Abstract

How can research discover something truly new? Many approaches in the theory of science and in many disciplines reject this question as naive, deny its possibility, or simply evade it. Research in intercultural communication was once concerned with predicting human behaviour on the global stage, but in recent decades it has increasingly focused on exploring interculturality as the incorporation of the other, the foreign and the new. Epistemological concerns have been at the root of several challenges in this project, such as the crisis of representation and the reflections on ‘writing culture’ in cultural anthropology. However, this search for the new has been given further impetus by the growing reception of poststructural thinking in intercultural communication research. In particular, movements such as the ontological turn, new materialism and post-humanism are arguing for a fundamental rethinking of the epistemological and, above all, ontological assumptions of the social sciences. Accordingly, the search for the new will require that it not be conceived in its difference from the self. Researchers will need to shift their perspective away from the traditional humanistic and anthropocentric worldview. Finally, they should no longer use existing research methods to structure what they find. This lecture will present and discuss some different approaches from the field of intercultural communication research that put these claims into practice. It will show the emergence of a search for what might be called a post-humanist interculturality. The lecture concludes by critically examining the limitations of such an approach.

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Dominic Busch is a professor of intercultural communication and conflict research at Universität der Bundeswehr München, faculty of human sciences. In his research, Dominic focuses on how societies project ethical aspirations into the way they deal with interculturality (full article) and how notions of culture are used in conflict mediation research to create different understandings of intercultural mediation (full article). Dominic is the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Intercultural Mediation 2023.