{"id":31433,"date":"2013-06-01T01:42:34","date_gmt":"2013-06-01T01:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=31433"},"modified":"2013-06-01T01:42:34","modified_gmt":"2013-06-01T01:42:34","slug":"senior-interculturalist-profile-dr-stella-ting-toomey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=31433","title":{"rendered":"Senior Interculturalist Profile: Dr. Stella Ting-Toomey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Senior Interculturalist Profile: Dr. Stella Ting-Toomey<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Society of Intercultural Education, Training, & Research (SIETAR) Newsletter<\/a>
\nJanuary 2002
\n4 pages<\/p>\n

Susan Rinderle<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stella Ting-Toomey is probably the only person who seems surprised that she is considered one of the top figures in the intercultural communication field, dismissing deserved compliments with a simple, \u201cI\u2019m just doing my job.\u201d An author and scholar who has been in the field for almost twenty years, Ting-Toomey is perhaps best known for her work on \u201cmindfulness\u201d and \u201cfacework\u201d in cross-cultural communication, in particular her face-negotiation theory which deals with ways people negotiate their communication identities during interactions with each other. The theory and its central issues such as face-saving, face-losing, and face-honoring \u201cresonate with diverse ethnic groups and cultural groups on a global level,\u201d she says. And while she continues to test and fine-tune the theory, she believes it\u2019s a perspective others can build on and extend.<\/p>\n

Ting-Toomey herself is no stranger to facework or face negotiation. Born in Hong Kong, she came to the U.S. in the summer of 1972, to attend the University of Iowa. Her decision was based entirely on chance \u2013 she was accepted at three U.S. universities and as she had no idea how the three differed, she wrote each name on a piece of paper and had her then nine-year-old brother pick a name at random. Thus began a journey that took her from an all-white campus town in Iowa to Washington, New Jersey, Japan, Arizona, and, finally, Southern California. She is now one of the most prominent theorists in the field, a prolific author, professor at California State University at Fullerton (CSUF), partner in a twenty-five year intercultural marriage and mother to a biracial child.<\/p>\n

Unlike many other interculturalists who were born in the U.S. and first faced with their \u201cotherness\u201d while abroad, Ting-Toomey\u2019s interest in the field sparked as an international student in the U.S. She studied mass communication as an undergraduate, which she enjoyed for being very intense, creative, fun and \u201chands-on,\u201d but found \u201cdeeper questions to be answered\u201d the more involved she got, and so decided to continue at the University of Iowa and try to address some of those questions during a Master\u2019s degree in communication theory. Later, as she reviewed the literature for her Ph.D. dissertation on conflict negotiation in marital relationships at the University of Washington, she found existing research to be \u201cbiased towards the individualistic Western way of managing intimate conflict.\u201d She could not relate to or identify with certain concepts then accepted as givens within that framework \u2013 for instance, the idea that confrontation or self-disclosure in conflict is desirable and healthy, and avoiding conflict is considered a negative conflict behavior. She turned her dissatisfaction with the existing body of research into a drive to develop new theories…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article in HTML<\/a> or PDF<\/a> format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Senior Interculturalist Profile: Dr. Stella Ting-Toomey Society of Intercultural Education, Training, & Research (SIETAR) Newsletter January 2002 4 pages Susan Rinderle Stella Ting-Toomey is probably the only person who seems surprised that she is considered one of the top figures in the intercultural communication field, dismissing deserved compliments with a simple, \u201cI\u2019m just doing my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,8],"tags":[14816,14820],"class_list":["post-31433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-media-archive","tag-stella-ting-toomey","tag-susan-rinderle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}