15th IALIC Conference

Today’s increasing globalization and the mobility of people have brought new challenges to repositioning Intercultural Communication and its practices. Although research in Intercultural Communication has long been grounded in everyday communication, language classroom and communities, tensions in research frameworks remain and new questions arise with the changing global landscape: Moving away from an essentialist view of culture, what are the alternative perspectives to study language and intercultural communication in this increasingly hybrid, mobile and interrelated world? How does the “fuzzy” concept of culture remain useful when social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and class become interrelated and complex? How do researchers reach out from the Ivory Tower and turn their research into social actions that bring positive changes to the communities they reside in and/or investigate? How can conflicts be resolved and dialogues be facilitated between local communities, between local and international communities, between researchers and practitioners, and between the past and the present? How do individuals understand, relate, speak and act in their private, family, communal and working lives? How does web-based technology connect to and change our communication practices and facilitate the development of hybrid identities? How does the ever-changing China preserve its past, speak to the present world, and enact its new dreams in local and global arenas? This conference, with its focus on intercultural communication in social practice, aims to explore intercultural practices in different social arenas. It welcomes research that uses dialogical perspectives to theory and practice, and especially those that bring positive social change to the communities. The conference aims to encourage greater dialogue between researchers with different theoretical and methodological frameworks, and between Chinese and non-Chinese researchers and practitioners. It seeks to open up dialogues that will lead to new and future directions in intercultural communication research.