From ivory tower to social arena: critical approaches to cultural identity in the public sphere

Aim and scope of the special issue

Cultural identity, a familiar and recurrent topic in Intercultural Communication (ICC), has been studied from many angles. Discursive approaches that shed light on and deconstruct processes through which cultural identities are negotiated, challenged and (re)produced have become increasingly prominent over the past decades (e.g. Jenks et al., 2013). Connected to the critical turn undergone by ICC (Halualani et al., 2009), liquid notions of cultural identity have become commonplace within the field, as elsewhere in academia, and echo widespread criticisms against the misuse and instrumentalization of the concept of culture in a reductive, rigid, essentialising sense (Dervin, 2011; Holliday, 2010).

However, while academics theorise about the liquid state of culture, it seems that discourses about cultural identity in the public sphere increasingly (visibly) resort to solid views. This includes reductive, xenophobic populist discourse on the one hand, naïve or superficial discourses about cultural diversity (in the workplace for instance), which reproduce essentialised notions of identity under a cover of relativism or diversity management (denounced in Romani et al., 2019, for example), but also accusations of cultural appropriation (Frame & Ihlen, 2018) and minority identity movements on the other. As this list illustrates, examples of discourses drawing on solid views of cultural identity emanate from a variety of sources, suggesting we cannot reduce these discourses to ‘problematic’ or ‘wrong’ ones that need fixing. Rather, reasons for the (widening) gap between academia, increasingly reduced to the privileged and closed-off image of the Ivory Tower, and the Social Arena it yet endeavours to engage with, seem to merit deeper analysis.

The purpose of this special issue is therefore two-fold. First, it sets out to identify and analyse the gap between academic literature and public discourses regarding cultural identities. The papers included in the issue reveal the complexity of the meaning-making process surrounding cultural identities in different contexts: in literature, teacher education, environmental organisations, institutional discourse from universities, and through readings of sport media by different audiences. Second, in offering insights into how cultural identities are used, including as fixed entities, these articles also point to ways of designing and promoting (theoretical and methodological) solutions to bridge the gap between academic and public discourses.

Liquid and solid approaches to cultural identities: issues at stake and possible paths to move forward

For decades now, scholars have deplored the way in which the notion of culture has been exploited and ‘misused’ in the public sphere, in support of various causes grounded in majority or minority identity discourse, by various groups defending or promoting national/nationalist, regional/regionalist, postcolonial, linguistic, religious or other agendas, and resorting to ‘culture speak’ (Hannerz, 1999). There appears to be a consensus among many researchers within the field of ICC, as to the necessity of deconstructing the notion of culture by adopting more liquid (Bauman, 2011) or fluid (Ogay & Edelmann, 2016) perspectives, and exploring the agency associated with the use of culture in everyday language to produce intercultural moments (Bolden, 2014). Although critical views towards culture have (re)gained increasing visibility in ICC in recent decades following the heyday of cross-cultural research (see Moon, 1996 for a genealogy of the field), they had already been widely shared across other disciplines such as Cultural Studies (e.g. Hall & Du Gay, 1996), Anthropology (e.g. Olwig & Hastrup, 1997) and Social Science at large (e.g. Titley, 2004). The gap between academic and public discourse may be partly favoured by the disciplinary barriers that scholars are so inclined to build and perpetuate, maintaining their career prospects but possibly creating scattered, less visible and less impactful research as a result. The collection of articles brought together in this special issue exemplify the need for and potential of interdisciplinarity to understand such a complex and multi-layered topic as cultural identity.

Interdisciplinary dialogue helps move past discipline-based assumptions. Recent work in ICC, for instance, echoes directions taken in Cultural Studies with authors such as Gilroy (1987, 1993) and Hall (1990, 1997). Despite their thoroughly deconstructionist approach to cultural identity in the context of diasporic communities in the globalised world, they also warn us about the dangers of overly anti-essentialist views on identity which miss the crucial role of the process of (solid) cultural identification in both analytical and political terms. This relates to long-standing debates in feminist/gender and post/decolonial studies about strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1996) or anti–anti-essentialism (Gilroy, 1993) which complicate a binary and sometimes simplistic approach to cultural identity.

Echoing this line of work, more and more studies within ICC are rethinking and challenging dichotomous approaches to liquid–solid or essentialist-constructionist views. Through the notion of simplexity, Dervin and Gross (2016) encourage us to move past simplistic and polarised discourses and solutions, and to instead embrace the ‘contradictions, instabilities and discontinuities’ (p. 6) of social interactions and realities. Similarly, Amadasi and Holliday (2017) have highlighted the way individuals’ narratives about cultural identities can be competing as they navigate between essentialist blocks and non-essentialist threads. These conceptual tools call for more nuanced exploration of discourses of cultural identities grounded in people’s experiences and keeping away from paternalistic attitudes that have sometimes characterised intercultural research (Dervin & Gross, 2016). Indeed, even if scholars deconstruct and show certain uses of the notion of culture to be oversimplified and hegemonic from an academic point of view, we must also take into account the fact that such culture speak makes sense to many people thinking about identity in their everyday interactions (Holliday, 2015). To address this gap, we might again turn towards increased interdisciplinarity and examine possible points of convergence between critical approaches to culture in ICC (e.g. Dervin & Machart, 2015; Nakayama & Halualani, 2010) and in postcolonial or critical cultural studies, which have long been interested in the (de)construction and repression of identity discourse notably within minority groups (e.g. Gilroy, 1987; Hall, 1997).

Although we have drawn a fairly neat picture so far, suggesting a clear-cut gap between the increasingly liquid approaches of academia and increasingly solid discourses which appear commonplace in the public sphere, this division and the blocks it entails may require a more nuanced and in-depth look, particularly when it comes to the field of ICC. Are liquid views really commonplace in ICC or are they only consensual on the surface? Janusian approaches (Dervin, 2011) and neo-essentialist views may in fact be the dominant paradigm through which scholars advocate for liquid understandings of culture and cultural identities in the first place while (re)producing entity-views through the methods or concepts they use. The lack of (yet) deep running critical engagement from ICC scholars may reflect its fairly recent critical turn in contrast with other disciplines that have embraced and addressed issues of power and inequalities for a long time already. Although the genealogy of the field suggests its overall Janusian orientation may be an issue specific to ICC, privilege and uniformity in academia, however, extend beyond this sole discipline. This raises issues when researching cultural identity (among other topics) as it reproduces normative and hierarchical frameworks whereby we look at them and provide answers relying on frameworks often underpinned by whiteness, euro/western-centricity, and colonial accents (see e.g. Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008). Such epistemological injustices (e.g. Ennser-Kananen, 2019) contribute to and strengthen the dichotomous representation of the academic ivory tower and the social arena.

Similarly, are solid views of culture really increasingly dominant in the public sphere or are they only more visible? In the era of media soundbites, (bad) buzz, and algorithmic communication, sensationalist and socially divisive discourse may tend to be given centre stage. The echo-chambers of social media networks further fragment and polarise audiences around positions which commonly reflect ‘us versus them’ identity logics, or the emotional appeals to a sense of (political) belonging in the post-truth era which have largely replaced the Habermassian vision of a deliberation-based public sphere. In a context where the legitimacy of ‘experts’ is increasingly being challenged, a process catalysed by the trends of fact-checking, ‘fake news’ and the fragmented digital public sphere, academic discourse is frequently discredited, falling victim to the social constructionist relativism it extols. It seems to reflect less and less the social consciousness of those parts of the world population who feel they have been left behind in the rush towards globalisation.

Contributions

The contributions to this special issue all focus on different contexts, illustrating the scope of discursive activities through which solid and liquid cultural identities are negotiated, challenged and (re)produced.

The article by Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska investigates the way that radical environmental organisations seek to bring about cultural change through discourse aiming to combat environmentally damaging everyday practices in different societies (Poland, UK and US). The author uses critical discourse analysis to characterise the discursive strategies used to call into question dominant cultural representations and myths, surrounding neoliberal society, political action and social practices, aiming to reframe them in order to precipitate cultural change, while remaining acceptable to their target audiences. The counterhegemonic agenda of these organisations does thus not focus directly on calling into question national or other cultural identities per se, but rather on changing the taken-for-granted cultural representations which underly everyday practices. Although the strategies used by the three organisations studied do appear to share common themes, they can also be seen to reflect some of the specific domestic concerns, as well as the political status of environmental activist organisations, in their respective countries of origin.

Lea Sinoimeri’s contribution discusses the ways in which Xiaolu Gao’s novel A Concise Chinese – English Dictionary for Lovers uses multilingualism and broken English to denounce the hegemony of standard English as the international language of capitalism and colonialism. The scholar situates the novel in the context of an increasingly popular body of ‘multilingual’ literature, which seeks to question the myth of monolingualism and the implicit hierarchy of languages in the international literary canon. In exploring the way in which the cultural and linguistic identities of the main protagonist and her lover evolve throughout the novel, she foregrounds feminist and postcolonial readings which seem to aim not so much to question the essentialism of Xiaolu Gao’s characterisation as to illustrate the way in which such literary experiments in antihegemonic discourse can introduce their own dominant normative readings.

The study by Michelle Stack looks at the discourses produced by two elite universities, Cambridge (UK) and Harvard (US), about racism. The article relies on critical discourse analysis and a versatile dataset including materials from newspaper articles from the Guardian and the New York Times, excerpts from both universities’ websites and the official statements they released after the murder of George Floyd in Spring 2020, as well as student news. The findings show that both top-ranked universities do not address racism unless pressured to do so by the media, and tend to address the issue as external and social rather than linked with their own history and institutional practices. This study, therefore, demonstrated how Harvard and Cambridge separate acknowledgements of institutional racism from their own practices and identities as leading higher education institutions.

The article by Jacco van Sterkenburg and Maximilian Walder explore how football talk functions as a place where discourses surrounding race/ethnicity are (re)produced. The authors interviewed 21 students enrolled at a university in the North of England about their mediated experiences of football. The findings show how participants navigated, sometimes in a contradictory manner, discourses about race/ethnicity and whiteness. Although many of the participants challenged the hegemonic discourse of natural physicality, particularly in relation to Black football players, respondents also drew on this discourse at times, for instance in talking about ‘natural’ shortcoming in relation to Asian players. The findings also show how whiteness operates as an invisible and normative discourse as White players were relatively absent from the participants’ talk about race. Yet, different ‘shades of whiteness’ were (re)produced by respondents who positioned differently players from the England national team and players from other countries. Overall, the article reveals how complex and contradictory meaning-making processes about race and ethnicity can be in everyday talk, and the various repertoires (e.g. physical explanations, cultural arguments, national discourse) participants can draw on.

The study by Virginie Trémion and Véronique Lemoine-Bresson focuses on the use of video as a means of fostering critical reflection about interculturality among pre-service teacher students. After demonstrating the importance of a critical intercultural approach (CIcA) in teacher education, the authors explain how videos, as multimodal tools, can stimulate perceptions of students and potentially help them problematise and critically engage with intercultural situations. The findings show limitations in the way video is used to do this, which the authors reflect on to formulate recommendations for future research and practice. They stress the importance of supporting students as they engage with videos to sharpen their reflective senses. They also point to the use of video annotation tools as a tangible way to encourage exchanges that stimulate and challenge students’ interpretations.

As a collection, the papers included in this special issue address some of the conceptual limitations of approaching cultural identities in a dichotomous manner – liquid versus solid – and suggest improvements to analyse social discourse on the topic in a more nuanced and multilayered manner. As a multidisciplinary collection of articles, they also demonstrate how the field of intercultural communication can renew itself through collaborations with other fields, by indicating areas of convergence and synergies between intercultural communication and critical cultural studies, media and audience studies, postcolonial studies, and literary studies.

Acknowledgements

This special issue derives from the ‘Critical Approaches to Cultural Identities’ conference that was set to take place in Dijon in Spring 2020 and had to be cancelled due the Covid-19 pandemic. The discussions we were hoping to have during this conference about the perceived growing gap between critical approaches to cultural identities in academia and essentialising discourses widespread in the public sphere could not take place physically. We are extremely thankful to have the opportunity to bring this topic and part of the discussion to a wider audience, thanks to the Language and Intercultural Communication journal. We are particularly indebted to the Editor, Malcolm N. MacDonald, for his continuous support with this project.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mélodine Sommier

Mélodine Sommier works as an assistant professor in University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research concentrates on the use of culture as a discursive and an interactional resource, in particular regarding the conflation of culture with dimensions such as race and religion and outcomes regarding the production of difference. Her strong expertise in the field of intercultural communication and command of critical approaches within that field are particularly valuable for this special issue. Mélodine is co-founder and co-chair of the temporary working group on Intercultural Communication & Diversity within the Netherlands-Flemish communication association (NeFCA) and vice-chair of the International and Intercultural Communication (IIC) division within the European communication association (ECREA).

David Bousquet

David Bousquet has been working as an associate professor in English Studies and Modern Languages at the University of Burgundy (Dijon, France) since 2014. He co-supervises the MA course in Intercultural Management with Alex Frame. He is a member of the TIL (“Texte, Image, Langage”) research group (EA 4182), where he specializes in postcolonial studies, cultural studies and sociolinguistics. He has been working on the question of cultural identities, “métissage” and creolization in the postcolonial world and is interested in the possible convergence between this theoretical framework and critical approaches to intercultural communication.

Alexander Frame

Alex Frame has been working as an associate professor in Communication Science at the University of Burgundy (Dijon, France) since 2010, where he set up and now runs the MA course in Intercultural Management with David Bousquet. He is a member of the TIL (“Texte, Image, Langage”) research group (EA 4182), where he specialises in critical approaches to intercultural communication. He has published several books (a monography and several collective volumes), journal issues, articles and chapters in the field of intercultural communication.