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Culture Shock Recalibration: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Afro-Asian Experience in a Digitally Mediated Environment

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: With the rise of global academic mobility, cultural shock has re-emerged as a critical lens for understanding intercultural transitions, particularly among scholars navigating unfamiliar social environments. This paper explores the lived experiences of a Nigerian scholar in Malaysia. This context bridges the Afro-Asian divide and foregrounds the complexity of culture shock when local norms and behaviours diverge from long-held socio-cultural expectations. Adopting an autoethnographic approach grounded in subjective epistemology, the study centres on the researcher’s four-year sojourn in Malaysia as a site of knowledge production. Culture shock is conceptualised as a reflexive curriculum, with shifts in gender roles, rituals, and etiquette serving as learning moments. Data were sourced from personal journal entries, smartphone notes, Dropbox photographs, and social media reflections, creating a multi-sourced record for critical self-inquiry. Thematic analysis, facilitated by AI-assisted NVivo software, revealed seven culturally charged vignettes: reversal of ritual symbolic weight, gender role inversion, humour in authority relations, culinary adaptation, sonic silence in traffic, civility norms, and nationwide consumer ethics. These were not isolated disorientations but key moments of identity and perceptual shift. Culture shock thus emerges as a co-authored, digitally-mediated process shaped by social and digital contexts. This narrative contributes to intercultural theory by integrating digital reflexivity into the analysis of cultural adaptation, advocating for an ethical, pluralist approach to digital autoethnography that recognises technology as co-shaping the intercultural self. It also validates the use of digital autoethnography as a valuable approach for capturing intercultural experiences. The findings can inform the improvement of inclusive academic programmes and the development of a culturally sensitive virtual analysis and learning environment.
DOI: 10.61211/mjqr110201
Subfield: Communication
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7167694552
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