Our Role as Intercultural Scholars,Practitioners, Activists,and Teachers in Addressing These Key Intercultural Urgencies,Issues, and Challenges

As the finale, the participating scholars connect their discussion of key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges to our role as intercultural scholars and the pathways for engagement. We all inhabit different and multiple roles for addressing and confronting such urgencies—as researchers, practitioners, activists, teachers, and community members with macro and micro modes of agency, influence, and impact. Discussants grapple with how to envision these roles in contemporary society and actuate meaningful change for multiple constituencies and communities around us.     

Introducing the Discussion and One Another

Over a month-long period, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication hosted an online discussion among 11 intercultural scholars across and outside of the discipline in response to four key questions. Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Rona Halualani, facilitated the discussion and introduced the question prompts. The goal was to create a vibrant, interactive dialogue about definitional framings of intercultural scholarship and their views of key urgencies, issues, and challenges in today's intercultural world. This section features the introduction of the discussion and of the scholar discussants themselves.     

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.     

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.     

Culture,Communication, and Peacebuilding: A Reflexive Multi-Dimensional Contextual Framework

Abstract

This article argues that intercultural communication scholars should play a central role in advancing the study and practice of peacebuilding. A reflexive, multi-dimensional and contextualized framework for viewing peacebuilding is proposed, with a focus on personal, relational, and structural dimensions. Three topical areas—community engagement, intercultural dialogue, and alliance building—are used to illustrate the framework and point to possibilities for additional research and development. Seven strategies for applying this framework in the complex arena of intractable conflicts are proposed and described.     

Navigating with the Stars: Critical Qualitative Methodological Constellations for Critical Intercultural Communication Research

This collaborative essay seeks to chart new methodological pathways for intercultural scholars with a specific focus on Critical Race Theory and Decolonizing and Indigenous Research Methodologies; Activist/Engaged Methodologies; and Performative Methodologies. Each section begins from our own researcher subjectivity, then outlines the constellation within the development of Critical Intercultural Communication (CIC); identifies the constellation's methodological commitments, thematics, and concerns; highlights key exemplars; and raises key questions. At the end of the essay, we explore through a dialogic performance the larger implications that these methodological constellations hold for CIC as a field.     

White Innocence Heroes: Recovery,Reversals, Paternalism,and David Duke

Abstract

For over a decade, critical scholars have exposed antiracist white heroes in popular discourse who reproduce white innocence, superiority, and privilege. This essay exposes claims of antiracist white heroics by former Klansman and Nazi sympathizer, David Duke. Critical analysis of Duke's letter to the editor, published 11 days before his Louisiana State Senate victory in 1989, reveals that Duke used implicit whiteness strategies of mythic recovery to justify his infamous civil rights reversals and white paternalism to rescue blacks from welfare and whites from affirmative action by restoring rugged individualism. Duke's rhetoric models ways for whites to sanitize personal and cultural histories of white supremacy, while reproducing white privilege. The recovery of white masculine heroes and rugged individualism myths is also found in the 2008 McCain-Palin presidential campaign. Critical analysis of such rhetoric challenges our scholarly knowledge about whiteness and exposes persistent constructions of white innocence.     

Thawing the North: Mostly Martha as a German-Italian Eatopia

Abstract

The establishment of the European Union, reunification of Germany, and Germany's extension of dual citizenship to immigrant minorities provided challenges to the country's understanding of itself as a nation. In negotiating these changes, debates on citizenship frequently centered on definitions of German culture. Using the concept of Leitkultur (guiding culture), conservatives argued that Germany should reject multiculturalism and stem immigration. This essay analyzes discourses on cultural policy in Germany through a contextual and textual analysis of the film Mostly Martha. In its alignment with aesthetic conventions of the art house food film, Mostly Martha participates in the debate on cultural citizenship and embodies changes in the German film industry that have moved German cinema toward increased commercialism. The film's main character, Martha, is transformed through an intercultural relationship and a trip to Italy. We argue that the film's citation of this well-known tradition of traveling south to redeem oneself and its treatment of ethnic “Otherness” engages in the Leitkultur debate and participates in the transition from national German to transnational cinema. Through the utopian treatment of Italian food, the film fetishizes cultural difference and reaffirms fixed constructs of nation and gender, thereby avoiding an explicitly politicized engagement with intercultural citizenship and identity.     

Intercultural Interaction at a Multicultural University: Students' Definitions and Sensemakings of Intercultural Interaction

Abstract

This essay examines how racially or ethnically different students define, make sense of, and evaluate intercultural interaction at the multicultural university. Eighty qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with university students of varied backgrounds. These interview sessions access students' definitions, sensemakings, and experiences of on-campus intercultural interaction as it has played out in their lives. The findings demonstrate that interviewees equate intercultural interaction with being present in demographically diverse settings. Moreover, this study reveals that definitions and sensemakings of intercultural interaction vary among interviewees primarily based on their racial or ethnic background. Latino/a, Black/African American, White/European American, and Asian American interviewees define and make sense of intercultural interactions in culturally specific ways and in relation to their historical experiences.     

Contextual Negotiation of Cultural Identifications and Relationships: Interview Discourse with Palestinian,Israeli, and Palestinian/Israeli Young Women in a U.S. Peace-Building Program

Abstract

An integration of critical and interpretive perspectives frames the analysis of interview discourse from participants in a U.S. peace-building dialogue program during 1997–1998. Israeli, Palestinian, and Palestinian/Israeli identified participants’ discourse reveals that they negotiate multiple and contextually contingent cultural identifications, and that the context both enables and constrains their relationships with each other. Discursive themes demonstrate the complexity and struggle in which participants position themselves and exercise levels of agency, and negotiate their cultural and intercultural relationships. The findings of the study substantiate calls by scholars and practitioners to incorporate contextual factors such as history, politics, social hierarchies, and agency into research and training models of intergroup dialogue.     

Language Convergence and Meaning Divergence: A Theory of Intercultural Communication

Abstract

Meaning lies at the core of intercultural communication. The ways in which meanings are made and the differences in meanings form a core problematic for intercultural communication. Yet intercultural communication theorists have yet to systematically explore the processes by which language and meanings converge and diverge within and across particular cultural milieus. The goal of the present analytical essay is to move the theory of language convergence/meaning divergence (LC/MD) into the intercultural communication realm. LC/MD processes discussed in the analysis include language convergence, meaning divergence through meaning clusters and meaning fragments, and the illusion of shared meanings. To illustrate ways in which LC/MD can be utilized by intercultural communication scholars, cults and morality as foreign policy are analyzed.     

Commemorative places,political spaces: Virginia Indians,the Jamestown Quadricentennial,and the quest for sovereignty

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the cross-cultural communication strategies deployed by a coalition of indigenous tribes in Virginia to leverage the Quadricentennial commemoration of the founding at Jamestown in support of their sovereignty campaign. The tensions between Jamestown’s mythos as the “birthplace of democracy” and the natives’ historical and contemporary lived experiences, combined with the national and international attention focused on the events, constructed the 400th anniversary “celebrations” as a compelling location for social action. The coalition employed intercultural communicative practices—particularly cross-cultural dialogue and negotiation—as means of mobilizing these tensions to renegotiate their relationship with the federal government, illustrating the intersection of intercultural communication, memory, and identity.     

Communication and identity management in a globally-connected classroom: An online international and intercultural learning experience

Though global classrooms are designed to expose students to varied cultural knowledges and experiences, how students consider and display their own identities in cross-cultural exchange has yet to be fully interrogated. This study focuses on U.S. college students who participated in a series of online conversations with learners in Singapore. Grounded in Goffman's sociological work and based on Hecht's communication theory of identity, this article focuses on students’ conceptions of themselves relative to others, and perceptions of identity work in cross-cultural conversations. Limitations tied to this project and avenues for future research on intercultural communication classroom practice are considered.     

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.     

Neoliberalism,Nationalism, and Intercultural Communication: A Critical Analysis of a Japan's Neoliberal Nationalism Discourse under Globalization

Abstract

This paper attempts to draw implications of neoliberalism for intercultural communication by critically analyzing a Japanese neoliberal nationalism discourse. In January 2000, a governmental report proposed adopting English as an official language of Japan. Utilizing the notion of representation as a methodological lens for the analysis, this essay first examines how Japanese culture and communication, which have played key roles in asserting Japanese “uniqueness” along with the Japanese language, are redefined in the report. This essay then investigates how Japan's relations with Asia and the West—two significant discursive “Others” for constructing Japan's identity—are depicted in the text and situate the representation of Japanese culture and communication in the discursive triad for further contextualizing the analysis.     

Ontological violence: Catherine Malabou on plasticity,performativity, and writing the feminine

ABSTRACT

Catherine Malabou's opinion of non-essentialist models of gender identity and art is unambiguous: in her words, they are ‘catastrophic’ to women and to artists (Malabou [2014]. ‘Sujet: Femme'. de(s)générations des féminismes 21, 29-38: 135). What, then, are the implications of Malabou's hallmark concept of ‘plasticity’ on theories of performativity? Has plasticity come to supplant performativity, just as Malabou believes that it has come to supplant Derridean writing? Or if, as Malabou suggests, philosophical concepts are inherently plastic, may we maintain that performativity was always already plastic? In the following article, I read Malabou's work on writing alongside her work on the feminine in order to question how plasticity and performativity might be examined together to theorise the ways in which the discursive and the material interact in the production of subjectivities. By highlighting the performativity at play within Malabou's own writing about the end of writing, I propose that her work challenges her claim that literature cannot deconstruct philosophy. In response to Malabou's anti-essentialist plastic theory of the essence of woman, I underline the parallels between performativity and plasticity and suggest that the two concepts overlap in their mutual configuration of identity and form as mutable and transformable.     

Half and Half: An (Auto)ethnography of Hybrid Identities in a Korean American Mother-Daughter Relationship

Abstract

This essay focuses on how immigrant mothers and second generation interracial daughters construct, perform, and negotiate racial and ethnic hybrid identities. Placing my mother's experiences in dialogue with my own experiences, I (auto)ethnographically examine how we navigate our mother-daughter relationship and intercultural and interracial identities in relation to discourses of Asian American-ness. I identify three sites for identity formation: location, language, and the dialectical tension of assimilation-preservation. I argue that the enactment of a racial self is not always a conscious part of one's identity. Rather, we each enact racialized cultural identities that are contextually performed and continuously shifting.     

Taiwan's Fifth Ethnic Group: A Study of the Acculturation and Cultural Fusion of Women who have Married into Families in Taiwan

Abstract

One of the under-studied effects of global migration has been an increase in transnational marriages. This phenomenon has greatly impacted Taiwan as women from Southeast Asian nations and Mainland China, through professional marriage brokers or personal contacts, enter into marriages with Taiwanese men. How well these women adapt to Taiwan's culture and learn its local languages is studied through the lens of two theories of intercultural communication: Kim's theory of cross-cultural adaptation and Kramer's theory of cultural fusion. Based upon in-depth interviews with 28 women, results show some support for both theories. However, the postulates of cultural fusion demonstrate a better fit: Learning is an additive process; long-term association with co-ethnics appears to correlate with greater satisfaction and adaptation; and women's negotiated identities follow a range of outcomes.     

(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.     

MAX WEBER AND THE MORAL ECONOMY OF OFFICE

This article focuses upon a crucial aspect of Max Weber's work, one that has been largely neglected by scholars of organization, in cultural economy as much as in economic sociology more generally. That is Lebensführung, the conduct of life. The article argues that Weber's approach to questions of Lebensführung locates him as a late but prodigious practitioner in a tradition of the ethics of office, particularly as the latter becomes a defensive doctrine. In making this case, the vocabulary of office in Weber's work is explored and its importance for an understanding of the ethico-cultural constitution of a variety of instituted personae is highlighted. The article concludes by briefly suggesting why and how a Weberian ethics of office remains a key resource for scholars of organizational life, including those operating in the emergent field of ‘cultural economy’.