Reflections and focal points for critical intercultural communication

Invited paper

Critical Intercultural Mentoring and Allying

In this essay, we write about our collaborative experiences with faculty mentoring/allying relationships using autoethnography. From two different locations of academic faculty standing, we articulate that faculty mentoring/allying relationships can be sites of critical intercultural communication praxis in which differences informed by historical and existing power relations are productively discussed and acknowledged. However, these are easier to talk about than to practice. Thus, we share our continuing struggle to complicate the notion of faculty mentoring/allying and offer our experiences as complex, fluid, multiple, and contextual productions and constitutions of differences.

Memories as a discursive strategy: Exploring representations of laïcité and Frenchness in Le Monde

Laïcité (i.e. secularism) has been increasingly and widely represented as a French exception. This study investigates such association by examining the cultural reality in which laïcité is embedded through the use of collective memories. Drawing on critical intercultural communication and aspects of a Foucauldian approach to discourse, this study explores collective memories that are associated with the concept of laïcité and how they contribute to the discursive association of laïcité with France. Qualitative content analysis was used to examine newspaper texts ( N = 60) published in the French daily Le Monde between 2011 and 2014. Results reveal the salience of historical memories and indicate ways in which they can be used to normalize meanings, produce instances of disciplinary power, and present reified representations of collective identities and practices.