The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication Studies aims to produce a volume of essays that powerfully engage issues and topics related to critical intercultural communication studies. Critical intercultural communication studies represents a burgeoning area of inquiry within the field of intercultural communication in the larger Communication discipline. This area focuses on issues of power, context, socio-economic relations and historical/structural forces as these play out in culture and intercultural communication encounters, relationships, and contexts. Scholars in the field have imagined and envisioned what critical intercultural communication studies can be; however there is no resource to date that fully engages such imaginings.
Compared to other intellectual courses, the theoretical and contextual range of critical intercultural communication studies has not been fully delineated, articulated, or explored, although scholars have argued for its creation since the 1970s. Because this intellectual course is still developing and taking shape and is in dire need of delineation, a Handbook will help furnish scholars with a consolidated resource of essays that highlight critical intercultural communication studies, its historical inception, logics, terms, and possibilities. This handbook will be one of the first volumes to sketch out the intellectual terrain of critical intercultural communication studies in terms of the following: a) tracing and reengaging the historical steps and developments that enabled such a course of study and b) presenting new and vibrant possibilities of engaging culture and intercultural relations and contexts in a “critical” way. This handbook will help scholars revisit, assess, and reflect on the formation of critical intercultural communication studies and where it needs to go in terms of theorizing, knowledge production, and social justice engagement.
