ICC 2026 Plenaries

To view the plenary presentation abstracts, click the presentation title below each speaker’s biographical statement.

Dr. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, where she leads transformative conversations about education in complex times. A former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education, Vanessa has more than 100 published articles and has worked extensively across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, global citizenship, critical literacies, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergency. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism, one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and one of the designers of the course Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability, available at UVic through Continuing Studies. Her latest work, Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That is Not Really About AI, co-authored with Aiden Cinnamon Tea (an emergent intelligence), explores AI as a mirror and metaphor for human systems and invites readers to rethink relationality amidst planetary crises.
 
When Intercultural Competence Isn’t Enough: Hospicing Modernity and the Limits of Translation

Abstract

As ecological, social, and psychological instabilities intensify globally, intercultural work is increasingly called upon to mediate not just between different cultural perspectives, but between different onto-epistemologies—radically divergent understandings of what a person is, what knowledge is, and how reality works. In this keynote, Vanessa Andreotti invites participants to consider the limits of conventional intercultural frameworks when facing systemic collapse, historical harm, and relational breakdown. What happens when translation fails—not due to linguistic limits, but because the foundational assumptions of one worldview erase, misrecognize, or metabolize another?

 
Building on over two decades of work in education, Indigenous-settler relations, and decolonial thought, this talk explores how we might navigate interculturality when shared sensemaking is fragile, and when the terrain includes grief, complicity, and the crumbling of modern certainties. Rather than offering new techniques, Andreotti proposes a shift in orientation: from the pursuit of mutual understanding to a deeper capacity for bearing witness, being unsettled, and becoming compost for more generative relations.
 
Participants will be invited to reflect on their roles not just as mediators of culture, but as stewards of complexity in a time when many of our dominant paradigms—including those of intercultural competence itself—are losing their coherence. In the face of this, how might we learn to hold space for what exceeds us, including the impossibility of resolution?
Dr. Irina Golubeva is Professor of Intercultural Communication and Linguistics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA). Her main research interests include the internationalization of higher education and the development of multilingual awareness, empathy, and intercultural citizenship. She teaches and publishes in four languages: English, Hungarian, Russian, and Spanish. She is co-editor of From Principles to Practice in Education for Intercultural Citizenship and Intercultural Learning in Language Education and Beyond: Evolving Concepts, Perspectives and Practices, and co-author of Intercultural Competence for College and University Students: A Global Guide for Employability and Social Change. She also co-hosts the acclaimed webinar series, Decentering Intercultural Research and Practice, which brings together international scholars and practitioners to critically reimagine the field. She is deeply committed to non-profit work and served for seven years as Vice-President of the European Association of Teachers. In 2020, she received the title of “UMBC Innovation Fellow” for her contribution to fostering intercultural dialogue on campus and enhancing students’ engagement in Internationalization at Home. Most recently, she was elected a Fellow of the International Academy for Intercultural Research.
 
Intercultural Communication in Action: Exploring Conflict Styles and Fostering Empathy through Virtual Exchange

Abstract

In a world marked by growing polarization and global tensions, the ability to navigate conflict with empathy and intercultural awareness is essential for fostering global citizenship and sustainable communities. In this plenary, Irina Golubeva shares how a virtual exchange project served as a transformative pedagogical space for undergraduate students at a U.S. minority-serving university to critically reflect on their conflict communication styles and empathy.

Grounded in intercultural education and conflict theory, the study combined assessment tools with guided reflective writing, inviting students to engage in a process of discovery through telecollaboration and intercultural dialogue. Participation in the project’s activities challenged students to explore their conflict styles and empathy through embodied, relational, and emotional realities.

Findings from qualitative and quantitative data indicate that participants developed greater self-awareness, intercultural sensitivity, and a strengthened ability to empathize and intervene if someone was treated in an unjust or discriminatory way. This study highlights the transformative potential of intercultural virtual exchange in advancing sustainable intercultural communicative language education.

Irina Golubeva argues that such pedagogical interventions—by providing a safe space for students to engage in critical self-reflection on their lived experiences—help cultivate transformative dispositions: empathy, perspective-taking, and intercultural awareness. These outcomes demonstrate how intercultural virtual exchange can directly support SDG 4.7’s call for global citizenship and education for sustainable development.

Dr. Ricardo Römhild is a teacher educator and scholar in the field of English language education. His work revolves around language education for global citizenship and sustainability – particularly socio-environmental justice, decoloniality, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and pedagogies of (critical) hope. With a background as a teacher at secondary and tertiary levels in Germany and the USA, these perspectives and questions inform his work both in research and in teaching at university and in teacher workshops. Ricardo has published various articles, books, and edited volumes. Among other projects, he currently works on a monograph with Palgrave Macmillan on Language Pedagogy of Hope (to be published in 2027), the co-edited (with William Gaudelli) Elgar Handbook of Global Citizenship Education, as well as a co-edited volume (with Frauke Matz) on language education for sustainable development.

Building Cultures of Hope: On the Transformative Power of Critical Hope and Eco-cosmopolitanism in Cultural Learning

Abstract

In this time of crisis, ‘education as usual’ does not suffice. Hence, it is time to rethink conventional educational approaches and frameworks. Given the educational task at hand, as specified by SDG 4.7, all education efforts need to be re-evaluated critically – this includes cultural learning in language education.

This presentation envisions language education for sustainable development and global citizenship as pedagogy of hope. In this context, Ricardo Römhild discusses an alternative approach to cultural learning, one informed by eco-cosmopolitanism and critical hope.

He will contextualize language education as an integral, albeit unreferenced, element of SDG 4.7, and connect it to broader forms of liberatory, critical, and transformative education. In particular, he will discuss Freirean critical pedagogy as well as eco-cosmopolitanisms as potentially fertile constructs that can inform guiding principles for language education for sustainability and global citizenship. At the heart of this discussion sits one of the central learning objectives of language education, the ability to participate in global discourses, which will be revisited vis-à-vis the social aims of language education.

Building on these intersections of critical pedagogy, eco-cosmopolitanism, and cultural learning in language education, the presentation will explore the concept of critical hope as a potential way of empowering students to envision better, more just and sustainable futures and thus develop communicative agency rather than paralyze them through fear. He will discuss these concepts and principles in relation to his research as well as his experience as an educator both at secondary schools and at university.