Decolonizing culture and communication

The complex challenges facing our world include, but are not limited to, different forms of discrimination and material inequalities. The challenges are manifold when we take into consideration broader questions of intercultural understanding, disinformation, digital cultures, democratic participation, community mobilization, and transformations in ecosystems. These challenges call for culturally-situated communication scholarship because such an approach provides essential guiding frameworks for expanding theoretical horizons as well as building registers that impact material realities.

During my editorship of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (JIIC), my overarching goal is to continue the remarkable work of previous editors. Additionally, I hope to emphasize the analytics of culture and communication with a decolonial focus. I envision guiding the journal in the following ways.

First, issues of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access have gained immense importance in all areas of academic practice, including journal publication processes. To bolster this movement, my goal is to draw upon ideas of decolonization and turn to epistemologies of indigenous struggles and local communities of the global South (Dutta & Pal, 2020). Decolonization in this sense foregrounds care for and connections with nature, seeks to unsettle structures of whiteness (Escobar, 2015), and, above all, calls for returning land and knowledges to colonized communities (Tuck & Yang, 2012). In order to address structural inequality from a decolonial perspective, there is work that needs to be done to decolonize and undo, colonialist—white, capitalist, heteronormative, ableist—modes of scholarly inquiry and representation in disciplinary knowledge production. Thus, I look forward to fostering a space for diverse voices in JIIC through an active commitment to inviting difference. I aim to create a space for anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, feminist, queer, indigenous scholarship in the US and worldwide to broaden the understanding of international and intercultural communication from the margins. My expectation is that scholars will engage with intersectional analyses of different social categories to interrogate how colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial relations and structures of oppression are sustained.

Second, I encourage authors to envision new ways of knowledge-making to decolonize the discipline. What counts as intercultural and international communication knowledge ought to be fundamentally interrogated, and JIIC has a vital role to play here. As one strategy, I would like to create a space for testimonios (Beverley, 1999), autoethnographic performances, narratives of emancipatory struggles, and any other form of creative/non-traditional engagement with a cultural artifact. In addition, I will invite scholars to submit collaborative work with practitioners, community leaders, and activists, who work closely with communities in different cultural sites and contexts. Building on “Communication Interventions” initiated by Mohan Dutta in Journal of Applied Communication Research, this special section of the journal will be called International and Intercultural Manifestos and there will be opportunities for submissions beyond written texts. JIIC will host a digital platform alongside its regular section. This digital platform will feature an array of peer-reviewed “International and Intercultural Manifestos” that reflect discourses, practices, and critique of intercultural communication. A manifesto can be a stand-alone piece of work, or supplemental content (audio, image, video) accompanying a journal article published in JIIC. It is my hope that the digital platform serves as a space for challenging the dominant framework of the written word. Please send your ideas for International and Intercultural Manifestos as well as submissions for the section to JIIC (please include International and Intercultural Manifestos in the subject line).

Diverse forms of scholarship expand the boundaries of knowledge and offer diverse recommendations for praxis. This approach will enable JIIC to make space for local and global social movements. My hope is that during my editorship, the scholarship published in JIIC will bring these conversations into mainstream academic discourses and extend the communicative theorization of cultural and social change from an international perspective.

Third, I encourage research utilizing a broad range of research methods while maintaining JIIC’s overall focus. I will also welcome an interdisciplinary approach to communication scholarship. As long as work advances theory of cultural and/or international communication and meets the highest standards of quality for empirical scholarship, I would consider it at JIIC. Recognizing that international and intercultural communication issues may span across multiple disciplines and methods, I hope to publish research across established boundaries. In short, I look forward to fostering the journal as a multi-disciplinary space.

I am honored to serve as the incoming Editor for the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication and look forward to enriching our understanding of intercultural communication with a particular focus on crystallizing social justice agendas in theory and praxis.