Intercultural Communication

Intercultural Communication remains the definitive critical introduction to how we navigate cultural difference in everyday life. Now in its fifth edition, the book presents a bold reworking of its core structure, offering ten streamlined chapters that challenge essentialist thinking and centre the lived, shifting realities of intercultural encounters.

Through a rich blend of fictionalised ethnographic accounts, media analysis, and academic extracts, Adrian Holliday explores how culture is constructed and negotiated in settings ranging from universities and workplaces to families, migration, and tourism. Topics include self-representation, institutional discourses, classroom dynamics, popular media, and more. Each chapter ends with reflective questions and readings that support further exploration and small-scale research.

This new edition foregrounds interculturality as a practical and political practice, calling for critical curiosity, ethical self-awareness, and resistance to reductive stereotypes. With its accessible framework and engaging materials, Intercultural Communication is essential reading for advanced students and researchers in intercultural communication, applied linguistics, and related fields.

Author Biography

Adrian Holliday is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Education at Canterbury Christ Church University. He is the author of Contesting Grand Narratives of the Intercultural (Routledge, 2022) and co-author of Making Sense of the Intercultural (with Sara Amadasi; Routledge, 2020), with research interests spanning interculturality, qualitative methodology, and critical pedagogy.