Critical Intercultural Communication Research Articles

Critical Intercultural Communication and the Public Sphere: Theoretical Engagements with Tahakkum and Other-Interculturality

ABSTRACT This article argues that tahakkum [ التَّحَكُّمِ ], an indigenous intercultural communication concept, impedes the functioning of the public sphere and underlines the failure (or unwillingness) of the authoritarian state and political actors to set conditions for plural deliberation and good governance. Using the critical cases of the sliding back of Islamist influence and the hirak (movement) against water privatization in an oasis town in southeast Morocco, the article theorizes tahakkum and proposes “other-interculturality” as an-other epistemological and ethical framework to articulate an intercultural communication model that interrogates embedded layers of power and domination, champions collective solidarity, and celebrates diversity without occluding difference.

Nationalism: threat or opportunity to critical intercultural communication?

Nationalism: threat or opportunity to critical intercultural communication?

Student Discourses of Community in an Intercultural Conflict and Community Course: A Critical Assessment

ABSTRACT This study is based on an undergraduate course on intercultural conflict and community building, which was grounded in critical intercultural communication pedagogy (CICP) and included a two-day, over-night, off-campus retreat. Three themes were critically analyzed and problematized in student retreat reflection paper discourse: celebrating difference and plurality, emphasizing similarity over differences, and building community: tools and tensions. Students praised individuals’ pluralistic cultural identities and differences, described spaces of connection primarily through the identification of similarities, and described communication practices such as sharing culturally-based visions and narratives in community building and intercultural conflict management. Bringing together frameworks for critical reflexivity and critical communities within CICP, the conception of critical intercultural communities becomes an important way to define, orient, and teach intercultural communication, conflict and community building.

Culturally Responsive Instructional Supervision: Further Analysis of a Leading Textbook

This study explores whether and how culturally responsive practices are embedded in the leading text for instructional supervisions, SuperVision and Instructional Leadership: A Developmental Approach (Glickman et al., 2018). Having identified a dearth of references to culture in most of the text, and a relative wealth of references to culture in two segregated chapters (Guerra et al., 2022), we explore how the cultural content-rich chapters address culturally responsive instructional supervision (CRIS) and how the lack of CRIS content influences the chapters that focus on the clinical supervision cycle. Employing Jacob’s (2014) framework for supervisors for social justice and critical intercultural communication studies we examined how references to culture intersected with knowledge, skills, and dispositions of CRIS. Findings revealed instances of hegemony-supporting language, an indifference to the influence of invisible culture, a segregated treatment of CRIS content, and lack of practical application tools. Instructional supervision preparation and practice requires new texts informed by diverse perspectives and centering CRIS.

Criticizing Female Genital Mutilation Practice from Feminist Standpoint Theory: A View from Communication Science Perspective

This conceptual review examines Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) practice in Indonesia viewed from Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST). The current study uses a literature review to build an argumentative contribution from communication science perspective. FGM is a global phenomenon locally and culturally practiced in more than 29 countries, including Indonesia. Despite many state regulations and international treaties forbidding the practice because of its harmful consequences, FGM practice is persistently maintained by religion, culture, tradition, and other factors. The author proposes FST as a theoretical base to criticize FGM because it does not represent the lived experience of women, marginalizes women further to the brink of ideal democratic participation, and does not contribute towards the positive construction of female selfhood. The author will elaborate on these three objections using the communication science perspective within the Indonesian cultural context. The author proposes more action-oriented theorizing to overcome FST's practical deficiency by providing insights from critical intercultural communication. Women's collective agency based on situated knowledge will empower their communicative skills as enablers of transformation to eradicate FGM.

Toward Critical Reflexivity through Critical Intercultural Communication Pedagogy: Student Discourse in an Intercultural Conflict Course

Critical reflexivity, situated in a critical communication pedagogy framework, enables students and instructors to critique their identity positions alongside broader contextual structures enmeshed within the dynamics of intercultural conflict. This study therefore examines undergraduate students’ discourses of critical reflexivity following a retreat workshop experience in an intercultural conflict course. After collecting data through reflection papers, we found uneven understandings and applications of critical reflexivity that reflect the potential of critical reflexivity in helping students to question various assumptions about themselves and others but also the challenges of disrupting dominant ideologies such as individualism to increase understanding of structural factors.

Integrating the Soliya Connect Program into a Classroom Course on Critical Intercultural Communication

ABSTRACT This paper presents a two-year pedagogical, teacher-as-researcher, action research project at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Sousse, Tunisia, which investigates how the integration of the Soliya Connect Program, a facilitated dialogic online exchange programme, with a theoretical course on critical intercultural communication helped students develop critical interculturality. Despite some initial concern about the extra time commitment, students were unanimously positive about integrating the two aspects, claiming that the Connect Program helped them to develop criticality in real life, and that the online communication was much more effective because they participated with the critical perspective developed in class. The findings support the integration of theoretical and practical online components in developing students’ critical intercultural communication skills, and the use of action research to inform adjustments to both components in order to improve the outcomes.

Revisiting Whiteness Pedagogy: Examining the Discursive Practices of Diverse Students in an Intercultural Communication and Conflict Course

ABSTRACT Our study explores discourses of whiteness amongst a diverse group of undergraduate students within the context of critical intercultural communication pedagogy. Through a qualitative analysis of two sets of student essays, we look across discourses of students who primarily identify as white and students with nondominant identities to identify convergences and divergences. We found that many white-identifying students used strategic rhetorics to maintain the invisibility of their whiteness and/or enact white privilege even while expressing awareness of it. Many students with nondominant identities expressed tensions in defining those identities within the liminal spaces constructed by whiteness. Some challenged the constraints of whiteness by drawing from complex histories, highlighting the potential of hybridized identities as cultural bridges, and using their privilege towards deeper learning.

Intercultural communication, creative practice and embodied activisms: arts-based interculturality in the Maghreb

ABSTRACT Grounded by a theoretical framework of art and interculturality, critical intercultural communication, and performance studies, this study analyses women's intercultural arts-based practice and performance in the North African Maghreb region. We examine how creative practice is employed in constructing cultural identity, peaceful political resistance, and decolonisation of Maghrebi citizens and nations. We analyse how Maghrebi creative practice transcends linguistic, social, and political boundaries, offering possibilities for profound intercultural exchange. We also examine how creative practice allows re/envisioning cultural identities through music, dance and theatrical work, and developing diverse embodied, performative communities of feminist practice both within and outside the Maghreb.

Representation of African Cultural Knowledge and Identity in Versions of German-Translated Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe—A Critical Intercultural Communication Analysis

The translation of Things Fall Apart (TFA) into German has elicited interest in language interaction and especially in German-African textual intercultural communication within broader Euro-African cultural and postcolonial relations. The publication of a third German translation of TFA, Alles Zerfällt, in 2012 by Uda Strätling promises an alternative reading and possibly a truer representation of African cultural knowledge and identity compared to the two previous translations. Drawing on I.A. Richards’ theory of meaning, skopos theory, and postcolonial theory, this study examines, through a critical intercultural analysis of purposively selected cultural text units, the transfer of African cultural knowledge from the source text to the target texts in order to elucidate how African cultural identity is represented to the target readership. The study shows that while Strätling’s version appears to more adequately represent source text cultural knowledge and identity, it nevertheless still manages to perpetuate the exoticization of African culture as archaic, primitive, and inferior.

“Yellow Perils,” Revived: Exploring Racialized Asian/American Affect and Materiality Through Hate Discourse over the COVID-19 Pandemic

The goal of this essay is to explore what kind of hate is produced against Asian bodies in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. By centering Asian/American affect and materiality – marginalized voices, narratives, and feelings of Asian/Americans as affective-performative texts, this essay attends to critique the historical continuum of racial discrimination against Asian/Americans (i.e., yellow peril) and advocate for social justice, equality, and inclusion in the U.S. Overall, I argue that Asian/American bodies are both physiologically and ideologically desensitized, dehumanized, and weaponized as the revival of yellow perils over the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, this essay highlights the possibility of adding affective and performative lenses in Critical Intercultural Communication research, exploring the politics of Asian/American bodies and the hate discourse as a case study for further academic conversations in Asian/American scholarship in Communication.

Digital transnational queer isolations and connections

ABSTRACT In this essay, my goal is to push the discourse of critical queer intercultural communication research further and expand its circumference by focusing on transnational and diasporic digitalized queer experiences. Hence, I argue that new media technologies, social media platforms, and quick media applications play a significant role in the lives of transnational, diasporic and immigrant queer individuals by providing new opportunities to imagine home and belonging and perform transnational and accented queer identities. Therefore, I enact and embody decolonizing autoethnographic writing. In doing so, I aim to decolonize mainstream queer spaces, including how queer stories are being told and whose stories are being published in which venues. Thus, I aim to speak from the periphery, including that of queer and critical intercultural communication scholarship, with a transnational queer accent.

Ethnicity and Belonging among Young Igbo in the United States: Explicating Coculturation and Ethnic Communication Theory

This theoretical and empirical study examines how second-generation Igbo (SGI) young adults in the United States articulate their ethnic identity within the framework of theorizing beyond the West. Identity struggles of SGI are fluid and inevitable and, therefore, deserve close attention in this ever-changing environment. This study advances the critical intercultural communication concept of coculturation and ethnic communication theory by elucidating the complexity of challenges and issues constituting the experiences of SGI. In order to explicate how SGI maintain their Igbo identity, a qualitative in-depth interview was employed. Three major themes emerged from the analysis: (a) the impact of family, community, and esthetics; (b) tensions between national and ethnic identities; and (c) pride in Igbo culture, identity, and language. Grounded in coculturation, a critical concept of cultural adjustment, and ethnic communication theory, the results show that ethnic identity, nationalism, and belonging evolve through ancestral connections while the people reside and establish themselves in the diaspora.

Sounding sight in an ASL classroom

ABSTRACT This essay reflects on critical intercultural communication pedagogy associated with Deaf instructors teaching American Sign Language (ASL) to hearing students. Focusing on the presence and absence of sound while learning ASL—a language that lives visually–spatially—the essay offers preliminary observations of how the present absence of sound demonstrates the distinctive way an ASL classroom performs difference.

“We Don’t See LGBTQ Differences”: Cisheteronormativity and Concealing Phobias and Irrational Fears Behind Rhetorics of Acceptance

Research Article| February 01 2020 “We Don’t See LGBTQ Differences”: Cisheteronormativity and Concealing Phobias and Irrational Fears Behind Rhetorics of Acceptance Roberta Chevrette; Roberta Chevrette Roberta Chevrette (PhD, Arizona State University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research interests are in queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories, rhetorical field methods, whiteness, national identities, and social movements. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Shinsuke Eguchi Shinsuke Eguchi Shinsuke Eguchi (PhD, Howard University) is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico. Their research interests focus on critical intercultural communication studies, queer studies, critical race studies, Asian/Pacific/American studies, and performance studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2020) 7 (1): 55–59. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.1.0055 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Roberta Chevrette, Shinsuke Eguchi; “We Don’t See LGBTQ Differences”: Cisheteronormativity and Concealing Phobias and Irrational Fears Behind Rhetorics of Acceptance. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 February 2020; 7 (1): 55–59. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.1.0055 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Michigan State University2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Social Justice in Action

Teachers of all students, particularly English Learners (ELs), need to integrate social justice pedagogy into their lessons so that all learners are included in the learning process, thinking critically about curriculum and taking action in the face of injustice. There has been some research into teacher preparation programs focusing on how they integrate culturally responsive and social justice pedagogy into their curricula and whether there has been a positive impact on teachers’ self-awareness, social justice knowledge and classroom practices as a result (Ruffin, 2016; Thieman, 2016). However, these studies do not address lesson content. This document analysis study, framed theoretically with critical intercultural communication (Halualani & Nakayama, 2010), explored the integration of social justice principles into lesson plans developed by pre-service and in-service English as a second language (ESL) teachers who were pursuing a TESOL graduate degree (Initial License) at a university in the Northeast of the United States. The lesson plans were analyzed using a rubric aligned with the Social Justice Standards: The Teaching Tolerance Anti-Biases Framework. The exploration unveiled the need for more connections to students’ backgrounds, structured in-class dialogues, support for linguistic needs and modeling of intercultural practices.

Teaching Critical Moments within Neoliberal Universities: Exploring Critical Intercultural Communication Pedagogy

ABSTRACTThis study seeks to understand critical intercultural communication pedagogy (CICP) and the struggles associated with how to teach intercultural communication from a critical perspective. We explore the nexus of critical communication pedagogy and critical intercultural communication by analysing interview discourses with fifteen self-identified critical intercultural communication instructors across the United States. The analysis revealed themes featuring: (1) embodying accountability in CICP instruction; (2) challenging white supremacy and U.S. imperialism within neoliberal universities; and (3) calling for support on how to teach critical moments. We offer an extension of current conceptualizations of CICP and future directions.

Rethinking Migrant Socialisation in the Light of Critical Intercultural Communication: Proposals to Favour the Integration Process in France

Le modele republicain d’integration, dans sa mise en œuvre en tant que politique publique concernee par la migration en France, fait appel a des concepts qui ont ete remis en cause par des etudes recentes en communication interculturelle. Cet article passe en revue ces concepts et les modeles et approches qui les ont remplaces dans la litterature scientifique, puis propose, a partir d’une analyse du dispositif d’integration prevu actuellement par la loi, des pistes d’amenagement afin de mieux prendre en compte une approche critique de l’interculturel, pour mieux promouvoir la cohesion sociale, face a une realite sociale moderne dans laquelle les revendications identitaires des groupes non-majoritaires se montrent de plus en plus pressantes.

Anti-LGBT violence and the ambivalent (colonial) discourses of Ghanaian Pentecostalist-Charismatic church leaders

This study examines the discourses used by Ghanaian Pentecostalist Charismatic Church leaders (GPCCs) to describe same sex sexual relations and anti-LGBT violence. This research was informed by the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of postcolonial theory, queer of color critique and critical intercultural communication. Consistent with the critical perspective, Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis was utilized to analyze the ideological tensions framing the discussions of same-sex relations in Ghana. Findings show that the prior relationship between Christianity and colonialism have made GPCCs an influential colonial institution currently masquerading as an innately "African" institution protecting the interest of all Africans. The author concludes that social justice programs and initiatives in Ghana and other African countries with similar sociopolitical contexts should create spaces for counter narratives that center the voices of queer Ghanaians/Africans.

The need to transform Science Communication from being multi-cultural via cross-cultural to intercultural

Abstract. When dealing with issues that are of high societal relevance, Earth sciences still face a lack of acceptance, which is partly rooted in insufficient communication strategies on the individual and local community level. To increase the efficiency of communication routines, science has to transform its outreach concepts to become more aware of individual needs and demands. The “encoding/decoding” concept as well as critical intercultural communication studies can offer pivotal approaches for this transformation.