Research and Publication by Communication Faculty in East Africa: A Challenge to the Global Community of Communication Scholars

Abstract

Few African scholars publish articles in top journals, present papers at prestigious conferences, or produce monographs that influence the direction of the field of communication as a whole. We explored hindrances to scholarly productivity in East Africa by administering questionnaires to faculty members at five leading communication departments and conducting in-depth interviews with department heads, librarians, and other senior faculty members. Results indicated that an increase in institutional priority on research and publication makes this an opportune juncture for collaboration with the international scholarly community to facilitate research and publication activity by African academics.     

Discursive negotiations of Kenyan LGBTI identities: Cautions in cultural humility

This study identifies and analyzes sites of discursive negotiation regarding sexual and gender minority identities in Kenya. A demonizing master narrative of homosexuality is constructed through cultural myths prevalent in Kenyan media yet challenged by claims of innate identity through strategic essentialism and glocalized naming practices. Using participant observation and creative focus group methodologies with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersex community members and journalists in Nairobi, Kenya this research project demonstrates the necessity of cultural humility while addressing contemporary absences in the study of queer identities in intercultural scholarship and communication research within African contexts.     

Performing Difference: Repetition in Context

Abstract

In this essay, I sketch a performative, constitutive theory of difference that avoids the major trappings of this discussion in current communication scholarship. Building from Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler, I argue that by focusing on difference in intercultural communication scholarship we can, as a discipline, create more complex understandings of people in cultural contexts. I first examine how difference has been written in communication scholarship. Second, I offer a reading of Deleuze and Butler who, together, provide the grounding for seeing the repetition of difference as political and contingent ontology. I conclude by examining an everyday context, showing how intercultural communication scholarship can benefit from this kind of analysis.     

The Rhetorics of Racial Power: Enforcing Colorblindness in Post-Apartheid Scholarship on Race

This article examines the reproduction of colorblindness discourse in selected post-1994 South African studies in economics, education, literature, philosophy, and sociology. It argues that the presence of dominant racial ideologies in this scholarship is emblematic of an active investment in maintaining racialized privileges. As it illustrates some of the rhetorical mechanisms that inform the articulation of colorblindness discourse at large, it shows that unpacking colorblind rhetoric is itself necessary if we are to make sense of the research emphases, arguments, logics, and findings of a significant body of South African scholarship on race published since the advent of democratic rule.     

(Re)conceptualizing Intercultural Communication in a Networked Society

We offer four theses about how intercultural communication is altered in a digitally networked era. Digital media shape intercultural communication by (1) producing new public fora capable of (2) hosting rich, multimodal “spaces” of contact on (3) a scale of many-to-many communication that (4) challenges traditional modes of representation.     

Virtual Cosmopolitanism: Constructing Third Cultures and Transmitting Social and Cultural Capital Through Social Media

Increasingly, individuals interested in intercultural communication can turn to computer-mediated communication (CMC), particularly social media, to discursively construct hybridized cultures. This essay examines how CMC can facilitate virtual cosmopolitanism and virtual third cultures by reviewing current literature on virtual third culture spaces and ethnographic data exploring virtual cosmopolitanism.     

Attending to the “face of the other” in intercultural communication: Thinking and talking about difference,identity, and ethics

This essay contributes to the discussions in intercultural communication scholarship on key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges in today's world through the ethical framework of Emmanuel Levinas and his discussion of “absolute otherness” that informs and expands the dialogue on interculturality, cultural humility, and ethics. Levinas's discussion of “absolute otherness” aims to preserve difference—the otherness of the other—by asserting the ethical relation prior to the ontological relation and carries significant communicative implications in terms of the relation of the self and the other as well as making sense of difference and identity, and offers a new way of talking about these issues in the field of communication studies, specifically in intercultural communication. An illustration of attending to the other beyond reduction to the same is offered through a pedagogical application of the Levinasian framework in the intercultural communication class.     

Connecting Community Voices: Using a Latino/a Critical Race Theory Lens on Environmental Justice Advocacy

Abstract

This study examines the contested space of environmental inequity and demonstrates how engaged intercultural communication research can be used to put forth seldom heard cultural environmental meaning systems. In an attempt to bridge ecojustice–environmentalist divides, we use Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) to understand and promote practices of Hispanic communities enacting environmental justice and cultural activism. We also exemplify the value of an explicit focus on the role of race in environmental issues for communication scholarship.     

Defining and Communicating What “Intercultural” and “Intercultural Communication” Means to Us

In order to engage in our larger discussion, we needed to share our definitions, framings, and theorizings of what “intercultural” and “intercultural communication” mean to us and how we inflect these based on our own experiences, identities, and perspectives. Discussants break down how they understand the notion of “intercultural” behind commonly used and circulated terms in our scholarship.     

Extinction,genealogy, and institutionalization: Challenging normative values in popular endangered language discourse

News accounts of the recent discovery of Hawai’i Sign Language tell of the identification of a new language—one nearing extinction—and, ultimately, the happy ending of language preservation. By applying postcolonial and disability studies scholarship to the news coverage, we reframe marginalized languages through an alternative logic. We examine the narratives of extinction, genealogy, and institutionalization that underlie both colonial and ableist discourses in the articles. We argue that popular conceptions of endangered language and language purity obscure how normative values are applied to language communities and institutionalization, often at the expense of those very communities.     

Theorizing Communication Orientations of Privilege: How White Discourses (De) Construct Australian Aboriginals

We conducted a discourse analysis of Australians' conversations about race, exploring communication that (re)produces and decenters whiteness. We identified 23 communication practices, organized into four orientations (unity, separation, monologue, and dialogue), describing how those with power talk about those without power and (fail to) balance tensions between similarity and difference. Orientations of unity, monologue, and separation serve antidialogic functions by obstructing transformative thinking, de-legitimizing Aboriginal experiences, and reifying whiteness. Findings suggest it is possible, but rare, for individuals to engage in intercultural dialogue about race. Understanding communication orientations of privilege is a step towards facilitating talk that disrupts whiteness.     

A Multimodal Approach to Identity: Theorizing the Self through Embodiment,Spatiality, and Temporality

Abstract

This article problematizes the theoretical assumption of communication-as-symbolic that delimits the way identity is theorized. I argue that deconstructing identity requires moving beyond the symbolic construction of social categories, and instead focusing on how a perceptual and embodied subject is constituted through communication. Informed by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenologically driven approach to critical inquiry, I present a multimodal approach that reveals how perceptual subjectivity and the reflexive body are constituted within, and constitutive of, the symbolic mechanisms of social construction. Utilizing various examples pertinent to intercultural communication, I theorize cultural identity through the perspective of communication-as-embodied.     

Police-Civilian Interaction,Compliance, Accommodation,and Trust in an Intergroup Context: International Data

Abstract

Prior cross-cultural research has produced models of police-civilian interaction that highlight the effect of officers’ communication accommodation and reported trust in police on attitudinal outcomes. The present study, conducted in Korea, Japan, Guam, and Canada and involving 684 university students, continued this program of research by testing a theoretical model exploring the influence of perceived police officer communication accommodation and reported trust in police on attitudes about compliance with police requests. Findings indicated that across study locations perceived police officer communication accommodation predicted trust in police which, in turn, predicted attitudes about compliance with police requests.     

Weaving Webs of Faith: Examining Internet Use and Religious Communication Among Chinese Protestant Transmigrants

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between new media use and international communication that addresses religiosity and affirms users’ standpoints occupied by transmigrants that are marginalized in dominant societal structures. Drawing from focus group interviews among recent Chinese Protestant immigrants in Toronto, we argue that new media “use” is broadened by users’ cultural appropriation in situational contexts to include proxy internet access as accommodative communication given the political and legal constraints in their home country. Chinese transmigrants not only reinterpret and alter semantic associations that spiritualize the internet, they also engage in innovative strategies that involve the intertwining of offline and online communicative modes. These include deploying complementary media forms or communicating in codes that are mutually understood among participating members to facilitate intragroup networking among Chinese religious communities. Implications are discussed with regard to the importance of cultural norms and situational context in shaping mediated international communication.     

The Regional Dimension: How Regional Media Systems Condition Global Climate-Change Communication

Abstract

Global perspectives and national approaches have dominated studies of climate-change communication, reflecting the global nature of climate change as well as the traditional research focus on national media systems. In the absence of a global public sphere, however, transnational issue attention is largely dependent on regional media systems, yet the role this regional dimension plays has been largely overlooked. This article presents a comparative study of climate-change coverage in three geo-cultural regions, The Middle East, Scandinavia, and North America, and explores the link between global climate-change communication and regional media systems. It finds that regional variations in climate-change communication carry important communicative implications concerning perceptions of climate change's relevance and urgency.     

The Immigrant Experience: Differences in Acculturation,Intercultural Sensitivity,and Cognitive Flexibility Between the First and Second Generation of Latino Immigrants

This study tested the assertion that intercultural communication competence develops as a result of intercultural adaptation. Surveys were collected from a sample of 216 first- and second-generation Latino immigrants in the US. It was predicted that first-generation immigrants would score higher on cognitive flexibility, intercultural sensitivity, and biculturalism than second-generation immigrants because of their direct exposure to two cultures. These hypotheses were not supported, as second-generation immigrants scored higher on all three measures. As predicted, bicultural orientation was correlated with both cognitive flexibility and intercultural sensitivity. The findings are discussed with attention to immigrants' acculturation strategies.     

“Land is Our Mother”: Alternative Meanings of Development in Subaltern Organizing

Abstract

Land grab has emerged as an increasingly key component of neoliberal frames of development, resulting in large-scale displacement of rural populations. The discourses of farming communities living on lands threatened by these neoliberal reforms reflect an alternative rationality around land, and critique the dominant understanding of development by foregrounding local cultural meanings. Based on a culture-centered engagement with a subaltern movement opposing land grab in Singur, India, this research informs participatory development communication and offers alternative meanings of development.     

Transfiguring identity: Social relationships and intercultural communication between foreign “children” and Japanese “parents”

This paper examines how intercultural communication and interpersonal relationships between Japanese “parents” and African “children” are capable of destabilizing status quo notions of identification. Using qualitative ethnographic data, this paper demonstrates how intercultural interactions unfold in ways that engender new forms of sociality, which underscore the diversifying nature of majority–minority relationships in Japan. Drawing on theoretical insights from applied linguistics and communications studies, this paper suggests that the material products of these relationships warrant increased scholarly attention because they are capable of positing compelling challenges to existing understandings of identity, as well as to the ways various groups conceptualize themselves in relation to others.     

Honest Evaluation in the Academy

Minerva - Honesty is widely understood as an ethical imperative in science and scholarship. This article examines the operation of this ethic in an area crucial to academe but which has not...     

Black is not beautiful: Persistent messages and the globalization of “white” beauty in African women’s magazines

ABSTRACT

This study examines the representation of African women in an era of globalization. Using Dyer’s concept of whiteness and a visual content analysis approach, this study focuses on how four influential African magazines portrayed African women from 2010 to 2015. Findings suggest that African magazines’ portrayal of beauty is not representative of diverse body sizes, skin tones, and hair types common among African women. Rather, magazines represent an image of beauty rooted in white/western/Eurocentric beauty standards.