Celebrating MIC Research by Undergraduate Students
In Spring 2014, 19 individual undergraduate student projects from AAS/LIN 370 Intercultural Communication (taught by Prof. Agnes He) and 5 group projects from Global Studies Freshman Seminar (taught by Prof. Shyam Sharma) were presented at the annual URECA under the theme “Multilingual and Intercultural Communication”.
These student projects covered a wide range of topics from internet communication to grocery produce labels to face-to-face encounters, from interracial couples’ display of affection to familial communication of rejection to cross-cultural parental discourse, from communication between native and non-native English speakers to negotiations between women and men to transmission of cultural knowledge between generations, from verbal expressions to visual interpretations to conversational pauses. Collectively, these projects offer a linguistic and cultural mosaic that includes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Eastern European, native American, as well as many forms of hybrid languages and cultures in our increasingly globalized world.
We hope that participation in MIC-URECA will encourage students to value the important role language and communication play in shaping our increasingly multilingual and intercultural lives, to remain open-minded to and appreciative of people with different language backgrounds and communication styles, and to remember that the power to change the world for the better can lie in our very ability to communicate with one another.
Below are some student reflections on that MIC-URECA experience.