Intercultural dialogue in a critical and multilingual perspective

One of the preconditions for intercultural dialogue is the participants’ engagement in wider society. The critical perspective sees the world as characterised by a host of social and cultural issues and conflicts that set the scene for intercultural communication and understanding, and that may both facilitate and hinder an inclusive and equal intercultural dialogue. Cultural Encounters (CE) focuses on problems and possibilities in multicultural and multilingual society, and thus relates to both the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Teachers/researchers attached to CE have backgrounds in subjects like Anthropology, the Sociology of Religion, Sociolinguistics, Minority Studies, Postcolonial Literature, International Development Studies, and Psychology, or they have studied CE themselves. Language within the context of the Language Profiles becomes the object as well as the resource for learning. The Language Profile theme focuses on intercultural dialogue along the time dimension, studying German colonialism in Africa, including the massacre of the Herero people.