Intercultural Communication

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Intercultural communication incorporates critical reading of academic and general audience publications on the trans-disciplinary field of intercultural communication; collecting and analyzing instances of “intercultural communication”, and applied simulation activities of the type used in professional development training in private industry. Term projects are geared towards an academic deliverable (a research paper) or a professional deliverable (a “practitioner’s project”). In this class, you will 1) Engage in the critical examination of what “culture” means when it is co-produced in interaction as an explanation for human behavior, 2) Explore situated intercultural discourse in interactional contexts such as workplaces, classrooms, courtrooms and institutional gatekeeping encounters, 3) Examine relationships between language use and various social identities, including race, ethnicity and gender from an intersectional perspective, and 4) Wrestle with how we can apply research-based findings in interdiscourse communication to “improve” everyday interactions as well as to address and redress social inequality. Our primary theoretical framework is interactional sociolinguistics with a focus on qualitative discourse analysis and ethnographic field methods. You’ll have the opportunity to record and analyze interactional data throughout the course and to analyze data brought in by your facilitator and colleagues. In additionl to readings in interactional sociolinguistics, we will read research theoretically grounded in linguistic anthropology, communication, raciolinguistics and educational linguistics. We will focus on how features of conversational interaction (such turn-taking, silence, indirectness) vary across groups of people; how (mis)communication occurs, how social inequality can be reproduced; the intersectional nature of identity; face systems, conversational style, and conversational inferencing. The course also focuses on the practical applications of intercultural communication, such as in private industry organizations and government, bringing in the facilitator’s experience as a consultant and intercultural trainer for large organizations. Simulation activities and role plays used in organizational training and development will be enacted and analyzed from a critical perspective.