Centering the Body in Cross-Cultural Adaptation

Based on the Cartesian worldview, intercultural communication theories, especially those from a social-scientific perspective, have privileged the mind over the body in conceptualizing and explaining intercultural interactions. For example, theories such as anxiety and uncertainty management theory and the integrative theory of communication and cross-cultural adaptation put forth the notion of the stranger who is perceived as ‘strange’ based on perceptions of differences in attitudes, values, and beliefs. However, how these perceptions of difference arise and the role that the body plays in constructing and negotiating these differences in the context of adaptation to a culture have not received much attention. Though theories from the critical perspective that emerged later decried the decontextualized theorizing of intercultural interactions and situated them in socio-historical, political, economic, and cultural contexts, studies that theorize the engagement of the body have been limited. Hence, this Research Topic invites scholarship grounded in the sociality of the body and the bodily dimensions of cross-cultural experiences. The nuances of the body in cross-cultural contexts emerge from its perceived difference, processed through marginalizing affective frameworks and notions of alterity shaped by discourses of power.

The sociality of the body posits that beyond biological essentialism, the body is inherently social, modifying, and modified by culture. The body that produces, negotiates, and contests its meanings, therefore, is a social body. It is a site of power and contestations, processed through the economy of valuation that is lived-in (in that it is relative to other bodies), meaningful, situated, and discursive. Body politics encourages us to think about the relational significance of the body as it traverses social, political, and discursive frameworks of its society. The economy of valuation within which bodily meanings emerge includes, but is not limited to, bodily affordances derived from race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. The culture within which bodies are socialized in this instance inherently implicates bodily affordances. This nuance is at the heart of our theorizing of embodied cognition as an approach to understanding cross-cultural adaptation.

With these complexities in focus, our goal is to center the body as the adapting subject in cross-cultural adaptation, and we conceptualize cross-cultural adaptation as inherently intersubjective and embodied. Grounded in embodied cognition, we ask the following question: what role does the body play in cross-cultural experiences, and how does that shape our theorizing of adaptation? Specifically, we encourage studies that examine the spatio-temporality of the body and how the situated body negotiates its presence in power-laden contexts/systems.

We invite manuscripts that address the following questions across various paradigms, methodological orientations, and geographical contexts:

• What kinds of affect does the discursively constructed body evoke in power-laden socio-economic, historical, political, and cultural contexts? What implications does that have for the adapting subject?
• How does the body affectively experience the embodiment of multiple intersecting identities in intercultural interactions? What kinds of feelings are generated in/against the body? And how do those feelings shape adaptation?
• How does the body affectively negotiate its presence in power-laden contexts? And what does it say about its adaptation?
• Centering the departure from purely cognitive adjustment to how the body experiences, performs, and navigates new environments, how does the body reorganize its spatiotemporal orientation when there is a clash between environmental cues of the host culture and its internal habit-body?
• How do colonial residues affect the embodied adaptation of individuals whose bodies are hyper-visible, stigmatized, and/or stereotyped in the host culture?
• How do host institutions, from workplaces to schools, discipline the immigrant body into specific modes of behavior, productivity, and cultural orientation?
• How do newcomers in host environments become aware of the affective intensities in environments where their bodies are inherently misperceived because of existing narrative tensions and misrepresentations?

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• ... View all formats

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: cross-cultural adaptation, embodiment, immigrants, embodied cognition, body politics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.