Victoria Orange - Supercomplexity in Interaction: An Introduction to the 4Es

Cover credit: Melisa Hasan

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The seeds for this book were sown several years ago when I attended an interesting talk by Dianne Tyers on complex systems and the application of them for social sciences and in particular for culture, at an International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) conference held at Peking University in Beijing. This talk helped me to start to bring some kind of sense to this vast, fascinating, shifting and timeless phenomenon of human interaction. From my experience, first and foremost as a linguist, then as a translator, an interpreter, a teacher and a traveller, I know that interaction is complicated and can be messy. Trying to contain or restrain it in order to better understand it or teach about it is a difficult task. When I heard about complex systems, despite my pronounced phobia or all things mathematical, I felt that this could be a way to understand the messiness of interaction and help others understand it too. It seems to me that by demonstrating the supercomplexity of interaction, we can appreciate the enormity of what we navigate each and every day and wonder at how we manage to do it at all.

What is more, despite there being a considerable body of work on intercultural communication that does not encourage essentialism, over time I had started to be concerned that some of the models I was covering in my teaching on intercultural communication could be causing more harm than good by reinforcing essentialist attitudes. Regardless of how much I encouraged students to take a critical approach to these models, and they seemed to be doing so in classroom discussions, when I marked their papers I often found them turning to essentialist terms when they were writing about interaction. This is what led me to decide to reconsider what and how I taught to see whether the outcome would be any different.

I chose to adopt a complexity-informed approach because it seems to me to be very important that students grasp the intricacy of what they are navigating when they interact and this is a clear way to show them that, albeit not without meeting certain requirements as discussed in the following chapters and in particular Chapter. The first attempt was encouraging but I consider it to be only a start and hope to go further in drawing on the supercomplexity of interaction in my teaching and in conducting future research on this subject.

This work is my own and I take full responsibility for it. I do not claim to have all the answers to the ideal way to approach interaction and I am quite sure that I have overlooked some points. Nevertheless, I would like to share my ideas and open them up to constructive discussion.

This monograph is intended for all those interested in interaction and involved in learning or teaching about it. I hope it will be useful and perhaps offer a new perspective for further reflection.

I am grateful to colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire for their encouragement, in particular Kath Houston, who coached me through the early stages with patience and sensitivity.

Many thanks go to the editing team at Palgrave Macmillan, in particular Cathy Scott and Alice Green, for their valuable advice and support. I also sincerely appreciate the very useful and comprehensive feedback from the anonymous reviewers which greatly helped in shaping this book.

I would like to thank friends, particularly Noel, who had first drafts foisted on them to read and who provided helpful and much-appreciated comments.

Finally, my overriding inspiration for teaching about interaction is the hope that future generations will be more insightful about it. No better example of my hope for the future is my son, Louis.