Conference Program

Contemporary cultural policies often frame intercultural competence as a measurable, individualized skill aligned with neoliberal and technocratic models of integration (Biesta, 2011). While these approaches aim to standardize inclusion, they tend to shift responsibility onto individuals and short-term projects, obscuring the structural asymmetries and epistemic injustices that shape cross-cultural encounters. As a result, interculturalism is frequently reduced to fragmented, project-based interventions rather than engaging with its broader political and institutional dimensions (Dervin, 2022; Milani, 2018).
This presentation argues that Intercultural and Transcultural Competence (ITC) should instead be understood as a dynamic, generative praxis: a relational process continually negotiated within conditions of institutional constraint and power imbalance. Drawing on the INTRACOMP project as its primary site of inquiry, the study examines how practitioners engage in the labor of “staying with tension”—specifically the friction between grassroots activism and bureaucratic survival.
Grounded in the INTRACOMP Manifesto for Cultural Democracy, the research adopts a post-qualitative, narrative methodology utilizing Story-Based Collective Enquiry. This approach foregrounds reflexivity and methodological reciprocity, resisting extractive research paradigms. Central to the theoretical framework is the concept of Transensus—an agonistic space where differing values are mutually acknowledged without forced consensus—shifting the focus from social integration toward the subjectification of the political actor.
Through the analysis of INTRACOMP’s diverse contexts—from the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, where Indigenous dance decolonizes research paradigms, to the Italian Third Sector, where cultural competence is embedded in informal community mechanisms—the paper conceptualizes the project as a “living infrastructure.” This site reveals how practitioners must navigate the "coloniality of care" to translate grassroots creativity into the quantifiable evaluation regimes required by international funding bodies.
The findings suggest that decolonial pedagogies must embrace the unfinished, processual nature of intercultural work. Rather than seeking technocratic closure, inclusive cultural practice depends on sustaining institutional fragility as a space for collective imagination. It concludes that cultural difference functions not as a problem to be managed, but as a democratic resource through which cultural democracy can be practically enacted.