TU Chemnitz : ICC
Chair of Intercultural Communication
Why study a programme of Intercultural Communication?
In an increasingly globalized world an understanding of cultural difference und intercultural communication is of vital importance in everyday life. With our Programme we contribute to this matter while enabling our students to become specialists working in various occupational fields in which intercultural competence is at the core of professional practice such as in institutions of higher education, civil services, and international business companies. We offer interdisciplinary and modularized scientific and practice-oriented courses and provide theoretical and empirical knowledge for an understanding of cultural differences, intercultural encounters, and trans-/international cooperation.
We are a committed team which currently consists of Andrea Bogner as Chair of the programme. Maik Arnold, Corina Markert, Steffi Nothnagel, and Arne Weidemann are also part of the team.
Our Teaching Philosophy
Learning how to conduct empirical research enables our students to acquire a good understanding of the complexity of cultural phenomena and contexts of intercultural communication. In addition, this approach equips students with the ability to assess critically the adequacy of mainstream scientific concepts. Therefore, we encourage them to contribute to ongoing scientific discussions on the basis of their own scientific projects. Moreover, we strive to train our students’ scientific, methodological, and methodical skills, especially in so-called “research internship” seminars, and excursions.
Furthermore, we employ an interdisciplinary perspective that includes psychology, sociology, philosophy, history, political sciences, economics, media communication, linguistics, and foreign languages. These courses are offered by colleagues from other departments as well as distinguished lecturers from other academic institutions and experienced specialists in the field.
Our teaching philosophy aims at qualifying our students for achieving the following objectives:
- familiarity with social and cultural theories (social and cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, sociolinguistics, history);
- ability to assess theoretical approaches and use them in their own work;
- familiarity with methodological tools of interpretative research and qualitative methods;
- general knowledge within distinguished domains of intercultural practice;
- ability to plan and conduct independently qualitative empirical research projects;
- designing and evaluation of intercultural trainings, intercultural coaching and mediation;
- acquisition of research based intercultural communication skills and intercultural competence in order to prepare our students for working in various fields in which intercultural encounters and cultural differences is a crucial factor of everyday experience.
