Welcome back to the ICS Blog!

Since the success of WOW Festival, the ICS team have been thinking about new ways in which we can continue promoting intercultural exchange and encouraging international links across the city of Southampton.

On the evening of Thursday 5^th May, we trialled one of these ideas at the Art House Café in the city’s Cultural Quarter. Based on the idea of a ‘Language Café’, the Intercultural Café is a gathering of people from both within and outside the University of Southampton community in an informal, sociable café setting where participants are encouraged to engage in intercultural exchange. It will aim to provide a space for people to meet, chat and share information about different cultures. Whereas a ‘Language Café’ might tend to focus around the practice and sharing of foreign languages, the Intercultural Café will not require any previous language proficiency and will solely focus on the exchange of intercultural knowledge, experience and observations.

For this trial session, we used the theme of ‘Celebrations and Gatherings’ as a springboard to facilitate our discussions and ended up chatting about everything from weddings and water festivals, to carnival and Christmas. Although we were a small group of ten participants, everyone involved enjoyed the session and really felt that they not only had the opportunity to teach others about their cultural traditions, but also learnt a lot about celebrations and gatherings that take place around the world. A couple of comments we received were that it ‘was nice to meet new people and exchange stories’ and that is was great ‘to hear about diverse cultural experiences’.

Following the success of this session, we are hoping to run the Intercultural Café again in the coming weeks. Make sure you keep an eye on our Facebook page to check for announcements!

We would also like to take this opportunity to offer our thanks to the Art House Café for hosting the session in their fantastic Gallery Space.