In August, 2023, two of my friends — Sandra Fowler and Daniel Yalowitz — set out to make a difference. They envisioned a book on the field of interculturalism structured around individual professional autobiographies written by twelve people, mostly in their eighties, whom they deemed to be intercultural pioneers . I was one of the dozen selected, also the oldest at 91 when the book — Creating the Intercultural Field: Legacies from the Pioneers — was published in 2025.
Within diversityworld, the field of interculturalism is not all that prominent. It isn’t a widely-trumpeted diversity term like microaggressions or white fragility or critical race theory. It doesn’t make headlines like DEI. In fact, although its origins date back to the early twentieth century, interculturalism has operated effectively in the shadows without the widespread public recognition of hotter and more critically scrutinized fields like ethnic studies.
Interculturalism is based on the idea of building bridges of mutual understanding and respectful communication among people of different cultural backgrounds, although the definition of what counts as “cultural” is continuouslyl debated. It emphasizes the thoughtful analysis of otherness and the commitment to adapting constructively when operating within cultures different from one’s own. The field’s major presence on college campuses is through programs in intercultural communication.
When Sandy and Daniel invited me to be part of the project, I responded with a degree of reticence. While I’ve been involved in the field for more than three decades, I don’t consider myself to be an intercultural pioneer. In fact, although I had been active in diversity work since the early 1970’s, I didn’t even know that the field of interculturalism existed until March, 1991.
I had been invited to be part of a three-person opening plenary panel at the 1991 Washington, D.C., conference of the late American Association for Higher Education. Arriving two days early, I decided to get my fill of nearby Ethiopian food. If in the mood, I would also attend some pre-conference events.
Glancing through the program, I spotted an intriguing workshop on interracial communication featuring a couple of people named Bennett. Why not? If I became bored, I could always slip out and head for the injera. However, boredom did not become an issue.
The two Bennetts – Janet and Milton — turned out to be a revelation. Their opening remarks on the complexities of Black-White communication patterns managed to provoke participants, some of whom challenged the Bennetts with hostile comments. However, the Bennetts deftly managed what could have turned into a polarizing session and presented their arguments with calmness and dexterity.
Afterward I hastened to introduce myself. The Bennetts subsequently attended my plenary discussion. Over the course of the conference we became friends. That friendship grew over the ensuing decades.
I learned that Janet and Milton were directors of the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC), then being held each year at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. They explained that the program annually drew hundreds of professionals from around the world for an array of week-long courses on aspects of interculturalism. They invited me to give the opening plenary talk for one week of SIIC and to present an evening workshop on intercultural humor in July, 1992. I did, and soon became a regular faculty member at the Summer Institute.
My weeklong courses covered such topics as privilege, equity, and teaching about diversity. Sometimes I taught the courses alone, sometimes in collaboration with Louise Wilkinson, a Seattle-based Boeing diversity trainer and video creator, whom I met at SIIC. My teaching continued every summer for nearly a quarter of a century until the Institute closed its summer program in the late 2010’s.
Although the Summer Institute ended, interculturalism marches on. Its organizational centerpiece is the Society for Intercultural Education, Training, and Research. Its main scholarly journal is the International Journal for Intercultural Research. But back to the book project.
At our first zoom group meeting, Sandy and Daniel shared their vision that the story of interculturalism could be illuminated through the lives of some of its veteran practitioners. The dozen individual stories would illustrate the breadth, variety, and importance of the field. Taken as a composite, those stories would provide a sort of multi-personal, perspective-based history of interculturalism.
The process of creating the book was both enriching and delightful. For some two years we — the two editors and the twelve authors — met regularly via zoom. We circulated chapter drafts, provided mutual feedback, and collaboratively shaped the book’s structure. It was exciting to engage with the other authors, some of whom I knew, others whom I had never met until the onset of our project. Each had become involved in interculturalism in a unique way. Some came from academia; some from government work; some via non-profit organizations. Some were scholars; others were practitioners; some combined these two thrusts.
As the project developed, my insights into the larger interculturalist journey expanded continuously and sometimes surprisingly. By the end of the project I felt as if I had benefited from an advanced post-graduate seminar with myriad experts. It was with considerable fulfillment that I saw my chapter in Sandy and Daniel’s book, Creating the Intercultural Field: Legacies from the Pioneers (2025), along with personal essays by a group of thought leaders I had grown to admire.
Through the project I also got to know interculturalism in ways I had not before. I also grew to recognize even more fully how interculturalism has played a unique role, although an under-recognized role, in the history of the diversity movement by providing insights into intergroup perceptions and relations. Moreover, interculturalism has developed a set of ideas, values, and principles upon which the diversity movement can draw as it seeks to renew itself while confronting the current anti-diversity onslaught.
Maybe what makes interculturalism so critical at this moment is its core dedication to the central importance of intergroup and interpersonal bridge-building. It was this pursuit of bringing down barriers and building bridges that animated much of ethnic studies and multicultural education during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Yet most advocates of those two fields, myself included, were not fully aware that the field of interculturalism had championed intergroup bridge-building long before we 1970’s advocates got into the action.
Over time, some ethnic studies and multicultural education activists began to move away from the bridge-building emphasis that animated early efforts. For some scholars, teachers, and trainers, the building of bridges gave way to the framing of the world as a series of polaric dyads, what John Dewey referred to as “pernicious dualisms.” In this more dour reconceptualization, the world was hopelessly divided into oppressors and the oppressed; the privileged and the unprivileged; microaggressors and the microaggressed, and colonizers and the colonized. In the process of championing these brutalist dyads, such elements as subtlety, nuance, and even universal humanity tended to get lost.
That is why interculturalism remains so important, as documented in Legacies from the Pioneers. It features myriad approaches that re-center the human dimension of interpersonal and intergroup relations. In a world increasingly pervaded by divisiveness, interculturalism challenges the constructors of barriers by proclaiming the timeless value of bridge building.
He also edited the four-volume Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia (2013).