Editorial

As is generally well known, the project of intercultural communication originated on two successive fronts: first as an extension of foreign language training programmes offered to new recruits by the American Foreign Service in the wake of the Second World War (Martin et al., 2012); and later in higher education across Europe as a merging of cultural studies with the teaching of modern and foreign languages (Byram, 1989). However, by the third decade of the twenty-first century, it has evolved into a very much broader-based area of concern: global in its reach, as illustrated by our previous special issue (van Maele & Jin, 2022); and extending beyond the classroom to encompass the ‘languaging’ of multicultural societies as well as the ethics of language and politics (e.g. Holmes et al., 2022). In this final issue of Volume 22 of Language and Intercultural Communication, we offer you a sometimes intriguing, sometimes controversial, selection of these ‘extra-pedagogical’ concerns of intercultural communication. Issue 6 begins with a paper which successfully blends psychological approaches to acculturation with social constructionist discourse analysis. We then bring together two papers which look at the ways in which intercultural communication is carried out on the internet to part celebrate, and part parody, the skills in and knowledge of Chinese language and culture by American microcelebrities. In a challenging essay, Marco Santello next draws on the work of Michel de Certeau as he attempts to restrain claims for the unbridled creativity of translanguaging. The final paper in this collection offers a critique of the current state of Indigenous language education in the Northern Territory of Australia. We round off the volume with our customary two book reviews.

It has been 20 years since Malcolm first came across the chapter in Ruth Wodak & Michael Meyer’s (2004) collection, Critical Discourse analysis: a sociocognitive approach (pp. 63–85). In this, Teun van Dijk issued a plea for a tripartite approach to critical discourse analysis which addressed the relationship between discourse, mind and society. In part due to the somewhat reductive nature of models of cross-cultural communication inherited from early psychological approaches to intercultural communication, over the years this journal has veered towards a commitment to studies of intercultural communication which focus more on the relationship between language and society. In their opening paper for this issue, Catho Jacobs, Dorien Van De Mieroop, and Colette Van Laar transcend this theoretical dichotomisation to re-initiate a fruitful ‘dialogue’ between psychological research and social constructionist approaches in order to understand how the national and ethnic identities of second- and third- generation immigrants to Belgium are constituted in the discourse of the research interview. In so doing, they shed a fresh light on what a psychological perspective on acculturation can bring to a discourse analytical, social constructionist perspective. Eschewing Berry’s oft-used acculturation model (1997), which can lead to the over-deductive treatment of raw research data, Catho et al. embrace what they call a ‘holistic discourse analytical method’ in order to arrive at a nuanced analysis of the discursive construction of the identities of their participants. To illustrate their argument, they home into the fine grained use of discourse by just three participants, which reveals three broad strategies whereby participants construct their transnational identities. Their study concludes that while some of their interviewees construct a ‘clear and straight-forward identity strategy’, many of their participants either negotiate an identity strategy with their interviewer, or engage simultaneously in more than one strategy. This paper therefore illuminates with a high degree of specificity the ‘dynamic and fluid nature’ of the identity strategies which their migrant participants mobilise in relation to the changing context(s) in which they find themselves at any given point in time.

Nowadays most people – in industrialised societies at least – not only regularly enjoy engaging with a range of unmediated, DIY communication through the internet, but with the necessary skill and inclination they can also post their own content – sometimes even turning this into a highly profitable pursuit. This can provide a source of both entertainment and information for, generally younger, ‘netizens’ (though see the cautionary paper by Dooly & Darvin, 2022, in our twentieth anniversary issue earlier in this volume). An aspect of this which is attracting increasing attention in intercultural communication research (e.g. Chang & Chang, 2019) is the phenomenon whereby young people living in a foreign country, commonly American males who have resided in China for lengthy periods of time, can display their prowess in the local language and culture to create short scenarios which they regularly post on the web. Their activity is overtly ‘intercultural’ in as much as they often compile a series of ironic commentaries focusing on the differences between their native culture and that of the country in which they now reside. In this, they are maybe creating an ironic, postmodern inversion of the forms of intercultural training decried by IALIC’s premonitory conferences in cross-cultural capability held in the late 90s, and sometimes still rolled out to this day to still credulous members of the ‘business community’. These ‘microcelebrities’ often engage in scurrilous humour and profanity, and also construct complex online personae which are as ironic as their verbal commentaries. Using a range of different platforms, they also display a full gamut of sexual fluidity, ranging from the hyper-masculine to the androgynous.

In this vein, the second paper in this issue also marks a welcome return to a more linguistic engagement with interculturality by Xingsong Shi, who - along with her colleagues Yujie Chang and Jiawei Gao - present three case studies of three popular microcelebrities who regularly post videos on Bilibili. Drawing once again upon Darvin and Norton’s revised model of investment (2015; see also Shi & Guo, 2021), they explore the ways in which the linguistic and cultural capital possessed by ‘languagers’ can be transformed into economic capital. The authors invoke Homi Bhabha’s (1994) conception of Third Space as a metaphor for the ‘ephemeral and emergent’ zone navigated by these new intercultural communicators as they deploy a complex interplay between language, visual imagery and humour to create and transmit their hybrid, ‘transnational’, identities (see also MacDonald, 2019; Zhou & Pilcher, 2019). In this Shi et al. have carried out a painstaking qualitative transcription, coding and analysis of a commendably large corpus of more than 200 videos in order to describe in detail how these Uploaders not only ‘invested in local language and cultural practices’ but also, in keeping with Darvin and Norton’s (2015) thesis brought to bear ‘previously possessed affordances as sociocultural capital to enhance their transnational identities’. This enables them over time to achieve legitimacy for their posts and eventually become accepted by a broad cross-section of internet users in China and beyond.

Complementing Shi et al.’s engagement with youthful wannabes seeking to engage with the internet for fame and fortune, Jennifer Ho next presents a close analysis of a more pedagogically oriented use of the internet. In this case, she examines close-up two ‘moments’ from the video blogs (or ‘vlogs’) posted on YouTube by an American English language teacher. These illustrate his attempts to use Mandarin at a Chinese Supermarket in the US, accompanied by a friend. Ho’s focus on a single case study enables her to engage in detail with the complex multimodal resources which this particular vlogger mobilises in order to ‘do interculturality’. These include the semiotic import of gesture and the interactive nature of the comments which users make on the vlogger’s performance. In order to illustrate these, we have included two detailed and intricate appendices at the end of the paper which the author has created in order to support her analysis. In this, rather than just focusing upon the language used by participants, Ho draws on the wider palette of spoken word, written text, screen imagery, sound, visual perspective and gaze to examine how her vlogger constitutes the cultural identities of himself and his associate. Thus Ho successfully provides us with empirical evidence, not only of the complexity of the multimodal data entailed in such encounters but also of the paradoxical and somewhat contradictory nature of the identities which we construct in relation to the ever-shifting cultural contexts in which we find ourselves.

Ho’s paper above undertakes a moment-by-moment analysis of empirical data to illustrate the ‘spontaneous performances of the multilingual language users, and the consequences of the spontaneous performances for the individuals concerned and for the translanguaging space’ (after Li, 2011, p. 1223). The creative potential of translanguaging for ‘doing interculturality’ has also featured extensively in other issues in this journal over the past decade with respect to the investigation of social spaces which lend themselves to the intermingling of languages and cultures: e.g. English Languaging Workshops run in Padova by activists for refugees (Helm & Dabre, 2018), and a French language course attended by Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Luxembourg (Kalocsányiová, 2017). Due to the recent proliferation of research funding in this area over this period (e.g. https://tlang.org.uk/), contexts of translanguaging enquiry from the UK have also featured prominently in these pages, e.g.: arts-based methods of enquiry with younger people and basketball training sessions at a sports centre in the ‘superdiverse’ city of Leeds (Callaghan et al., 2018), a legal Advice Centre for citizens with Eastern European background in West London (Hua et al., 2019), and most recently a writing project undertaken with a small group Congolese women asylum seekers in Manchester (Brownlie, 2021). It would seem, then that translanguaging, which once seemed to be a rival to the orthodoxies of monolingualism in education, has by the 2020s become distinctly mainstream. Marco Santello’s essay, which we present next, also takes up a challenge offered by Li Wei’s paper, but in a rather more contrarian fashion. Drawing on the work of the French ethnographer and language philosopher Michel de Certeau, it brings to task the idea that the creativity of translanguagers in social spaces, be they located on terra firma or in virtual reality, is necessarily manifested in an unbridled fashion. While De Certeau certainly regards humans’ use of language as creative, he does so only in relation to its potential within the constraints of the social space within which this action takes place. Santello develops this stance to argue that creative uses of language, such as the hybridisation of multiple linguistic systems, enable users to engage agentively with their immediate social situations – but that this does not necessarily entail the potential for the wider spread global of societal transformation that is sometimes implied by some of the politically inclined translanguaging literature. In our view, this caveat quite possibly also applies to the relationship between creativity in the arts and social transformation, which we have featured in these pages in recent years (e.g. Harvey et al., 2022; Matos & Melo-Pfeifer, 2020). Like Santello, we would welcome further theoretical and empirical investigations into the specific relations between the creativity which might be experienced in particular social contexts and any ensuing transformation which might take place – either specifically within its immediate context or more broadly.

As we have seen, there can be little doubt that mounting empirical evidence has been marshalled to support the claims of translanguaging. In order to embrace the languages and cultures of incoming transnational social groups, translanguaging has arguably become the latest language ideology of cultural and economically influential societies across Europe, as well as the virtual spaces which intertwine them. However, it would be a mistake if we imagine that this condition is universally applicable. As with any theory of language use or acquisition, both multilingualism – and its flipside monolingualism – are subject to the specific economic, social and cultural conditions within which they are born. In this respect, in areas of the world which were colonised by European nations, the languages of Indigenous and First Nation peoples – far from being incorporated into the mainstream – remain susceptible to marginalisation and even suppression. In this, Australia is no exception. In a potentially controversial paper which rounds off this entire volume, Janine Oldfield brings us some outcomes from her seven-year study carried out on Indigenous language education policy in the Northern Territories. Combining social analysis, policy analysis and historical discourse analysis, Oldfield shines a searing light upon the condition of Indigenous language education in the neoliberal episteme which has gradually intensified since the noughties within the educational policy of the Northern Territory. Drawing on Roberts and Mahtani's (2010) critique of the model of a racialized neoliberal orientation towards educational policy which ‘inscribes cultural and language differences as defective and simultaneously silences or suppresses contestation and critique’, Oldfield argues that the importance ascribed to the cultural capital of the dominant colonial group in the Northern Territories has been to the detriment of the educational development of the children of Indigenous families in the region. Not only has this led to the dominant language – English – ‘supplanting’ support given to the teaching of and through Indigenous languages and culture, but it has also led to the norms and values of the dominant social groups becoming normalised within a system geared to the marketability of the educational standards (after Apple, 2000), carried out in schools through an exclusionary human resourcing policy and a normative testing regime.

We round off this issue with reviews of two books which have recently been published by two stalwarts of our Association. Sadia Shad introduces us to Manuela Guilherme’s latest (2022) collection of papers which offers us A framework for critical transnational research; and Kenny Nomnian reminds us about the long-awaited second edition of An intercultural approach to English language teaching, now updated (2022) by John Corbett, who was our predecessor in the Editor’s chair. Once again, we extend our thanks to both our reviewers for their labours in bringing these two volumes to our attention.

Throughout this year, we have also been grateful for the continued dedication of the team at Taylor and Francis who have undertaken the hard graft of transporting good copy to you: Kate Morse, our ever-supportive Portfolio Manager; Taylor Gill, our attentive Production Manager; Kavitha Sambantham who as Production Editor has ensured that good copy reaches you bang on schedule; and Venalyn Somejo, our Editorial Assistant, for ensuring that drafts find their way to all the right people in a timely fashion. We have also welcomed Eugene Tam who now assists Hans in vetting papers for our open issues. We also thank the Editorial Board of LAIC for offering their expert oversight of the journal over another year. And we especially salute all 82 reviewers of the papers for this volume, who have so earnestly acquitted their roles as members of the academic community.