This chapter outlines the evolution, scope and transformative potential of environmental communication, framing it as a praxis-oriented field rooted in crisis response and care-driven action. It traces the emergence of environmental communication from its activist origins in the 1970s to its present interdisciplinary form. The chapter highlights the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of environmental struggles, particularly in the Global South. It introduces environmental communication as both a ‘crisis discipline’, committed to documenting unsustainable practices, and a ‘care discipline’, fostering relational ethics and biodiversity awareness. The dual functions of environmental messages – pragmatic (informative and persuasive) and constitutive (identity and meaning-shaping) – are explained through examples ranging from mass media portrayals to grassroots interventions. Emphasising intercultural mediation, the chapter advocates for inclusive dialogues that account for power hierarchies, postcolonial legacies and cultural frames. Ultimately, the text proposes environmental communication as a transformative tool for bridging divides and catalysing collective environmental responsibility, with a particular focus on justice, empathy and critical engagement across global contexts.

Lara Martin Lengel, Ahmet Atay and Yannick Kluch propose in their chapter to theorize decolonization as a framework that emphasizes empowerment through the potential to reframe and re/envision history. The aim is to break away from dominant Western and US-centric ways of studying culture, communication and identity and the relationships among them, including especially the construction and performance of gender. This chapter also presents methodological strategies for critical intercultural communication research, particularly with focus on the intersectional nature of gender, identity, culture and power.

Thomas Nakayama discusses the importance of ‘critical intercultural communication’, i.e. an approach that he has proposed, defined and very substantially developed, with particular regard for interactions in an environment increasingly shaped by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Since, despite the rise of the network society, overall little attention has been paid to the ways that social media influence intercultural communication, the chapter introduces examples that allow for an in-depth exploration of the ways that social inequality is reinforced in the digital environment, as well as the ways that people utilize social media to resist that inequality.