Amardo Rodriguez - Böcker

""What is the promise of intercultural communication in a post-September 11 world-one that seems to be increasingly threatened by religious differences?""""Can intercultural communication ultimately bring peace and prosperity among different people…or are aggression and conflict inevitable?""In Intercultural Communication: An Ecological Approach, the authors respond to these questions as well as concerns that changing population and religious trends threaten the stability and prosperity of the United States. The authors believe that communication is always laden with possibility, including the possibility of harmony among different peoples.Intercultural Communication addresses, openly and honestly, the issues, perceived or real, that arise when communicating with people from different backgrounds-their traditions, predispositions, and persuasions.Features:Introduces a new intercultural communication framework that moves beyond the limits of multiculturalism.Develops the thesis that intercultural problems are fundamentally communication problems rather than problems of differences.Debunks the popular claim that language diversity impedes communication and thereby poses a threat to social cohesion.Introduces a definition of communication that defines communication as a mode of being and becoming rather than merely a means of relaying messages or sharing meanings.Redefines diversity in terms of processes, relationships, and environs rather than merely in terms of differences.Develops the claim that our emerging global, multicultural, and plural world is presenting us with new challenges and resources that can allow us to enter a new realm of being human that reflects a larger and richer understanding of the human condition.Integrates contemporary case studies from the United States, as well as from around the world, into nearly every discussion.

The goal of Essays on Communication & Spirituality is to expand students' understanding of communication theory and inquiry. The editor and contributors aim to present the beginning position of an emerging discourse in the communication field. The collection's essays explore the potential contribution of spirituality for the study of communication. They also examine and illustrate how scholarly work that is premised on such spiritual assumptions reshapes our understanding of communication. Essays on Communication & Spirituality is intended as a supplemental text for any foundational communication course that explores different understandings of communication.

Communication, Space, and Design looks at how our worldview shapes our relations to and conceptions of space and place, and how our spaces and designs impact our communication practices. By asserting that our spaces and designs are increasingly promoting various expressions of separation, this book contends that this separation makes us more private. We find this increasing inwardness, for example, in the rise of gated-communities, exclusionary suburbs, and hyper-suburbs. Ultimately, the book asks how our spaces and designs impact our understanding and embodying of democracy, civility, and justice. It also explores how this inward turn limits our sense of obligation to the world and each other by undermining our ability to develop the communicational resiliency and moral sophistication that comes through public interactions.

Examining actual policy to identify the facts, this book exposes how racially charged political and legal debates over immigration reform in the United States continue to inform our immigration policy.Immigration reform policies continue to influence domains like housing ordinances, official language laws, mass deportation, and bilingual education, amongst many other topics. In this work, authors Donathan Brown and Amardo Rodriguez demonstrate how immigration policies belie simplistic conversations pertaining to border control. Their focus is on actual policy as opposed to mere headlines and "talking points," as it is policy and the debates that it produces that inform the headlines and subsequently incite controversy and heated arguments. Each chapter of the book addresses both policies and the fallout they produce to clearly articulate how such policies usurp fact with fiction, producing residual messages that equate "diversity" with destroying our social and political order.This accessible book provides high school, college, and graduate-level students insight into the laws and lawsuits stemming from current legislation, an understanding of the peculiar racial dimensions intertwined in these policies and debates, as well as comprehension of immigration reform against the grander backdrop of the growing Latino demographic in the United States. The authors argue that the varying degrees of immigration reform passed by state legislatures throughout the country are based on thinking that ignores the sociopolitical and cultural realities of modern-day America and continue to rely less on facts and more on fear, causing greater deep-seated paranoia, distrust, and resentment within our nation.