Language, culture and interculturality: global debates, local challenges

Abstract

This issue of LAIC brings together a selection of articles, revised and refereed, that, with one exception, grew out of presentations delivered at the 2021 conference of the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), on Language, culture and interculturality: global debates, local challenges. This conference was remarkable in a number of ways. For the first time in its two-decade history, the IALIC conference was hosted in South America, by the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá in Colombia. While the organisers originally hoped that this would be an in-person event, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic ultimately forced the conference online. This turned out to be a mixed blessing. While IALIC participants were denied the opportunity to visit Bogotá in person and enjoy the hospitality of what would have been an excellent conference venue in the Universidad de los Andes, the number of international participants increased both in their number and their diversity. With more than 200 online contributions coming from all over the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania, the 2021 IALIC conference became a truly global critical space in which to explore the nature of interculturality. The conference theme, conventionally broad in scope, invited participants to revisit and critique our theoretical and practical assumptions as scholars, educators and practitioners of interculturality, particularly in times of crisis. The contributors accepted the invitation with gusto, addressing and contesting established models of language, intercultural communication, and the modes by which we research and measure our outputs. Among the plenaries, Claire Kramsch raised specific concerns about the ways in which educators and students might engage in political debate around conflict in the language classroom, focusing on case studies of anti-Asian prejudice in the United States, the commemoration of Hiroshima, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and attitudes in Italy towards Muslim immigrants. Her discussion was complemented by Anne-Marie Truscott de Mejía, who reported on an international research project, carried out in Bogotá and in Paris, aimed at helping in-service language teachers and learners to grasp the complexity of intercultural relationships, with a particular reference to gender relations and the urban-rural divide. Emergent themes from the conference presentations included the challenges and affordances of researching multilingually, post-qualitative research methodologies, innovative ways of composing intercultural autoethnographies, arts-based research approaches, and bio-narratives. Appropriately, for the first IALIC conference in South America, a prominent theme was the decolonisation of language pedagogy, curricula and materials, especially when the major languages taught are potent symbols, not only of colonial hegemony but also of a scientific and economic positivism that holds out the promise of future prosperity. It is fitting, then, that this special issue should include a revised version of a plenary presentation given by Manuela Guilherme, whose own history with IALIC stretches back to her presence at two ground-breaking conferences in Leeds, in 1997 and 1998, that led directly to the birth of the association in 2000. Guilherme surveys the developing nature of the topics presented at the series of conferences, from Leeds to Bogotá, finding in the presentations offered evidence of an increasing appetite among contributors to decentre from Eurocentric frameworks of interculturality, which, in the late 1990s, were coalescing into the first edition of the Common European Framework of