Intercultural Communication Education and Research in the Middle East and North Africa

This edited volume gathers insights into the production of knowledge about interculturality in education and research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The MENA region is seen in this book as a space with unique circumstances, conditions and complexities that need to be thoroughly explored and further unpacked. The book defines intercultural communication education and research broadly, but focuses on how teaching and researching interculturality is understood and practiced in MENA formal education classrooms and in various training situations such as business, politics, media and communication. This edited volume aims to (a) navigate representations of intercultural communication in education and research, starting from the premise that interculturality is not only a theory of analysis but also an activism for social and epistemic justice, (b) investigate specific phenomena, challenges and issues in education and research, including concepts/notions such as acculturation and intercultural understanding/empathy, and (c) explore subfields of knowledge such as sense-making and intercultural pragmatics, and specific contexts of interculturality such as immigrants, exchange programs and student mobilities.

This book will be valuable read for students, educators, scholars and policymakers interested in intercultural communication and education in the region, as well as language and sociology more broadly.

Hamza R’boul is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. His research interests include intercultural education, (higher) education in the Global South, decolonial endeavors in education, cultural politics of language teaching and postcoloniality. His books with Routledge also include Intercultural Communication Education and Research: Reenvisioning Fundamental Notions (Routledge, 2023, with Dervin), and Postcolonial Challenges to Theory and Practice in ELT and TESOL: Geopolitics of Knowledge and Epistemologies of the South (Routledge, 2023).