Intercultural Issues in Discourses of Health
and Medicine: Reflective encounters
Huiling Ding
Department of English
NC State University
@Discourses of Health and Medicine Symposium, 2015
Defining culture
• “Culture” as monolithic nation-states as used in
• Intercultural communication
• Face-to-face communication and objectivist research approaches (Gudykunst; Hall;
Hoftstede, Cultures; Kim; Ting-Toomey).
• Comparative rhetoric and contrastive/intercultural rhetoric (Ulla Connor)
• Focus on nation-states as unit of analysis and examines various schools of dominant
rhetorical theories (Kennedy)
• Deficit model: individual non-Western cultures are examined in search for rhetorical
theories, which are then often compared with the Western model to demonstrate their
inadequacy and incompleteness
• Nation-centric approaches
Defining cultural
• Appadurai sees global connectivities and transnational flows as ‘‘the
cultural dimensions of globalization.’’
• The adjective sense of culture stresses the “idea of situated difference” and
the “contextual, heuristic, and comparative dimension” of individual cultures
(13).
• He redefines culturalism as “the conscious mobilization of cultural differences
in the service of a larger national or transnational politics,” which is
“frequently associated with extraterritorial histories and memories” (13).
• Grassroots globalization examines grassroots participation, civic
intervention, and bottom-up collaborative action (Appadurai)
Transnational rhetoric
• Hesford and Schell stress the need to consider the “complex histories
of capital, power, nationalist discourses, and global
interconnectivities” as well as “networks and relations across cultural
groups” in transnational rhetorical studies (465).
Transcultural rhetoric
• Transcultural rhetoric studies institutional and extra-institutional
negotiations not only among individual nation-states but also among
diverse cultures as represented by communities of different
geopolitical, ethnic, and class compositions. Focusing on the
circulation and transformation of discourses across localities via
communication technologies, transcultural rhetoric examines the
interactions and negotiations between localities and larger global
processes, flows, and structures (Ding).
• Intercultural
communication: F2F
• Comparative and
contrastive rhetoric:
Textual analysis
Nation-centric
approaches
Nation-centric
approaches
Discipline, biopolitics
Connectivities,
flows,
•Transnational
rhetoric, contact zone,
hybridity, global
flexible citizens,
Cultural at all
levels
• Public participation,
civic infrastructure,
grassroots
globalization
Topics of comparative
scope
Topics of inter/
transnational scope
Worldviews
Health and medicine outside
North America
Health/medicine related to
ethnic minorities
Global epidemics
Access
Eastern and Western medicine
Culture, technology use,
infrastructure, and spirituality in
medicine/healthcare
Topics of transcultural
scope
Costs
Health/medicine related to
immigrants/refugees
Medical/transplant tourism
Globalization
of medicine
Fertility tourism/Cross-border
reproductive care
Power
Use cultural informants to obtain
insider knowledge
Technologies
Transcultural/translocal flows of
health/medicine-related
discourses
Literacy
Offshore commercial surrogacy
Medical migration/LTC
Participation
References
•
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