North/South imbalances in intercultural communication education

ABSTRACT

Western-centric perceptions of knowledge, behaviors and communication are more dominant and often obscure underrepresented non-western communities. This renders the mission of intercultural communication education (ICE) necessarily encompassing the reconsideration of these hierarchies and differentialisms. This article argues that by de-westernizing ICE, there could be a valid scope for establishing reconciliation between western and non-western ontologies, e.g. Africa, Asia and Latin America, resulting in mutually satisfying intercultural communicative experiences. Throughout this article, I present ‘decolonized consciousness' and ‘pluri-perspectivality’ as postmodern reflections and approaches to the complexity of intercultural communication in socio-politically unbalanced contexts.

Las percepciones occidentales del conocimiento, los comportamientos y la comunicación son más dominantes y, a menudo, oscurecen a las comunidades no-occidentales subrepresentadas. Esto hace que la misión de la educación en comunicación intercultural (ICE) abarque la reconsideración de estas jerarquías. Este artículo sostiene que al desoccidentalizar ICE, podría haber un ámbito para establecer la reconciliación entre ontologías occidentales y no occidentales, p. África, Asia y América Latina, resultando en experiencias comunicativas mutuamente satisfactorias. A lo largo de este artículo, presento la “conciencia descolonizada” y la “pluriperspectivabilidad” como reflexiones posmodernos de la complejidad de la comunicación intercultural en contextos sociopolíticamente desequilibrados.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural communication education
• interculturality
• power relations
• pluri-perspectivality
• de-westernized consciousness

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. M. Camino Bueno-Alastuey and the journal's editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous drafts of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This paper makes use of some binaries such as ‘privileged/oppressed’, ‘north/south’ and ‘west/non-west’. It is indeed important to indicate the contested nature of these terms; each term comes with its own limitations and contestations. Questions can be asked about each division in terms of relativity, especially whether people always fall neatly into these categories and what boundaries can set the dividing line. However, these terms are used throughout this paper with caution; they are mainly employed to signal the concomitant narratives and the imaginaries of lingering colonial structures. While these terms are not definitive, they might contribute to our understanding of how power imbalances have shaped the dynamics among different spaces in terms of knowledge and being.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hamza R’boul

Hamza R’boul is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities and Education Sciences at the Public University of Navarre. He is currently working on intercultural communication pedagogy in reference to language teachers’ cognitions. His research interests include intercultural communication and education, cultural politics of language teaching, postcoloniality and geopolitics of knowledge.