CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION ARGYRO KANTARA, DOROTTYA CSERZė AND JASPAL NAVEEL SINGH Revisiting Intercultural Communication Research In the current era of mobility, web 2.0, mobile technology, diaspora, forced and voluntary travel, big-C Culture loses analytical purchase. It seems to become increasingly difficult to identify what Cultures are, who belongs to one of them and who does not, who has the right to claim membership in a Culture, who has not, or what effects Culture has on conviviality, multiculturalism and governance, among other questions. Scholars have attended to these questions by deploying concepts such as ‘cultural complexity’ (Hannerz 1992), ‘hybridity’ (Bhabha 199Ő), ‘network society’ (Castells 1996), ‘transculturality’ (Welsch 1999), ‘liquid modernity’ (Baumann 2000) or ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec 2007). At least in the visibly multicultural societies of this world these questions concerning big-C Culture become pertinent not only for scholarship, but also for policymaking, media and communal life. In this volume we ask how such questions challenge intercultural communication, both its theory and its application. For Blommaert and Rampton (2011) such challenges of superdiversity can be analytically captured by taking a ‘multi-scalar perspective of context’. Scales emphasise that the context and the processes of contextualisation, or indexicality, with which language users make meaning operate simultaneously on multiple, yet ordered, layers of normativity. Meaning is made both on ‘higher’ scales of institutional, abstract and imagined cultures, and on ‘lower’ scales of the immediate, concrete and perceived interactional reality (see also Blommaert 2007; 2010; Blommaert, Westinen and Leppänen 2015). The notion of scales brings these macro and micro contexts together into one analytical unit: