International Work Placements: Developing Intercultural Skills?

Abstract

Intercultural skills are generally defined in relation to having a positive and respectful emotional response to cultural difference. However, what this actually means is difficult to define (Deardorff, 2006;Griffith et al., 2016), and consequently, takes various guises: intercultural literacy, global citizenship, international mindedness, to name but a few. In the critical social sciences, intercultural skills are often conceptualized, either explicitly or implicitly, through the lens of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism (see, e.g. Hannerz, 1996;Caruana, 2014).