In 2011, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) was thrust into the Western media spotlight through the murder of LGBTIQ activist, David Kato Kasule, and the now-infamous “Kill the Gays Bill.” During the last six years, SMUG and its members have continued to fight oppressive Ugandan governmental systems and conservative leaders that have been instigated by U.S. evangelical fundamentalists, most notably Scott Lively. And while SMUG and its members have fallen out of the Western media spotlight since 2012, SMUG continues its social justice activism with and for LGBTIQ Ugandans on the ground, while also building transnational coalitions with other LGBTIQ organizations both within and beyond the borders of Uganda. In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which SMUG utilizes its website (sexualminoritiesuganda.com) as a site for transnational and translocal coalition-building for the sake of social justice activism. To understand the ways in which SMUG is engaging in LGBTIQ activism with nuance, I build a conceptual framework for my analysis through five constructs of critical intercultural communication: critical cosmopolitanism, transnational activism, the global-local dialectic, power, and identity. Critical cosmopolitanism, as conceptualized in Communication Studies by Miriam Sobré-Denton and Nilanjana Bardhan (2013), “is a world- and Other-oriented practice of engaging in deliberate, dialogic, critical, non-coercive and ethical communication. Through the play of context-specific dialectics, cosmopolitan communication works with and through cultural differences and historical and emerging power inequalities to achieve ongoing understanding, intercultural growth, mutuality, collaboration and social and global justice goals through critical self-transformation” (p. 50, emphasis in original). Through this definition, I also work with critical cosmopolitanism as conceptualized by Walter Mignolo (2000, 2010, 2012) and Gerard Delanty (2006, 2009). For Mignolo (2000), critical cosmopolitanism “comprises projects located in the exteriority and issuing forth from the colonial difference” (p. 724) as “an argument for globalization from below” (p. 745) that works to dislodge West-centric modes of thinking. Delanty (2006) extends this definition, as critical cosmopolitanism “seeks to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities” (p. 25). In this, critical cosmopolitanism is a project that asks us to consider the ways in which “diversality,” or “diversity as a universal project” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 743), can dislodge Western modernity, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization from above. To understand the ways in which SMUG is engaging in a critical cosmopolitan vision through its website, I examine for clues of transnational activism as a way of performing and engaging in critical cosmopolitanism through Bardhan (2011), Burgmann (2013), and Gledhill (2010). To complicate our understanding of transnational activism, I turn to the global-local dialectic, as conceptualized by Stuart Hall (1997). The global-local dialectic helps me to observe the ways in which SMUG is dislodging all-encompassing narratives that center globalization as a top-down-only mechanism that ceases all local particularities of culture from existing. Kraidy (1999, 2005) also helps me to investigate the ways in which the global and the local are always already present and in a dialectical tension in our postmodern and postcolonial world. To understand more about how these tensions function, I investigate the construct of power through sociologist Jonathan Hearn’s (2012), Theorizing Power. In it, he seeks to shift theorizing of power away from questions regarding what “we mean by power” to questions of “what do we have to bear in mind when studying power?” (p. 4). Through theorizing five oppositions associated with power—“(1) physical versus social power, (2) power ‘to’ versus power ‘over’, (3) asymmetrical versus balanced power, (4) power as structures versus agents, and (5) actual versus potential power” (p. 4)—Hearn helps me to complicate the ways in which power is observed and discussed in relation to SMUG, LGBTIQ Ugandans, Ugandan leadership, U.S. evangelism, and Western political involvement. Finally, I offer a conceptual framework for identity in critical intercultural communication research, including questions on how we theorize difference differently through John T. Warren’s (2008), “Performing Difference,” as well as offering a framework to understand cosmopolitan identity as constructed by Sobré-Denton and Bardhan (2013) and a framing for African queer sexualities through the works of Ugandan feminist scholars, Sylvia Tamale (2003) and Stella Nyanzi (2013). To address my research questions, I engaged in an ideological criticism (Foss, 2003, Hart & Daughton, 2005, Wander, 1983) of SMUG’s website to more fully understand the ideologies driving SMUG’s rhetorical choices. I chose to use ideological criticism as a methodological framework as it allowed me, the critic, to construct a critical framework with which to analyze a text. Ideological criticism also offered me the opportunity to bring critical rhetorical methods into conversation with critical intercultural communication constructs. Through this conceptual and methodological framework, I analyzed 110 screen shots of their website and all 54 articles included as content on their page over the course of 13 months. Through this process, I argue that SMUG is showing signs of a critical cosmopolitan vision in their website through their participation in peripheral partnerships and activism that speaks back to oppressive systems in ways that highlight globalization-from-below, as conceptualized by Walter Mignolo (2000, 2010, 2012). I also trouble the ways in which SMUG represents LGBTIQ Ugandans on the ground as I call for more intersectional representation that speaks more broadly to LGBTIQ Ugandan experiences in the everyday than SMUG is currently offering visitors. This dissertation research also highlights the difficulties of reading critical cosmopolitanism in one online mediated space, and that centering people and the relationships among people is critical when engaging in critical cosmopolitan research. I end this project with a call to critical intercultural communication scholars to offer more nuance around the representations of LGBTIQ people around the world that takes us beyond sensationalized subjects while also not erasing the devastating impacts of LGBTIQ hatred locally and globally.

Each year, thousands of Chinese international students come to the United States to further their education. Most of them need to adjust their identities in some degrees to adapt to U.S. American social and cultural contexts. One key transition that is significantly under discussed and often ignored is Chinese international students’ adjustment into a racialized system in the U.S. Because of different racial and ethnic contexts in China, Chinese international students have to disorient from the racial and ethnic identity of their home country and adapt to and accept the U.S. American hierarchy of race and ethnicity. Lacking sufficient social and intellectual support, this process often leads to struggle, depression, and ambivalence amongst Chinese international students in relation to their identity and communication in the U.S. society. As a Chinese international student myself in the U.S., my own experiences with the shifting of racial and ethnic knowledge, and the struggles these experiences have produced in relation to my identity (ies), leads me to investigate this topic further. Thus, in this study I examine how members of a socio-cultural group that I identify with, Chinese international students, negotiate and make sense of their/our new racial and ethnic identity upon entering the cultural space of the U.S. Race and ethnicity, as social categories of identity and power, play out differently on bodies located in different spatial, national/historical and cultural contexts. The meanings and hierarchies of race and ethnicity presumed to be commonsense in one national context are not so in others. At the same time, in today’s increasingly mobile and globalizing world, how we make sense of and communicate race are acted upon by complex transnational forces. In recent years, there has been a growing interest among critical intercultural communication scholars to theorize race and ethnicity as social constructions and relations of power, but this theorization has mostly happened in the U.S. and Western contexts. The transnational and globalized dimensions of race and ethnicity still largely remain under studied (Shome, 2010). Tomlinson (2007) points out that, under the conditions of contemporary globalization, the global-local dialectical relationship could be interpreted as the global’s entry into the local; the local’s identity in the global; and the “disembedding” of the local to the global. This global-local dialectical approach provides me with a conceptual lens to look at how race and ethnicity are constructed, understood, and communicated in the climate of today’s increasingly transnational world. In this dissertation, I use critical complete-member ethnography (CCME), as “an insider-looking-in-and-out-critical approach” (Toyosaki, 2011, p. 66), to study the racial and ethnic identity dis/reorientation process of Chinese international students in the U.S. Specifically, I used ethnographic observations, interviews, and autoethnographic journaling as my research methods to examine the direct, subjective, and embodied experiences of my 13 participants and myself, negotiate and make sense of their-our new racial and ethnic identities upon entering a global-local dialectical context in the U.S. I strategically categorize my analysis into “disorientation” and “reorientation” from a critical intercultural perspective, and use CCME’s consensual-conflictual and cultural-individual dialectical theorizations to study their-our dis/reorientation processes. My findings reveal that Chinese international students’ previous “Chinese” racial and ethnic identity become invalid and even problematic in the U.S. context. We often find ourselves struggling with sentiments of exhaustion, cynicism, and nihilism (Warren & Fassett, 2012), and interconnected yet ambivalent double consciousness such as insider–outsider, Chinese-–people of color, and majority–minority in the racial and ethnic identity dis/reorientation processes. In my findings, it is clear that Chinese international students have experienced and formed a similar sense of uncomfortable-ness, lost-ness, and struggle in our racial and ethnic disorientation process when we enter the U.S. context from the Chinese context. My participants all reported that after they were geographically relocated in the U.S., they have gone through the phase of being lost and confused because they were unable to find or construct a new racial and ethnic selfhood that made them immediately fit into the U.S. society. After their initial transition and adjustment, they reported experiencing certain forms of racial and ethnic discrimination in the U.S. that they had never faced in China. These lived and embodied discriminatory experiences in the U.S., which often turned out to be very direct, uncomfortable and stressful, forced them to consciously disorient their normative identity and reorient themselves to becoming a racial and ethnic minority for the first time in their lives. At the same time, they felt that the new and transformative outcome they reoriented to was a temporary state rather than a permanent identity. As a result, most of them became more open-minded, and felt the need to keep constantly reorienting their sense of their racial and ethnic identities, meanings, and presences in the U.S. My findings demonstrate that contemporary globalization not only produces different interpretations of race and ethnicity, it also constantly alters possibilities and conditions of our real racial and ethnic experiences in the world. As we try to respond to racial and ethnic issues and crises in today’s transnational world, simply recognizing that race and ethnicity are socially constructed rather than biologically innate does not make racial and ethnic conflicts and problems easier to solve. The relative nature of race and ethnicity in different local and global contexts are far more intricate than we ever imagined. Therefore, it is necessary and useful to study how race and ethnicity are understood and communicated through the direct, embodied, and performative experiences of non-Western and non-White bodies in transnational and globalized contexts. This study also shows the possibility that might lie in pushing the concept of race and ethnicity beyond the hegemony of the ways it is understood and deployed in the U.S. and other Western cultural and social contexts. In this regard, this study opens up a constructive approach for critical intercultural scholarship to more effectively engage in understanding and communicating race and ethnicity in the global-local dialectical context of globalization.