On Wednesday, 16^th July, the Department of Linguistics and English Language hosted the third annual conference of the cross-faculty Culture and Communication network (CULCOM).

Since 2023, CULCOM has been connecting Lancaster University staff, students and visiting scholars interested in any aspect of culture and communication.

This year’s conference focused on business communication coinciding with the launch of Lancaster University’s new MA in Intercultural Business Communication.

The day featured 2 keynote talks and 8 presentations and attracted 40 delegates. 22 joined online; 18 gathered on-site on the grounds of Lancaster Castle - a historic monument of local and international importance.

In the first keynote of the day, Professor Xingsong Shi (University of International Business and Economics, China) demonstrated how multinational automotive giants Tesla and BYD Auto closely attune their social media self-promotion strategies to salient cultural values within different markets using multimodal resources.

In the second keynote of the day, Professor Veronika Koller (Lancaster University, UK) dispelled myths about culture and proposed a new model of intersectional business communication which systematically analyses the role not only of national culture in business communication, but also of other key factors (e.g., age, socialisation).

Multimodality was a prominent theme throughout the day. Peipei Jin (Tianjin University of Chinese Medicine, China) presented a multimodal analysis of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) heritage brand packaging. Amily Wang-Guenier (Lancaster University, UK) showed how TCM-inspired herbal milk teas are promoted on social media through multimodal resources.

Also focusing on milk teas, Wenshu Zhang (Xi’an Jiaotong University, China) analysed the crisis communication strategies of key milk tea brands from China.

Man Lang’s (Xidian University, China) talk on the economic logic and cultural communication in tourism linguistic landscapes transported the audience to Xi’an’s Grand Tang Mall.

Oksana Torubara (Taras Shevchenko National University “Chernihiv Collegium”, Ukraine) reflected on the implications for academics of the increasing Englishisation of Ukrainian higher education workplaces.

Across two talks, Tim Douglas (Lancaster University, UK) made a case for the importance of pronouncing names correctly and shared advice how L1 English speakers can adapt their language use to better interact with individuals from different cultural backgrounds. While these tips can help improve communication in any context, they are especially relevant to interactions in business contexts which can be of high stakes.

The day concluded with a practice-sharing talk by Yu Chang (Beijing Jiaotong University, China) who shared her teaching practices for developing business and engineering students’ intercultural competence in the instructed classroom context in China.