The discourse of zhong (centrality) has dominated the study of Chinese philosophy for more than 2000 years. Zhong, dictating the interplay of yin and yang motivated by chi, is the foundation of the paradigmatic assumptions of Chinese culture. In order to regulate the motion of chi to reach the holistic state of equilibrium, shou zhong (nurturing zhong) is considered to be not only the most effective way of cultivating self-competence, but also the key to the success of social interaction in Chinese society. This paper attempts to delineate the nature of zhong and further applies it to demystify the meaning of self and social/communication competence from a Chinese cultural perspective.

The study of intercultural communication in the 21^st century faces multiple challenges. To borrow what Byram says, “it has both practical and challenging values.” It has a particular role to play in extending the concept of national citizenship to transnational civil communities – small or large, temporary or permanent. To this end, the Confucian anthropocosmic perspective on intercultural communication is proposed in this paper as a response to the multiple challenges of increasing globalization. In this perspective, several potentially correlative, overlapping and complementary relationships are inherently grounded. One relationship is between the processes of learning to be national and intercultural/global citizens on the one hand, and the Confucian way of learning to be human on the other. A second relationship is between the concepts of communication and intercultural communication and the concepts of national society/community and intercultural/global community. A third relationship is between the concept of intercultural communicative space and the global communicative community. A fourth relationship is between the concepts of communicative competence and intercultural/global communicative competence and the concept of national citizenship and intercultural/global citizenship. All these four relationships combine to make possible the national education for national citizenship and, by extension, the intercultural education for global citizenship. The paper argues that all the communications and all the communication acts, in the 21^st century in particular, are in essence ethical issues so that a global ethics is badly needed in human interaction. The paper proposes the Confucian self and other togetherness as the global ethics. This is also called social and moral responsibility. The implementation of this ethics can be summarized as “If you want to establish yourself, you must help others to establish themselves. And if you want to make yourself outstanding, you must help others to make themselves outstanding.” As Fei Xiaotong (2007, p. 302) said, “if you better yourself, and help others to better themselves, we will all eventually better ourselves and others together, and then we will do general good to the commonwealth.” The ethics of responsibility/concern for Confucian self and other togetherness brings out co-humanity, the ideal of human relationships which do not only mark the locations of landmarks but also mark the locations of “landmind”. In the long run, the practice of this ethics that undergirds dialogic interaction is a long-term human project. It concerns the life of our global community. It concerns whether “we shall live together like brothers and sisters or perish together” in the 21^st century.

This paper discusses English as a multicultural language in Asia and what we can do to deal with this reality in English language teaching (ELT). Certainly, the essential thing about the current state of the English language is: there is no one English; there are many Englishes. At the same time, ELT across the world emphasizes English as an international language. In view of this situation, this paper explores some pedagogical issues involved in understanding and teaching English as a multicultural language for international communication. In implementing this frame of reference in ELT, three challenging issues are noticed. (1) How we can understand and teach English, not as an American language or a British language, but as a multicultural language for international communication, (2) How we can train our students to be able to talk about themselves, their community and their ways of life in English, and (3) How we can encourage our students to become interested in the cultures of speakers of different varieties of English around the world. I will address these issues by taking a close look at Japan’s ELT as a case study.

Despite social needs and people’s enthusiasm for globalization and internationalization, opportunities are scarce for actual practice of international and intercultural communication in Japan, where most daily needs can be met in the mother tongue. In many attempts to improve Japanese citizens’ international communication competence, English education has been the focus of attention. However, people have also acknowledged that good English skills do not necessarily and satisfactorily lead to intercultural communication competencies. Thus, an attempt to provide better learning and enlightening opportunities has recently been developed by a Tokyo-based non-profit organization; to issue certificates for the qualification of International Communication Management Professionals to those who have successfully finished a learning program that provides the learners with opportunities to study different aspects of international communication and with different kinds of knowledge and skills to solve problems in international and intercultural situations. The concern of this paper is to discuss the university version of this certificate, the process and advantages of students’ learning toward this, and the significance of this qualification itself. The Japanese society needs these professionals, and university students, i.e., would-be business people and international communicators, have much to contribute to Japan’s communicative competence with the qualification in question.

Researchers creating knowledge about African-American culture use various methodologies, including field research. Field research is knowledge creation in the space and location of interest to the researchers and is not limited to either qualitative or quantitative research methods. In this article, we focus on our diverse field research experiences as members on a multi-disciplinary research team that utilized mixed methods to examine the various factors that affect fruit and vegetable consumption in two African-American communities. Interacting with participants at community events and at various data gathering sites became part of the experience of our fieldwork. Accounts of interactions and relationships such as these, however, are often missing in journal articles, particularly those reporting findings from quantitative studies. This article, therefore, focuses on the reflexive methodological reporting of ways in which each researcher’s positionality may have affected the observed phenomenon, the data collection process, and the dynamics of participation in fieldwork. The authors’ reflective statements show that the researchers were aware of their positionality before, during and after the research process. Positionality is a concept that has largely been individualized. In this paper, although we present our individual research experiences, we also had to consider our position as a group. As a multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural team, our group identity was complex. Those who were part of the African-American community or identified with a similar heritage acted as “insiders” (while simultaneously reflecting upon the ways in which they were “outsiders”) and as cultural brokers, enabling us to respectfully gain access to willing participants. Those who did not identify as people of color played other vital roles.

My primary goal in this article has been to study the concept of time, its perception and anthropocentric attitude towards time, the way it talks. I argue that anthropocentrism characterizes not only language, but also nonverbal communication. Systems of teaching about time and temporalism in various epochs have been formed within the frames of cultural and historical conditions. In other words, temporal consciousness, temporal orientation and conceptualization depend on collective experience, on the collective social life of society. Time and perception are predetermined by culture. What is essential, is that perception, cognitive activity and reality come together and converge. Temporalism is universal for all cultures, which means that it is represented in all languages and cultures. The comparison of Russian and American attitudes towards time manifests both general and culture specific signs, reflecting the asymmetry of Russian and American temporal, cognitive systems.

In 2008, Robert N. St. Clair and Wei Song published a book entitled The Many Layers of Culture Within Each City, applying their analytical framework to case studies of Harbin, Rio de Janeiro, Venice and Lisbon (St. Clair & Song, 2008). Invited to write a preface to their book, it struck me that a number of other cities could have been included. This influenced me to revisit an earlier text I had written in 1995 on the Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) and his novel Doctor Zhivago, which won him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1958. My text was concerned with Pasternak’s literary prowess, especially his stylistic use of anthropomorphisms which are so typical of his style, and which infuse life into the prose and poetry parts of this great novel (Vaagan, 1996). But there were also many other ideas I had to set aside, including the role of the capital Moscow as a possible main character or heroine in the novel. Few would question the existence of many layers of culture in Moscow with its complex history, but is there enough justification to consider the city as the main heroine of the novel?

Human beings make and find meaning on several levels, as we are intrinsically driven to do so in order to experience life satisfaction and sense of fulfillment. In this auto-ethnographic paper, I share my experiences as a communication and English teacher in China, helping students to understand and express meaning. This basic level of working with meaning has led to higher levels of meaning in discussions inside and beyond the classroom with scores of students, positively affecting not only my students but also myself. In contrast to considering language and communication meaning in my professional arena, I share my higher level personal search for meaning, after making radical career, relationship and personal life changes to become a sojourner in China. The paper concludes with the realization that working with the different levels of meaning in different life arenas has repurposed and brought wholeness to my life, validating that meaning is what makes life worth living.

In the dictionary, inverse can mean a form of inference in which a new proposition is formed whose subject is the opposite of the original proposition. This is the sense in which I refer to the inverse outlook, that which manifests opposition while the habitual and hegemonic outlook loses its naming force. Analyzing the inverse outlook from photos taken by a group of young Huicholes¹ during their first trip to a city allows us to observe visual choices portraying the city from an reverse angle; where we ourselves are the others and the photographers are indigenous people. The work I show here is from a trip made by 31 youths between the ages of 13 and 15, who left their village of San Miguel Huaixtita headed for the city of Guadalajara (Corona, 2012) with the object of “researching” the city and its urban Mexican residents.

The process of borrowing from one culture to another is complex and it involves cultural diffusion (the spread of one culture item from one culture to another). The focus of this paper is on the kinds of cultural diffusion and adaptation that one finds in the film industries of the United States and China. It focuses on the film Sleepless in Seattle, and highlights how portions of that film were borrowed and adapted for a new cultural audience in China by the film director Xiaolu Xue, in her film Finding Mr. Right. It is argued that culture plays a key role in what is borrowed and how it is borrowed.

Five partner institutions have received Erasmus + financing 2015-2017 to create a European Media Cloud Campus (EMCC). This is an innovative, cloud-based learning environment for cross-media content production based on open source technology. The participants are primarily students in journalism, media and the creative industries, and the EMCC employs a constructivist didactical approach.

Five partner institutions have received Erasmus + financing 2015-2017 to create a European Media Cloud Campus (EMCC). This is an innovative, cloud-based learning environment for cross-media content production based on open source technology. The participants are primarily students in journalism, media and the creative industries, and the EMCC employs a constructivist didactical approach.