Intercultural Studies/CLER Conversation By Elisabetta Adami

Room: Baines Wing SR (2.10)
Date: Wednesday, 14/02/2024
Time: 14:00-15:00

Intercultural communication research is often confined to linguistic analysis of interactions between people from different countries or mother tongues. Yet cultural practices cross national borders, nations are not culturally homogeneous, and we communicate with more than language.

What if we examine shared and non-shared meanings and practices beyond language? Can this reveal boundaries of cultural others/kins beyond nationalities/ethnicities? And can this turn interculturality into a useful lens to look at, and cross all kinds of societal divides, as in polarisation, identity politics, intergenerational incommunicability, clashing lifestyles, neurotypical-neurodivergent encounters?

My talk will present a social semiotic approach to interculturality tested on the case of food as shared/non-shared semiotic practices. Culture is a problematic word. Even within discourses promoting ‘diversity’, culture is often used as a proxy for nationality/ethnicity, complemented with ‘global culture’ on the one hand and ‘sub-cultures’ on the other. Culture thus becomes a convenient black box for labelling people, simultaneously ignoring/silencing non-conformity ‘within’ and highlighting difference with/of ‘others’. Food is a case in point as it is seen as a core expression of (material) culture, yet often through pervasive nationalistic, ethnocentric and exoticizing discourses.

Instead, moving beyond critical analysis of discourses, I propose to use culture/interculturality as a lens to look at the co-construction of sharedness in semiotic practices. Findings from a netnographic study in different language-based social media spaces show a series of dimensions and degrees of non-/sharedness, derived from attributions of provenance in interactions through and about food. Empirically, findings show that the dynamics emerging in interaction are much more rhizomatic than hegemonic discourses on food and on culture would portray them. They also show lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, 1980) that allow interactants not only to cross but also to undermine essentialised boundaries of kins/others. Methodologically, the identified dimensions and degrees of non-/sharedness can be used as intercultural framework for all kinds of meaning making in interactions.

The talk hopes to prompt research that moves beyond a “conflation of intercultural and international” (Collins, 2018, p. 174), and more broadly, to reflect on diversity beyond tokenistic approaches. Challenging ideas of multi/interculturality as necessarily tied to different nationalities, ethnicities and/or mother tongues, the approach, I hope, can be used as a lens through which to look at difference and co-construction of sharedness in any contexts – thus making it useful vis-a-vis a landscape of growing nationalisms and anti-immigration propaganda, and equally growing societal divisions, at a time when global challenges, inequalities and survival needs demand co-construction of sharedness, solidarity and joint action.

References:

Collins, H. (2018). Interculturality from above and below: Navigating uneven discourses in a neoliberal university system. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(2), 167–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2017.1354867

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Biosketch:

Elisabetta Adami, PhD, is Associate Professor in Multimodal Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research specialises in social semiotic multimodal analysis with a current focus on issues of culture, interculturality and translation. She has published on sign-making practices in place (on urban visual landscapes and superdiversity), in digital environments (on intercultural digital literacies, aesthetics, interactivity and social media practices), and in face-to-face interaction (in intercultural contexts and deaf-hearing interactions). Her latest volume is Multimodal Communication in Intercultural Interaction (2023, Routledge), co-edited with Ulrike Schroeder and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain. She is a founding editor of the journal Multimodality & Society (SAGE), former editor and in the editorial board of Visual Communication (SAGE), leads Multimodality@Leeds, and co-organises the Multimodality Talks Series.