This study investigated the relationship between the experience of ethnicity and self-identified ethnic identity in biethnic middle school students in Japan. The participants were 12 biethnic students, one of whose parents was Japanese. The biethnics are known as Hafu in Japan. We conducted semi-structured interviews and asked the participants about their positive and negative experiences of ethnicity and feelings about it, the presence of supporters and the participants' feelings when receiving support, and how they identified their ethnic identity. As a result, it was suggested that those participants who had positive experiences, such as being praised for being bilingual, could accept their ethnicity, which led them to trust in their surroundings. Conversely, those who had negative experiences, such as discrimination, gave up gaining the understanding of others and hid their ethnic background or could not accept being biethnic. These negative experiences included discriminatory remarks during class.

Controversial advertising is a popular advertising creative strategy and technique that can grab consumer attention, generate emotional responses, and cause attitude changes. Storytelling advertising campaigns with a strong racial equality theme can easily spark controversies in today's Woke culture, as a type of social justice movements for Black minorities. This study employs a one-shot pre-experimental design to collect consumers‟ narratives after watching a professionally-produced controversial racially-themed campaign by Pepsi. We rely on past research in narrative transportation and controversial advertising as our interpretive lens to analyze text mining results. A total of 61 participants were conveniently recruited to participate in this study. This study found that audience's gender, generation, and race/ethnicity can predict variations in terms of their negative/positive sentiments toward and perceptions about a racially-themed controversial ad. Discussions and implications are provided.

The great Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay was the founder of the “Kazan School” of linguistics in imperial Russia. Baudouin’s work was seminal in the development of linguistics in Poland and Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to linguistics, Baudouin’s career encompassed political activism, as exemplified by his unsuccessful candidacy for the presidency of Poland in 1922. This paper focuses on Baudouin’s uncompromising personality as a social activist during the latter part of his long life. This was brought to the fore in a dramatic episode: in 1927 Baudouin committed an explicit and public act of apostasy by petitioning the Catholic Church and the municipal authorities of the city of Warsaw to expunge his Catholic identity from his official government ID. Even to this day, apostasy is a controversial and taboo topic. I examine the reasons behind Baudouin’s daring act. I then extrapolate from this historical incident to the present-day situation of apostasy in Poland, where it has recently been trending as a social movement of protest against abortion law.

This article is derived from the presidential address delivered at the 26^th Conference of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies (IAICS). Because of the pandemic, the conference was held online. While the pandemic has connected us to our common humanity, it has also drawn attention to the dark side of our cultural lives. Colorblindness and othering are two significant concerns that silence opposition to racial and ethnic inequality. Researchers suggest that we are socially wired to cooperate within our group but not without our group. This predisposition for bias cries out for a re-imagining of our communicative practices. I propose that, as communication scholars, we examine our linguistic, rhetorical, and communicative choices from a place of mindfulness. Mindfulness in the time of a pandemic allows us to be with what is in the moment, to be compassionate to ourselves and to others.

Due to their common focus on means and modes of communication, the fields of rhetoric and communication studies overlap in many ways. However, many scholars in these separate fields remain relatively unaware of connections and differences between them. One case of parallel, but separate, fields of study are the subfields of comparative rhetoric and intercultural communication studies. Both of these disciplines study communicative practices within various cultures and peoples around the world. This essay describes and explores two Hindu/Indian approaches to logic, rhetoric, and performance, Nyaya and Sadharanikaran, in order to illustrate and discuss the inter-relationship between comparative rhetoric and intercultural communication. This presentation is an expanded version of a keynote address delivered to the 2021 Manipal, India meeting of the International Association of Intercultural Communication Studies.