Translocal Pragmatics: Operationalizing Postnational Heuristics to Locate Salient Cultural Overlap

The importance of creating projects that allow students enrolled in American universities to collaborate with students enrolled in foreign institutions cannot be overemphasized. However, for these projects to be effective in terms of learning outcomes, it is important that instructors identify the factors that either prevent or prompt fruitful collaboration across cultural boundaries. The power of cultural boundaries demands that research on intercultural communication conceptualize and measure cultural difference. Additionally, research on intercultural communication has been irrevocably altered by the pace of communication technology change that allows for rapid and rich cross-cultural communication across great distances. An understanding of culture that takes into consideration how the variety of communication technologies that Arjun Appadurai calls “technoscapes” (Appadurai, 1996) allow faster and denser interaction across all sorts of boundaries can help researchers ask questions that are relevant