Unsettling Intercultural Communication

Santhosh Chandrashekar is an assistant professor at the University of Denver located on the unceded ancestral lands of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and other Indigenous nations. His work has appeared in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Western Journal of Communication, and Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies. Bernadette Marie Calafell (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is a queer Chicana and hip-hop feminist living in the Pacific Northwest. She is the inaugural Chair and Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Gonzaga University. Her research is focused on queer of color theory, Latina/o/x studies, women of color feminisms, performance studies, and monstrosity. She has co-edited six books and authored Latina/o Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance and Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture.

Intercultural communication scholars have done important work tracing how the legacies of colonialism continue to structure our world. However, missing from this corpus is sustained attention to (North American) Indigeneity and its repression under settler colonialism as foundationally linked to contemporary imperialisms and Euro-American domination.





Unsettling intercultural communication brings together essays by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors that make a strong case to center Indigeneity and, by extension, settler-colonialism as core analytics that can transform the field. Drawing upon the insights of critical Indigenous studies and settler-colonial studies, the contributors approach Indigeneity not as an additive but central concept that demands thorough engagement by intercultural communication scholars if we are to make sense of the unequal and violence-ridden world that we live in. In doing so, they open some of the core intercultural concepts to examination.