Despite growing public and academic interest in the role of religion in immigrants’ lives, research focusing on a religious dimension of acculturation is still scarce. This chapter proposes an integrative acculturation framework (cf. Arends-Toth & van de Vijver, 2006) as a heuristic for conceptualizing and assessing a distinct religious dimension of acculturation conditions, orientations, and outcomes. We focus on Muslim immigrant minorities in Europe as illustrative cases and review exemplary empirical studies on (1) the processes related to religious transmission in immigrant families and communities as a critical religious acculturation condition, (2) the role of high religiosity in maintaining a distinct heritage culture and adopting the mainstream culture as acculturation orientations, and (3) the conditions under which religiosity serves as a cultural boundary maker in an intercultural context. To conclude, we encourage researchers to integrate religiosity assessment as standard practice in acculturation research.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It starts with an introduction of readership, including all those who are interested in intercultural relations – in relating with people who have different national, linguistic, social, ethnic, religious or other backgrounds to ourselves. The focus, as the subtitle indicates, is therefore ‘relating across cultures’ – how people build, maintain and manage relations when communicating across group boundaries of various kinds, such as national, linguistic, ethnic. It then considers the two concepts within the main title of the book: ‘politeness’ and ‘intercultural’. It explains that we take a ‘relating’ perspective to politeness, and it offers a working definition of ‘culture’ as well as the notion of ‘intercultural’. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing together concepts and ideas from pragmatics, intercultural communication and cross-cultural and moral psychology, and we argue that such an interdisciplinary approach is vital for a topic like intercultural politeness. The chapter introduces the book's authors, providing some background to them, so that readers can understand the subjectivity of the authors' positions. The chapter also outlines the types of data the book uses throughout in support of its arguments. The chapter ends by briefly introducing the remaining chapters of the book.

This final chapter of the book considers the implications of its findings for the intercultural field. The chapter explores a number of facets that are important both conceptually and from an applied point of view, including the relevance of ‘relating’ to intercultural competence and training, factors that affect the relating process, and the nature of the culture, context and behaviour interface. The chapter ends by suggesting some directions for future research. There are eight main sections in the chapter: intercultural relations and conceptions of intercultural competence; intercultural competence as behaviour: the contribution of interactional discourse; relational management as an interaction and evaluative process; the importance of context; exploring the interface of culture, context and behaviour; culture and social groups; intercultural relations and intercultural training; future research directions.

The process of recording, defining, and narrating the development of any given academic field most often results in an unfortunate reduction and reification of multiple streams, movements, and figures into a single story. The field of intercultural communications faces this challenge to a greater degree, as it involves remembering and recognizing the nuanced roots and unique influences of multiple fields of origin (linguistics, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, communication, education, and more). Recent scholarship has called for re-examining the genealogy of lines traced back to Edward T. Hall to better account for, affirm, and give agency to other perspectives in our complex history. Thus, this chapter seeks to answer the question: “Outside of the mainstream narrative, what are the historical contexts, events, people, places, theories, concepts, processes, and impacts that we cannot afford to forget as a field?” This Bordieuan-guided sociology of knowledge and praxis will be organized into three main areas: (1) influential philosophical thinking on culture and social relations (pre-1900s); (2) comparative and intercultural initiatives that provided conceptualizations, critiques, and applications of social and cultural theory (pre-Hall and pre-1970s); and (3) concurrent parallel tracks that formalized fields of cross- or intercultural studies, which continue to cross-over, contend, and realign to meet the needs of today’s complex cultural contexts (since the 1970s). By approaching the disciplinary history of the field(s) of intercultural studies in an intercultural (multiple-perspectival, reflective, context-sensitive) manner, both revived and new insights are garnered for grappling with and finding new approaches to the important issues facing inter-group relations and intercultural communication research and praxis today.

This chapter examines research that illuminates the experiences of international immigrants, especially women. Our emphasis is on the women’s multiple social identities and their intersectionality, which uniquely shape their experiences in the settlement society depending on the broader historical and intercultural contexts of the countries between which they travel. Starting with a brief discussion of selected social psychological frameworks relevant to immigrants, including social identity theory and intersectionality theory, the chapter reviews research on immigrant women’s experiences in several topical areas, examining the impacts of religion, sexuality, domestic violence, media stereotypes, and career opportunities in the global labor market. Immigrant women’s experiences today are highly heterogeneous. The chapter ends with a call for an in-depth examination of intersectionality of identities from an intercultural perspective.

Anne Ife’s chapter traces attitudes towards language tolerance in Western Europe during the last half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. This includes an exploration of the post-Second World War climate of cultural and linguistic acceptance as well as the current climate shaped by increased fear and suspicion, and the growth of populism and resentment of incomers. Using media and documented sources and relevant research findings, this chapter examines in particular evidence of linguistic othering, and gauges its impact on intercultural relations, notably in the UK where language issues featured prominently in political campaigns and media discourse relating to migrant communities in the lead-up to the 2016 European Union referendum.