ICC 2026: Call for Proposals
Intercultural Competence in a Rapidly Changing World:
Supporting Sustainable Futures for All
The Tenth International Conference on the
Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence
February 27 – March 1, 2026
A Hybrid Event in Tucson, Arizona, and Online
Proposal Submission Deadline: July 21, 2025
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (University of Victoria)
Irina Golubeva (University of Maryland Baltimore County)
Ricardo Römhild (University of Passau)
Our planet is on fire! Around the world, we are witnessing a surge in ecological disasters, the degradation and depletion of natural resources, the loss of biodiversity, the pollution of land and water, the spread of hunger and disease, the rise of violent geopolitical conflicts, and the widening of long-standing inequalities for billions of people.
In 2015, 191 United Nations (UN) member states adopted the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their targets to improve life on our shared planet by 2030. Goal 4 calls for quality education for all, and Target 4.7 calls for increased education in two key areas: global citizenship and sustainable development, which have recently received increased attention in language education.
Global citizenship and sustainable development in SDG 4, Target 4.7 are recommendations of the what but not the how. The UN recognizes the need for a pedagogical shift because “for education to be truly transformative, ‘education as usual’ will not suffice” (2016, p. 163). It must “foster thinking that is more relational, integrative, empathic, anticipatory, and systemic” (2016, p. 163).
In this moment of global reckoning, what does it mean to be a global citizen and how do we, as language educators, help students make sense of the histories that have brought us to this moment? These issues are not new, they are interconnected and require transformative solutions that bring about systemic change. The SDGs can provide a blueprint for examining the intersectionality that exists among pressing global issues and a common language for educators to critically engage with these goals and move from transmissive and conformative to transformative education.
We ask: What role might intercultural communicative language education play in promoting a more sustainable world for all? What might an intercultural communicative language education for a more sustainable world look like? What might be the implications for teachers and learners of moving towards intercultural communicative language education for sustainability?
With these issues and questions in mind, CERCLL invites language educators to reflect on how they could re-envision what they teach and how they teach it to meaningfully address these crises with the goal of building a sustainable world for all.
The organizers of ICC 2026 seek presentation proposals that focus upon these questions. Authors will be asked to choose from among the following strands:
- Theoretical and conceptual approaches
- Assessment
- Curricula, materials, and instructional approaches
- Technology
- Policy and institutional initiatives
- Exchanges (physical and virtual)
- Service/Community-based learning
- Professional learning of language educators
The Proposal Submission Deadline is July 21, 2025, 11:59 pm (Pacific Standard Time).
Types of Contributions
During the submission process, authors will indicate whether they would like to present their work in person or virtually. The conference organizers will contact prospective presenters about the final form of their presentation when acceptance status notifications are sent in September 2025; the organizers will consider authors’ preferences, but cannot guarantee that they will be honored.
A. In-person Presentations
Proposals for in-person presentations at the conference may be submitted as one of three types: 1) paper presentation; 2) symposium; 3) 3-hour workshop. Each of these is explained in more detail below.
1. Paper Presentations (25 minutes total: 20 minute presentation plus 5 minutes discussion) are best suited for reports on completed research or scholarly work on a topic related to one of the conference strands. Presenters should not read their papers, but rather present the main points of their work in an engaging manner. Paper sessions will be organized into sessions of four papers by strand.
2. Symposia (2 hours total: 90 minutes for presentations and 30 minutes for discussion) provide a venue for a group of presenters to propose a set of 3-5 papers based on a shared theme or topic related to one of the conference strands. The papers may present complementary aspects or contrasting perspectives. Total presentation time is limited to one hour and thirty minutes. Thirty minutes are allocated at the end to give presenters and symposium participants an opportunity to engage in extended dialogue.
3. Workshop Presentations (3 hours) are best suited for teaching or demonstrating particular procedures or techniques. These sessions should be structured so that some explanatory or introductory information is provided with ample time for audience interaction, participation, and involvement. Please include information about what participants will have achieved upon leaving the workshop, and details about the identity of the target audience.
B. Virtual Presentations
This format is intended for authors who know that they will be unable to attend the conference in person. Upon notification that their abstract for a virtual presentation has been accepted, author(s) will be given a date in later 2025 by which they must submit their recorded presentation to CERCLL (instructions for when and how to do so will be mailed with their proposal acceptance).
1. Virtual Paper Presentations (20 minutes maximum) are similar in content to in-person papers (above). Virtual presentations should consist of a video file with audio, 18-20 minutes long. The video should not be film of the author speaking, but rather a slideshow presentation with recorded voiceover. Multimedia and creative modes of presentation are encouraged. Presentations will be submitted to CERCLL in MP4 format, no larger than 80 MB. Further details (including deadline for recording submission) will be provided with acceptance emails.
2. Virtual Symposia consist of a group of recorded presentations, similar to the description of in-person symposia above.
3. Virtual Posters consist of a single image file, with a pre-recorded video (3-5 minutes) of the presenter explaining the topic.
Proposal Restrictions
No more than two proposals per person may be submitted; an author can be a primary presenter on only one proposal. Submitting more than two proposals will eliminate all proposals including that presenter from consideration. Submissions with similar titles and content will also be eliminated from consideration. Each proposal must have one lead presenter, and can have up to three secondary presenters. The only exception is a symposium, which can have two presenters per paper included in the symposium.
Requirements for Submission
All proposals must be submitted using the online form by the proposal submission deadline of July 21, 2025. Each proposal will need the following information: strand, title (maximum 75 characters including spaces), summary (maximum 350 characters including spaces) and abstract (maximum 3,000 characters including spaces and citations).
For symposia: submitters will be prompted for a title, summary and abstract for the symposium as a whole, as well as a title and summary for each paper included in the symposium (character counts as before). No identifying information should be included in the summaries and abstracts. Citations and references should not be included in the summary; if they are in the abstract, bibliographic information must be provided (included in the character count). The following information is required for each presenter: name, institution, institution location, presenter’s email address, phone number, and professional biography (350 characters maximum).
Dates and Deadlines
The Proposal Submission Deadline is July 21, 2025, 11:59 pm (Pacific Standard Time).
Acceptance status notifications will be sent via email by September 29, 2025. Presenters will need to confirm their attendance at the conference by October 17, 2025, and must register by a deadline given in their acceptance email.
Ready to submit a proposal? Do that here:
Questions? Contact CERCLL: cercll@arizona.edu.
This is the tenth iteration of the ICC conference organized by the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL), a Title VI Language Resource Center at the University of Arizona.
ICC 2025 is cosponsored by the College of Humanities, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) Program, Arizona International, Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), and Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at the University of Arizona; and by the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) at Pennsylvania State University, the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at the University of Minnesota, the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon, and the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.