Language & Globalization Speaker Series : Globalization and Intercultural Contact

Using a critical intercultural communication perspective, this presentation examines globalization as a terrain of intercultural communication understood as a process of ‘categorization (difference-making) and stratification (inequality-making),’ and as a key concept accounting for the spread and intensification of globalization. Professor Jaworski presents a view of globalization in which the world’s ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ exist as culturally distinct spaces populated by people who are, or should be seen as, both conducting their mundane, day-to-day business and engaging in special and spectacular rituals that are so ‘distinct’ as to require commentary, explanation, translation and evaluation by a myriad of self-proclaimed experts. Such instances of intercultural translation and explanation can be found in many areas of social life, especially those involving mobility – cultural tourism, transnational business, student exchange programmes, and the like. These forms of communication can be found in all manner of texts, from popular media to academic books and journals. This paper critically assesses the historical, political and institutional forces and constraints, often invisible to others, that operate on these texts and on the emerging relationships between individuals and groups that are deemed to belong to different cultures.

The inaugural lecture of Languge & Globalization Speaker Series is sponsored by: IHC, LISO, Dept. of Film and Media Studies, Dept. of Global Studies, Orfalea Center for Global and Int. Studies, Mellichamp Professors of Global Dynamics