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Editor's Introduction: Critical Interventions in Urgent Times

These are times when the violent silencing, racialization, criminalization, and erasure of our communities of color and the stripping of rights and freedoms to indigenous groups all over the world, transgender and gay and lesbian communities, and women across multiple intersectionalities, run rampant. With such urgencies brewing and escalating at every second, the role of international and intercultural communication research and praxis seems even more necessary. This journal issue features two important and riveting articles that highlight the intricate operations of power in the current historical-political moment (by Michelle A. Hollings, Dreama G. Moon, and Alexandra Jackson Nevis) as well as the ways in which we as scholars can become more attuned and equipped with tools for identifying and engaging such power moves (by Kate G. Willink, Robert Gutierrez-Perez, Salma Shukri, and Lacey Stein). The operations of power are simultaneously blatant and subtle, shocking and sympathy-inducing, and historically brewing and swift. In order to highlight the connection between these articles and our surrounding sociopolitical context, I invited two key scholars, Ronald L. Jackson II and Keith Nainby, to provide reflections on each of the featured essays. Their thoughtful and powerful reflection essays continue the momentum of the two articles presented in the pages that follow: that is, toward making critical interventions in the often gridlocked (and yet not foreclosed) and ever-present nature of power, oppression, and domination. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication Vol. 7, No. 4, November 2014, p. 259