On the afternoon of 10 October, the 19th instalment of the ‘Seeking Truth in Media’ lecture series, supported by the Zhejiang Mobile Humanities and Social Sciences Fund and hosted by Zhejiang University's Digital Communication Research Centre, School of Communication and International Culture, and Digital Social Sciences Convergence Research Programme, took place at the Zhongxi Bookstore · Dazhong Bookstore on the Zhejiang University campus. The lecture featured Associate Professor David Boromisza-Habashi from the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. Moderated by Professor Huang Guangsheng, a researcher under our School's ‘Hundred Talents Programme’, the event drew participation from dozens of faculty members and students, who engaged in a lively discussion.
Professor David Boromisa-Habashi stands as a leading scholar in cultural discourse studies, with a longstanding focus on the interplay between culture, communication, and mobility. His seminal work Speaking Hatefully: Culture, Communication, and Political Action in Hungary employs ethnographic methods to uncover the cultural significance and political functions of ‘hate speech’ within the Hungarian context. His current research centres on how communication facilitates the cross-border circulation of diverse forms of discourse across languages, societies, cultures, and nations.
This lecture, entitled Made to Move: Anglo-American Public Speaking in the Global Speech Economy, examines the global circulation of Anglo-American public speaking. Professor Boromisa-Habashi begins by examining the contemporary global prevalence of public speaking: this Anglo-American tradition is not only widely taught in American universities and Toastmasters clubs, but also adopted in university classrooms and corporate training programmes across China, Japan, Kenya and beyond.
Here, a pertinent question arises: why have these discursive forms transcended linguistic and cultural boundaries to achieve global circulation and widespread acceptance? Beyond factors such as social media, mass media, and entertainment, an indispensable reason lies in the very process of ‘communication’ itself. To explain this fluidity, Professor Borromesa-Habashi draws upon Peters' (1999) distinction between ‘dialogue’ and ‘dissemination,’ noting that public speaking blurs the lines between the two: it possesses the “dialogic” nature of face-to-face, real-time interaction while also embodying the openness and diffusivity of ‘dissemination’ through processes such as instructional videos, media platforms, and textual reproduction. It is precisely through the interweaving of these two communicative logics that public speaking achieves cross-contextual replication and re-creation, gradually blurring the boundaries between different cultures and languages.
Within this framework, Professor Borromesa-Habashi further emphasises two levels: ‘discourse’ and ‘metadiscourse’. ‘Discourse’ refers to the concrete practice of speaking itself—such as classroom presentations, peer feedback, or assignment demonstrations—constituting the direct act of communication. ‘Metadiscourse,’ conversely, denotes ‘discourse about how to speak,’ wherein participants reflectively discuss, evaluate, and affirm the meaning and norms of speech acts during transmission. The two are mutually embedded: every instance of discourse contains implicit metadiscourse, which in turn continually shapes new forms of discourse. It is within this cyclical process that public speaking transforms from a classroom skill into a cultural resource capable of being disseminated and reproduced.
Taking her own public speaking course as an example, Professor Boromisa-Habashi vividly demonstrated how communication endows public speaking with “fluidity”. Towards the end of the course, students were required to record a “self-assessment video” summarising their learning outcomes and offering advice to future learners. In her analysis of these self-assessment videos, Professor Boromisa-Habashi distinguished two types of metadiscourse.
The first type of metadiscourse (Metadiscourse 1) manifested in students directly naming and emphasising public speaking conventions such as eye contact, gestures, and variations in intonation. This effectively involved naming and acknowledging a set of normative standards for public speaking, indicating their understanding and acceptance of what constitutes appropriate performance in public speaking.
The second type of metadiscourse (Metadiscourse 2) manifests when students generalise these behaviours into ‘skills’ applicable throughout life. Within this narrative, ‘skills’ detach from the classroom context, becoming transferable, universal competencies applicable across other domains. This endows “skills” with cross-cultural fluidity and universality, transforming them into a ‘circulating symbolic resource’. Public speaking is thus communicatively constructed as a ‘universal resource for communication’.
Although socioculturally oriented communication scholars often criticise the concept of ‘skills’ for its vagueness and capitalist connotations, from a communicative practice perspective, it is precisely this ‘ambiguity and openness’ that renders skills highly transferable. They function like a ‘suitcase’ that can be freely loaded with content, redefined by different agents and brought into new contexts.
Reviewing the students' self-assessment videos reveals that the boundary between ‘dialogue’ and “dissemination” has already blurred. ‘Discourse + Metadiscourse 1’ embodies both dialogic (adhering to and naming interactive norms) and disseminative (affirming classroom interaction norms while participating in language socialisation); while ‘Metadiscourse 2’ simultaneously possesses disseminative qualities (emphasising communicative value within and beyond the classroom) and dialogic elements (achieved through situational performance) .
In this sense, Professor Borroméa-Habashi further contends that public speaking, as a ‘mobile genre made to travel,’ circulates globally through a combination of ‘dissemination + replication.’ The former relies on cultural entrepreneurs spreading and promoting cultural elements; the latter manifests in local learners integrating Anglo-American expressions into their own contexts. Public speaking is thus transformed into a resource within a ‘global linguistic economy’—possessing use value, exchange value, and acquisitive value.
In the latter part of the lecture, Professor Boromisa-Habashi analysed the recontextualisation of meaning and redefinition of value in public speaking across linguistic contexts by comparing Chinese and American frameworks. In the United States, the study of oratory points towards individual moral self-realisation; in China, it emphasises collective growth achieved through interaction and motivation. The former centres on ‘moral cultivation’, while the latter aims for ‘quality enhancement’. Though originating from distinct societies, both models regard public speaking as a vital resource for fostering individual development and social cohesion. This comparison also reveals two pathways of meaning generation: first, ‘Meanings in SITU,’ denoting the cultural significance of public speaking within specific interactive contexts; second, ‘Meanings in MOTU,’ referring to the metacultural meanings conferred upon it during cross-contextual circulation.
Finally, Professor Boromisa-Habashi concludes that ‘public speaking is made to move’ carries at least threefold significance. Firstly, it aims to move audiences emotionally and intellectually (as a cultural expressive genre within Anglo-American contexts). Secondly, it is communicatively constructed as a portable, transferable resource that transcends the classroom into new contexts (facilitated by metadiscursive practices). Finally, driven by cultural entrepreneurs, it flows from the United States to the wider world, entering a global discourse economy shaped by universal values and local re-inventions.
This raises several critical questions that merit further reflection: what convergence of communicative, economic, cultural, political, social and technological forces is required for an expressive form to circulate globally? Beyond metadiscourse and sign use, what communicative practices are accelerating this circulation? Is the global economy of language also generating new inequalities and silences? When a local expressive form enters the global context, what do we gain and what do we lose? Professor Borromisa-Habashi concluded with these probing questions, allowing the lecture to both summarise and extend into a profound reflection on global communication and the circulation of language.
During the interactive session, attendees engaged with Professor Borromisa-Habashi on topics including cross-cultural communication and localisation, alongside the impact of AI technology on public expression. With AI now widely deployed, the core function of public speaking is being re-examined: in an era of intelligent text generation and algorithmic communication optimisation, is the emotional rapport and interaction between speaker and audience paramount, or does the knowledge and content conveyed constitute the essence of the address? Professor Boromisa-Habashi noted that artificial intelligence is indeed reshaping both the form and essence of public speaking. AI tools not only assist speakers in generating or adapting texts to better align with specific audience needs and contexts, but also compel us to rethink the status of ‘communication’. It is no longer viewed as a subsidiary or ‘soft skill’, but rather as a key competency constituting core competitiveness and cultural practice in contemporary society.