Beyond Dualisms: Revisioning Critical Communication Principles in Intercultural and Environmental Communication

Capitalism produces dualisms, and these dualisms create ruin. There is an urgent need for critical communication studies to address such harmful separations as nature versus society, or human versus nonhuman, in order to better understand and respond to contemporary crises. This paper addresses this need by assessing five dynamic principles of critical communication that underlie an eight-year programme on environmental communication research, based in Sweden, and offers our ongoing work on these principles as a template for how we might reconfigure critical work in critical intercultural communication studies and beyond, to deal with these exigencies. The paper begins by establishing the consubstantiality of these principles with core work in critical intercultural communication studies over the last two decades, and discusses in detail how the five principles have shifted and adapted over time. It then outlines some features of a processual, performative ontology, focusing on the concepts of intra-action and more-than-human as a foundation for expanding these five principles in non-dualistic ways. Subsequently, it turns to a discussion of how each principle might be re-envisioned. We conclude with emphasizing the need to learn to think, exist, and act in/through ruins, even as we know that more ruins are already being produced.