Critical Advocacy Research, Sage Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence

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The ideal goal in conflict resolution is to find solutions that are agreeable to all parties in a given conflict, again a greater challenge when the parties to the conflict represent differing worldviews. This is often referred to as reaching a mutual agreement or achieving a win-win outcome. The practice of conflict resolution, however, has the potential to yield many possible outcomes, any of which might qualify as successful. In crisis situations, for example, the conflict resolution process might focus on de-escalating the crisis, thereby guarding against potential disaster.

Stages of Crisis Crisis is typically considered to include four stages: (1) precrisis, (2) crisis, (3) accommodation/negotiation, and (4) resolution. In the precrisis stage, parties might be aware that there is conflict but might be unaware that it is approaching a crisis point. The crisis stage is characterized by an eruption of high emotions and a perception of a threat of harm to self or others. In crisis, the coping skills that might have sufficed to manage conflict (or precrisis) no longer serve to help. This stage is characterized by frustration and fear. The mistrust that might exist between the cultures of the conflicting parties increases the tensions. In the accommodation/negotiation phase, there is a decrease of intense emotions and an increase in receptivity to constructive conflict management. The resolution stage is characterized by a willingness to engage in solution building and a greater sense of equilibrium and stability between the parties.

De-Escalation of Crisis De-escalation of crisis is typically the result of multiple interventions that are engaged in a step-by-step fashion and that hold consistent pressure on the situation over time. Consideration of the essential aspects of the cultures involved may include attention to facework, conflict resolution styles, and deep cultural value differences. In addition, familiarity with the historical relationships of the cultures involved as well as power and privilege differences is vital. The goal of de-escalation is to reduce hostility and mistrust between parties that regard one another as adversaries. Parties are typically most receptive to the introduction of de-escalation when

they have reached a stalemate in conflict and there are no obvious solutions within sight. De-escalation is typically initiated by one party, which makes a conciliatory gesture to the other. The steps of deescalation may include bringing parties together for negotiation, reaching agreements about peripheral issues, and moving toward resolution of the underlying conflict issues. Amanda Smith Byron See also Conflict Management; Intercultural Conflict Styles; Intercultural Conflict Transformation

Further Readings Irrera, D. (2014). NGOs, crisis management and conflict resolution: Measuring the impact of NGOs on intergovernmental organisations. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Mayer, B. S. (2004). Beyond neutrality: Confronting the crisis in conflict resolution. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Rabi, U. (2010). International intervention in local conflicts: Crisis management and conflict resolution since the Cold War. London, UK: I. B. Tauris. Vecchi, G. M., Van Hasselt, V. B., & Romano, S. J. (2005). Crisis (hostage) negotiation: Current strategies and issues in high-risk conflict resolution. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 10(5), 533–551.

Websites Association for Conflict Resolution: http://www.acrnet.org Beyond Intractability Essays: http://www .beyondintractability.org/library/essay-browse-tree Crisis Management: http://www.buildingpeace.org/ think-global-conflict/curve-conflict/crisis-management Journal of Conflict Resolution: http://jcr.sagepub.com/ Peacebuilder Tools: http://www.buildingpeace.org/ think-global-conflict/peacebuilders-tools Preventing Violent Conflict: http://www.usip.org/sites/ default/files/preventing_violent_conflict.pdf

CRITICAL ADVOCACY RESEARCH Critical advocacy research is scholarship dedicated to promoting social change and transformation through examining the role power plays in structuring intercultural relations. In contrast to most

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Critical Advocacy Research

social scientific accounts of intercultural interactions that tend to assume a level playing field (and that focus mainly on the interpersonal aspects), critical advocacy research emphasizes the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of domination and hierarchy that frame the conditions of encounter in much of the modern world. Critical interculturalists thus see the ground of interaction between groups not as a neutral arena where individual actors meet as free agents but as a site of struggle where competing interests, taken-for-granted histories, and differing material investments invariably play out, consciously or unconsciously, in the course of an encounter. Identifying the ideological elements, structures, forces, and institutional mechanisms and communicative dynamics at work in sustaining conditions of inequality is key to critical advocacy research. The goal is to intervene in the world to rectify such conditions and to promote interdependence, reciprocity, mutuality, and just relations between groups. This entry describes the key perspectives informing critical advocacy research, provides a brief account of the research tradition’s development in the field, and briefly outlines the challenges confronting critical intercultural scholars in the face of today’s mounting global and ecological crises.

Core Elements Critical advocacy research starts from the assumption that all knowledge is dependent on historical forces and reflective of the specific values and priorities of those involved in its use and production. Knowledge is not simply there to be gathered and reproduced in the research report but is actively constructed, given meaning, selectively organized, and placed in service of particular interests. To engage in critical advocacy research is to take a stance as engaged scholars regarding issues of public concern and to employ one’s intellectual resources toward providing alternative understandings and finding creative solutions to problems. Until the past four decades, perspectives coming from the positivist tradition influenced many but not all scholars from the field of intercultural communication, where now constructivism has established a strong foothold. The positivist tradition

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holds the view that knowledge about the social world may be gained directly by employing the same empirical methods used to study the physical world. Among others, it presumes that researcher values, biases, and subjective calculations about power may be bracketed out of the research process altogether, in effect producing “objective” (i.e., “positive”) knowledge. Critical intercultural scholars, however, found such assumption of value and power neutrality problematic. They believed instead that researchers themselves, including their tools, language, and subjects, are always already shaped by unequal relations of power given the context of colonial conquest and the imperial formations that gave rise to the modern academic disciplines in the first place. A key task in this regard is the surfacing of assumptions of cultural superiority and other ideological biases embedded in traditional understandings of research scholarship and the distorting effects this has on the research outcomes. A major critique is that the very certainties produced through this latter research tradition are built mainly on Eurocentric assumptions represented as universal (e.g., of individualism, rationalism, voluntarism, and a level playing field) and can be seen to promote a monocultural view of the discourse on knowledge about intercultural interactions. Reflexivity, then, both in regard to the ideological premises informing any given study as well as conscious awareness of a researcher’s position vis-à-vis one’s subject(s) of study is deemed indispensable to ensuring that relationships of hierarchy and subordination, along with the unwitting exclusion of alternative views, are not reproduced in the very conduct of the study. Here, the stance of transparency and value neutrality invoking methodological rigor is itself seen as constituting a power move. For example, when norms of competence are talked about in universal terms without questions being raised as to whose norms get set up as “standard” (i.e., “universal”) in the first place, who gets to say so, and why, it becomes easy to construe the struggles of individuals coming from disempowered and marginalized communities as a case of failure to adapt or not playing by the rules. In this instance, some build on the default assumption that successful adaptation to the dominant culture is a prime criterion for evaluating minority groups’ competence. This assumption may be left unquestioned,

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unwittingly conveying that whoever happens to be in a position of dominance gets to direct the ensuing encounter. Likewise, the notion of meritocracy acts as surety for social analysis, instilling the belief that successful individuals know enough to succeed individualistically and that, therefore, if certain groups are languishing, it is because they have yet to learn to succeed and only have themselves to blame should they fail. Critical interculturalists, among other interculturalists, reject such individualistic explanations as inadequate, at best, and distorting of reality, at worst. They note that meritocracy’s liberal premises of “free choice,” individualism, and personal responsibility encode mainly a Eurocentric set of cultural assumptions based on the cultural logic of competition, separation, and denial of collective interdependence. They insist on exploring the possibility of proceeding from premises resonant in other, non-Western, especially indigenous, cultures, where values of cooperation, mutual care, reciprocity, and shared responsibility have been known to promote the thriving of all (not just of some individuals), as a starting point for inquiry. They also stress the importance of identifying constraining forces such as historic and ongoing disenfranchisement, institutionalized racism, structural distortions in access to opportunities, and other forms of discriminatory policies and practices that thwart collective thriving and distort life chances. For critical interculturalists, the fact that statistical evidence with regard to social thriving or languishing shows a systematic patterning based on group membership (as codified by race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) signals not a strictly individualistic causation for most social disparities but a systemic one. Such patterns cannot be adequately accounted for by referencing merely individualistic differences in motivation but require theories capable of making the operations of social power visible. Grasping intergroup relations thus requires a rendering of macro politics; otherwise, analyses devolve into pathologizing explanations, as is common in discourses of deficit (the cultural deficit model, “cultures of poverty,” etc.) that unwittingly end up blaming the victim, thus displacing responsibility for change onto individuals rather than placing it on society as a whole. Although cultural differences no doubt present real challenges when individuals from differing

backgrounds encounter one another, critical interculturalists do not typically regard such encounters as inherently problematic. As noted earlier, what is believed to pose a problem in the encounter of difference is the element of power differentials—that is, the assumption of superiority (or supremacy) on the part of one group over another in an attempt to secure advantage or control, or the communication of attitudes of paternalism and patronage, which results in dependency and disempowerment, on the one hand, and resistance and resentment (if not outright conflict) on the other. Key then to the task of critical advocacy research is the tracking of the operation of such a power dynamic in all its subtle and not so subtle expressions and manifestations, for example, in its coding in discourses of hierarchy as in “the West and the rest,” as “American exceptionalism,” and, more prosaically, in notions of “progress” and “development.” More subtle and covert is the naturalization and universalization of the Eurocentric norms of Whiteness, Christianity, aggressive pursuit of material wealth, individualism, and rationality as the unspoken measure of what it means to be a human being. Tracking the history of the invention of such liberal ideas allows for their conception as arbitrary constructions of human being, inaugurated on a grand scale as a legitimating ideology to justify the colonial plunder and genocide of native peoples beginning in 1492. Indeed, liberalism’s emancipatory promise (of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”) is recognized historically as resulting not in the inclusive thriving of all but in the disenfranchisement of women, people of color, and “poor White folk”—unsurprisingly so given the fact that such a declaration was made within a closed circuit of communication where only White, male, propertied, Christian subjects were present (symbolically) at the table. Today, such liberal tenets find their continuing elaboration in interventionist policies; corporate takeover of indigenous peoples’ lands, bodies, and resources; militarism; wars; and planetary destruction. The invention of race and White supremacy, in particular, is deemed one of the most, if not the most, destructive legacy of such supremacist ideas. As such, critical interculturalists deem it a moral imperative for committed intellectuals to name, critique, and resist this continuing racist legacy in all its institutional enactments and

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Critical Advocacy Research

covert interpersonal dynamics. The belief is that conflictual relations between groups are less a result of simple misinterpretation of differing cultural codes than of unresolved issues having to do with histories of injustice, hierarchy, and domination that continue to plague relations between groups in what is now a globalized stage of encounter.

The Critical Turn The turn to critical theorizing had a belated advent in the field of intercultural communication. Given the discipline’s genealogy in the U.S. Foreign Service Institute and its task in the 1950s to service Cold War exigencies, the early study of intercultural communication was informed by the pragmatic need to train diplomats, business personnel, international students, and study-abroad students for extended sojourns overseas. Although the foment of the 1960s and 1970s saw the beginning complexities of intercultural studies’ inclusion of a more diversified and politicized conception of culture in terms of gender, race, and class, by the decade of the 1980s, this nascent turn to critical inquiry suffered a serious setback with the return of conservative politics in the form of Reaganomics in the United States and Thatcherism in Great Britain. Furthermore, pressure on the young field of intercultural communication to qualify itself as a true “science” turned the focus to securing disciplinary credibility through the adoption of statistical and mathematical models borrowed mostly from the more established discipline of psychology, which treated culture mainly as a fixed variable tested largely within interpersonal contexts. Although some resistance from scholars coming from other, non-Western traditions began in earnest even during this time period, it was not until the mid-1990s that intercultural scholars trained in critical theory began raising serious questions about the power effects of such ahistorical and decontextualized accounting of intercultural interactions. Moreover, corporate globalization and the imposition of neoliberal policies on struggling economies not only intensified privileged travel such as tourism and business but, more significantly, also intensified the forced migration of impoverished populations as resources continued to be pulled from the South to the North and

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capital searched for ever cheaper labor in service of the bottom line. Over time, the contexts of intercultural encounters also included those of poor migrant workers, domestic help, mail-order brides, overseas contract workers, refugees, slave laborers in sweat shops, and, more recently, the “terrorism” of the weak in response to the prosaic, everyday terrorism of state- and corporate-sponsored poverty of what are deemed “disposable populations.” Thus, critical scholars keenly attuned to social justice issues began increasingly to emphasize the importance of theorizing not just the interpersonal dynamics of intercultural encounters but also the larger macro socio-historical-political-economic contexts framing such encounters. More important, what became clear is the crucial work that had to be done on the ideological front to ferret out the symbolic mechanisms of co-optation, legitimation, and the securing of consent that keep the status quo in place.

The Global Challenge More than ever, critical intercultural scholars today face the challenge of performing intellectual labor under increasingly dire conditions. With the global population having exceeded 7 billion as of March 2011 (vs. 1.6 billion in the 1900s), the question of how to live together peaceably with other beings on a finite planet presses ever more urgently on would-be critical intercultural scholars. They understand that within the context of increasing global competition over fast-diminishing resources (e.g., fossil fuel, water, land), categories of difference—race, class, gender, ability, age, sexual orientation, and so forth—function not as innocent descriptors of biology and of social reality but as codes determining the disposition of power and privilege, of who loses and who wins. The question likely to spell the difference between survival and extinction for the human species is whether or not we can learn to value all lives and all beings in all their diversity and difference and learn to live together on a shared planet without exploitation, domination, and violence. Examining the context of the past 500 years of modern culture and civilization that spelled the first moment of encounter between diverse peoples and cultures on a global scale is crucial for this purpose, as well as understanding the altering

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effects that such a momentous historical process has had on life on the planet. The task is to hear the perspectives coming from those least heard from in such encounters: the displaced, disenfranchised, enslaved, disappeared, and vanquished. The task of critical advocacy research is fourfold: (1) to surface the unconscious assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes that unwittingly help keep systems of oppression in place; (2) to identify practices that can help create new structures encouraging of more reciprocal and just relations with others; (3) to cultivate critical awareness and self-reflection in our communicative interaction with those different from us; and, finally, (4) for the privileged and empowered to learn ways of becoming critical allies with those struggling to create a more just, diverse, and ecologically healthy world. S. Lily Mendoza See also Change-Agentry; Competition and Cooperation; Critical Race Theory; Feminist Research Paradigm; Intercultural Relations and Globalization; Transformative Learning; Underrepresented Groups

Further Readings Collier, M. J., Hegde, R. S., Lee, W. S., Nakayama, T. K., & Yep, G. A. (2001). Dialogue on the edges: Ferment in communication and culture. In M. J. Collier (Ed.), International and Intercultural Communication Annual 24: Transforming communication about culture: Critical new directions (pp. 219–280). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mendoza, S. L. (2013). Savage representations in the discourse of modernity: Liberal ideology and the impossibility of nativist longing. Decolonization, Indigenization, Education, and Society, 2(1), 1–19. Miike, Y. (2003). Beyond Eurocentrism in the intercultural field: Searching for an Asiacentric paradigm. In W. J. Starosta & G. M. Chen (Eds.), International and Intercultural Communication Annual 26: Ferment in the intercultural field: Axiology/value/praxis (pp. 243–276). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Moon, D. (1996). Concepts of “culture”: Implications for intercultural communication research. Communication Quarterly, 44(1), 70–84. Nakayama, T. K., & Halualani, R. T. (Eds.). The handbook of critical intercultural communication. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

CRITICAL INCIDENT METHODOLOGY A critical incident describes a set of circumstances (the “incident”) wherein a conflict or problem arises in a particular setting due to cultural differences between the affected parties, thereby jeopardizing the success or undermining the effectiveness (hence “critical”) of a particular activity or work environment. Critical incident methodology is the use of critical incidents in an education or training setting to enable participants to practice resolving culture-based conflicts. Critical incidents are also used outside the intercultural field, but within the field they are distinguished by the fact that the core problem or conflict, the heart of the incident, is the result of one or more cultural differences. This entry describes the requirements and types of critical incidents used in training and educational settings. The entry concludes with two examples of critical incidents and how they can be used to further cultural understanding. There are two requirements for executing the critical incident methodology: (1) creating or selecting suitable incidents and (2) effectively processing the incidents through a discussion that yields significant learning. The components of a suitable critical incident include a relevant setting, a significant problem, an obvious clash of cultures, and enough detail to enable a lively discussion of the incident, including possible solutions. A relevant setting means that the incident transpires in a context with which participants are familiar and can readily identify—for example a business setting for a group of businessmen/ women, a government or even a specific agency setting for government workers, and so on. For a mixed group, the setting might have to be more vague and nonspecific. A significant problem means that the consequences of the incident should be sufficiently compelling to participants that they would immediately grasp the urgency of resolving the conflict. Where to hold the annual office Christmas party, even if there were culture-based differences of opinion, would not normally be a compelling issue. If the opinions were so strong as to disrupt normal workplace performance, however, then such an issue might be suitably compelling.