Intercultural Communication By Sobre-Denton Summary

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As a communication scholar, Miriam Shoshana Sobre-Denton focuses her research on intercultural communication. She pursues various tracks that are nested under intercultural communication including cosmopolitanism and virtual cosmopolitanism, often using qualitative methods with a focus on autoethnography and the critical intercultural perspective for analysis. Sobre-Denton approaches cosmopolitanism, the study of interconnectedness and how humans are simultaneously local and global, from both a post-colonialism and globalization studies perspective. Within the last five years, Sobre-Denton and Bardhan (2013) published a book titled Cultivating cosmopolitanism for intercultural communication: Communicating as a global citizen and consistently …show more content…

Her personal narrative from her past experience working as a White minority with a non-profit neighborhood association where majority of the population is Latino is juxtaposed to her current analysis of her six-month employment with the non-profit and the struggles she faced with workplace bullying in an attempt to make sense of the mistreatment she experienced. This publication accounts Sobre-Denton’s first experience of autoethnography and is captivating with a unique use of personal narrative describing the emotional effects and trauma of bullying by intimidation in the workplace with male coworkers exerting dominance to control the power structure and culture. “The Cage,” affectionately named by Sobre-Denton’s compatriots, is a glass-walled conference room where their superior berates them for the rest of the office staff to bear witness (Sobre-Denton, 2012). Sobre-Denton plays with “Then” and “Now” throughout the piece to paint a vivid picture of her experience and then analyze the issues within that toxic work environment and the discrimination she experienced (Sobre-Denton, 2012, p.220). Sobre-Denton said she worked on this piece for four years and recommends this publication as a good resource of cross-pollination of …show more content…

This piece analyzes three case studies and focuses on a look at critical intercultural communication pedagogy and cosmopolitanism pedagogy, supporting the idea that all participants in the learning environment can act as both the instructor and the learner. The first case study uses empirical methods to analyze Hostelling International-Chicago and the effectiveness of intercultural programs and activities made available to underserved students in the greater Chicago area in an effort to foster CICP and encourage participants to embrace and engage difference and broaden their perspectives (Sobre-Denton 2017). The second case study also used empirical methods and looks at Space2Cre8, a social networking platform designed to connect middle and high school students to international peers, with the objective for students to learn from one another in this intercultural pedagogical space (Sobre-Denton, 2017). This case study provides a great example of virtual cosmopolitanism as well as CICP. The final and third case study presented in this publication focuses on Sobre-Denton’s (2017) autoethnographic account of shifting the focus of a course to a CICP from