Category Archives: News

Good news just before the holidays! The Netherlands’ taskforce for applied research (SIA) has awarded a KIEM grant for the project ‘Cultural Bridges: Enhancing Workplace Recruitment and Onboarding for Migrant Professionals in Dutch SMEs‘. The project will be conducted by my colleagues Shohreh Parham and Cansu Aslan at Amsterdam School of International Business (AMSIB), with support from Hafid Ballafkih (HvA Work Lab) and myself.

Through this initiative, we aim to create practical, employer-friendly solutions that enable Dutch SMEs to successfully onboard and keep migrant workers into their work environments. By reducing barriers to stable employment, it fosters social cohesion, economic resilience, and equity. The resulting tools and strategies help SMEs embrace diversity as a driver of innovation, ensuring underutilized talent contributes to sustainable growth and a more inclusive labor market. Our partners bring deep expertise and firsthand knowledge of migrant employment challenges in the Netherlands, ensuring solutions are relevant and impactful.

In september 2025, the project on intercultural chatbots has entered the next phase, funded by a NRO Comenius Fellowship. We will further develop the chatbots, and implement them into courses at Amsterdam School of International Business in spring 2026.

For a more detailed description, visit our project page:

https://www.hva.nl/projecten/2025/9/intercultural-chatbots

In 2007, as a newly minted PhD Candidate, I attended my first conference of the International Academy for Intercultural Research (IAIR) in Groningen, the Netherlands. Since then, I have participated in numerous IAIR conferences, served on several committees, and was elected as a board member of the academy for the period 2019-2023.

I consider the IAIR my ‘academic home’ and its diverse, international and multidisciplinary community has been a steady source of inspiration and support throughout my career as an intercultural scholar. I’m therefore very honored to have been named a Fellow of the IAIR.

I’m proud to have been awarded a Comenius Teaching Fellowship, by the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO). This grant will enable me to develop and implement a series of Intercultural Chatbots, AI-based teaching tools that enhance intercultural learning.

It is undeniable that generative AI are having a profound impact on higher education. While many challenges exist, we also believe that there is great, as-of-yet unrealized, potential for using these tools for enhancing students’ intercultural competence development.

The aim of this project is to develop and validate a new teaching tool that uses Intercultural Chatbots: AI-based conversational agents that can mimic distinct cultural communication styles. These chatbots will be implemented in intercultural education at AMSIB, allowing students to gain experience in intercultural communication, and reflect on how they respond to communication styles that are different from their own. Such experiences will provide new opportunities for enhancing students’ intercultural competences

The LLM-algorithms that lie at the heart of this project have been developed with support from the Center of Economic Transformation (CET), which funded the proof-of-concept. The Comenius Teaching Fellowship will enable us to take this project to the next level, by developing the interfaces which allow us to implement the chatbots in our education program, assessing their effectiveness at enhancing intercultural learning, and disseminating our findings with other educators in the Netherlands and beyond.

The Intercultural Chatbots project is a collaboration between experts in intercultural communication, generative AI and human-machine interactions, from Amsterdam School of International Business (AMSIB), Alphacrucis University College (Sydney, Australia), Erasmus University Rotterdam, and University of Amsterdam.

On Sept. 20th, we will host a Research Symposium on the topic of ‘Intercultural Competence in Higher Education’ at Amsterdam School of International Business (AMSIB). We will present state-of-the-art research on this theme, and provide an opportunity for networking and catching up with colleagues.

Our Keynote speaker will be Prof. dr. Lily Arasaratnam, of Alphacrucis College in Sydney, Australia.

Click here for more information: https://www.amsterdamuas.com/amsib/shared-content/events/events/2024/09/research-symposium-intercultural-competence-in-higher-education.html?origin=%2FyT197CJTjSdAP1RBigaxw

This week, all universities in the Netherlands are expressing concern about the upcoming budget cuts for higher education that have been proposed by the new national government, as well as policies to regulate the number of English-language study programs, and reduce the number of incoming international students.

In her yearly address at the opening of the academic year, Annelien Bredenoord, president of Erasmus University Rotterdam, cited our recent study that shows that internationalization provides benefits, also for students from the host society. The university press office summarizes the article here: https://www.eur.nl/eshcc/nieuws/internationale-studieomgeving-stimuleert-ruimdenkendheid-onder-nederlandse-studenten

Elsevier magazine (https://www.ewmagazine.nl/) just published the response of the Minister of Education, Eppo Bruins, to Bredenoord’s address. It can be found here: https://www.ewmagazine.nl/kennis/achtergrond/2024/09/onderwijsminister-eppo-bruins-wil-bezuinigingsklap-dempen-1429280/

Global citizenship remains a fuzzy and often contested term, especially when used in the context of higher education. In this new paper, Leonor Gaitán-Aguilar reviews and synthesizes the vast literature on this topic and provides directions on how to research intercultural learning and civic engagement in global academia.

This project is funded by the Community for Learning & Innovation (CLI) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, and supervised by Jeroen Jansz and myself.

My first foray into AI-based data analysis! Joao Goncalves, Pytrik Schafraad, Biyao Wu, and I used supervised machine-learning to study how organizations communicate about diversity on social media.

The validation of our digital tool, called Diversity Perspectives in Social Media (DivPSM) was just published in Public Relations Review. The algorithms are open source (https://github.com/joephofhuis/divpsm), so feel free use them in your own research, or contact me if you need more info.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2024.102431

In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, I developed a new online teaching module intercultural communication. The project was financially supported by the Community for Learning and Innovation (CLI) at Erasmus University. The module was taught by experienced trainers from RISBO

Together with Mijail Fugueroa, I conducted an evaluation study, to test whether the module was effective in raising students’ cultural intelligence, and who benefited the most. The results of our study have just been published (Spoiler: the training works!).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2023.101927

It was very cool to be back in my birthplace to provide a workshop at the Gemeente Delft (Municipality of Delft) on diversity in teams. Thanks, Mark Rothuizen, for the invitation. Also nice to see my former school building in the ‘Delfts Kwartet’: What used to be the Jan Vermeerschool is now the Vermeer Centre.