Intercultural Communication Education and Research: Reenvisioning Fundamental Notions

Seeking to uncover underlying epistemic invisibilities in generating intercultural communication education and research knowledge and to open up space for envisaging interculturality alternatively, this book reexamines and problematizes the assumptions and ontologies in the conceptual systems of interculturality.

In enunciating and critiquing what has been largely endorsed, normalized and taken for granted, this volume brings to the fore different, changing and situated understandings of intercultural ontologies and epistemologies in terms of premises, workings and objectives, unveiling the entangled factors and contexts that have delimited and circumscribed the realm. The authors believe that the field would benefit from some cognitive and sensory dissonance while reengaging effectively with notions to move forward. In particular, they endeavour to de-monumentalize and disrupt the very conceptual tenets that may have rendered interculturality myopic, repetitive, monolithic and aseptic in expanding the epistemic concerns of the ＂intercultural＂, especially in the English language.

This book will be an essential read for scholars and students of the sociology of education, educational philosophy and intercultural education and also for all readers interested in the broad field of interculturality.

Hamza R’boul is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong, China. His research interests include intercultural education, (higher) education in the Global South, decolonial endeavours in education, cultural politics of language teaching and postcoloniality.

Fred Dervin is a Professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Helsinki (Finland). He specializes in intercultural communication education, the sociology of multiculturalism and international mobilities in education and has widely published in different languages on identity, interculturality and mobility/migration. Exploring the politics of interculturality within and beyond the ＂canon＂ of intercultural communication education research has been one of Dervin’s idée fixes in his works over the past 20 years. His recent publications with Routledge include The Paradoxes of Interculturality: A Toolbox of Out-of-the-box Ideas for Intercultural Communication Education and the coedited volumes Teaching Interculturality ＂Otherwise＂, Academic Experiences of International Students in Chinese Higher Education.