Details of the Initiative
Kiernan-Seminar is seminar in the School of Business Administration (SBA) that focuses on Intercultural Communication. Intercultural communication is concerned with developing communication among individuals, groups, and societies in order to build global understanding and promote equality. It is about breaking down the barriers that lead to inequalities and discrimination that are also ultimately responsible for poverty, war, and environmental destruction. Developing Intercultural Competence in order to address discrimination and inequality for our seminar includes learning about these issues academically. Seminar participants research such issues and present them in class as well as at the annual SBA presentation contest and go on to write dissertations on these topics during the final year. At the same time, we aim to begin intercultural communication in the classroom. We are lucky to have had many international students in the seminar and currently have students from Japan, China, and Korea, those with parents from Britain, the US and Vietnam, as well as a student from Ukraine. Usually, the first task in our seminar is having each student present on the culture and hometown of another student in the class. We take this a step further at iMeetings. iMeeting stands for “International Meeting”. They are social events which provide opportunities for international students to share something about their country and culture with other students as well as provide a space for students interested in intercultural communication on campus to communicate, have fun together, and share ideas. In our first iMeeting after pandemic restrictions were relaxed Tania, the student from Ukraine introduced her country. In contrast to the war-torn images we see on the news, Tania shared beautiful images of the largest nation in Europe. The first step in regrowing our iMeeting community.
