Search

This study examined the recent issue and perception towards Korean wave on media coverage in Republic of Korea. Korean wave (Hallyu) that refers to a preference of Korean cultural contents, including drama, movie, and music, has been expanded throughout several regions initiated from Asian countries. In order to understand the global cultural phenomenon in a changing media environment, it is necessary to continuously review issues and changes of Korean wave. To investigate recent perception on the media, news data regarding Korean wave were analyzed by applying text-mining. Results showed that issues of news of Korean wave changed according to the social circumstances. For instance, the issue of favoured cultural contents, such as Korean idol “BTS” and the movie “Parasite,” appeared as associated words. In 2020, it was found that COVID-19 was one of the frequently mentioned words related to Korean wave. This paper provides the recent case of cultural phenomenon using quantitative method. © 2021 World Communication Association.

In this essay, we advocate for a queer (post)colonial studies as a continuation of the critical foundational work that has been done by postcolonial feminists, women of color, queer people of color...

En: Doxa Comunicación: revista interdisciplinar de estudios de comunicación y ciencias sociales. e-ISSN 2386-3978 n. 30, 2020, pp 127-143. Este estudio presenta una tipología de espectadores teatrales que contempla la influencia de los medios de comunicación y otras instancias de prescripción en sus decisiones de asistencia al teatro, un aspecto no abordado por ninguna investigación previa. La investigación se basa en una encuesta a 210 asistentes a representaciones teatrales de tres salas de la ciudad de Valencia. La aplicación de diversas técnicas estadísticas multivariables ha permitido identificar una tipología de cuatro perfiles de consumidores escénicos: los informados-alternativos, los documentados-receptivos, los distantes- independientes y los convencionales-comerciales. Esta tipología pone de manifiesto que los consumidores escénicos difieren en la influencia que sobre ellos tiene la presión mediática, el contenido temático de la representación o el prestigio y la notoriedad de la dirección y el reparto de la obra, así como en la intensidad con la que buscan información y consultan noticias y reseñas en los medios de comunicación. This study presents a typology of theatre audiences that contemplates the impact of the mass media and other influential agents on the decision to attend the theatre, an aspect that has not been examined in previous research. The study is based on a survey of 210 spectators in three theatres in the city of Valencia. The application of various multivariate statistical techniques made it possible to identify a typology with four profiles of theatregoers: informed-alternative; documented-receptive; distant-independent; and conventionalcommercial. This typology reveals that members of the theatre audience are differentially influenced by the media, the thematic content of the representation, the prestige and notoriety of the director and actors, and the intensity with which they search for information and consult opinions and reviews in the media.

In this essay, we advance the Critical Media Effects (CME) framework as a way of bridging two major subfields of communication that seldom speak to one another: media effects scholarship and critical cultural communication. Critical Media Effects is situated within the dominant mode of social scientific theorizing within media effects scholarship and draws on four key interrelated concepts from critical cultural communication: power, intersectionality, context, and agency. Critical Media Effects advocates for greater reflexivity, rigor, and nuance in theorizing about media effects to better respond to the complexity and dynamicity of emerging global sociopolitical mediated contexts. Recommendations, salient examples, and future directions for co-creating a shared research roadmap for CME are discussed. Through this work of bridging, we hope to promote more collaborative partnerships, productive engagement, and mutual solidarity across these two important subfields to address the most pressing social issues and challenges of the world today.

Since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, it is apparent that the political, economic, and cultural communication between China and other countries beyond and within East Asia has b...

This essay outlines a future research trajectory of critical cultural communication research as a practice in Radical Imagination. The author argues for institutionalizing play as a methodology tha...

The use of world-simulation videogames for cultural heritage (CH) communication presents one of the greatest opportunities for engaging people with the safeguarding of cultural resources. However, not all simulation videogames have the capacity to transmit heritage values efficiently. This article reviews the use of serious and commercial videogames in CH to frame and properly identify characteristics for the selection and assessment of videogames in the context of cultural communication. Based on the analysis of the capacities of videogames to motivate, immerse and represent reality, the videogame Minecraft is identified as one of the optimal solutions to represent and promote engagement with the cultural built environment. As such, the authors assessed the capacity of the videogame Minecraft to be used as an efficient tool to communicate built heritage environments, considering identified criteria on immersion, motivation, and fidelity on simulation.

Around 13.6 million heterosexual women in China are married to gay or bisexual men, and they call themselves tongqi. Tongqi belong to both co-cultural groups (as women and wives) and a domi...

Communication and culture is communication that has a reciprocal relarionship. Culture can influence communication and conversely communication affects culture and the prvailing culture in one area will be different from other regions. The Geringging River are, Padang Pariaman Regency. The Community has a tradition of giving japuik money in the custom of marriage. The marriage custom of Sungai Geringging In Padang Pariaman Regency is different from the marriage customs of other Minangkabau areas, becouse it has a Bajapuik tradition to pick up the groom) which requires japuik money. Many meaning are stroed fom this japuik money. Not all mean to demean or indeed buy someone. This is not a human trafficking transaction, just a culture to honor one’s partner in the way of the Garingging River community. This writing discusses and observes how the cultural communication of the meaning of the traditional of Bajapuik marriage in the Garinggiang River community Padang district. Using a Qualitative method with a descriptive design, namely writng that gives an accurate description of symptoms of particular individual or group of a situation and symptoms that occur, operationalizing the concept and producing variable and indicators. Basically, every community in their life will experience changes, changes are condition of a community at diferent times and places, as well as the implementation of the Bajapuik tradition in the Garinggiang River.

Although opening up of research is considered an appropriate and trend-setting model for future scientific communication, it can still be difficult to put open science into practice. How open and transparent can a scientific work be? This article investigates the potential to make all information and the whole work process of a qualification project such as a doctoral thesis comprehensively and freely accessible on the internet with an open free license both in the final form and completely traceable in development. The answer to the initial question, the self-experiment and the associated demand for openness, posed several challenges for a doctoral student, the institution, and the examination regulations, which are still based on the publication of an individually written and completed work that cannot be viewed by the public during the creation process. In the case of data and other documents, publication is usually not planned even after completion. This state of affairs in the use of open science in the humanities will be compared with open science best practices in the physical sciences. The reasons and influencing factors for open developments in science and research are presented, empirically and experimentally tested in the development of the first completely open humanities-based PhD thesis. The results of this two-part study show that it is possible to publish everything related to the doctoral study, qualification, and research process as soon as possible, as comprehensively as possible, and under an open license.

Although opening up of research is considered an appropriate and trend-setting model for future scientific communication, it can still be difficult to put open science into practice. How open and transparent can a scientific work be? This article investigates the potential to make all information and the whole work process of a qualification project such as a doctoral thesis comprehensively and freely accessible on the internet with an open free license both in the final form and completely traceable in development. The answer to the initial question, the self-experiment and the associated demand for openness, posed several challenges for a doctoral student, the institution, and the examination regulations, which are still based on the publication of an individually written and completed work that cannot be viewed by the public during the creation process. In the case of data and other documents, publication is usually not planned even after completion. This state of affairs in the use of open science in the humanities will be compared with open science best practices in the physical sciences. The reasons and influencing factors for open developments in science and research are presented, empirically and experimentally tested in the development of the first completely open humanities-based PhD thesis. The results of this two-part study show that it is possible to publish everything related to the doctoral study, qualification, and research process as soon as possible, as comprehensively as possible, and under an open license.

The base of relational communication curriculum is Eurocentric. Given the importance of global citizenship and cross-, as well as, inter- cultural communication competencies the following paper out...

In this study on food terminology and culture, Frame-based Terminology Theory (FBT) (Faber 2012, 2015) was combined with corpus analysis to explore the use of culture-specific terms in the food categories of bread and rice. For the sake of comparison, semplates (Levinson and Burenhult 2009; Burenhult 2008) were formulated for food, bread, and rice, as a kind of cultural frame to highlight the relatedness of these categories, based on the actions that were most frequently linked to them in our corpus. For this purpose, an FBT semantic analysis of these terms in a general language corpus was combined with an analysis of their cultural contexts in the literary work of authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Najat El Hachmi, Chimamanda Adichie, and others. The situations portrayed in their novels reflect the cultural embeddedness of food and its communicative value.

Courses: Intercultural Communication, Interracial Communication, or an Interpersonal Communication class that covers co-cultural theory.Objectives: Students will be able to demonstrate a practical application of co-cultural theory by creating scenes that illustrate different communicative approaches and desired outcomes based on communication between marginalized and dominant group identities. In this experience, students will reflect on their own marginalized and dominant identities and consider ways in which they experience privilege and disadvantage based on these identities.

Intercultural communication is often understood as interpersonal communication in an intercultural context confounding both areas in ways that makes it difficult to disentangle and view each as uni...

En esta investigación abordaremos la problemática del deseo de las minorías gitanas de ser reconocidas por las élites culturales. Para ello, utilizaremos los conceptos de Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari para pensar el nomadismo del pueblo gitano en correlación con sus formas heterodoxas de comunicación cultural: el flamenco y la rumba catalana. Finalmente, sobre esta base teórica, analizaremos las formas de subalternidad cristalizadas en el documental Petitet (Carles Bosch, 2018) In this research, we will address the problem of the desire of gypsy minorities to be recognized by cultural elites. To do this, we will use the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to think about the nomadism of the gypsy people in correlation with their heterodox forms of cultural communication: flamenco and Catalan rumba. Finally, on this theoretical basis, we will analyze the forms of subalternity crystallized in the documentary Petitet (Carles Bosch, 2018)

This study explores two relatively untapped areas of instructional communication scholarship: Hispanic students’ communicative behaviors and the influence of context in student-to-student communication. Specifically, we utilize Co-Cultural Theory (CCT) to explore what, if any, differences exist in Hispanic students’ reports of their co-cultural communication when interacting with White students based on their enrollment in either a 4-year, public Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) or 4-year, public Predominately White Institution (PWI). We found that Hispanic students’ communicative approaches did not differ based on their institutional context. However, Hispanic students in the PWI group scored higher on accommodation as their preferred outcome than their Hispanic HSI counterparts. We argue the findings highlight both theoretical and pedagogical implications for researchers and instructors.

Internet humour flourishes on social network sites, special humour-dedicated sites and on web pages focusing on edutainment or infotainment. Its increasing pervasiveness has to do with the positive functions that humour is nowadays believed to carry – its bonding, affiliative and generally beneficial qualities. Internet humour, like other forms of cultural communication in this medium, passes along from person to person, and may scale (quickly or gradually, depending on the comic potential and other, sometimes rather elusive characteristics) into a shared social phenomenon, giving an insight into the preferences and ideas of the people who actively create and use it. The present research is primarily carried by the question of how the carriers of Internet humour, that is, memes and virals, travel across borders, to a smaller or greater degree being modified and adapted to a particular language and culture in the process. The intertextuality emerging as a result of adapting humorous texts is a perfect example of the inner workings of contemporary globalising cultural communication. Having analysed a corpus of 100 top-rated memes and virals from humour-dedicated web sites popular among Estonian users, we discuss how humour creates intertextual references that rely partly on the cultural memory of that particular (i.e. Estonian-language) community, and partly on global (primarily English- and Russian-language) cultural influences, thus producing hybrid cultural texts. The more interpretations are accessible for the audience (cf. polysemy Shabtai-Boxman & Shifman 2014), the more popular the text becomes, whereas the range of interpretations depends on the openness of the cultural item to further modification.

Intersemiotic translation is viewed as the basis of cultural communication through which ideas are circulated, translated and explained using language, images and other semiotic resources. From this perspective, intersemiotic translation is conceptualised through the principle of resemiotisation which is concerned with how semiotic choices are translated over time as social practices. Key issues which arise from viewing intersemiotic translation as resemiotisation are investigated in this paper: (a) how can shifts of meaning be conceptualised across semiotic resources which are fundamentally different in nature?; (b) what meanings are retained and changed as a result of resemiotisation?; and (c) how can such meanings be modelled theoretically and tracked analytically? In order to explore these issues, a multimodal social semiotic approach based on Michael Halliday’s systemic functional theory is presented. In this approach, semiotic resources are conceptualised as systems of meaning which differentially fulfil various functions in society: to structure experience and make logical connections in the world, to enact social relations and create a stance towards the world, and to organise these meanings into multimodal messages. The multimodal approach to intersemiotic translation is illustrated through examples which explore shifts of meaning which take place across theses strands of meaning as semiotic choices are resemiotised within and across multimodal texts. The focus of this discussion is intersemiotic translation across language (spoken and written), images (photographs, film tracks and graphs) and mathematical symbolism in a range of different text types (i.e. a news report, an infographic, a video and a mathematical graph). These examples illustrate the principles of intersemiotic translation through which semantic expansions occur as semiotic choices are resemiotised using different semiotic resources, which result in access to a new meaning potential.

Author(s): Hodge, Felicia Schanche; Cadogan, Mary; Itty, Tracy Line; Williams, Angela; Finney, Arneta | Abstract: BackgroundCaregivers play a special role in the management and control of cancer-related pain. For American Indians with cancer, caregivers can contribute to patient education, medication compliance, and can facilitate communication between the patient and the provider and the patient and the family.ObjectiveTo identify the role(s) of caregivers of American Indian cancer survivors.MethodsAs a part of a large randomized intervention designed to improve barriers to cancer symptom management, 13 focus groups were held among American Indian cancer survivors and their caregivers at Southwest reservations and urban sites. Focus groups, audiotaped and transcribed, used constant comparative methods in the analysis of caregiver dialogues.ResultsCaregivers are patient educators and provider culture-brokers and their communication strategies use a combination of cultural and conventional strategies in their care of American Indian cancer patients. Cultural communication styles include "talk stories" (storytelling), group (talking circles), and dialogue to manage cancer pain, educate the patient and community, and to protect the patient from stigma, reduce barriers to care, and provide support to patients and families. Active discussion with providers "re-packaged" the patient's reporting/responses to specific clinical measures (pain measure scores) and identified the need for pain medication and compliance-related issues.LimitationsFindings are not generalizable to the American Indian population outside of the sites and focus groups from which data were collected.ConclusionsCaregivers are "cultural brokers" who inform providers of the cultural nuances associated with American Indian patient care. However, caregivers voiced that cultural restriction for not discussing illness openly was a sanction and an important barrier.

This article examines the oral communication training that took place in Eloqi, a virtual language-learning community. Eloqi (a pseudonym) was a for-profit start-up that built and operated a proprietary Web-based, voice-enabled platform connecting English-language learners in China with trainers in the United States. While it existed, Eloqi’s unique platform was used to deliver short, one-on-one lessons designed to improve students’ oral English communication skills. Using the ethnography of communication and speech codes theory, a theoretical–methodological approach, the author presents an analysis of the speech code, or code of communicative conduct, employed at Eloqi. This code of English logic, which Eloqi’s community members associated with native English speech, comprised six locally defined rules for oral English speech; namely, speech had to be organized, succinct, spontaneously composed rather than rehearsed, original and honest, proactively improved, and positive. This article discusses the significance of this code, particularly as it pertains to cultural communication, and concludes with some implications for researchers and practitioners in business and technical communication.

While many studies on international/interracial adoptees were conducted quantitatively with adoptees, or by various research methods from the perspective of adoptive parents, this study seeks to gain an in-depth understanding of how Chinese born, American adopted individuals perceive, make sense of, and negotiate their bicultural identities as they transition into adulthood by exploring the narratives of 10 such women. Grounded in the interpretive paradigm and framed by co-cultural communication theory, our findings not only illustrate the diversity of communication strategies used by these women to negotiate their multifaceted identities while navigating through various situational contexts and life stages, but also unveil the perceived role of adoptive parents in shaping their identity (re)construction. The numerous instances of contradiction throughout each woman’s retrospective sense-making reveals the ambivalences, vulnerabilities, nuanced complexities, and ongoing negotiations that they must engage in as a uniquely positioned co-cultural group.

Cultural communication has been put forth in the context of globalization and the emergence of Indigenous movements as a framework for dialogue to be carried out by organizations ( Love & Tilley, 2014 ). Concepts of Māori communication for instance have been foregrounded in the public relations literature to anchor strategies of effective engagement through dialogue, leading to the building of trust in Indigenous communities ( Love & Tilley, 2014 ). Similarly, Indigenous engagement has been foregrounded as a key resource in achieving global sustainable development ( Dutta, 2013 , 2019 ). This turn to Indigenous cultural communication is broadly situated in the framing of indigeneity as a category to be developed within frameworks of dialogue and engagement, constituted within the structures of transnational capitalism ( Dutta, 2019 ). Drawing from Dutta’s (2008) theorizing of the cultural sensitivity and culture-centered approaches to communication, we critically interrogate the hegemony of Indigenous dialogue as a strategy deployed by dominant organizations. Whereas cultural sensitivity incorporates cultural characteristics to serve organizational goals, cultural-centering serves as an anchor for collaborating with cultural communities at the margins in building “communicative infrastructures” for voice. Arguing that superficial markers of culture incorporated into engagement is a communicative inversion that serves the colonizing tools of transnational capital, we attend to culturally centered communication strategies of engagement that are grounded in resistance and emerge from within the voices of Indigenous movements that are increasingly threatened by ever-expanding colonial missions of globalization. Comparing across two case studies, one about the struggle of the Dongria Kondh in the Odisha state of Eastern India against mining capitalism, and the other a critical review of the use of Māori cultural knowledge in the public relations literature, we articulate indigeneity as a site of resistance within the meta-theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach ( Dutta, 2008 , 2011 ). In conceptualizing Indigenous resistance as an agonistic anchor to communication, we attend to the impossibilities of dialogue, and simultaneously to the role of communicative infrastructures in inverting neoliberal hegemony. Dialogue is radically transformed, not in generating consensus but rather in its capacity to disrupt the neoliberal status quo through the presence of Indigenous voices. Indigenous resistance “renders impure” the ontological category of dialogue, on one hand, attending to the limits of dialogue, and on the other hand, turns dialogic tools into the hands of Indigenous social movements. Dialogue as a communication infrastructure located materially within Indigenous resistance movements turns the power of communication into the hands of Indigenous communities.

Drawing on a social constructionist approach and Philipsen's theoretical framework of cultural communication, this study examines how rural–urban migrant workers in China construct the meaning of home in their communication about migration. Interviews with migrant workers and participant observation of their everyday conversations reveal that migrant workers frequently evoke a cultural code of home attachment and actively construct a political code of displacement to construe their prolonged liminality between the city and the countryside. Implications for studying the use of culturally specific and politically situated discursive practices to address common challenges of displacement are discussed.

This article details how an intercultural partnership between a grassroots nonprofit organization and a critical cultural communication scholar was forged and maintained via complementary epistemic stances of engagement. The NPO members’ stance was grounded in la consciencia broadly defined and border logics linked to the use of emotive narratives and strategic Spanish, while for myself an ethic of speaking with was comprised of self-reflexivity, self-examination of positionalities, dialogic relationship building, and an enactment of care in representing community members. Ultimately, tuning into the importance of decoloniality via an ethic of speaking with and the necessary strategy of delinking allowed for two intercultural partners to work together toward social justice in the borderlands.

This study examined the term oplakvane in Bulgarian discourse. It refers to a communication practice – similar to complaining – and a range of associated cultural meanings for ways to construct a socio-economic and political reality. Data for this study included naturally occurring talk recorded during social events, interview responses from 50 participants, and a range of media postings from newspapers and online sources. These were examined through the lens of ethnography of communication and studies of terms for talk. By examining the term's context, potency, use, messages, meanings, and enactments, a larger cultural landscape is made available, illustrating how oplakvane not only describes negative talk, but references a communication ritual that serves to: (1) release the frustrations of everyday life, (2) celebrate and reinforce feelings of fate and despair, and (3) identify and locate a national Bulgarian character.

Since paradigms of research were first proposed (Kuhn, 1962) and then identified in communication studies (Anderson & Baym, 2004; Burrell & Morgan, 1979; Deetz, 1996), scholars have splintered acco...

This article explores how a particular kind of popular music of Dhaka city called ‘urban folk’ and the cultural identity of the rural migrants have been producing each other in an ongoing process of cultural communication. Following a discussion on the historical background of urban migration and its depiction in the prevailing pop music culture, this article uses the concepts of ‘cultural hybridity’ by Homi K. Bhabha and ‘political society’ by Partha Chatterjee to argue how the fluid structure of this hybrid form of music and its unconventional mobility between the folk and the pop have been in close association with the urban poor's formation of political society in contemporary Dhaka.

This study examines Twitter's hashtag trend topic functionality in America and explores social dialects within popular trending topics, specifically categories relating to the social constructions of gender and race where the majority of users employ Black avatars. The methodology applies a content analysis of words within a specific 24-hour trending hashtag (#becauseofhoes), followed by a critical discourse analysis, informed by feminist thought and critical race theory, of the emergent semantic fields. While previous research examines the “social relevance” of Twitter hashtags, this study's results and discussion explore the semiosis, or analysis of cultural communication, of gender and race constructions within trending topics popular with what appear to be predominately Black participants.

Se analiza la presencia de los museos catalanes participantes en el proyecto Museos en línea en las redes sociales: si están, en cuáles de ellas, qué contenidos difunden, cómo se comunican con los usuarios, y la respuesta de éstos. La metodología utilizada se ha basado en dimensiones, parámetros e indicadores empleados en análisis semejantes por expertos cualificados adaptados al objetivo del estudio. Los resultados obtenidos muestran disparidad y diferencias significativas en relación con la importancia del museo, sus fondos y, previsiblemente, sus recursos económicos y humanos. Pero también demuestran la importancia de ser altamente activos y comunicar contenidos de calidad. Los datos más significativos, lamentablemente, se refieren a la escasa presencia en las redes sociales y a la casi nula implementación de herramientas web 2.0. En las conclusiones se aborda el necesario reto de mejorar en la implementación de las herramientas y en la presencia y actualización de la información que se difunde a través de las redes sociales. The presence of the Catalan museums that participated in the Online Museum project in the social networks is analysed: whether they are present, in which ones, what contents they share, the way in which they communicate with the users, and their users’ response. The methodology used was based on dimensions, parameters and indicators applied in similar analysis by qualified experts; and adapted to the specifities of this study. The results show disparity and significant differences among the museums, according to their importance, their funding and the expected financial and human resources. However, they also evidence the value of being highly active and communicate quality contents. Pitifully, the most significant results refer to their low presence in social networks and the almost null implementation of web 2.0 tools. The conclusions state the challenge of improving the implementation of adequate tools, the presence in social networks and the update of the information shared through them.

A partir de dos documentales vascos, exponemos las bases teórico-metodológicas para abordar el documental intercultural. Partimos de la concepción de interculturalidad de Fornet-Betancourt, las teorías del documental de Nichols y Bruzzi y el análisis del documental de Whiteman. De acuerdo con nuestros hallazgos, los documentales interculturales no sólo describen e interpretan el mundo colectivo sino que, además contribuyen con la construcción social de la realidad. The theoretical and methodological fundamentals for an approximation to intercultural documentaries, taken from two Basque documentaries, are outlined in this article. The authors begin with Fornet-Betancourt's notion of interculturality, Bruzziy Nicholsy's theories on documentaries, and Whiteman's documentary analysis. According to their findings, cultural documentaries not only describe and interpret the collective world, but also contribute to the social construction of reality. A partir dos documentários bascos, exporemos as bases teórico-metodológicas para abordar o documento intercultural. Partimos da concepção de interculturalidade de Fornet-Betancourt, as teorias do documentário de Nichols e Bruzzi e a análise do documentário de Whiteman. De acordo com nossos resultados, os documentários interculturais não só descrevem e interpretam o mundo coletivo, mas também contribuem para a construção social da realidade.

Ethnographers of communication are increasingly working within interdisciplinary teams to address social problems in communities, corporations, and governments. This special forum brings together ethnographers of communication to reflect on the opportunities, tensions, and challenges involved in using the ethnography of communication to seek workable solutions to social problems with fellow scholars, practitioners, and community members. Through empirical case studies, contributors demonstrate how the ethnography of communication is used to build cultural competence and design strategic action.

This chapter evaluates effectiveness of We-media on immigration issues in China. Guided by Cultural Communication Theory as theoretical framework and Cultural Discourse Analysis as analytic procedure, we delve into identity construction of foreign users and study the relationship implied with meanings of identities. Results show that foreign users are identified with nationalities on cultural level, as immigrant on social level, and as Internet celebrity on personal level. Cultural and social level identity emphasis the differences between foreigners and Chinese, therefore exclude immigrants as Cultural Others from Chinese society; personal level identity helps generating share meanings and discourses of popular culture with Chinese users, and situate foreign users as one of Cultural Us in We-media community. However, it is a conditional inclusion outside mainstream culture in Chinese society. In a nutshell, we propose that intercultural communication on We-media can help immigrants well blend into certain online community, but it might not contribute as much on immigration integration.

Public relations (PR) academics can sometimes experience difficulty in applying interdisciplinary and critical cultural pedagogy within the classroom; while critical cultural approaches are regarded as appealing in theory, the transition to praxis can be challenging. One reason for this is that few published case studies of best practice exist. In this article, I draw on my own experiences within a UK university to explore the value of teaching culture within PR degree programmes before critically evaluating curricular developments in multicultural/intercultural communication and their value for PR theory and practice. I then discuss a framework for (1) teaching a final year undergraduate optional module in ‘multi(inter)cultural communication’ grounded in ethnography and critical pedagogy and (2) designing formative and summative assessment activity that encourages students to develop ‘cultural imagination’ – self-reflection drawn from the study of others’ stories/experiences, and the ethnographic knowledge, skills and competences necessary to embrace their professional practice as culturally sensitive, reflective practitioners.