A plea for change in research on intercultural discourses: A ‘liquid’ approach to the study of the acculturation of Chinese students

TLDR

Research on intercultural communication and education often inadequately examines the utterances of “Others,” especially Chinese students abroad. The article proposes a “liquid” approach to studying intercultural discourses. It outlines a constructivist, open‑ended framework that continuously engages interdisciplinary concepts, employs dynamic methods such as linguistic dialogism and enunciation theory, and redefines the researcher’s role, illustrated through four studies on Chinese students abroad. The review reveals that existing studies rely on static culturalist or Janusian perspectives, with no consistent liquid approach, prompting a call to renew epistemological and methodological positioning in the study of Otherness.

Abstract

Abstract Research on intercultural communication and education is often unsatisfactory in the ways it examines the utterances of research participants, especially if they are ‘Others’. This often seems to be the case in research on acculturation of ‘the Chinese student’ abroad. In this exploratory article, I propose to look at intercultural discourses through a ‘liquid’ approach. The article first describes the components of such a constructivist and open-ended approach to the ‘Other’: a constant effort to review and interact with interdisciplinary concepts; the use of research methods that are dynamic such as linguistic dialogism and theories of enunciation; and a fundamental renewal of the role and positioning of researchers in their studies. In order to illustrate the approach and verify if some of its aspects are taken into account by researchers, four studies from the fields of intercultural education and communication on ‘the Chinese student’ abroad are examined. The results show that the researchers base their analyses on solid/culturalist approaches, which place a lot of emphasis on a loose and static understanding of the concept of culture. The research discourses of some articles also derive from a Janusian vision of interculturality, which encompasses both culturalism and an open-ended, individual and hermeneutic vision of the Other. No consistent liquid approach to intercultural discourses was identified. This article thus represents a plea for renewing epistemological and methodological positioning in the study of Otherness and intercultural discourses.