Signing off and urging us forward

Three years ago, I started my journey as the third Editor-in-Chief of this journal in Volume 7 (1): Online Discussion Forum: Engaging Key Intercultural Urgencies in Today’s World. After twelve journal issues, thousands of emails, hundreds of hours spent in Scholar One, dozens of phone calls in which I relayed good and bad news, and countless close reads of fascinating essays on intercultural communication, cultural identities, global contexts, and various approaches to interculturalism, I have come to the bittersweet end of my journey in heralding this journal. It has been in all senses of the word a “gratifying” honor and privilege. I acknowledge the true stars of the last three years, my amazing graduate student editorial assistants, Vicky Arafa and Erin Michaela Weeks, of the Department of Communication Studies at San Jose State University. I am indebted to them for their critical insight on all of the readings, their leadership in figuring out the technological gauntlet of Scholar One, and their amazing (and spot on) instincts about the direction of the journal. I thank all of the amazing scholars who I asked (often in the last hour) to serve as reviewers for the journal and without whose talent in identifying the strengths and potentialities of each essay I would be lost. I also commend all of the featured authors in this journal whose talents are immeasurable and their contributions to intercultural scholarship vast. I issue special thanks to the Taylor & Francis team (Katherine Robson, Sophie Wade, and Amanda Titmas) for taking care of us and helping us along the way. I also send heartfelt support to the incoming Editor-in-Chief Todd Sandel and his editorial team as they will take this journal into a needed direction.

In my role as Editor-in-Chief, I have been in awe at the stunning work of intercultural scholars all over the world and in different career stages (graduate students, beginning scholars, established scholars, and senior scholars). Our work as intercultural scholars (whether one sees oneself grounded in the field of intercultural communication or in related fields and disciplines) has traversed multiple paradigmatic, theoretical, and methodological approaches as well as a varied range of key constructs (cultural discourses, ideologies, identities, contexts). Our field of intercultural communication has grown in ways that I never dreamed of when I started out as a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University over 20 years ago.

However, we must remember that our work is far from over. I wish I saw more intercultural essays coming through the journal portal on transgender discourses and problematics, queer identities and problematics, the complex collision of feminisms and intercultural dimensions of nation, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and sexual orientation, and the engagement of disabilities (especially the engaging scholarship of critical disabilities). I also waited for more work that connected our intercultural theories and analyses to applied social justice and advocacy contexts to confront and tackle the cultural genocides around the world, the horrific murders of Black bodies and female bodies of color, and the depressing acceptance of public discourse that champions racism, sexism, and hatred against all aspects of difference (and in a way that de-sensitizes our work). As an intercultural communication scholar whose work is grounded in critical intercultural communication studies, I call for all of us to seek out ways to make our scholarship matter in the lives and world around us; for us not to just build a discipline together but to help reshape our social world and fight for a more just world through the positions we are in (e.g., in the classroom, at our schools, in our neighborhoods and communities, in a part of the world that matters to us). I see this as my role and have identified ways that I must now carry out this work in ways that I can (developing global and regional intercultural justice faculty learning communities, creating a framework for critical intercultural dialogue to share with our own local community, neighborhood, and professional networks). Social change is an active practice constituted in our everyday lives. As my final words for this journal, I recount what Thomas Nakayama and I urged intercultural scholars to do: to continue to do more as a diverse and intercontinental network of scholars, advocates, and teachers who are deeply committed to justice, liberation, transgression, transformation, and the surpassing of conditions that have been deemed as “natural,” “right and good,” “inevitable and necessary,” and “the way it has always been” (Nakayama & Halualani, 2012, p. 614).