ATS2199 Intercultural encounters: Communication, misunderstandings and conflict resolution

People use skills in communication – especially language – to achieve goals in critical areas of life: the workplace, social life (family, relationships), study and leisure. In such settings, successful achievement of shared goals requires contributors to have the right knowledge and competency.

In this intensive unit, we learn about how this can break down, and explore examples where the communicative fit between individual and group falls apart. We are interested in situations where individuals and groups – for diverse reasons – might fail to achieve their goals due to failures in communicative competency.

This is a very important question in many ways. Individuals with ‘inadequate’ communicative skills can easily be excluded from group contexts, with harmful effects for the individual and the group. In this unit, we study these exclusions, and ways of overcoming them. And we go a step further to learn how groups can respond to these problems in order to improve their environments as fields for inclusive communication. In other words, we examine solutions.

The course provides a special perspective on ‘intercultural’. It is common to think that cultural differences follow from the diversity of group identities. But here, we consider cultural difference as borders that emerge through conflicts between different communicative competencies. Modules include: 1) Public space and its effect on communication between youth; 2) The use of assistive robots to overcome the communicative deficits associated with the Autism Spectrum; 3) Linguistic meaning and social practices, and; 4) breakdowns in workplace communication due to bias or prejudice.