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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2020

Teaching and learning about interculturality in 2020: reflections on current and future practices from a European University perspective

Résumé

20 years of studying and teaching interculturality as a British expat in France have shaped the way I think about and teach interculturality applied to business settings in today’s mediatized world. Accusations of cultural appropriation, discrimination, religious and ethnic tensions, even genocides are among the challenges societies are currently facing, linked to identity claims and power dynamics, where “cultures” serve very often as a pretext for symbolic or physical violence. Yet, despite the lonely protests of a few academics, dominant media discourse, numerous politicians as well as “public opinion” in many countries all tend to legitimise the view that “cultural differences” are insurmountable barriers to understanding, which need to be defended, respected, resisted, reduced, overcome or annihilated. In such a context, how should we go about presenting interculturality to students and businesspeople? If this target group is often relatively openminded, it also tends to bring its own ideological agendas, be they cosmopolitanistic, productivistic or exoticising. Within the “European Universities initiative”, launched by the European Commission within the Erasmus+ programme, learning about interculturality is also a key objective, although the term is often understood in a “Janusian” way, related to national identities. Working with intercultural trainers and the expectations of their clients can often involve similar emphasis on the question, whereas in the context of an MA programme in intercultural management we need to present students and professionals with more “complex” approaches to cultural and identity-based dynamics in order to better understand everyday social phenomena taking place within organisations and in society more generally. Finally, the Covid-19 pandemic, which arrived in a context of localism, of environmental concerns and cosmopolitan xenophobia, but also widespread accessibility of online communication tools, has currently, and maybe durably, reconfigured the situation. Online communication in businesses and universities has increased massively and will very likely remain as a common practice once the virus has subsided. Deterritorialized communication brings its own cultural challenges, both social and algorithmic, and interculturality is often presented as a key soft skill required for and acquired through “virtual exchange” or remote working in international teams. How might we link cultures, identities and algorithms in order to better prepare for the challenges of communication in the years to come?
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Dates et versions

hal-03088912 , version 1 (27-12-2020)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03088912 , version 1

Citer

Alexander Frame. Teaching and learning about interculturality in 2020: reflections on current and future practices from a European University perspective. « Teaching about and researching interculturality in business contexts: Perspectives, practices and impact - a series of online lectures », Fred Dervin & Zhao Ke, Jul 2020, Shanghai, China. ⟨hal-03088912⟩

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