Making Internationalization an Intercultural Endeavour: Practices and Processes of Engaging in Intercultural Dialogues and Developing Interculturality

With the increasing rise of nationalism, populism and geopolitical tensions worldwide, it is more pertinent than ever before for universities to engage in promoting constructive intercultural dialogues through concerted efforts of internationalization. Intercultural scholars have alerted us that “greater number of international students and a higher global institutional ranking do not necessarily reflect a higher degree of beneficial intercultural interaction or education”, nor the quality of students’ experience or that of meaningful and genuine dialogic exchanges between the students (Ladegaard, 2022; Young et al., 2017:189). In internationalizing universities, it is thus of great importance to adopt a critical intercultural approach that strives to contribute to advancing the practices of internationalization to be inclusive, sustainable and socially responsible in higher education. This project fully aligns with this direction of research and aims to examine the practices and the effectiveness of an intercultural dialogue approach to internationalization. The goal is to foster intercultural learning and cultivate interculturality through three study phrases, that is, the research phase to diagnose concrete issues in doing intercultural interactions, the development phrase of intercultural pedagogies and the implementation phase to test the effectiveness of the intercultural interventions.