Faculty of Humanities

School of International and Intercultural Communication

In 2014 the School of International and Intercultural Communication was founded as a joint project of those three departments of the Ruhr University Bochum, TU Dortmund, and the University of Duisburg-Essen concerned with the field of communication, media, and journalism studies.

SIIC aims to deepen the relationships of the institutes involved in research and teaching and intends to strongly internationalise the UA Ruhr by offering a platform for a structured PhD programme for dissertation projects with an explicit focus on international and/or intercultural research issues. At the UDE, SIIC is located at the chair of Communication Studies. Prof. Jens Loenhoff supervises the dissertation of SIIC fellow Michele Gonelli M.A. on Somali Diaspora members as unofficial Development Agents and Bourgeois Values Remitters in their Country of Origin. The study investigates communication practices and transfers of informal developmental aid of Somali diaspora members in Germany, England, and Italy, by which in Somalia different processes of social change are stimulated. The research design intends to reconstruct spontaneous dynamics or bottom-bottom processes, which have been widely overlooked up to now. These processes are not effected by institutional and professional development projects and are usually below the threshold of what is perceived as development communication.