This study employs the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) to explore how structural forced migration, identity through citizenship, and the need to survive informed food practices and body image among second generation Vietnamese Americans (VA). Using qualitative methods, the research examines how food functions not only as a site of cultural continuity and community-building, but also as a medium through which "good" citizenship as an immigrant and a Vietnamese individual are performed. Participants described expectations of hard work and productivity - rooted in migrant survival and Vietnamese culture - as central to family and community beliefs about food and embodiment. Within this dual framework of formal and cultural citizenship, thinness emerged as both proof of material stability and an embodied display of cultural discipline. Navigating these competing expectations, participants described eating disorders as an agentic, though harmful, strategy for meeting the demands of being a "good" immigrant and a "good" VA. This study expands communication research on citizenship, health, and identity by showing how experiences of food and thinness are shaped by broader systems of migration, belonging, and survival.
Given the extreme dearth of empirical studies documenting the prevalence and operation of caste in Pakistan, this article invites viewers of Pakistani Urdu-language drama serials to consider how caste dynamics shapes characters and plotlines of widely consumed media. Urdu language dramas are viewed extensively not only in Pakistan but also across the diaspora, making them an important site for both the encoding and unraveling of dominant caste ideologies prevalent in a predominantly Muslim Pakistani context. Drawing on two drama serials, Standup Girl (2023) and Udaari (2016), I examine how caste is simultaneously consolidated and concealed through discourses of "class difference," "family honor," and patriarchy. I focus on these two dramas because their female protagonists hail from caste-oppressed communities associated with lower class hereditary performance traditions in Punjab. Pejoratively labeled as M & iacute;r & aacute;si/bh & amacr;nd, these characters depart from the normative figure of the "respectable" heroine - typically coded as belonging to dominant-caste or Sayyid backgrounds - even when economically disadvantaged. By centering the characters of Zara and Meera and their association with performance labor on the stage, the article renders caste legible in ways that resist its narrative erasure. This article contributes to broader, transregional, transcultural, and transreligious discussions by demonstrating how cultural production serves as an important site for enacting, normalizing, and contesting caste violence.
This paper illuminates the brahminical nature of Communication Studies scholarship and calls for a critical caste criticism which articulates the ethical, political, and epistemic commitments needed. This method of Critical Caste Criticism is emergent from Ayyathurai's call for Critical Caste Studies and explores beyond to sharpen our critical gaze in practicing a ruthless critique of the ontologizing capacity of caste, one that would be able to articulate the emergent historical formations of the brahminism, and racial capitalism. I illustrate this method by engaging an archival artifact about domestic slavery from the eighteenth century records of the Maratha Empire.
This paper examines how Portuguese nationals perceive and negotiate their relations with the Chinese majority in postcolonial Macau. Employing a Critical Intercultural Communication (CIC) approach, this study explicitly foregrounds Portuguese residents' accounts and interpretations of interaction and investigates how they navigate identity negotiation, cultural boundaries, and power structures within a predominantly Chinese society following the 1999 handover to Chinese governance. A meta-theoretical lens integrates CIC with Bourdieu's linguistic capital and Foucauldian power/discourse to situate interactional narratives within Macau's institutional fields (law, education, labor markets, media). Using a critical ethnographic methodology, the research captures the layered experiences of Portuguese nationals as they contend with linguistic barriers, cultural separations, and legacies of colonial hierarchy that continue to impact social relations. Key findings reveal that while Portuguese nationals strive to preserve cultural heritage, they encounter a "glass wall" of language and cultural distinctions that reinforce social divisions - a wall sustained not only by linguistic difference but also by historically produced institutional arrangements and privileged expectations about who should accommodate whom. This study contributes to intercultural communication scholarship by examining how colonial histories shape contemporary intercultural dynamics, shedding light on the nuanced process of identity negotiation and selective adaptation within Macau's postcolonial landscape.
This forum brings together rich and diverse interdisciplinary scholarship examining how violence against women operates not only as physical harm but also as cultural communication that reinforces power, hierarchy, and control. Spanning historical and contemporary contexts, the forum explores how myths, artistic canons, media narratives, legal systems, wartime practices, and everyday discourses normalize or obscure gendered violence while simultaneously generating spaces of resistance. Contributions address colonial legacies, honor and shame regimes, digital and media representations, state and institutional responses, migration and labor precarity, religious and nationalist discourses, and feminist and grassroots movements challenging systemic abuse. By situating femicide and gendered violence within global cultural narratives rather than isolated events, the forum highlights both the persistence of structural violence and the diverse forms of resistance emerging across societies. Rather than producing despair, the project invites critical self-reflection, cross-cultural dialogue, and collective responsibility, encouraging scholars and publics alike to reconsider inherited narratives and imagine cultural futures in which tradition, community, and belonging no longer rely on the regulation or silencing of women's lives.
As empirically shallow and politically polarised discussions on the Muslim social stratification have failed to adequately theorise the Muslim caste associations within the larger trope of inequality and underrepresentation, there emerges a greater need to locate the Pasmandaa Muslim women within the larger political rubric of dominant "Ashrafization" (Muslim caste supremacy equivalent to the Hindu Brahmanical supremacy), foregrounding their associational engagements with social exclusion, declassing and political assertion. The article will critique the intra-Muslim caste mechanisms through a feminist intersectional framework, addressing the multiplicative matrix of oppression, while challenging not just the efficacy of the Indian Pasmandaa movement but also the growing Hindutva ascendency (using the Muslim woman figure as central to its politics of hate), as critical feminist resistance to subvert the communally fascist agenda in India. The paper will engage in an exploratory study of a cross-section of Pasmandaa Muslim Women's engagements within feminist protest paradigms, like the Anti-CAA/NRC protests of 2020, through intensive interviews with those who challenge the conventional notions of "being political" and "doing political," in an attempt to regenerate Indian democracy through an alternative subaltern-feminist political agency as a counter to Hindu authoritarian majoritarianism.
This article explores the identity negotiation of transnational Chinese in the U.S., with a focus on the intra-ethnic identity politics among them. This study problematizes the dominant U.S. race logic for its limited capacity in understanding identity, communication, culture, and power in an increasingly interconnected world. It also calls for an alternative theorization of race and identity in the transnational context. In doing so, the author employs a mixed-methods approach that combines autoethnography and in-depth interviews to interrogate the complexities of Chinese-ness(es) and to build bridges to reach the "inter" across differential belonging among transnational Chinese (Bardhan, 2016). The study also sheds light on the identity negotiation of transnational bodies from the Global South who seek the "us" amid their otherness. As a decolonial project, this article contributes to critical intercultural communication scholarship by situating knowledge of race, identity, and power within a Global South perspective through a thick(er) postcolonial transnational lens. Furthermore, with the objective of provincializing the dominant U.S. race logic, it seeks to transnationalize and internationalize the theorization of identity and race.
Despite calls for an ecological turn in intercultural communication, critical scholarship on the anthropocentric climate crisis remains limited, particularly from Global South and Indigenous perspectives. Addressing this gap, this study analyzes environmental justice activism through frameworks that interrogate catastrophe colonialism and impacts of imperialist occupation and extractive capitalism. Focusing on Indigenous and Global South activist demonstrations at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, the study theorizes Indigenous embodied activisms and employs a decolonized critical discourse analysis to investigate how activists contest silencing and negotiate exclusion within global climate governance. Analysis foregrounds Indigenous and Global South resistance in spaces that routinely displace and erase their voices.
Amid growing global interconnectivity, transcultural communication offers a critical framework for understanding cultural interaction in digitally mediated, participatory spaces. This study examines the "Cat Tax" meme on RedNote (Xiaohongshu), highlighting its role as humorous, user-generated content negotiated between established users and recent migrants from TikTok, self-identified as "TikTok Refugees." Grounded in Hepp's (2015) transcultural communication theory, the analysis explores how the meme operates as a culturally resonant medium that bridges linguistic and cultural boundaries while facilitating affective engagement central to transcultural dialogue and identity negotiation. The dataset comprises "Cat Tax" posts with over 10,000 likes, capturing highly interactive engagement. Using Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) within a nested, multi-level framework, the study interrogates the phenomenon across micro, meso, and macro levels. It demonstrates how the meme functions as a digital ritual, enacts participatory culture, and reveals socio-political tensions and power dynamics embedded within user-driven content. Findings indicate that grassroots practices can evolve into replicable rituals that sustain participation, drive organic transcultural exchange, and enhance global visibility. The study challenges monolithic portrayals of China's digital environment and shows how everyday digital practices contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Chinese digital soft power in global media ecologies.
This paper makes a case for how the politics of the Global South is integral to understanding and dismantling power-knowledge systems, which are inherently exploitative, and therefore hostile to the containment of existential risk posed by the looming environmental crisis. The paper focuses on the Hollywood blockbuster Black Panther to critique Western media's relentless propagation of technological-determinist and capitalist-extractive political-economic ideologies, which suppress voices from the Global South, only to uphold ecologically and economically unsound Cornucopian visions of endless growth and development. Focusing on Western propaganda machine's inordinate power, it analyzes how Global South's progressive politics and arguments for racial and social justice, and as imbedded in Afro-futurism's politics and aesthetics, are coopted to align with Western power-knowledge systems. Drawing on eco-feminist critiques, which speak urgently for climate justice and environmental sustainability, it explores how Black Panther appropriates Afro-futurism's potentials. Such that rather than aligning with the Global South's anti-colonial and anti-imperialist agendas to dismantle geographical, socio-economic and political inequalities, Afro-futurism becomes instrumental in promoting the techno-determinist logic of neoliberal and monopoly capitalism. However, within current inter-connected and hyper-mediated contexts there are also possibilities for enabling "alternative alliance" of diverse voices from the Global South against exploitative capitalism, as the Indian farmers' protests in 2020 demonstrated.
The nuanced ways that people use humor across cultures poses communication and psychological challenges for individuals transitioning to new cultural environments. This investigation explores the relationship between international students' interpersonal and mediated communication activities and their humor understanding/appreciation in Singapore. Participants (N = 223) described their friendship networks, viewed and assessed short video clips of Singaporean stand-up comedians, and completed the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Consistent with previous comprehensive friendship network research, international students tended to have a higher ratio of and form stronger bonds with co-national friends. However, the correlation coefficient and regression analysis indicated a significant relationship between host national friendship and Singaporean humor understanding/appreciation. Additionally, results suggest positive relationships between affiliative, self-enhancing, and self-defeating humor styles and Singaporean humor understanding/appreciation. These findings not only have implications for humor styles in an intercultural context but also demonstrate the potential impact that host social communication activities have on humor understanding/appreciation in a new culture.
