Clara Sarmento, coordinator and researcher at the Center for Intercultural Studies (CEI), is the author of the chapter “When Interculturality and Business Meet: A critical turn in Portuguese higher education” included in the recently published The Routledge Handbook of Critical Interculturality in Communication and Education (568 pages, ISBN 9781032815732), coordinated by Fred Dervin, from the University of Helsinki.
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The Routledge Handbook of Critical Interculturality in Communication and Education is the first book entirely dedicated to the concept of critical interculturality, reflecting on what the adjective ‘critical’ means for research and teaching in interdisciplinary studies. The book consists of 35 chapters, including a comprehensive introduction and conclusion. Its aim is to present a current and specialized debate on critical interculturality and to help readers understand what the topic entails in contemporary global and local contexts, beyond mainstream studies and pedagogical practices. The chapters question the use of these concepts in different languages in the debate on interculturality, drawing on the most recent research produced in different parts of the world.
Clara Sarmento contributes chapter 24, “When Interculturality and Business Meet: A critical turn in Portuguese higher education”, where she analyses an experience of conceptualizing and teaching critical interculturality in Portuguese higher education, namely in the Master’s Degree in Intercultural Studies for Business, at ISCAP-P.PORTO. By looking at interculturality as movement, communication and encounter, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the chapter analyses how students can be invited to question the pragmatic impact of culture on the economy, politics and society, while being aware that acts of intercultural communication do not mediate monolithic cultures but rather the individual and contextualized understanding of these cultures.