Critical Advocacy Research

Critical advocacy research is scholarship dedicated to promoting social change and transformation through examining the role power plays in structuring intercultural relations. In contrast to most [Page 133]social scientific accounts of intercultural interactions that tend to assume a level playing field (and that focus mainly on the interpersonal aspects), critical advocacy research emphasizes the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of domination and hierarchy that frame the conditions of encounter in much of the modern world. Critical interculturalists thus see the ground of interaction between groups not as a neutral arena where individual actors meet as free agents but as a site of struggle where competing interests, taken-for-granted histories, and differing material investments invariably play out, consciously or unconsciously, in the course ...