Our everyday lives are profoundly and historically transnational and intercultural, from our language and culture to our politics and diets. For instance, most key ingredients of garam masala, a quintessential spice in Indian cuisine, originally came to India hundreds of years ago from South East Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and even South America! However, while it has certainly been possible to identify pervasive and historical intercultural and international influences on our cultures, our collective awareness of how they constitute and shape communicative practices has probably never been greater than today. Such awareness is singularly true in communication studies, with studies of intercultural, cross-cultural, international and global communication phenomena flourishing in a wide variety of subfields, including interpersonal communication, rhetorical studies, media studies, sociolinguistics, organizational communication, feminist studies, queer studies, ethnography, performance, and public relations. As such then, international and intercultural issues have a special centrality in communication, and as I see it, this underscores the importance and relevance of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. The contemporary and historical relevance of international and intercultural communication studies is also reflected in the dual history of this journal, currently only in its fourth volume, but based on an annual series that is more than 30 years old.
As this journal grows, it has to come to grips with the rapidly changing contours of academic publishing that are placing new demands on all of us. One transformative shift in academic publication has been digitization, the impact of which will continue to be felt for decades to come. Digitization has not only increased the global availability, portability and circulation of scholarly work, it has also begun to make scientific knowledge itself more malleable, as technologies begin to redefine how information and knowledge themselves are structured, connected, and interwoven. The implications for the production of scholarship are immense. On one hand, our work can be circulated faster and disseminated more widely than ever before. This bodes extremely well for studies of intercultural and international communication that are already significantly interdisciplinary and that, by definition, speak to audiences in a wide variety of locales. I can report that this journal is keeping up well with the demands of digitization: Efforts are underway to incorporate the journal in several key databases, and like other major journals, we are moving to provide content before it is available in print form. In future months, readers of Journal of International and Intercultural Communication will be able to access fully produced articles using Taylor & Francis's iFirst platform before they have come out in print.
On the other hand, in the midst of neophilia it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there is nothing new about the labor involved in academic knowledge production. Engaging in research and writing continues to be arduous, demanding, and rewarding; likewise, reviewing manuscripts continues to require energy, intensity, and effort. Here too, I can report after 10 months’ work as editor-elect of this journal, that we are in extremely good shape. The journal received close to 150 submissions in the last 12 months, from five different continents. This issue is the first produced under its new and expanded editorial board, composed of prominent and active scholars, close to 30% of whom are based outside of the United States. They truly reflect the international character of the journal, and I thank them for the rigor, care, detail and dedication to the journal. Without them, the task of editing would simply not be possible.
My editorial policy follows the tradition established by Fred Casimir when he inaugurated the International and Intercultural Communication Annual in 1974, and reiterated in 2008 by this journal's founding editor, Thomas Nakayama, in that we will continue to strive to feature a wide spectrum of work from a wide range of scholars. These include critical, qualitative, textual, historical and quantitative approaches to both historical and contemporary issues in international and intercultural communication. While future issues of this journal under my editorship may emphasize one particular approach or another, be devoted to special issues, or feature forums on contemporary topics and debates, it is more than a happy accident that, taken together, the four articles in this issue are a fair representation of the diversity in paradigm, method, and data that characterize contemporary scholarship in intercultural and international communication. And so, I have chosen to begin this issue with a study that features historically central and still vital quantitative methods, and close it with an article that combines, in a novel way, the imaginative form and method of autoethnography, with more traditional interview-driven qualitative methods. The other two articles feature rhetorical and textual analyses. The theoretical commitments of the four manuscripts also differ significantly: One study examines diasporic commentary through a postcolonial lens; another updates theories of nonverbal immediacy; a third is concerned with critical race theory; and the fourth complicates notions of cultural assimilation by excavating intracultural identity. Yet, within this diversity, all four articles engage with major communication problems that characterize our era: racism, gender, power, migration, and prejudice, and in so doing, resoundingly underscore the significance of contemporary communication inquiry. It is hard to read them and not be optimistic about the future of our field.