Disruption or emancipation?

Disruption is the preferred mode of contemporary interaction of writers from critical intercultural research with the social world. At the same time, writers lament the low effectiveness of their attempts to disrupt. This chapter aims to shed some light on possible reasons for this dilemma and to open our eyes to possible alternatives to the disruptive approach. In order to do so, the chapter recapitulates the diversity of paradigms, assessments of human nature, and modes of acting on the social in intercultural research to get an overview of which ethical goals lead to which forms of interacting with the social. It turns out that humanist orientations in intercultural research provide most of the contemporary ethical approaches, and that they are followed by posthumanist works that may offer emancipation as an alternative mode to disruption. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of the posthumanist approach in this vein.