Jolanta A. Drzewiecka

Desirability of differences in destinations

Abstract The purpose of this study was to explore how potential tourists interpret representations in terms of familiarity and desirability, and whether stereotypes influence interpretation. College sophomores viewed guidebook images of two locations and listed thoughts about the scenes in terms of the people who live there and what vacations and living there would be like. Responses were analyzed using a computer-assisted content analysis program that identifies co-occurrence of terms within cases, and terms were cluster-analyzed to determine relationships. Results indicated that familiarity and desirability are complex concepts. Respondents preferred familiar images for vacations, differentiating among various images of those destinations. Interpretation of destination images and perceived familiarity appears to strongly rely on stereotypes of the places considered.

Moving the discourse on identities in intercultural communication: Structure, culture, and resignifications

In this essay, we seek to provide a focused critique of theories of identity within intercultural communication literature. In addition, we propose ways of revising/extending identity theorizing in the field through the use of alternative communication‐based frameworks or theoretical lenses that give the construct, “identity,”; a more dynamic and multi‐faceted re‐reading; and finally, we offer empirical examples of the use of such alternative frameworks in three brief case studies drawn from the three authors’ individual works. This essay will therefore surface both the structural constraints as well as the subjective re‐creative processes involved in the constructing, construing, performing, and negotiating of identities. Ultimately, we seek to show how the concept, “identity,”; might be engaged more adequately taking into consideration its cultural, historical, and political embeddedness in multiple contexts using the lens of communication.

“Critical” Junctures in Intercultural Communication Studies: A Review

This literature review foregrounds the critiques, moves, and junctures that have specifically retheorized culture and communication from a critical intercultural communication perspective, and set the stage for a fifth “moment” in the field of intercultural communication. Likewise, the historically specific moments when various scholars dared to question, confront, and wrestle with definitions and theoretical formations of culture and intercultural communication are delineated. Such a review will elucidate the role a critical perspective has played in the field of intercultural communication, and the crucial research questions, stances, and directions that arise from such a perspective for future intercultural communication studies.

Intercultural Friendship Development

This study examined intercultural friendship development through analysis of in-depth interviews. While extant literature on friendship development has examined friends from the same cultural background, interviewees in the current study (N = 30) described relationships with friends from cultures different than their own. Analysis revealed four factors that respondents felt influenced the development of their intercultural friendship; targeted socializing, cultural similarities, cultural differences, and prior intercultural experience. Results also indicate several ways in which communication both enables and hinders the development of intercultural friendships, providing evidence of the uniqueness and complexity of communication in these relationships.

Reinventing and contesting identities in constitutive discourses: Between diaspora and its others

This paper explores how diasporic identities are reinvented through constitutive rhetoric to legitimate certain forms of collective power and action. Diasporic collectivities are constituted in relationship to nation‐state systems as well as other groups with whom they share histories and compete to establish claims to the homeland. The collective “we”; emerges as a shifting formation as the identity of the diaspora, its borders, and who counts as its members is constantly contested and repositioned. The paper analyzes discourses reinventing Polish American diasporic identity within the changing political situation of Poland including its democratization and incorporation within Western political structures.

Racial Immigrant Incorporation: Material-Symbolic Articulation of Identities

We advance “incorporation” as a new way to understand immigrant identities as sutured within and sustaining symbolic and material structures of racial inequality. Incorporation elucidates the interlacing of the multidimensional symbolic and material processes overlooked in theorizing adaptation, assimilation, and integration as forms of cultural change in immigrants. We examine how the material and the symbolic articulate in claims to belonging and alignment with whiteness. We demonstrate that Polish immigrants’ narratives of racial identities in (post)apartheid South Africa have been shaped by specific institutional and economic structures regulating immigration and labor. The study also advances understanding of whiteness in its global and culturally specific dimensions.

City sites: Postmodern urban space and the communication of identity

Fragmented urban space combines elements of time and place that people use to negotiate their multiple identities. In this essay, we examine how Polish immigrants in Phoenix utilize particular locations to enact aspects of their ethnic identity. We argue that particular identity formations are articulated through configurations of space and that examination of spatial configurations gives us insights into enactment of ethnic identifications and the politics of multiple identifications. The postmodern urban environment contains fragmented and sometimes fleeting spaces that people seek out to communicate particular aspects of their identities.

Intercultural Dating Patterns Among Young White U.S. Americans: Have They Changed in the Past 20 Years?

Using the contact hypothesis as a theoretical foundation, this study investigates whether attitudes toward and frequency of intercultural dating have changed in the recent past. We surveyed 316 young White people and investigated the relationships between individual variables (gender, age), contextual variables (diversity of neighborhood, diversity of friendship and acquaintance networks, and family experience with intercultural dating) and intercultural dating--comparing our results with a similar study conducted by Philip Lampe in the early 1980s. Results suggested that frequency of intercultural dating has changed little in the past years. Although individual variables (gender, age) did not seem to be related, there were significant relationships between contextual variables and intercultural dating. That is, respondents who grew up in diverse neighborhoods, had diverse acquaintance and friendship networks, and whose family members also dated interculturally were most likely to engage in intercultural dating. The findings and conclusion emphasize the continued impact of historical and contemporary societal structures that inhibit meaningful intercultural contact.

Rescaling the State and Disciplining Workers in Discourses on E.U. Polish Migration in U.K. Newspapers

The European Union (E.U.) 2004 enlargement extended the freedom of movement of workers and persons to ten states and thus rescaled the states power to regulate citizenship and movement. We examined how this important shift in scalar relations has been registered by discourses about migrants. To this end, we analyzed how the U.K. and the E.U. were scaled in the representations of post-E.U. accession Polish migrants in U.K. newspapers. Representations reconstructed the national scale, in this case Britain, through moralizing and ambivalent immigration discourses. However, we also found that the newspapers constructed the E.U. scale in ways that advanced open market values and erased the progressive potential of the free movement for workers. The newspapers rearticulated the changing relations of scale between the state and the E.U. in ways that legitimized differential levels of citizenship and precarious positions for both migrant and domestic workers.

Polish ‘Pawns’ between nationalism and neoliberalism in British newspaper coverage of post-European Union enlargement polish immigration

The United Kingdom was one of four countries to open its labor market to Polish workers post-European Union enlargement in 2004. In this study, we analyze the articulation of discourses of neoliberalism and nationalism through examination of mediated representations of Polish immigrants in four British newspapers. We argue that within the coverage analyzed, across format and political orientation, neoliberal values were promoted and the seeming tension between the two ideologies was articulated in ways that could be discursively mobilized to further particular political, economic, and media objectives. Polish immigrants were constituted as discursive pawns employed by various political and media entities toward these contrasting agendas.