Journal Of Intercultural Studies Vol 14

In Worlding Women Jan Jindy Pettman asks 'Where are the women in international relations'? She develops a broad picture of women in colonial and post-colonial relations; racialized, ethnic and national identity conflicts; in wars, liberation movements and peace movements; and in the international political economy. Bringing contemporary feminist theory together with women's experiences of the `international', Pettman shows how mainstream international relations is based on certain constructions of masculinity and femininity. Her ground-breaking analysis has implications for feminist politics as well as for the study of international relations.

Navigating and resolving issues in intercultural communication is an integral part of the interpreter’s role on a daily basis. This book is an essential guide to the interpersonal dimensions of intercultural communication in a variety of key interpreting contexts: business, education, law, and healthcare. Drawing on the unique perspectives of professional interpreters, Cho focuses on two key questions that remain underexamined in the field of intercultural communication: why does intercultural communication often break down, and how do individuals manage intercultural communication issues? Each chapter deals with issues pertinent to small cultural aspects of intercultural communication, including gender, ethnic migrant communities, educational cultures among migrants of Asian backgrounds, and monolingualism/monoculturalism in courtroom and refugee interview contexts. Spanning diverse geographical domains, the book highlights the impact of macro power on interpreting as well as the significance of individual agency and micro power, which can rebalance the given communicative context. Offering a comprehensive, up-to-date, innovative, and critical perspective on intercultural communication in interpreting, this is key reading for student and professional interpreters and those on courses in language and intercultural communication.

WeChat (the international version of Weixin), launched in 2012, has rapidly become the most favoured Chinese social media. Globally available, equally popular both inside and outside China and widely adopted by Chinese migrants, WeChat has fundamentally changed the ways in which Mandarin-speaking migrants conduct personal messaging, engage in group communication and community business activities, produce and distribute news, and access and share information. This book explores a wide range of issues connected to the ways in which WeChat works and is used, across the world among the newest members of the Chinese diaspora. Arguing that digital/social media afford a great degree of individual agency, as well as a collective capacity for sustaining an ‘imagined community’, the book shows how WeChat’s assemblage of infrastructure and regulatory frameworks, technical capabilities, content and sense of community has led to the construction of a particular kind of diasporic Chinese world, at a time marked both by China’s rise, and anxiety about Chinese influence in the West. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Sensational reporting by the media has led to attitudes that racialise Muslims and frame them as potential threats to national security, placing them outside the circle of trustworthy citizenship. Muslims in the West are increasingly confronted with the pressure of conforming to dominant core values and accepting 'mere tolerance' from society, or else risk exclusion and even hostility when exercising their rights to maintain diverse cultural norms and religious practices. Muslims in the West and the Challenges of Belonging offers not only rigourous accounts of current difficulties, but also new thinking and deeper understanding about race relations and intercultural engagement in multicultural societies. It explores the increasing visibility of Muslim migrants in the West and the implications this has for multicultural co-existence, cultural representations, belonging and inclusive citizenship.

Engaging with the idea that the world reveals not one, but many routes to modernity, this volume explores the role of religion in the emergence of multiple forms of modernity, which evolve according to specific cultural conditions and interpretations of the 'modern project'. It draws upon case study material from Africa, The Middle East, Russia and South America to examine the question of whether modernity, democracy and secularism are universalistic concepts or are, on the contrary, unique to Western civilization, whilst considering the relationship of postsecularism to the varied paths of modern development. Drawing together work from leading social theorists, this critical theoretical contribution to current debates will appeal to sociologists, social theorists and political scientists, with interests in religion, secularization and postsecularization theory and transitions to modernity in the contemporary globalized world.