Information will be available soon...

Fellows Day 2023
Envisioning and Actualizing a New Generation of Acculturation Research
July 23^rd, 2023

Calls for new approaches to acculturation research have been growing; in fact, some contend that we are now on the cusp of a third generation of acculturation research that is incorporating new theoretical models and methods to capture the increasing complexity of intercultural interactions (Sam & Ward, 2021). Debates have promulgated about the ontology and epistemology surrounding acculturation (Komisarof & Hua, 2016) such as what constitutes culture, which has implications for conceiving and measuring the nature of cultural change that is at the heart of the acculturation process. For instance, traditional concepts of interculturality and multiculturality based on the assumption of inherent differences between national cultures are challenged by the notion of transculturality (Skrefsrud, 2021). Moreover, in our increasingly interconnected digital world, virtual acculturation has become an area of active research—leading us to reconceive the communication mediums through which acculturation occurs (Ferguson et al., 2018). These controversies and new developments in the field underscore the exigency of conceiving new approaches to respond to the dialectic forces of homogenization and fragmentation of cultures, people, and practices in the context of an interconnected global community. Thus, the need for acculturation scholars to envision and actualize a new generation of acculturation research is more significant than ever before.

 Fellows Day 2023 at IAIR’s 13th Biennial Conference in Philadelphia aims to explore new approaches to acculturation research—particularly those that challenge longstanding assumptions—and encourage dialogue about integrating contemporary and longstanding methods that complement each other to meet current and future acculturation research needs. Facilitated presentations of novel approaches to acculturation research will be shared to address the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of our global society characterized by a hybrid of face-to-face and virtual communication. The goal of this Fellows Day is to answer the call for a new generation of acculturation research by addressing such issues as majority group acculturation, cultural appropriation, virtual acculturation, and many more. 

We see this as ideally accomplished not by ignoring past research, but rather bringing together Fellows who represent both entirely novel approaches to acculturation in their work with those who have done seminal studies that have brought us to our current point of understanding of acculturation.  By engaging in dialogue with each other, we hope to create conditions in which acculturation researchers can utilize the knowledge gained in the past, remain informed by it, and leap into the future in novel ways that address our increasingly complex world of intercultural interactions and identities.

Potential speakers and tentative titles include:

David Sam, tentative title, "The third generation of acculturation research: Progress and challenges"

John Berry, "Berry framework in the 21st century"

Young Kim, “Much has changed, much remains”

Gail Ferguson, “Remote acculturation”

Jonas Kunst, “Majority-group acculturation: Genuine change or cultural appropriation?”

Chan-Hoong Leong, “Geography, intercultural contact, and acculturation”

Valery Cherkov, "Critical approaches to acculturation: IJIR Special Issue revisited"

Pawel Boski, "Becoming a bicultural person: A cultural psychology approach" 

Seth Schwartz, "Micro-level perspective on acculturation"

Dina Birman, “The Many Meanings of ‘Acculturation’”

Colleen Ward, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants or Re-inventing the Wheel? Reflections on the Way forward for Acculturation Theory and Research”

As has been the practice at the previous two Fellows Days in Shanghai and Rapperswil, speakers in each session will be divided into two parallel streams. Participants may choose to attend either stream within each session during the same time block.  Each speaker will have 20 minutes to present their ideas, followed by 25 minutes of group discussion within each stream. In the last session, as a composite group, participants will also share insights from the day’s earlier discussions in order to build plans for state-of-the-art acculturation research in the future.

Information will be available soon...