Author: Center for Intercultural Dialogue

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

Promoting Intercultural Dialogue Onstage (Czech Republic)

Applied ICDToday is the First Day of the Rest of My Life, Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Prague, Czech Republic.

 

Through a theater play, LWF Prague supports the integration of people with a migration background into Czech Society.

“Memories and personal stories are among the few things that refugees and migrants can carry with them wherever they go. The LWF office in Prague, Czech Republic, encouraged people with different cultural backgrounds and locals to share their stories in a theatre play, to connect and foster integration. The first edition premiered in November 2024.

Based on true stories of foreigners and Czechs living in Prague, the play examines the universal challenges of love, friendship, fear, and tough life choices. The amateur actors brought questions from their everyday experience to the play: How can I navigate societal stereotypes about single motherhood while considering what’s best for me and my baby? Will my girlfriend’s mother accept me, or will she always think I’m using marriage for a residence permit? Where can I get help for domestic violence if I don’t speak the local language? Will the authorities trust me, or will I face deportation? These are just some of the real-life situations explored in Today is the First Day of the Rest of My Life, a play that premiered at Vinohrady Theater D21 in Prague.”

U Edinburgh IASH: Heritage Collections Research Fellowships (UK)

FellowshipsHeritage Collections Research Fellowships, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK. Deadline: 25 April 2025.

Applications are invited for Heritage Collections Research Fellowships (previously known as Library Fellowships) from postdoctoral scholars in any area of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, to carry out research based on any of the Heritage Collections held at the University of Edinburgh in 2025-26.

The University’s collections include archives, manuscripts, rare books, art, musical instruments and other museum collections representing four centuries of collecting, and occupying 100km of shelving. They are managed by a multi-disciplinary team of curators within the Centre for Research Collections (CRC). The collections offer almost limitless possibilities for research across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. The Fellowships offer privileged access to the collections and curatorial team, enabling forms of collections-based research which are difficult to accomplish through ordinary reading room services. The Fellows are expected to be correspondingly engaged with the CRC, contributing to projects or events as appropriate.

They particularly welcome applications linked to the themes of the Institute Project on Decoloniality which took place at IASH from 2021 to 2024. Among other areas, this would include:

Identities and Inequalities

The CRC collections offer a range of objects and materials which explore or illustrate the intertwined concepts of identity and inequality. There is significant research potential not only in collection material and objects, but also in the records connected to the infrastructures and individuals related to the collections’ histories.

International Connections: Focus on Africa

There is a wealth of material within the collections which either originates in Africa, or records relationships between Scotland and Africa. It offers huge research potential, but much of it has been little explored.

CFP Book Chapters on Rhetoric & Communication of Travel

“Publication

Call for book chapters on Rhetoric and Communication of Travel. Deadline: 16 May 2025.

Co-editors: Margaret M. Mullan (East Stroudsburg University) and Jenna M. Lo Castro (Point Park University).

Travel and communication are themes that has not been extensively explored by communication scholars. Intercultural scholars have studied travel as encounter but a broader exploration of travel and communication has not been studied in depth. Travel has been extensively studied as it relates to tourism, hospitality, and marketing studies. Philosophers have also explored the meaning of travel and experiences while travelling. Travel includes countless dimensions: vacationing, embodied communication, movement, encountering other cultures, experiencing difference, etc. This topic continues to gain social and cultural currency, as well as in various relevant industries. Paradigmatic shifts such as in how and where people work in a post-pandemic world, Gen Z’s demand for a better work-life balance, and surges in “digital nomad” visas are just a few indicators of why this area of study demands attention. We seek to bring the study of travel alongside our study of communication. The many approaches to reflecting on communication can be brought to bear on the specific context and content of travel.

This call for book chapter proposals invites contributors to examine travel and communication using a variety of approaches: including rhetorical studies, philosophical inquiry, narrative, critical, dialogic, semiotic, global, cross-cultural, and media studies. Editors welcome theoretical and practical approaches to the subject.

This edited volume will explore multiple dimensions of how travel and communication intersect, interact and inform each other. We communicate about travel as lived experience, as performative expressions, for monetizing purposes, for personal reflection, etc.

ReDICo 2025: Digital Pasts and Futures: Internet Histories, Digital Interculturality and Reimagining Digitality (Germany but Online)

ConferencesDigital Pasts and Futures: Internet Histories, Digital Interculturality and Reimagining Digitality, ReDICo, Germany but online, 23-24 June 2025. Deadline for abstract: 28 February 2025.

Digital Pasts and Futures: Internet Histories, Digital Interculturality and Reimagining Digitality – The Fourth ReDICo Conference Online, 23-24 June 2025. In this conference organizers would like to bring together scholars who engage with internet histories, digital futures and digital interculturality so as to initiate a discussion regarding the reimagining of digitality, not least its relationship to interculturality. They are, thus, interested in wide and interdisciplinary approaches that go beyond the presentism that often marks media and communication studies, while also engaging with alternative visions of how digitality can be construed, not least from an intercultural perspective.

It is intended that a selection of the papers presented will be published following a peer review process in book form, funding pending, with the transcript Publishing House in the Series “Studies in Digital Interculturality”. The conference is without fees, completely online and is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). Keynote speakers that have already been confirmed include Prof. Valérie Schafer (University of Luxembourg), Associate Prof. Helle Strandgaard Jensen (Aarhus University), Prof. Ethan Zuckerman (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan (University of California, Los Angeles).

Tomide Oloruntobi Profile

Profiles

Tomide Oloruntobi is Assistant Professor of intercultural and intergroup communication at Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.

Tomide OloruntobiWith an award-winning interdisciplinary background, Tomide examines globalization, cultural politics of taste, platformization, and political economy in postcolonial Nigerian visual cultures. His interdisciplinary works are widely published on topics such as identity, cross-cultural adaptation, embodiment, mis- and disinformation, intergroup communication, and global Black group vitality. His current research focuses on the narrative and perceptual shifts informed by the mainstreaming of African media products, specifically Afrobeats, and their implications for global Black relationalities.

Publications include:

Oloruntobi, T. (2022). Revisiting cross-cultural adaptation: An embodied approach. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 16(4), 283–299.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2022.2120207

Oloruntobi, T. (2023). “The battle is the Lord’s”: Social media, faith-based organizations, and the challenge of Covid-19/vaccine misinformation in Nigeria. In B. M. Calafell & S. Eguchi (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of ethnicity, race, and communication (pp. 424-437). Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367748586-40

Oloruntobi, T. (2023). On intersections of power and vulnerability: A critique of Nollywood, heteropatriarchy, and ideologies of motherhood. Howard Journal of Communications, 35(3), 294–310.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2023.2264232

Oommen, D., & Oloruntobi, T. (2024). (Dis)connecting with the USA: How African international students relate with diverse communities and adapt to the United States. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2024.2430517

Work for CID:

Tomide Oloruntobi has served as a reviewer for Yoruba translations.

U Plymouth: Head of International Student Recruitment (UK)

“JobHead of International Student Recruitment, University of Plymouth, UK. Deadline: 20 February 2025.

In this role, you will lead the International Student Recruitment team, which is part of the wider Plymouth Global Directorate. This includes International Student Recruitment, International Partnerships, Global Opportunities, and Enquiries and Admissions Services. As a member of the directorate’s Senior Management team, you will play a vital role in leading a highly experienced team from diverse backgrounds around the globe. You will also oversee talented colleagues in the International Marketing and Agent Management teams.

Ulster U: Research Associate for Youth Impact (UK)

“JobResearch Associate for Youth Impact, Ulster University, Northern Ireland, UK. Deadline: 9 February 2025.

The Youth Impact project is supported by the PEACEPLUS Programme, managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB). The Youth Impact Partnership is to provide a quality assurance and impact support role for the work and workers in the 3.2 PEACEPLUS Youth Programme (PPYP), delivering peace-building programmes for young people aged 14-24 across Northern Ireland and the border counties of Ireland.

The post holder will collect and analyse qualitative and quantitative data related to the Youth Impact Project and will be responsible for designing, developing, distributing and analysing and writing up research on the effectiveness and impact of the Youth Impact project. They will also be responsible for the development and delivery of accredited training modules for the Youth Impact workers and will support the research team in the preparation of a final report and contribute to the writing and publication of academic papers in peer-reviewed journals.

CFP Chinese Journal of Communication: Transnational Migration To/From China

“Publication

Call for a special issue of Chinese Journal of Communication on Transnational Migration to/from China: The Role of Digital Platforms, Publics, and Policies. Deadline: 31 July 2025.

Issue editors: Saif Shahin, Mingyi Hou, and Sagnik Dutta (all at Tilburg University, the Netherlands)

This special issue of the Chinese Journal of Communication aims to expand our understanding of transnational migration in the digital age, especially as it relates to platforms, publics, and policies. It explores how digital platforms (Chinese and non-Chinese), their sociotechnical affordances, and the discourses they produce (or censor) bear upon transnational migration between China and various parts of the world, including Southeast Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America, as well as North America, Europe and the rest of Asia. Editors are particularly interested in submissions that draw attention to the implications of digital technologies for migrant communities and the relations of power they (re)produce, user practices that work with or around digital affordances to achieve individual or collective goals, and national or supranational laws and regulations that shape digital industries and ecosystems and their impact on transnational migration.

CFP ICA Virtual Preconference: Media and Communication in Global Latinidades

Conferences

Call for extended abstracts: Media and Communication in Global Latinidades, International Communication Association VIRTUAL Preconference, 11 June 2025. Deadline: 15 February 2025.

This preconference examines the production, distribution, and consumption of media and communication in global Latinidades. It follows up to the six preconferences held in the context of the 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 Annual Meetings of the International Communication Association – on “Digital Journalism in Latin America” in 2019, on “Digital Media in Latin America” in 2020, on “Digital Media in Latinx and Latin America” in 2021, and on “Media & Communication in Global Latinidades” in 2022, 2023 and 2024.

In this seventh edition, we continue to center on media and communication practices of the Latinx and Latin American experience globally. Despite its long history, research about Latinx and Latin American topics — largely made by Latinx and Latin American researchers worldwide — tends to be underrepresented in communication scholarship in general and in ICA in particular. As such, the preconference will address the theme of media and communication in local, global, and/or transnational Latinx and Latin American experiences, such as those related to access issues, practices, representations, markets, technologies, and more.

Organizers think it is important to provide a platform that incentivizes community, the flow of information and scholarship, and equitable participation across the globe. As such, and in recognition of the often unsurmountable structural differences that exist among different national contexts concerning resources for traveling to international academic conferences, organizers will again hold the edition of the preconference virtually with a social in-person component that will be determined in due time.

Media and communication issues have increasingly featured more prominently in the global experiences of Latinidad. Thus, it is critical to inquire into the experience of these communities, which tend to be understudied and underrepresented, and to examine whether the specificity of Latinx and Latin American experiences might entail differences from those of other communities.

Bielefield U: IAS Research Group Funding 2024-26 (Germany)

FellowshipsVisiting groups (not individuals), Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld University, Germany. Deadline: 24 April 2025.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) is Bielefeld University’s Institute for Advanced Study. It offers opportunities—with respect to time, space, and funding—for outstanding interdisciplinary research. ZiF is open to scholars from all disciplines post-PhD, based in Germany and abroad. They can propose a research project to be conducted with a curated group of (preferably) international colleagues.

In support of the work of groups on-site in Bielefeld, ZiF allocates financial resources and provides infrastructure as well as organisational support. If their collaborative application is successful, ZiF will host these groups on its campus. Visiting Groups can, for example, explore new research topics and partnerships, finalise interdisciplinary publications or conduct small research projects during their stay at ZiF. Visiting Groups can, for example, explore new research topics and partnerships, finalise interdisciplinary publications or conduct small research projects during their stay at ZiF.

• Duration: one stay at ZiF of a duration between one and three months
• Funding Amount: up to EUR 50,000 to cover the costs for travel and accommodation, workshops and/or conferences on-site; personnel expenses (buy-outs) cannot be covered, but an allowance of 1.000 EUR per month will be paid as a compensation for any additional costs
• Timing: Projects can commence approximately 12 months after the deadline.