CFP: Mediated Intercultural Communication in a Digital Age

CFP: Mediated Intercultural Communication in a Digital Age

Editors: Ahmet Atay, College of Wooster & Margaret D’Silva, University of Louisville

Profound changes in global communication, particularly social media, are leading us to re-examine our notions of culture, communication, audience, and identity. This book aims to bridge the gaps between intercultural communication and traditional and new media scholarship.

Media texts, social media platforms, global applications, and cyber culture play a paramount role in intercultural communication, particularly in the context of globalization.  Beyond traditional media, social media are particularly relevant to facilitating intercultural communication. Global social network sites such Facebook or Twitter, online gaming sites, online courses, global blogs, and all of the applications that appear in smart phones, tablets or computer devices are part of a very complicated and multi-faceted digital culture that moves beyond the borders of nation-states.

These social media platforms allow global communities to emerge; immigrants, diasporic bodies, and cosmopolitans can communicate and connect across the globe. They also allow members of traditionally oppressed groups to find their voices, cultivate communities, create homes away from home, and construct their cultural identities and narratives. Digitalized social movements around the world, identity performances of diasporic queer bodies, and long-distance relationships between partners and family members are some examples. This cyber culture centers around communication between people who are culturally, nationally, and linguistically similar or radically different. Therefore, studying traditional and social media in relation to intercultural communication is extremely crucial and timely.

This call invites abstracts for an edited book that takes qualitative, interpretive, and critical and cultural perspectives in examining the reciprocal relationship between media and intercultural communication. The book’s interrelated goals are to:

1. Examine how media, social media in particular, influence and contribute to intercultural communication.
2. Analyze the complex and multidimensional relationship between culture and media in the context of globalization.
3. Understand how media, particularly social media, construct identities and enable or disable individuals to express their cultural identities.
4. Analyze how globalization as a cultural and political process impacts mediated and intercultural communication.
5. Look at different contemporary issues relevant to intercultural communication and social media scholarship such as immigration, diaspora, social movements, religion and spirituality, democracy, and intercultural/ international relationships, from a media perspective.
6. Examine both negative and positive influences of media, particularly social media, on intercultural communication.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

1. Theorizing mediated intercultural communication
2. Social media and cultural identity
3. Social media and intercultural relationships
4. Media and online courses in the context of globalization
5. Cyber intercultural communities
6. Social media and global social movements
7. Immigrant media
8. Media and intercultural representations

Abstracts are due by September, 20, 2016, with a word length of no more than 500 words, along with pertinent references, contact information, and a short biographic blurb of 300 words. Full-length manuscripts are due on April 1, 2017, with a word length of no more than 5,000-7,000 words and in APA style, including references, endnotes, and so forth. Please mail your abstracts as Word documents to Ahmet Atay (aatay@wooster.edu) for an initial review.