Editorial

In 2020 Cristina Ros i Solé, now Chair of IALIC, drew together with some of her colleagues, a collection of papers for publication in this journal, which took our thinking in a rather different direction to the one with which we had become familiar since the linguistic turn swept out of Continental philosophy to pervade the human sciences all those years ago (e.g. Derrida, 1976, 1978). In their special issue Vibrant Identities: vitalism, post-humanism and materiality, Cristina, Jane Fenoulhet and Gerdi Quist introduced LAIC readers for the first time to a theory that had been gaining considerable traction in the human sciences towards the end of the last millennium (cf. Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2011, 2013). This was the idea that subjects’ identities are not only constructed out of the – often linguistic – interactions that take place between humans and humans, but also out of the non-linguistic interactions that occur between humans and the myriad non-human artefacts with which we engage in everyday life, for example, in Cristina’s own well-regarded study, the clothes worn by a group of women (Ros i Solé, 2022). This approach had already informed many disciplines within the human sciences and has become dubbed ‘new materialism’ or ‘posthumanism’. This wave of thinking is very much in harmony with the current zeitgeist which draws on an ecological discourse to critique what has become known as ‘the Anthropocene’, the notion that we are living within the millennium which is characterised by humans’ dominance over the planet. And that we have come to exploit our dominance in pursuit of our own species’ material gain to the detriment, not only of the well-being of the planet but also that of other species. In positing an ontology which refuses to prioritise the subjectivity of Man, and within which all things inter-relate regardless of their animacy, posthumanism therefore serves to underwrite an ethic of concern both for other (animate) species and for the (inanimate) environment. This axiology is coterminous with the ethic of critical concern for other humans which has emerged in the work of IALIC over the past 25 years. In keeping with the ‘nomadic’ nature of the posthuman theory (Braidotti, 2020), this issue offers readers four papers which draw on a variety of epistemological orientations. The opening paper in this issue, by Amina Kebabi, extends the posthumanist ontology to explore not just the identitary relations between humans and material artefacts, but also between her participants and two categories of abstract entity. Then Maria Luisa Pérez Cavana then inverts the interaction between human beings and materiality by uncovering some of the ways in which the human body experiences the physicality of learning a foreign language. Our third paper, by Xiaoyan Wu, Bernadette Watson and Susan Baker, adopts a more rationalist stance to consider Mainland Chinese students’ views of the communicative behaviour of locals when they relocate to study in Hong Kong. And finally, Ying Wang postulates the intersection that place between translanguaging and English as a lingua franca when Chinese L1 speakers interact online with L1 speakers of English.

Amina Kebabi adopts the posthumanist approach sketched out above in order to unpack the cultural identities of a group of academics who are working in UK universities. In her opening study, she purposively sets out to investigate how her participants construct their identities through their relationships with three categories of artefact, fundamental to the human condition. The first of these is the tried and tested category of food, long regarded as a cornerstone of cultural identity, and an oft-times pressing concern in the practice of intercultural communication and intercultural living (aka ‘adaptation’). The food we eat and our relations with it fit neatly into the increasingly familiar materiality of everyday life which Braidotti (2011, 2013) and others argue impacts agentively upon our ways of being. However in her paper, Kebabi expands this posthumanist position to contend that the categories of things which impact upon the identities of human subjects also includes certain abstract categories, such as naming and death. To validate her argument, she offers evidence based on her interpretation of interviews carried out with five respondents, all of whom were employed within UK academe. Although the paper knowingly refuses to foreground either the nationality or the gender of her participants, it can quickly be inferred from the context that they have relocated to the UK from another country and, arguably, ‘culture’. One’s name is often viewed as a sign which serves as a co-constructed signifier of one’s identity. However, what emerges from Kebabi’s respondents as being of particular interest is the fact that the universe of names within a culture can also serve as a resource which offers itself to her participants as a means of re-signifying their identities in keeping with the agentive principle of posthumanism, as they choose new names for themselves and their children in the process of relocation. If naming is perhaps the most abstract of the categories which are considered in this paper, what emerges as being of particular resonance with regard to her respondents’ consideration of their own mortality, is not only where they consider to be a desirable place to die, but also where they will be finally laid to rest after death. In this respect, the collective response of the cohort suggests a certain agnosticism over whether they desire their final place of rest to be in their country of origin, or in the country where they are currently living. Of significance to the epistemological argument of the paper, however, is the fact that the material imaginary of the person’s final resting place offers them a canvas of options to draw on as they imagine the end of their lives. Intriguingly, the most conventional material category explored in this paper, that of food, appears to play the least significant role in the respondents’ sense of themselves, with only one person being reported as commenting – with a certain irony – on his/her attempts to cultivate a particularly distinctive mode of food preparation. Inter alia, this paper continues to expand our understanding of how non-human entities contribute to the construction of human identities, particularly in the process of becoming that takes place when we relocate from one country and ‘culture’ to another.

While this issue opens with Kebabi pursuing the material polarity of Ros i Solé’s most recent (2020) collection to explore some of the ways in which a small group of academics have built their cultural identities through their relations with non-human entities, our next paper draws on Cristina’s earlier (2016) monograph to explore the lived experience of materiality from the opposite, ‘humanistic’ polarity: that of humans’ experience of their own bodies when carrying out that activity most central to the project of our association – speaking and learning a foreign language. In so doing, Maria Luisa Pérez Cavana sets her work off against the still dominant view of how languages are learned, which prioritises its cognitive and linguistic aspects via the purview of psychology and linguistics, against the more ‘fundamental’ aspects of human experience such as ‘emotions, feelings and bodily sensations’. Building also on the work of Brigitta Busch (2015, 2017), it is the corporeal aspect of language learning that Pérez Cavana homes in on in this paper. In so doing, she adopts a phenomenological approach towards her subjects, as she seeks ‘to understand what matters to them and how they make sense of what they experience’ (after Zahavi, 2019, p. 117). In order to explore a range of human experiences of language learning, Pérez Cavana carries out in-depth interviews with five language learners in higher education who have reached different levels of proficiency in four different languages. She extracts from the descriptions of her subjects some of the very intimate ways in which, as the body attempts to articulate a foreign language, it experiences itself simultaneously as subject – he or she who perceives their own organs as phenomena; and as object – the tongue which struggles to articulate an unfamiliar phonological sound, or the lips which flounder in conveying the nuances of a local accent. In this way, it is possible for the very sounds which one’s own body produces to betray the ‘foreign-ness’ of one’s self as a language learner to the local community. From this evidence Pérez Cavana concludes, rightly in our view, that even after fifty years of second language acquisition research, ‘a more nuanced account of the role of emotions and bodily sensations for FL speakers is needed in order to develop more holistic approaches to teaching and learning’. Although Pérez Cavana avowedly takes a ‘human-istic perspective’ in this paper (our emphasis), we would suggest that conceptually her position is also in keeping with the post-human approach sketched out above, inasmuch as the aim of her study is to decentre the prevalence of the cogito in learning a foreign language in favour of the more ‘distributive, dispersed’ experience of her subjects’ bodies (after Braidotti, 2011).

Our next paper, by Xiaoyan Wu, Bernadette Watson and Susan Baker, arises from the increasingly polarised social and political milieu of Hong Kong. Despite the increased tension between many young Hong Kong people and their contemporaries from the Mainland of China, many Mainlanders still come to study in the prestigious universities which Hong Kong has spawned over the past decades. Previous work by Ladegaard and colleagues (2012, 2017; Mckeown & Ladegaard, 2020) has focused broadly on the different uses of language by Hong Kong students and their Mainland Chinese peers to construct their identities through their mutual social interaction. By contrast, Wu et al. investigate how the communicative behaviour of Hong Kong locals is viewed by Mainland Chinese students, and the effects of this upon their adaptation to their new environment. Not least is the significance of Cantonese in informal interactions between the two populations of students, since Cantonese is the predominant language in Hong Kong, and Mandarin predominates on the Mainland. In contrast with the post-human, post-modern position of our opening paper, Wu et al. adopt the more modernist and rationalist stance of Communication Accommodation Theory (after Giles et al., 1991) in order to analyse the experience of a small cohort of postgraduate Mainland students who enrolled in Hong Kong universities. This suggests that while Mainland Chinese students reported they could get by in Mandarin or English, they perceived that they were able to better adapt to their new lives in Hong Kong if they were able to understand and communicate in Cantonese. However, although many of the participants expressed their willingness to communicate with the locals in the local language, they also reported that they retained a tendency to fall back on Mandarin or English, with a number of participants also mentioning that some Hongkongers also seemed to display a certain hostility towards them in their interactions. This study is important in as much as it dispels the naïve assumption some of us might retain that Mainland Chinese would have little difficulty in communicating with locals in Hong Kong. It also suggests, in keeping with many adaptation studies carried out elsewhere, that – despite possible assumptions of cultural proximity – the adaptation of young people who have travelled from Mainland China to study in Hong Kong would benefit just as much from being primed in the local language as would be the case for anyone else travelling to sojourn a foreign country. The study also reminds us that relatively minor perceived cultural and linguistic differences might sometimes be harder to overcome than major ones, possibly because perceived similarity conceals other important intergroup differences in social interaction, such as ideology and politics.

While Pérez Cavana posits a distributed corporeality in the experience of learning a foreign language, there possibly remains implicit in her paper a more singular conceptualisation of the constitution of that foreign language. However, there is a parallel line of thinking, more in keeping with nomadic thinking, that linguistic singularity is elusive, and in an increasing number of contexts the human activity of ‘languaging’ is actually becoming more dispersed as speakers draw on several different languages at once in order to communicate, particularly when interacting with others who originally speak an L1 different to their own. Thus, from the four-square rationalism of Communication Accommodation Theory, we round off our selection of papers for this issue with a heady mix of translanguaging and English as a lingua franca. In the twentieth anniversary issue of this journal (2022), Will Baker argued that ‘transculturation’ was a more appropriate way of conceptualising ‘intercultural communication’. The final research article in this issue, by Ying Wang – also working out of the Centre for Global Englishes at the University of Southampton – adds yet another dimension to the theoretical edifice of English as a lingua franca by proposing its conceptual meshing with translanguaging, particularly in the context of online interaction. Wang adopts this ‘trans-perspective’ to argue that within the translanguaging which takes place online between speakers of different first languages, English makes itself available as the interactants’ lingua franca, and thereby serves as a ‘stand-by among various semiotic resources’. The paper sifts evidence from the author’s engagement with a wide-ranging cohort of speakers for whom English is not their first language who engage in mundane online exchange to illustrate three phenomena that arise in particular from Chinese speakers’ engagement in translanguaging chat: the deployment of spatial repertoires by Chinese speakers who use English as a lingua franca as a means of communication within social media; the ways in which Chinese speakers combine different languages and symbol systems in order to convey meaning and emotion; and the ways in which Chinese speakers perform their identities through online interactions with ‘native speakers’ of English. Of particular interest in Wang’s paper is the observation that the interaction in English she analyses taking place between Chinese L1 speakers and ‘native’ English speakers displays neither a sense of conformity to the rules of English, nor any sanction for breaking them. Wang argues in conclusion by that by superseding nation-bound linguistic codes in their online communication, speakers of English as a lingua franca now constitute a novel form of transnational community which transcends the boundaries of national languages and nation states. However, we would suggest that while there remain contexts in which linguistic normativity does still prevail such as language testing and – we concede soberly – international publication, this nevertheless suggests more broadly that the ‘rules of the game’ may well have shifted in the new millennium, even with regards to English. Such bastions of propriety as the new generation of the British royal family has – with some notoriety – largely abandoned Queen’s English in favour of a more contemporary version of Received Pronunciation, inflected with ‘Estuary English’; and even the BBC World Service has now embraced anchors who speak a gamut of different Englishes. Furthermore, if Baker proposes (2015, 2022) that transcultural communication is a necessary supercession of intercultural communication, the very same logic would suggest that translanguaging might actually represent a supercession of ELF: as a theory of multiple ‘languaging’ which does not foreground any one, politically hegemonic, language. We remain keen for research into languages other than English which also serve as a common resource for transnational communities.

From the very outset of this journal, successive editors have aimed at maintaining criticality as one of the key characteristics of published papers, and therefore, as a feature of the journal overall. This can be hard enough to maintain in our research and intellectual work. However, moving from an intellectually critical viewpoint to a position of actually being able to transform our work and the world around us can be even more elusive. We, therefore, round off this issue with a review of two recent collection of papers, published by Routledge, which should give us some pointers as to how to achieve this. The first, Interculturality in higher education: Putting critical approaches into practice (2022), is edited by Mélodine Sommier, a regular delegate at recent IALIC conferences, along with her long-standing colleagues Anssi Roiha and Malgorzata Lahti. And in our second reading for the new year, Hamza R’boul and Fred Dervin invite us to re-envision our fundamental notions about Intercultural communication education and research (2023). As ever, we remain grateful to our two reviewers – Mila Ida Nurhidayah and Zilong Zhong – and to our Reviews Editor, Vivien Zhou, for helping us to keep our ideas up to date.