Abstract
This chapter explores how culturally diverse environments create unique conditions for greater self-reflexivity and self-knowledge through the foreignness and strangeness of cultural others. Relying on a dynamic vision of culture and drawing on the psychoanalytical concept of the Freudian uncanny, the chapter explores how individuals manage strangeness in intercultural encounters. The uncanny describes a simultaneous sense of familiarity and strangeness associated with anxiety, disorientation, and confrontation with the unexpected. Individuals in intercultural encounters must negotiate differences while ascribing meaning to social situations, making cultural encounters quintessentially uncanny moments. Students in international and intercultural teams often collaborate in unfamiliar surroundings within conditions that elicit a fleeting sensation of the strange, discomforting, or simply weird. Generally speaking, conceptualizing the uncanny helps us engage in a broader societal conversation on diversity, identity, intercultural relations, and perspective taking that is increasingly needed in our currently polarized world.