Abstract
Communicating across cultural difference is a challenge for the mining industry as its attempts to gain social licence to operate in the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples. Industry organizations affirm their intention to respect communities and to develop mutually beneficial relationships, but because an understanding of culture is not a part of the mining engineer’s expertise, this goal cannot be fully realized. The undergraduate mining curriculum could address this deficiency through a critical study of culture and development of the dialogic communication skills associated with intercultural competence.
 Arguing that the epistemology of engineering is problematic in the cultural encounter, this paper examines, the ways in which disciplinary culture is transmitted and mechanisms for cultural change. With the objective of producing interculturally competent mining engineers, it outlines application of critical theories to deconstruct the hegemony of engineering knowledge and of communication theories to support a culturally-competent and effective approach to knowledges.
Highlights
The term social license to operate, a measure of social risk, reflects the quality of companycommunity relationships in the extractive industries
Because most mining projects occur on the traditional territories of culturally distinct indigenous peoples, management of social risk requires that mining engineers build respectful relationships across the cultural divide
Culture plays a role in conflict (Ting-Toomey, 1982; Avruch et al, 1991), including that associated with extractive projects (Kemp et al, 2010; Andrews et al, 2017)
Summary
Competent navigation of cultural difference is critical to the management of social risk in the extractive sector as conflict associated with resource projects is often the consequence of a clash of cultures, as the extractive and growth values of Western, capitalist culture collide with the relational, stewardship values of indigenous cultures. Arguing that because most new mineral deposits are located on the traditional territories of indigenous peoples, intercultural competence should be a learning outcome of undergraduate mining education, a theoretical framework for a curriculum to support development of intercultural competence’s skills and attitudes within the undergraduate engineering curriculum is presented
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