Intercultural Challenges For The Reintegration Of Displaced Professionals

This book critically reflects on the challenges faced by refugee aspirant professionals in securing employment and the ways in which professional intercultural competence development and attendant language learning practices can help facilitate the professional (re)integration in these communities. The volume draws on data from a large-scale research project that saw refugee aspirant professionals, researchers, and volunteer language teachers working together to develop and operationalise key intercultural skills needed for professional employment in the UK, the Netherlands, and Austria, ultimately culminating in a toolkit of free online resources co-designed to meet the needs of communities and facilitate the development of these practices across Europe. Detailed analyses of the data drawn from the project allow for critical reflections on co-production in intercultural spaces and researchers’ positionality, power relations, and ethical choices in multilingual contexts. Taken together, the book offers both theoretical and practical considerations for application beyond the European context toward better facilitating the professional (re)integration of migrant communities on a more global scale. The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in intercultural communication, refugee studies, and language education.

This collection brings together a range of perspectives on multimodal communication in intercultural interaction, bridging cognitive, social, and functional approaches towards promoting cross-disciplinary dialogues and taking research at the intersections of these fields into new directions. The volume assembles conversationalist, socially oriented, cognitive, and sensory approaches in considering culture as a dynamic construct, co-constituted and (re)negotiated among participants in interaction and filtering it through a multimodal lens, drawing on a range of examples, such as educational settings or online video platforms. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on "culture" and "intercultural," while also situating their own definitions of these labels against those of the other chapters. Taken together, the chapters form a fluid conversation on the nature of intercultural encounters in today’s globalizsd world, as digital environments intertwine with the physical mobility of people, encouraging researchers across these fields to adopt a more holistic multimodal perspective to approach intercultural interaction. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, multimodality, sociolinguistics, cognitive and interactional linguistics, and semiotics.

This edited collection provides research-informed guidance on how reflexivity may be practised in applied linguistics research. Specifically, we promote reflexivity as an essential hallmark of quality research and argue that doing reflexivity confers greater transparency, methodological rigour, depth, and trustworthiness to our scholarly inquiries. The collection features perspectives from different sub-fields of applied linguistics, including intercultural communication, language education, and multilingualism, and draws on data from a range of settings, including language cafés, classrooms, workplaces, and migration and displacement contexts. Each chapter follows a unified structure: theoretical background, context of the empirical study used as a backdrop for the chapter, an analysis of how reflexivity played out throughout the study, and conclusions which include takeaway points for other researchers. This approach allows readers to gain a sound understanding of the challenges and affordances of doing reflexivity in concrete examples of applied linguistics research whilst also gaining guidance on how to nurture and report on researcher reflexivity as this unfolds throughout the lifetime of a project. This book will appeal to students and scholars in applied linguistics, particularly those with an interest in research methods in the areas of language education, multilingualism, and intercultural communication.

This collection lends a critical decolonising lens to intercultural communication research, bringing together perspectives on how forms of education embedded in the arts and humanities can open up intercultural understanding among young people in conditions of conflict and protracted crises. The book draws on case studies from a range of educational contexts in the Global South which engage in creative arts methodologies to foreground decolonising approaches to intercultural communication in which researchers question their own power in the research process. The volume offers intercultural resources that can be used by researchers and community support groups to foster active intercultural communication, dialogue, participation, and responsibility among young people in these settings and those who may be marginalised from them. The collection also highlights the reflexive accounts of researchers working in a transnational, interdisciplinary, and multilingual research network and the subsequent opportunities and challenges of working in such networks. Advocating for intercultural understanding among young people in higher education and a greater focus on social justice in intercultural communication research, this book will be of interest to students and researchers in applied linguistics, language education, intercultural education, and multilingualism.

In light of increasing globalization, this collection makes the case for global citizenship education as a way forward for transforming foreign language learning and teaching to better address current and future global challenges in times of unprecedented change. The volume maps a multi-dimensional approach within foreign language pedagogy to take up the challenge of "educating the global citizen". Drawing on sociocultural, pedagogical, cosmopolitan, digital and civic-minded perspectives, the book explores the challenges in constructing epistemological frameworks in increasingly global environments, the need for developing context-sensitive educational practices, the potential of linking up with work from related disciplines, and the impact of these considerations on different educational settings. The collection reflects an international range of voices, attuned to global and local nuances, to offer a holistic compilation of conceptual innovations to showcase the relevance of global citizenship issues in foreign language education and encourage future research. This book will be of interest to scholars in intercultural education, foreign language education, and language teaching, as well as policymakers and foreign language teachers. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Migration movements have been a constant in the societies of the past, as well as in postmodern society. However, in the past ten years, the increase in political, economic, and religious conflict amongst nations; the increase of the poverty index; and many and various natural disasters have duplicated the forced displacement of millions of people across the seven continents of the planet. This situation brings important challenges in terms of the vulnerability, inequity, and discrimination that certain peoples suffer. Professionals from the fields of the social sciences, education, psychology, and international law share the fact that education represents an opportunity for children and young migrants to become members with full rights in the societies they arrive in. Empirical studies show that that the implementation of the right to education for migrants presents some challenges and dilemmas to the governments of host countries and more specifically to the education centers, NGOs, universities, and the professionals working in them, hence the need for more research on these issues of immigration, refugees, social justice, and intercultural education. The Handbook of Research on Promoting Social Justice for Immigrants and Refugees Through Active Citizenship and Intercultural Education provides visibility to issues such as the increase in migration and displacement and the difficulties in political agreements, educational contexts, and in cultural issues, stigmatization, vulnerability, social exclusion, racism, and hatred amongst host communities. This book gives possible solutions to this current complex situation and helps foster and promote sensitivity, perspective, and critical thinking for a respectful and tolerant coexistence and promotion of equity and social justice. The chapters promote cultural diversity and inclusion in classrooms by offering knowledge, strategies, and research on organizational development for educational institutions and multicultural environments. This book is essential for administrators, policymakers, leaders, teachers, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the promotion of social justice in education for immigrants and refugees.

This handbook deals with the question of how people can best live and work with others who come from very different cultural backgrounds. Handbook of Intercultural Training provides an overview of current trends and issues in the field of intercultural training. Contributors represent a wide range of disciplines including psychology, interpersonal communication, human resource management, international management, anthropology, social work, and education. Twenty-four chapters, all new to this edition, cover an array of topics including training for specific contexts, instrumentation and methods, and training design.

"This book presents a structured yet flexible methodology for developing intercultural competence in a variety of contexts, both formal and informal. Piloted around the world by UNESCO, this methodology has proven to be effective in a range of different contexts and focused on a variety of different issues. It therefore can be considered an important resource for anyone concerned with effectively managing the growing cultural diversity within our societies to ensure inclusive and sustainable development. Intercultural competence refers to the skills, attitudes and behaviours needed to improve interactions across difference, whether within a society (differences due to age, gender, religion, socio-economic status, political affiliation, ethnicity, and so on) or across borders. The book serves as a tool to develop those competences, presenting an innovative adaptation of what could be considered an ancient tradition of storytelling found in many cultures. Through engaging in the methodology, participants develop key elements of intercultural competence including greater self-awareness, openness, respect, reflexivity, empathy, increased awareness of others, and in the end, greater cultural humility. This book will be of great interest to intercultural trainers, policymakers, development practitioners, educators, community organizers, civil society leaders, university lecturers and students -- all who are interested in developing intercultural competence as a means to understand and appreciate difference, develop relationships with those across difference, engage in intercultural dialogue and bridge societal divides"--