Posthumanist intercultural multilingualism research: Culture as relations and as meanings in an overall meaning-making space

For linguistic subdisciplines focusing on language practice like sociolinguistics and pragmatics, the fields of multilingualism research and intercultural communication for long have been conceptual bridges from language to the social world whereby both concepts often have been perceived as competing. Both strands over the past decade have opened to new, overall social theory strands from poststructuralism and posthumanism that highlight complexities and non-dichotomies. This transition may invite us having a look at how authors transform ‘culture’ as one of the core terms of these schools. It is the interplay with multilingualism research that reveals that intercultural communication research on the one hand sticks with its traditional, semiotic understanding of culture as meaning-making and only partly incorporates a new posthumanist understanding of culture as pure relations. This new interplay of multilingualism and intercultural communication research results in a more integrative view on how culture can be thought of in social theorising without confining and tidying it away to a fixed ‘place’ in a theory.