International Centre for Intercultural Studies

Our centre

Director: Professor Zhu Hua 
Deputy Director: Professor John O’Regan

The centre promotes intellectually rigorous, practically relevant and interdisciplinary intercultural studies that advance understanding of the role of culture in society, education and communication and inform intercultural practices and policies.

Aims

The centre aims to:

• Push new frontiers of the field of Intercultural Studies through interdisciplinary collaboration and methodological innovations.
• Promote a critical approach to understanding the role of culture in society, education and communication.
• Develop a critical mass of inquiry in researching and teaching culture, and in particular, foreground the research strand of language learning /language use and intercultural communication.
• Develop international networks through affiliated learned societies, joint projects, seminars, networking activities, conferences, student exchanges and programme partnerships.
• Upscale lessons and rich insights gathered from our language education and intercultural education and disseminate good practices through research projects, briefings and engagement activities. 
• Engage with and influence national and international language-in-education policy and debates on intercultural collaboration and exchange. 

Background

The centre was originally founded as the Centre for Multicultural Education by the late Professor Jagdish Gundara in 1979. Its focus on intercultural education and the study of diversity, equity and social justice remains as one of the key strands of the current activities of the centre.

Image at the top: Ryoji Iwata via Unsplash.