New interculturalities? Rethinking the relationship between cultures, identities and communication in a mediatised, crisis-ridden world.
Résumé
The popularity of the notion of culture is such that the field of intercultural communication spans a rich and increasingly broad set of topics. Despite efforts to structure it into perspectives or paradigms (Kim, 2017), there is often relatively little consensus among specialists regarding definitions of cultures or their supposed impact on human behaviour. This year’s IAICS conference brings together scholars interested in a myriad of subjects, from national cultural differences to heritage and folklore, migration, international classrooms and student mobility, DE&I, intercultural competence, neuroscience, branding, intergroup stereotyping, social media and AI, to name but some. Many of these scholars study or compare national cultures, examine sensemaking in context, propose or evaluate training materials or practices, denounce social injustice, and generally seek to promote a better world, where respect, tolerance and understanding can lead to peace and prosperity.
Yet this world is changing rapidly, notably under the influence of technological reconfigurations of our social relations, which simultaneously open up possibilities to access new knowledge and erect new symbolic boundaries. Post-truth politics, deep fakes, right-wing xenophobia, ethnic tensions, filter bubbles, racial or religious violence, hate speech, neocolonialism, terrorism and open warfare dominate the headlines and news feeds of the early 2020s. While working to promote intercultural competence or global understanding is clearly a positive step in reaction to this, how can we also mobilise intercultural communication scholarship to better analyse and understand the “new interculturalities” which seem to underpin the various social crises and conflicts in today’s world?
I will argue that while research on intercultural communication potentially holds the key to shed light on many of these emerging global phenomena, in practice it often promotes simplistic essentialisations which can reinforce perceived barriers and social conflict. I will defend the need to go “back to basics”, to take seriously the dialectic between cultures and communication (Hall, 1959): the way that we draw on multiple sources of cultural knowledge to make sense of and for one another, and the way that our interactions contribute in turn to spreading, maintaining or recreating cultural knowledge. Shifting the focus from what cultures do to people to what people do with cultures and identities, how they negotiate and co-construct codes in their interactions, how they instrumentalise perceived similarity and difference to position themselves and others, I will outline an interpretivist understanding of communication and interculturality which places individual agency back at the centre.
In today’s volatile, digitally connected world, where information moves around the globe quasi-instantaneously and leaves indelible traces online, it is crucial to take into account the mediated dimension of interpersonal communication (Hepp, 2015). The ubiquity of social media affects both our sociability and our socialisation through contact with different groups, online and offline. Digital media reconfigure the way that cultures evolve, opening a whole new set of possibilities in terms of access to deterritorialized social groups and identities, while paradoxically separating us into affinity-based filter bubbles which comfort our world views. This personalisation of media contents in the fragmented media sphere, fuelled by marketing, can lead to “algorithmic isolation”, and to new social tensions in the public sphere. When neighbours, family members, coworkers and friends no longer have access to similar media contents, a vicious-circle of polarisation may cause them to develop different and opposing readings of the same phenomena, as seen through the strong positions for or against Covid-19 vaccination in many societies during and after lockdown (Maarek, 2022), or growing alienation between Republicans and Democrats in the US, for example.
This increased polarisation of opinions, be it on a local or global scale, rooted in identity-discourse and in media consumption, constitutes a growing source of social tensions and misunderstandings which remains largely understudied within the field of intercultural communication. Yet for scholars, this is an opportunity to apply existing research on conflict mediation, understanding difference and neurodiversity, identities and intergroup relations, competence development and so on, to help analyse, inform and possibly relieve some of these “cultural” and identity-based conflicts taking place under our very noses. It is also a chance to renew scholarship and existing models within the field, by taking into account the impact of digital media on the way that we relate to cultures and identities (Hepp et al., 2018), and on the way that these circulate and evolve in the global public sphere.
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Hepp, A. (2015). Transcultural Communication. Wiley.
Hepp, A., Breiter, A., & Hasebrink, U. (Eds.). (2018). Communicative Figurations. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65584-0
Kim, Y. Y. (2017). Editor’s Introduction: Mapping the Domain of Intercultural Communication. In Y. Y. Kim (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (1st ed., pp. xxxvii–xlvii). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118783665.ieicc0999
Maarek, P. J. (Ed.). (2022). Manufacturing Government Communication on Covid-19: A Comparative Perspective. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09230-5