CID History

The Center for Intercultural Dialogue (CID) was established by the Council of Communication Associations (CCA) in March 2010. CID broadly represents scholars in the discipline of Communication, as well as any others with an interest in intercultural dialogue, but has a specific mandate to directly serve those belonging to any member association of CCA. (Further details about CCA member associations available under What is CID?; further details about the people involved are under CID People and Director.)

CID was created as a direct result of the National Communication Association’s Summer Conference on Intercultural Dialogue, held in Istanbul, Turkey, July 22–26, 2009. Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, in her role as Chair of the International and Intercultural Communication Division of NCA, served as conference organizer, and Nazan Haydari, in Istanbul, served as local arrangements coordinator. Other members of the organizing committee were Donal Carbaugh (US), Tamar Katriel (Israel), Kristine Fitch Muñoz (US), Yves Winkin (France), and Saskia Witteborn (Hong Kong). Support for the conference was provided by both NCA and Maltepe University. (Additional details were published in an article in Spectra, NCA’s newsletter at the time, in October 2009.)

The Summer Conference resulted in a breakfast panel at NCA in November 2009, organized by Chitra Akkoor, and a preconference at the International Communication Association convention in Singapore in June 2010, organized by Evelyn Ho. The first published result was a special journal issue:
Ganesh, S., & Holmes, P. (2011). Positioning intercultural dialogue: Theories, pragmatics, and an agenda. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 4(2), 81-86.

The second result, Case Studies in Intercultural Dialogue, edited by Nazan Haydari and Prue Holmes, appeared in 2015. Both the journal issue and the book include some essays by scholars who were not at the conference.

Participants at the Summer Conference wanted a way to encourage further international connections for intercultural research, and so a proposal was brought before the CCA Board of Directors at their March 2010 meeting to create CID.  Leeds-Hurwitz was appointed Director at that same meeting. Through overlapping memberships, Board members represent all CCA member associations.

Since the CID grew out of the NCA Summer Conference on Intercultural Dialogue, all concerned parties agreed to continued use of the logo designed for that event by Özer Karakuş, then at Maltepe University. The multiple colors bound together represent cultural diversity and the need for intercultural dialogue. The bridge represents the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, connecting Europe to Asia.

In fall 2012, NCA funded five international travel microgrants, and in spring 2014, the Association for Business Communication funded more microgrants.

During Fall 2013, while Leeds-Hurwitz was based at Villanova University, Minh Cao, a master’s student there, served as Assistant to the Director. In that capacity, she added substantial visual content to the website, and significantly expanded the social media presence of CID through improvements to the Twitter feed and Facebook group. In addition, she established a LinkedIn group, YouTube channel, Google+ group, and Pinterest boards, and drafted a Wikipedia article. (In 2017, the Google+ group and Pinterest board were dropped, due to lack of significant response.) In December 2013, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the CID and the Waterhouse Family Institute, housed within Villanova University’s Department of Communication.

In 2014, CID began publishing Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue. In 2016, CID began publishing translations of the key concepts into several dozen languages.

CID co-sponsored the Roundtable on Intercultural Dialogue in Asia held at the University of Macau, China, on March 28-30, 2014, and posted a video documenting that event in August. Co-organizers were Todd Sandel (Communication) and John Corbett (English).

Min He, a master’s student at Royal Roads University (Canada), served as Assistant to the Director for 6 months across 2016-17. Her focus was to learn who follows the CID website and/or the various social media platforms, and prepare a report for Board members (the summary has been made public).

In 2017, CID began a second publication, Constructing Intercultural Dialogues. Linda de Wit, a master’s student at Freiburg University (Germany), served as intern in 2017, designing and significantly updating a wide range of visual materials for the CID across the various social platforms. Linda also created a collection of CID Posters, the third publication.

In 2018, the CID Video Competitions were started, with additional competitions in 2019 and 2020, before the competition was put on hold due to the pandemic. The winning videos are all posted to the CID YouTube channel.

In March 2020, Casey Man Kong Lum joined CID as Associate Director. Linda returned in 2020 as Graphic Design Consultant, creating two more posters (#13 and 14), and preparing the layout and design for a fourth publication, In Dialogue: CID Occasional Papers, the first issue of which appeared in August 2020. A series of interviews with people affiliated with CID were prepared and posted  by a new intern, Rehana Paul, studying at American University, across 2020-21. In November 2020, we began one more new series, Intercultural Dialogue Exercises.

In 2021, UNESCO invited CID to convene focus groups as part of their Futures of Education initiative; the result was a report explaining why we thought their 9 ideas for public action needed a 10th, intercultural dialogue. Linda de Wit again provided the layout and design, and created one more poster (#15) for that project. As a followup several months later, members of the focus groups were asked to describe concrete educational experiences that have contributed to transformational change, and 8 of the original 21 group members were able to make time to do so, and we submitted an addendum to the report. (This one kept private, rather than made public, due to the contact information and other personal details they requested.)