Critical Interactional Competence Network (CritIC Net)

Developing better social interaction and social relationships in the posthuman era

Critical Interactional Competence
a form of interactional criticality that allows humans to engage with interlocutors while displaying agency and reflexivity in social interaction
Transpositioning
the process through which humans transcend/transform/transgress existing positionings, perspectives and knowledges to arrive at new understandings of the social world
Interculturality
a dynamic process where individuals from different cultural backgrounds interact, learn about each other, and engage in mutual respect and understanding, leading to new identities, attitudes, and understanding
Professional communication
communication that takes place in institutional contexts with specific goals and distinctive interactional patterns
Human sociality
inherent capacity and tendency of humans to form and engage in social interactions and social relationships
Posthumanism
a 21st century human condition that emphasises the interconnectedness of humans, non-humans, and technology, and the dynamic, distributed nature of agency

CritIC Net is a research project that interrogates the perennial human sociality question at a time when humans’ ability to interact is being challenged by machines. It asks the question of how humans can become better at moment-by-moment social interaction and build more meaningful relationships with one another in a range of communicative domains such as professional communication, intercultural communication and mundane/everyday interaction. A particular focus of the project is on how technology reshapes human sociality especially with the increasing use of Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots in human-AI interaction.

CritIC Net is funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant (SRG2324\241722) and a University College London (UCL) Seed Grant awarded to Dr David Wei Dai.