This chapter maps the emerging conceptual terrain of posthumanism and its relevance for discourse studies, with a particular focus on sociolinguistics and applied linguistics work. Posthumanism is a label applied to a range of theoretical and methodological approaches across the humanities and social sciences that are calling into question dominant assumptions generated by Western Enlightenment thinking about the human by giving greater consideration to the role of material objects, animals and the environment in understanding the social world. Posthumanism thus considers the implications of the central role of materialism in our understandings of human agency, language, cognition and society. For discourse studies, a turn to posthumanism requires us to examine the role of discourse in how humans become entangled with the material world through their everyday embodied interactions with objects, artifacts, technologies, plants, animals, and the built and natural environment. Through embracing an activity-oriented perspective toward these human–nonhuman entanglements, the implications are that we must rethink modernist categorical boundaries between subject/object, human/nonhuman and society/nature, both within metadiscourses about these dichotomies and through a more microanalytic lens in the analysis of text and talk.

Liisa Salo-Lee highlights the need to transform academic and professional work in intercultural communication, which is still largely shaped by the multidisciplinary coexistence of different approaches. Her chapter presents ‘integrative intercultural communication’ as a proposal for an interdisciplinary approach to research and practice, which places intercultural dialogue at its core and stresses intercultural communication as an ongoing process of learning in exchange. This approach aims to provide researchers with supporting concepts and tools, e.g. the use of the rhizome as a metaphor for culture and nexus analysis as a method for cultural analysis, to tackle the complexities of the field.