Author: Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, the Director of the Center for Intercultural Dialogue, manages this website.

Gabriele Galimberti’s Toy Stories

Intercultural PedagogyGabriele Galimberti, the Italian photographer, has created an interesting comparative record in Toy Stories. “For over two years, I visited more than 50 countries and created colorful images of boys and girls in their homes and neighborhoods with their most prized possessions: their toys. From Texas to India, Malawi to China, Iceland, Morocco, and Fiji, I recorded the spontaneous and natural joy that unites kids despite their diverse backgrounds. Whether the child owns a veritable fleet of miniature cars or a single stuffed monkey, the pride that they have is moving, funny, and thought provoking.”

The photographs are available as a book, Toy Stories: Photos of Children from Around the World and Their Favorite Things. Prior collections also now published as books include In Her Kitchen: Stories and Recipes from Grandmas Around the World, and My Couch Is Your Couch: Tour the World from Inside Other People’s Homes. Each of these seems likely to be useful to anyone seeking examples of comparative cultural analysis.

Additional resources include several of the Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, specifically: Cultural Pluralism, Multiculturalism, Multimodality, and Cultural Mapping.

Global Handbook of Communications & Sustainable Development

Publication OpportunitiesCall for Chapters: Global Handbook of Communications and Sustainable Development. To be edited by Muhammad Jameel Yusha’u. Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 October 2018.

In 2015 several member states of the United Nations agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or what is known as the 2030 Agenda. The SDGs are expected to address major global challenges such as poverty alleviation, access to education, addressing inequality, climate change, improving access to quality healthcare, eradicating hunger, ensuring environmental sustainability, promoting innovation and infrastructural development among others.

To what extent are the intended beneficiaries of this ambitious plan aware of the 2030 Agenda? What is the role of the media in communicating the SDGs? Are the efforts to communicate the global goals reaching the target beneficiaries or do they end up as gathering of elites in major capitals with little to show for in terms of impact for the ordinary people? How can communication be utilized to address the challenges of achieving sustainable development? How is the digital media being utilized in communicating for sustainable development? How can communication serve as a tool for community empowerment in achieving sustainable development? These are some of the questions that the Global Handbook of Communications and Sustainable Development would seek to address. The book, expected to be published by Palgrave Macmillan seek contributions that provide critical analysis, empirical research, theoretical insights and practical examples on communication and sustainable development.

CFP East and West Bridges (Finland/Russia)

ConferencesFor the first time, SIETAR Russia and SIETAR Europa have organized a special event: EAST & WEST BRIDGES, October 26-28th 2018, Helsinki, Finland and St. Petersburg, Russia. Deadline: October 5, 2018.

In the world of international relations, intercultural relations are often left out of the discussion.

SIETAR Russia and SIETAR Europa invite participants to the international event dedicated to East and West Bridges. The journey to increase awareness and knowledge will start in Helsinki on October 26, 2018, and will carry on in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, on October 27-28, 2018, at the Higher School of Economics’ (HSE) Management Training Centre (Kochoubey Centre). The HSE Kochoubey Centre is a magnificent site of the accumulation of the historical and cultural heritage of Russia.

Organizerswelcome researchers, teachers, interculturalists, sociologists, educators, trainers, and others interested in the development of intercultural interaction and increasing awareness of the Russian culture and on how to develop awareness and building bridges between Russia and Western countries and between East and West.

The event will combine culturally guided visits and roundtable discussions.

Call for Nominations: JIIC Editor

Professional OpportunitiesCall for Nominations/ Applications: Journal of International and Intercultural Communication Editor-Elect, Assuming duties in 2020; overseeing 2021-2023 volumes. Deadline: January 1, 2019.

During 2019, NCA’s Publications Council will nominate an Editor-Elect (or co-Editors Elect) for the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (JIIC). The newly appointed Editor will begin processing manuscripts later in the year or early in 2020, and will oversee the volumes for 2021-2023. Editors of NCA journals occupy a particularly prominent leadership position in the field. In naming editorial boards, selecting reviewers for manuscripts, and making final publication decisions (among other duties), they make a vitally important contribution to the discipline, and they play a key role in maintaining the highest standards of integrity and scholarly inquiry.

JIIC is a peer reviewed publication of the National Communication Association. JIIC publishes original scholarship that expands understanding of international, intercultural, and cross-cultural communication. Widely interdisciplinary, JIIC features diverse perspectives and methods, including qualitative, quantitative, critical, and textual approaches to intellectual inquiry.

Todd L. Sandel, University of Macau, is the current JIIC Editor, and also a member of the CID Advisory Board, so if you are interested and have questions, please contact Todd directly.

Carleton U Job Ad: Asian Cinema (Canada)

Job adsAssistant Professor in Asian Cinema and Media Cultures, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Consideration of applications will begin on September 15, 2018 and will continue until the position is filled.

Carleton University’s Film Studies program, located in the School for Studies in Art and Culture, invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor beginning July 1, 2019. This posting is directed towards specialists in Asian cinema and media cultures, with a preference for scholars of Japanese cinema. The successful candidate will be expected to teach undergraduate courses at all year levels, as well as MA-level seminars, and also to supervise graduate theses.

Anglia Ruskin U Job Ad: International Business (UK)

Job adsLecturer/Senior Lecturer in International Business, Lord Ashcroft International Business School, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, UK. Deadline: 18 September 2018.

“We’re seeking to appoint a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in International Business with a strong commitment to undertaking high quality research and the ability to contribute excellent teaching to our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. You’ll be expected to teach on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in International Business and contribute to the supervision of research students, as well as the Departmental Research strategy.”

CFP China Media Research Special Sections

Publication OpportunitiesChina Media Research has issued two calls for submissions to two special sections. Deadline: October 15, 2018.

1. Communication and Wellbeing in a Multicultural Society. In an increasingly globalized world that brings members of diverse backgrounds into contact with each other in various relational, organizational, health, and mediated contexts, conflicts, tensions, and stress inevitably compromise the quality of life. Although mental illness has been a major public health threat in many countries, there have been low levels of mental health literacy, e.g., in China, that contributed to lack of support at interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels. This special section aims to explore how communication scholarship contributes to our understanding of psychological, socio-cultural, organizational, occupational, technological, or generational factors that impede or enhance our wellbeing, whether individually or as a group.

2. Paradoxes as Sources of Creative Tensions. Scholars are increasingly adopting a paradox lens as a new way of approaching the growing complexity of the “messy, apparently unexplainable, and often seemingly irrational contemporary world” (Smith, Erez, Jarvenpaa, Lewis, & Tracey, 2017, p. 304). Paradoxes have been acknowledged as a source of creative tensions and energy that can support learning, change and development. Notwithstanding the potential of a paradox lens to inform the increasingly equivocal reality, paradox research remains confined to organizational behavior and strategic management, while its application in other fields of research remains limited at best.

Finding Community in Diversity

Resources in ICD“ width=Here’s the most recent article I’m reading, in case it’s also of interest to others:

O’Sullivan, Feargus. (21 August 2018). Discovering that strangers aren’t all that strange. CityLab.

“Taking a class with a diverse group of Londoners helped me see the city and my neighbors in an altogether different light….We also got to imagine what it was like in each other’s shoes…Every day in a city, we brush past people with different backgrounds and outlooks from our own. To sit with each other and really focus hard on expressing and understanding each other’s experiences, however, that’s something completely different…I didn’t discover a specific space as such; the shift for me has been more about an attitude of openness.”

CFP Digital Diasporas: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (UK)

ConferencesCall for Papers: Digital Diasporas: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 6 and 7 June 2019, University of London, UK. Deadline: 1 December 2018.

Since Appadurai wrote on the intertwined phenomena of electronic media and migration as disruptive and defining features of modern subjectivity (1996), the relationship between digital technologies and diasporic communities has emerged as a critical area of study across a number of disciplines. However, such research risks remaining isolated within disciplinary silos, often despite the similar processes, practices and materials studied. This conference aims to inspire greater dialogue across disciplinary boundaries in order to develop a richer understanding of the role of the digital in creating and sustaining diasporic connections and communities, and of how diasporic groups and individuals transform and shape digital tools and technologies for their own creative and strategic purposes.

Organizers especially welcome research which pays attention to the linguistic and cultural dimensions of digital technologies and media. This is, however, not restricted to any specific geographical area, language or type of community. Equally, the digital is intended to encompass the fullest range of digital practices, materials and technologies, while the conference aims to include methodological and analytical approaches ranging across, for example, ethnographic, cultural studies and computational approaches.

Polish Institute of Advanced Studies Fellowships (Poland)

FellowshipsThe Polish Institute of Advanced Studies fellowships. Deadline: October 30, 2018.

The Polish Institute of Advanced Studies (PIASt) Junior and Senior Fellowship Programme offers residencies in all research areas of the social sciences and humanities, broadly defined. Fellowships run for the full 10-month period and the 5-month fall semester (October – February) or spring semester (March – July). For the 2019-2020 academic year, PIASt offers 12 fellowships (4 junior and 8 senior positions). The fellowships will begin in October 2019.