This book explores communication, culture, and intercultural communication. The emphasis is on promoting understanding of and appreciation for the rich and varied perspectives encountered in intercultural communication opportunities. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book focuses on the need to develop self-understanding as a first step to intercultural understanding, and highlights the need for the intercultural state of mind to match our multicultural world, the difficulties inherent in the quest of such an objective, the excitement of challenges on the way and the rewards of the success that are sputtering with new energy and yet waiting to be discovered. Furthermore, the book represents an initial step in the process of building competencies which may facilitate effective communication in all types of cross-cultural settings. It gives a unique outlook of how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. The book grows out of the philosophy that developing better interpersonal, intercultural communication skills will profoundly benefit the seven billion people who share this planet and who increasingly interact with each other by producing some guidelines with which people can successfully cope with the realities of cultural diversity, the challenges of living in a multicultural world, the need to transcend the unpredictability of intercultural interactions, the accompanying fears that such interactions often encompass, and the feeling of joy and comfort in the discovery of cultural diversity.
About the Author: Dr Natasa Bakic-Miric teaches at the University of Nis Medical School, Serbia. She has earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Serbia and a graduate certificate in intercultural communication and business administration from Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. Her research has focused on intercultural communication, multiple intelligences theory, English for specific purposes, and the poetry of P. B. Shelley. Up to now, Dr Bakic-Miric has received several grants to pursue her fields of study abroad. She is the author of two books: English for Pharmacy (first edition, 2006; second edition, 2007), and Percy Bysshe Shelley (2011, in Serbian with translations of Prometheus Unbound and Hellas). An author or co-author of numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals, she also serves as a reviewer in several refereed foreign journals, and as an editorial assistant for the official journal of the University of Nis Medical School. Since 2007 she has been engaged as a researcher in two international and two national projects.