This activity encourages students to reflect on discrimination and how it can touch upon everyone through implicit or explicit processes. In this activity students first discuss their own experiences of discriminatory practices in their own environment and elsewhere. Then, through the series of tasks, they are gradually guided to analyse discourses of discrimination in the media (TV news and the Internet) by deconstructing images of otherness, which are often conveyed by specific language choices. The ultimate objective is to enable students to apply what has been presented and discussed within the study circle of the class to their own explorations of discriminatory events/texts/images in their own lives and communities, and in the context of their future study abroad.

This activity invites the students to explore the concept of ‘multiple identities’ and to consider how it is related to intercultural communication. This concept is considered fundamental in view of an experience abroad. In addition, terms such as ‘co-constructed’, ‘negotiated’, ‘ascribed’, ‘contested’ identities will be introduced at the beginning of the activity and then practised in the four tasks, in order to provide the students with the appropriate language to articulate the concepts introduced. It will be in the light of these concepts that other more common terms are reconsidered, namely those of ‘stereotype’, ‘prejudice’, ‘essentialism’, and ‘ethnocentrism’.