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Critical discourses in intercultural communication (IC) scholarship continue to foreground the postcolonial malaise of Southern spaces. Intercultural communication education (ICE) may encounter some pedagogical challenges in its endeavour to reflect the complexity and depth of the discipline and its recent critical turn. This paper seeks to unravel the transformations and the emerging discourses accompanying the 'critical turn' in ICE. The rationale is (a) to engage more deeply with the realisations of this critical turn against a background of unequal power relations and its implications and contextualisations within the Global South and (b) to clarify the possibilities of ICE in disrupting ideological polarities and promoting social justice. The aims are, therefore, (a) to probe into the interrogating and resisting potentials of ICE in the periphery and (b) to discuss the complexities associated with teaching IC from a critical perspective in contexts situated within the lower spectrum of power asymmetries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the epistemological affordances of Islamic ethics as alternative knowledge within intercultural education. Despite the calls for epistemological plurality in intercultural education that centre epistemologies of the South, educators may find it hard to reaffirm their situated knowledges and practices because they may have been overwhelmed by the wide endorsements of the mainstream literature. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 EFL teachers, this study aims to (a) unpack educators' perspectives around the adoption of alternative knowledges anchored in local epistemologies and sensibilities, (b) foreground educators' epistemic positioning around alternative knowledges and how they are perceived as sites for cognitive and pedagogical renewal to account for local particularities and conditions and (c) examine inter-epistemic tensions within educators' reasoning in terms of how they navigate (in)congruencies between the mainstream and Islamic philosophy at the conceptual, pedagogical and practical levels. Findings reveal that educators acknowledge the legitimacy of Islamic ethics and their epistemological/pedagogical significance in intercultural education. However, some factors may problematize educators' attempts at making use of Islamic ethics including the additional burden of reflecting alternative knowledges while attending to contextual factors (class size, the course's orientation, exams, time constraints, etc.) and the lack of sufficient training in intercultural education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complexities of majority-group members' acculturation in the changing culture-scape of Morocco within the larger framework of South-South acculturation and the mobilization of subalternity. Taking into account linguistic, cultural and epistemic hierarchies, this study explores the dynamics of majority groups' acculturation and the manifestations that might confound, signal and/or deny acculturation among Moroccan university students towards Sub-Saharan students. In-depth interviews with Moroccan and Sub-Saharan university students and some auto-ethnographic accounts are used to account for the complexities in researching majority-group members' acculturation and to understand participants' subjectivities, ontologies and perspectives in greater nuance and depth. Findings revealed that Moroccan students' discourses articulate strong support for the increasing presence of Sub-Saharan people on campuses, however, this positive rhetoric does not necessarily translate into 'willingness' to adopt their ontologies. While this could be mere hospitable recognition, the claims of majority group acculturation require a stronger foundation of the appeal of migrants from the Global South beyond the local society's humanitarian hospitality. Implications of this study include developing the notion of 'mobilization of subalternity' which refers to the re-projection of the overlapping systems of privilege/subordination and the importance of sociopolitical framing that does not distance the geopolitical, racial and power-/image-laden from the very psychological factors that influence acculturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]