Transcultural Communication

Baker, Will (2024) Transcultural Communication. In, Shi-xu, (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Discourse Studies. Routledge, pp. 110-123. (doi:10.4324/9781003207245-10).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

This chapter presents transcultural communication as an approach to understanding the complexity and fluidity of communication in contemporary social spaces where the borders between cultures and languages are transcended and transgressed. Transcultural communication is introduced as a next step in critical intercultural communication research drawing on earlier discourse approaches to culture and transculturality. Specifically, transcultural communication is focused on interactions in which participants make use of multiple cultural scales simultaneously and where it may not be possible or appropriate to attribute communicative practices to a single ŉamed’ culture. Transcultural communicative practices are also characterised by a fluid and complex use of language and modality. Thus, the parallel trans theories of translanguaging and transmodality are used to inform transcultural communication theory. As such this perspective is distinguished from earlier transculturality approaches that focused on hybridising identifiable cultures and third spaces between those cultures. However, like transculturality, transcultural communication shares an interest in power relations and how different cultural references, discourses, practices and identities may be foregrounded, negotiated and given or denied legitimacy and space. The extent to which transcultural communication is commensurable with cultural discourse studies will also be discussed, particularly in relation to perspectives on cultural discourse that resists essentialism, view culture as interactive and fluid, emphasise the importance of uncovering power structures in cultural discourses and challenge hegemonic characterisations. It is hoped that transcultural communication will provide an alternative to the methodological nationalism and colonialism that remains deeply embedded in much of our thinking about language, discourse, culture and communication and open up new directions in how we research and teach these subjects.

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