Introduction

ICMI – the Research Center Intercultural Communication in Multimodal Interactions is an inter-institutional and international network of researchers who aim to analyze intercultural communication in interaction from micro-analytical and multimodal perspectives. The center was constituted in December of 2019 as a first result of the project “Intercultural communicataion in interaction: multimodal approaches”, funded by WUN-RDF – Worldwide Universities Network Research Development Fund. ICMI represents the follow up group of the prior Brazilian Research Group Comunicação (Inter)Cultural em Interação – NUCOI that began its activities with a pilot project in 2010. At the present moment, the research group counts with researchers from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), the University of Gießen (Germany), the Federal University of Lavras (Brazil), the University of Brasília (Brazil), as well as collaborators within our projects from the São Paulo State University (Brazil), University of Essen-Duisburg (Germany), the University of Potsdam (Germany), the University of Heidelberg (Germany), the University of Alberta (Canada), and the University of Leeds (UK).   

Aim

Our research aims to identify how interactants co-construct alterity, cultural key concepts, dimensions, language attitudes, and identities on verbal, prosodic, and corporal-visual planes. Concurrently, we focus on the emergence of intercultural spaces that arise from the interwoven nature of the disparate worldviews that co-participants bring into the interaction. These spaces are poised to engage each other reflexively, resulting in the creation of something new. Thus, we seek to integrate pragmatic, conversational, sociolinguistic, and cognitive research fields. The multimodal analysis starts with concrete interaction sequences, yet simultaneously provides access to the conceptual and cultural levels.

Corpus

In methodological terms, one core method is the videotaping and transcribing of intercultural interactions occurring in natural, elicited and institutional settings, and the analysis of these using theories from the field of intercultural pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, cultural linguistics, as well as gesture studies. Since the beginning, the essential aim has been to create a corpus of film recordings and their transcriptions, based on elicited, institutional, and natural interactions among participants from different cultures, as well as among participants with the same linguistic and cultural background, for comparative purposes. Currently, the ICMI corpus (previous NUCOI corpus) comprises of about 2,496 minutes of videotaped interactions with a total of 56,164 intonation units. 

Funding