i wasn't raised in an intercultural environment but i lived abroad as a young adult. I'm very much a WASP.

I went about my studies rather lackadaisically and never planned on going for it -- I was a college drop-out and took 10 years to finish undergrad when I had two small children. my undergrad studies were in media. It would've been journalism but I didn't start as a freshman and at the school where i went you had to go full time days to do j-school. I worked briefly in publishing, instructional tv and some radio.

Got my masters and started teaching adjunct just for fun and still never intended to go further.

When i was getting divorced, my lawyer said i needed to find a way to further my career if i wanted to get support (i.e., alimony) so I checked around. As far as studying media, I didn't think there was much more to learn about it. In the 90s mass media seemed to fall apart.

Intercultural communication seems like the discipline of the future, starting now. I studied interpersonal as an undergrad as well, which is interesting, but doesn't go far enough. I went to an historically black college which was one of the best in the country in intercultural with some of the top professors in the field.

Intercultural comm grew out of rhetorical studies, and also involves some anthropology and sociolinguistics. It has roots first in feminist studies -- women were the first to methodically study communication styles and point out how they were excluded. African Americans adopted a lot of the early feminist research. It looks at each of us as cultural beings -- we all bring our different backgrounds to every encounter -- sex, race, socioeconomic level, class, nationality, education, ethnicity, etc. We build our identities and develop our value systems largely by imitating those around us. We arrange ourselves hierarchically depending on who's in power and how much we resemble them.

That's a thumnail sketch (oops -- i'm trying not to think about fingers).