Preface

Living in a world of uncertainty

The years since the first edition of this text (2014) have seen many changes, and these have often bought increased tension and uncertainty. This tension augments the fact that many young adults were struggling with anxiety and depression in the United States and other cultures even before recent times. In the last years, we have seen protests across many cultures for racial justice, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and the right to public expression. Some countries are accused of suppressing Muslim, Kurdish, or other minority groups, seeking to force them to conform to dominant cultures. We have seen a growing frequency of climate-related changes, such as increased storms in some areas, rising sea levels, shrinking ice caps, and resulting changes in food supplies. The number of refugees from local strife and from climate-related issues has risen drastically. At the time of this writing, there is open conflict in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Yemen, but also refugees fleeing Syria, Venezuela, and other countries. And then there was that whole COVID-19 virus thing. Surrounding all of these, many of our countries are seeing a rise in political polarization, which hints at political instability.

Our need has grown for interconnections with those around the world to understand others and to reach hands across borders to seek resolutions for world problems that affect people in their everyday life. Our hope for this text is that you will learn about culture, but specifically, that the outcome of the book is that you will become a more informed and prepared world citizen.

Grand-scale problems require complex solutions, and these solutions require the synergy of efforts of people with different cultural perspectives. But even if we do not see the connection of global issues to our own lives or ever travel abroad, culture touches our lives. We live in a multicultural, global economy, where, to survive, most large businesses employ, buy, and sell across cultural and national lines. Many of us, regardless of our country of residence, have doctors, teachers, bosses, students, or employees from “cultures” besides our own. With new and interactive media, we might play online games, chat, or develop friendships or romances with people in other lands without leaving our own borders. Besides this, we each live within and are influenced and sometimes constrained by our own cultures. The more we know about our own culture, the more effective we will be where we live, the more we can engage in issues and problems within our own community (which have cultural elements), and the more we will see the strengths and limits of our own culture. As we see these strengths and limits, we will have more likelihood of being able to make choices and change those cultures. Rather than a "problem," we should see the interconnections with people from other groups and cultures not just as a challenge but as a strength. As our lives and cultures intertwine with the lives, experiences, and values of those of people from other cultures, our diverse and yet interconnected exepriences can weave together a rich fabric of diverse perspectives and solutions. We can weave our differences into a strong, vibrant, and colorful fabric, like that illustrated on the front cover of this text.

Whether we are discussing world-level crises or community issues, there is a bright spot as we talk about social issues, and that is the rise of involvement of citizens in the public sphere—at least in some ways. Kim Parker and Ruth Igielnik (2020), from the Pew Research Center, in a news article appropriately titled, “On the Cusp of Adulthood and Facing an Uncertain Future,” describe what they see as characteristics of the youngest adult generation in the United States. This generation is, overall, more comfortable with aspects of diversity, is higher in education than any previous generation, is more likely to believe that climate change is at least partly due to human activity, and sees “societal change as a good thing.” As we look at images of protests from around the world—including but far from limited to Iran, Bangladesh, India, Sweden, and Israel—the images are often of young adults seeking to change their world. Engagement and duty are both impacted by things such as level of education, racial background, and religiosity. Increasingly, companies are encouraging their employees to participate in the community, and universities are promoting civic and political engagement.

There seems to be a fresh wind in the air as students in secondary schools, colleges, and universities seek to give back to the community. Volunteerism had risen to a high point in 2017, according to Tobi Johnson (2020), with about 30% of people over 15 years of age volunteering in Australia and the United States, 38% in Great Britain, and 44% in Canada. Ironically, Johnson wrote in March 2020, just before the worldwide COVID-19 crisis. While some sources, such as the United Nations (n.d.) report a surge of volunteerism around the world in response to COVID, Theresa Wu, a volunteering advocate, reports that volunteering dropped 93% during covid and has only rebounded up to 50% of what it was before the crisis. Volunteering trends, according to Wu (2021), include digital media and corporate social responsibility, both things we will discuss in this book. In sum, there is a need for us to be engaged in our societies, in whichever country we find ourselves.

Why another intercultural text? (Features of this book)

The need for solutions for community, as well as the growing interest in community engagement, is a driving force for the present book. We have three main goals in writing this text. First, we want to provide responsible knowledge of things cultural. Many introductory textbooks present simple explanations of things for the student new to cultural issues. We believe students are capable of deep thought, so, where possible, we introduce basic ideas, but then challenge students to critical thought about those ideas. Our second goal is for readers to be able to take something practical from the text for their own workplaces, relationships, and schooling, the traditional focus of intercultural studies. But the third goal is to bring an imagination of possibilities for community engagement—civic or political. We want to encourage readers, and ourselves as authors, to find ways to make the knowledge practical for making people’s lives better, to address social issues, and to meet the personal needs of people in our lives and in our classrooms. With this in mind, this book has several distinctive features:

• → The authors write for introductory readers, with clear definition of terms, but use original frameworks and introduce theories in a way that does not condescend to the reader.
• → We treat culture complexly. While we sometimes discuss national cultures, through most of the book we see cultures as distinct from national boundaries. Some cultures cross national boundaries, and a single city might have people of many different cultures within it. There are regional, urban–rural, or other cultural differences within nations; even organizations have cultures.
• → We construct a vision of culture that uses examples from around the world as much as possible, seeking to remove some of our own U.S.-centric bias as authors, and we use examples that relate to a variety of types of diversity, including age, sex, race, religion, and sexual orientation. While these, in and of themselves, do not constitute cultures, they often contain cultural elements, and there are cultural constructions of how a society treats different groups that deserve our attention as engaged citizens.
• → As authors, we have different cultural backgrounds, but also different focuses within communication—rhetoric, media, and face-to-face communication studies—we (re)introduce notions to the study of intercultural communication not present in many books, including large sections on intercultural ethics and chapters on media (traditional and social media), rhetoric, and political communication.
• → Throughout the book, we promote civic engagement with cues toward individual intercultural effectiveness and giving back to the community in socially relevant ways; we do this throughout the chapters and with discussion questions and engagement activities at the end of each chapter.
• → We weave pedagogy throughout the text with student-centered examples, thought (or “text”) boxes, applications, critical thinking questions, a glossary of key terms, and online resources for students and instructors. These online resources include sample syllabi, test questions, glossary terms, power points, and class exercise options.

Focus and direction of this book

With these goals in mind, our text begins with a discussion of the foundations of intercultural communication. In Chapter 1, we introduce several reasons why it is important to study intercultural communication, with updated situations and examples of world and community diversity. In Chapter 2, we introduce our central concepts of political and civic engagement and discuss the importance and nature of ethical intercultural communication and cultural research. We then turn to different ways to define culture (Chapter 3).

The second portion of the book focuses on elements that inform the intercultural communication process, starting with the foundation upon which all communication rests—values, beliefs, and worldview...