference on the Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence

January 27-30, 2022
A Hybrid Event 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

Click here for a 2-page printable CFP [PDF]

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

Types of Contributions

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; the organizers will consider authors’ preferences, but cannot guarantee that they will be honored.

A. In-person Presentations

Proposals for in-person presentations at the conference may be submitted as one of five types: 1) paper presentation; 2) symposium; 3) roundtable discussion; 4) poster; 5) workshop. Each of these is explained in more detail below.

1. Paper Presentation (30 minutes total: 25 minute presentation plus 5 minutes discussion) are best suited for reports on completed research or scholarly work on a topic related to one of the conference strands. Presenters should not read their papers, but rather present the main points of their work in an engaging manner. Paper sessions will be organized into sessions of four papers by strand. Papers may be presented in Chinese, English, French, German or Spanish.

2. Symposium (2 hours total: 90 minutes for presentations and 30 minutes for discussion) provide a venue for a group of presenters to propose a set of papers (3-5) based on a shared theme or topic related to one of the conference strands. The papers may present complementary aspects or contrasting perspectives. Total presentation time is limited to one hour and thirty minutes. Thirty minutes are allocated at the end to give presenters and symposium participants an opportunity to engage in extended dialogue.

3. Roundtable Discussion (15 minutes total: 8 minutes presentation plus 7 minutes for discussion) present an opportunity for informal, in-depth discussions between presenters and participants on a specific topic or theme. They are particularly well suited for works-in-progress and are not meant to be formal paper presentations. Roundtable sessions allow for engaging conversations and provide networking opportunities among participants on common research interests.

4. Poster Session (55 minutes) are ideal for presenting preliminary results of work in progress or work that lends itself to visual displays and representations. The maximum area per poster is 4 feet high by 8 feet wide. In these sessions, presenters engage in informal discussion with conference attendees during the assigned period.

5. Workshop Presentation (half day [3 hours] or full day [6 hours]) are best suited for teaching or demonstrating particular procedures or techniques. These sessions should be structured so that some explanatory or introductory information is provided with ample time for audience interaction, participation, and involvement. Please include information about what participants will have achieved upon leaving the workshop, and details about the identity of the target audience.

B. Virtual Presentations

This format is intended for authors who already know that they will be unable to attend the conference in person. The guidelines above for in-person paper presentations apply to virtual presentations as well. Upon notification that their abstract for a virtual presentation has been accepted, author(s) will be given a date in later 2021 by which they must submit their presentation to CERCLL (instructions for how to do so will be mailed with their proposal acceptance). For examples of presentations created in this format, see the virtual presentations submitted for the 2016, 2018 and 2020 Intercultural Competence Conferences (at the past conferences links above) and digital presentations for CERCLL’s L2DL symposium (linked at l2dl.arizona.edu).

 

Proposal Restrictions

No more than two proposals per person may be submitted; an author can only be a primary presenter on one proposal. Submitting more than two proposals will eliminate all proposals including that presenter from consideration. Submissions with similar titles and content will also be eliminated from consideration. Each proposal must have one lead presenter, and can have up to three secondary presenters. The only exception is a symposium, which can have two presenters per paper included in the symposium.

Requirements for Submission

All proposals must be submitted using the online form by the proposal submission deadline of June 4, 2021. Each proposal will need the following information: strand, title (maximum 75 characters including spaces), summary (maximum 350 characters including spaces) and abstract (maximum 5000 characters including spaces). For symposia: submitters will be prompted for a title, summary and abstract for the symposium as a whole, as well as a title and summary for each paper included in the symposium (character counts as before). No identifying information should be included in the summaries and abstracts. Citations and references should not be included in the summary; if they are in the abstract, bibliographic information must be provided (included in the character count). The following information is required for each presenter: name, institution, institution location, presenter’s email address, phone number, and professional biography (350 characters maximum).

 

Dates and Deadlines

Proposal Submission Deadline: June 4, 2021, 11:59 pm (Pacific Standard Time).

Acceptance status notifications will be sent via email by September 3rd, 2021. Presenters will need to confirm their attendance at the conference by October 16, 2021, and to register by a deadline sent in September. Please note that these dates are tentative, and may change later, according to the status of the pandemic in late summer/early Fall.

 

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This is the eighth iteration of the ICC conference organized by the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL), a Title VI Language Resource Center at the University of Arizona.

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Works Cited

• Block, D. & Cameron, D. (2002). Globalization and Language Teaching. Abingdon, Oxon (UK): Routledge.
• Dasli, M. & Diaz, A. (2016). The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy. Abingdon, (UK): Routledge.
• Diaz, A. Cordella, M., Disbray, S., Hanna, B., & Mikhaylova, A. (Forthcoming). Reframing and hospicing mobility in higher education: challenges and possibilities. In Beatrice Dupuy and Chantelle Warner (eds.) Intercultural Communicative Competence and Mobility: Perspectives on Virtual, Physical, and Critical Dimensions. Intercultural Communication Education.
• Kramsch, C., & Zhu Hua (2016). Language, Culture and Language Teaching. In G. Hall (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching (pp.38-50). Abingdon, (UK): Routledge.
• Sorrells, K. (2016). Intercultural Communication: Globalization and Social Justice (2nd edition). Thousand Oaks (USA): Sage Publishing
• Sharon Stein (2019): Critical internationalization studies at an impasse: making space for complexity, uncertainty, and complicity in a time of global challenges, Studies in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2019.1704722
• The Douglas Fir Group. (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. Modern Language Journal, 100 (Supplement 2016), 19–47.