Abstract
The study of intercultural communication (IC) has a long history in the Central States Communication Association (CSCA). Some of the earliest work in IC has come from universities in the CSCA region, such as Indiana University (William Starosta) and University of Minnesota (Vernon Jensen and Rosita Albert). Since the inception of the Intercultural Communication Interest Group within CSCA in the early 1990s, IC scholars have contributed immensely to the discipline by studying different aspects of the relationship between communication and culture. Several active IC scholars present their recollections of the development of IC research in this issue.
The study of intercultural communication (IC) has a long history in the Central States Communication Association (CSCA). Some of the earliest work in IC has come from universities in the CSCA region, such as Indiana University (William Starosta) and University of Minnesota (Vernon Jensen and Rosita Albert). Since the inception of the Intercultural Communication Interest Group within CSCA in the early 1990s, IC scholars have contributed immensely to the discipline by studying different aspects of the relationship between communication and culture. Several active IC scholars present their recollections of the development of IC research in this issue.
The goal of this special issue is to review the history, significance, and distinctiveness of IC scholarship from the Central States region. Intercultural communication scholars as members of CSCA have often been questioned and sometimes challenged by scholars who have claimed that the Midwest is not an ideal locale for studying communication across cultures and among people from varying cultural backgrounds. However, over the years, scholars have shown that intercultural communication is an important area of scholarship in the Midwest and that the region offers plenty of opportunities for studying different aspects of cultural communication, ranging from racial and ethnic discrimination to the adaptation process of international students and from immigrant experiences to issues in queer cultures.
IC scholars have not only taken an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the IC context they also have borrowed from communication research in other areas (both theoretically and methodologically), and they have contributed widely to the discussion of cultural issues as they relate to many areas of communication research. In this special issue our goal is to present different concerns of IC research as these concerns connect to and intersect with co-disciples in communication studies, such as public address, communication education, international communication, rhetorical studies, family communication, listening, and media studies.
Because IC research does not exist in isolation and it is always connected to larger frameworks or theoretical approaches within communication studies, each contributor to this special issue addresses how IC scholarship informs other areas of research. The original articles presented in this issue serve as illustrations of how IC scholars use the concepts and theoretical lenses of IC research to examine issues of broader interest. Although we focus on IC scholarship within the CSCA region, this special issue is in conversation with and acknowledges the significant contributions that originate from the other regional communication associations.
Overview of Contents
For this special issue we invited several scholars to contribute their recollections of the development of IC research and to provide insights on their approaches to conducting research in the Central States region. Young Yun Kim, University of Oklahoma, describes the formative period of IC interest in the 1970s and 1980s. She notes that the early emphasis was “the theoretical and methodological development” of IC using “neopositivist” approaches. The communication foci were “direct contacts and interaction processes between individuals of dissimilar societal cultural backgrounds.” Kim notes that beginning with her dissertation focusing on Korean immigrants in Chicago, nearly all of her research has been conducted in the Central States region.
Dorthy Pennington, University of Kansas, describes the deeply personal nature of her work on interracial communication. Her formulation of “worldview” and communication was widely used in communication pedagogy and training. She began her association with CSCA in the early 1970s because she “longed for an orientation and convention programs that spoke to my positionality, which I, by that time was convinced CSCA was doing more and more.”
Mark Orbe, Western Michigan University, describes how cocultural theory “emerged from my lived experience as a newly transplanted doctoral student at Ohio University” and the first of several articles on cocultural theory was published in Communication Studies. Cocultural theory is concerned with “the exploration of how traditionally marginalized persons communicate in settings created, maintained, and monitored by dominant group members …” It remains a widely applied and cited theory in intercultural studies.
John Baldwin describes his “multimethod and multidiscipline” approach to the study of race, culture, and communication. Baldwin resists the constraints of traditional research paradigms that has led to a productive 24-year career at Illinois State University, which includes publication of Redefining Culture: Perspectives across the Disciplines (2006).
In his reflection essay Alberto González notes that the interactions of Ohio Mexican American farmworker and immigrant rights activists with the dominant White society constitute an intercultural context. Currently, Latinx communities create coalitions across cultures that are located in the Greater Toledo area to gain political and economic influence. He also observes that many critical voices have been based in the Midwest, such as Dwight Conquergood, John T. Warren, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Elizabeth Lozano, and Robert Shuter, among others.
Ahmet Atay and Satoshi Toyosaki emphasize the international and intersectional qualities in their work. They describe moments of accommodation to U.S. communication studies as well as their efforts to have communication studies accommodate their perspectives. They also describe the frequent mentoring and networking opportunities available at CSCA conventions.
The reflection essays are followed by five articles of original research. Brandi Lawless and Yea-Wen Chen focus on communication studies pedagogy and ask why certain class discussions surrounding difference are deemed difficult, a persistent “elephant” in the classroom. Their goal is to “better connect intercultural and instructional communication research” through an intercultural informed technique of “SWAP-ing” the communication classroom to better allow discussions of political and cultural difference.
Robert J. Razzante extends Orbe’s cocultural theory by examining how dominant group members interact with members of marginalized cocultural groups. Razzante draws from poststructuralist criticism, whiteness studies, and intercultural studies to interpret communicative “critical incidents” provided by college students. In their interactions with cocultural group members, Razzante organizes their strategies according to four themes: reinforcing privilege, dominant group self-awareness, using privilege to benefit cocultures, and using dominant group privilege to disrupt oppressive practices.
Jennifer A. Zenovich and Leda Cooks focus on the trial of Dragoljub Kunarac, who was found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) of crimes against humanity for organizing mass rape and torture of Bosnian Muslim women. As an act of sexual violence, rape also is performatively enacted by various institutions in postsocialist Eastern Europe. Zenovich and Cooks advance feminist intercultural communication studies by examining how the survivors’ stories produce agency and enact resistance to colonization and global capitalism.
Eun Young Lee and Chad Nelson apply notions from intercultural dialectics to examine how an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s television program Parts Unknown creates “a violent gaze that imposes and normalizes the cultural narrative of the American Dream.” The object of this gaze is the City of Detroit. In the show Boudain encounters the diversity of Detroit’s residents, yet “Bourdain interprets each intercultural encounter through a nostalgic entrepreneurial past and recasts the culinary present in neoliberal terms of urban entrepreneurialism.” Lee and Nelson argue that the dialectic of past-present involves a nostalgia that obscures tensions relating to culture, race, and class differences and leaves the myth of the American Dream intact as Detroit rebuilds.
Finally, Eric Karikari and Christopher Brown use interview data to examine how African student leaders apply a postcolonial mindset in guiding the activities of U.S. university student organizations. They find that the African student leaders are aware of their hybrid identities as they attempt to counter stereotypes of Africa and accommodate attitudes held by U.S. students. The article closes with analysis of student comments about the African leadership styles.
It is our hope that this issue may inspire continued research in intercultural communication and that the Central States region will be approached as a site that provokes important questions that are answered through international and local, intersectional, and interdisciplinary perspectives. This special issue is the result of many conversations across several CSCA conventions. At the risk of unintentionally omitting someone, we thank the following individuals who took part in one or more of those conversations: Melissa Beall, Carolyn Calloway-Thomas, and Jennifer Willis-Rivera. Finally, we thank Kenneth Lachlan, editor of Communication Studies, for approving our proposal for this issue.