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Revised version of a plenary paper presented on 29 January 2010 at the Second International Conference on the Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
1.
Introduction
The organizers of the Second International Conference on the Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence at the University of Arizona posed a challenge in their conference program as follows:
Intercultural competence is [the ability] 'to see relationships between different cultures - both internal and external to a society - and to mediate, that is interpret each in terms of the other, either for themselves or for other people'. It also encompasses the ability 'to critically or analytically understand that one's own and other cultures' perspective is culturally determined rather than natural.' (Byram 2000: 10). Globalization, having brought individuals in contact with one another at an unprecedented scale, has also brought forth a general challenge to traditionally recognized boundaries of nation, language, race, gender, and class. For those living within this rapidly changing social landscape, intercultural competence - as defined by Michael Byram above - is a necessary skill, and the cultivation of such intercultural individuals falls on the shoulders of today's educators. They should provide students with opportunities to help them define and design for themselves their 'third place' or 'third culture', a sphere of interculturality that enables language students to take an insider's view as well as an outsider's view on both their first and second cultures. It is this ability to find/establish/adopt this third place that is at the very core of intercultural competence.
I would like to explore in this paper the nature of the challenge presented above. How can one mediate, that is, interpret one's own and the other's culture each in terms of the other, if at the same time one's interpretation is culturally determined? Where, then, is mediation located? I wish to re-visit the notion of third culture I proposed more than 15 years ago (Kramsch 1993) in the light of the explosion of global communication technologies and the increased mobility caused by the large scale migrations of the last ten years. I stake out briefly the nature of the challenge, and suggest that the notion of third...