Category: Profiles

Inga Milēviča Profile

Profiles

Inga Milēviča was born and lives in Latvia. She has a Ph.D. in contrastive and comparative linguistics.

Inga Milevica

She currently serves as Docent at Alberta College, The University College of Economics and Culture, and Riga Technical University (academic courses: Rhetoric and Presentation Skills, Introduction into Communication Theory, Business Ethics, Corporate Culture, Business Communication and professional Ethics, Stylistics, and Culture of Latvian Language), and has been Guest Lecturer at Comenius University (Bratislava, Slovakia); Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest (Hungary); Eurasian National University (Astana, Kazakhstan); Uniwersytet Łódzki, (Lodz, Poland); Universidade do Minho, (Braga, Portugal). Since 2014 she has been a member of the Association for Business Communication (ABC); since 2016 she has been a member of the Liaison Committee of ABC. In 2014 she received one of the CID Micro-grants funded by ABC, for travel to a conference in Japan.

Milevica is the author of 3 monographs and more than 100 articles in comparative linguistics, cinematic text and translation and gender journalism. Some of her published papers include:

Milevica, I. (2014). Cinematic text and translations: Film adaptations. British Journal of Science, Education and Culture, 1(5), 8-15.

Milēviča, I. (2017). American cinematic text and translation. European Journal of Literature and Linguistics, 38-44.

Milēviča, I. (2018). Study tours and generation Y: Opportunities and challenges. Евразийский Союз Ученых, 11 (56), 3-6.

Milēviča, I. (2018) Power point presentation and the image of high school teacher. Proceedings of Academics World International Conference, Tashkent, 1-7.

Work for CID:

Inga Milēviča wrote Constructing Intercultural Dialogues #8: A Flying Miracle. She has also translated KC5: Intercultural Communication and KC55: Stereotypes into Russian, and KC5: Intercultural Communication and KC55: Stereotypes into Latvian. She received a micro-grant for travel to Japan from CID, funded by the Association for Business Communication.

Marika Preziuso Profile

Profiles Marika Preziuso is Associate Professor of World Literature at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the Caribbean Diaspora and an M.A. in Gender, Society and Culture, both from the University of London, UK.

Marika Preziuso

She writes: I teach 20th century and contemporary postcolonial literature, particularly by migrant and diasporic writers, and speculative fiction of the uncanny, magic realism and Afrofuturism.  The transnational scope of my classes actively invites students to cultivate the skill of intercultural understanding, specifically for visual artists and designers. In summer 2019 I designed and taught a graduate seminar titled “Intercultural Lab for Artists,” which focused on the intersections of craft, world, and self.

My working definition of Intercultural Understanding is: the orientation to any meaningful encounter across differences in which all parties involved recognize each other’s complexities, specificity, and dignity, and choose to engage with them from a self-reflective, dynamic and culturally responsive place.

At MassArt, I am the organizer of Creative Counterpoints,an annual series in its fourth year, devoted to the intersections of narratives of creativity and difference as investigated by visual artists, writers, public intellectuals, and other culture makers.

My academic research examines the intercultural pedagogies that result from transnational visual and literary narratives. These employ strategies of resistance and “opacity” to critique and expand Western imaginaries of “otherness” and create syncretic safe and radical spaces for their authors and their art.

My most recent publication is my conversation with artist Wangechi Mutu, titled “Is America Really Full?”, which is forthcoming in Transition, the magazine of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University.

I am a published poet and a RYT yoga instructor and meditation guide. My poetry stems from an intentional practice of “counterpoint”. As an immigrant woman, an academic of diaspora studies, a white “other” in a sea of American whiteness, I navigate layers of difference at times as a deficit, at times as an excess, a surplus. My poetry stems from this constant, exhausting and yet rewarding process of counterpoint, an alchemy, a (mis)translation. These qualities are both my curse and the lens through which I observe and make sense of the world, from the space of a sideway outsider, and suspicious insider space.

Outside Massart, I lead creative workshops in partnership with local communities in Boston to weave the practices of meditation, journaling, story-telling and verse in translation as gateways to explore our emotions and experiences as honorable and to practice holding space for them with curiosity, compassion, and a sense of humor. I particularly welcome the opportunity to work with creatives who straddle languages, cultures, and complex personal histories and support them in the (re)kindling of their creative light.

Academic website

Creative writing workshops

Work for CID:
Marika Preziuso offered her students credit if they would create potential CID Posters.

Lauren Mark Profile

ProfilesLauren Mark is a doctoral student and Graduate Teaching Associate at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. Lauren is currently researching the possibility of bringing Asian epistemologies to Western contexts.

Lauren Mark

She is a certified Civil Dialogue Facilitator and holds an M.Ed in Educational Organization, Leadership and Policy, an M.A. in Dance, and a B.A. in English Literature and French. Prior to joining Hugh Downs, Lauren worked as a co-founder and project manager of two cross-cultural learning organizations in Taipei, Taiwan – Becoming, 緣創an intercultural development platform, and the East West Culture Project. Lauren has also worked as a translator and interpreter in Taiwan and Israel across a variety of business and artistic sectors.Rooted in her experiences in the field, Lauren’s general research interests focus on identity shifts in acculturation. Her studies focus on the intersection of ethnic, linguistic and performative factors in acculturation, as well as how local cultures influence people’s ways of being.

Pedagogically, Lauren explores innovative means to bring embodied self-reflexivity to classroom contexts, within courses such as Communication and Creativity, Intercultural Communication, and Identity, Performance, and Communication. Her work in this arena began with her thesis work, Visible Histories, in which she explored how the sharing of embodied reminiscence and the collective physical reconstruction of memories served as a meeting ground for multiple generations exploring the art of dance. Lauren continues to experiment with ways that purposeful nonverbal communication can enhance reflexivity and promote collective care. This is an extension of her previous work in Taiwan, where she managed creative interdisciplinary labs and choreographed works that tested the boundaries between audience and performers.

Publications:

Mark, L. (2019). An Exploratory study of part time minorities: Finding home as a minority member. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 3. doi: 10.1080/17475759.2019.1602071

Wells, T., Mark, L., and Sandoval, J. (2019). Affect, space and the everyday: A reconsideration of waste in academic inquiry. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education. Special Ed. Waste. [Manuscript accepted].

Ray, C. D., Floyd, K., Mongeau, P. A., Mark, L., Shufford, K. N., & Niess, L. C. (2019). Planning improves vocal fluency and appearance of concern when communicating emotional support. Communication Research Reports, 36, 57-66. doi: 10.1080/08824096.2018.1560251

Brezis, R. S., Singhal, N., Daley, T., Barua, M., Piggot, J., Chollera, S., Mark, L., & Weisner, T. (2016). Self- and other-descriptions by individuals with autism spectrum disorder in Los Angeles and New Delhi: Bridging cross-cultural psychology and neurodiversity. Culture and Brain, 4(2), 113-133.

Work for CID:
Lauren Mark wrote Constructing Intercultural Dialogues #7: When the East Meets the Middle East.

Gabriel Furmuzachi Profile

ProfilesGabriel Furmuzachi has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Vienna (Austria).

Gabriel Furmuzachi

His academic work deals with issues such as multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, language learning, communication and narrative identity. His present research interests gravitate around the idea of dialogue as a means of bringing cultures closer and of cosmopolitanism (both in its guise as identity and responsibility and as moral and institutional cosmopolitanism). He also has written essays about metaphors and emotions, the accommodationist use of reason in Canadian philosophy, the relationship between reason and nature, aesthetics and more.His non-academic work consists in surveying the international fine art trade (with emphasis on Eastern European art), buying and selling nineteenth and twentieth century paintings.

He is also involved in a series of projects spread on a wide cultural spectrum including, for example, Space and Place (a non-profit group based in Vienna, Austria, focused on urbanism and social interventions aiming at promoting cultural and social diversity in the city), Liternautica (a Romanian literature portal where he is part of the editorial team, encouraging young and established Romanian writers and building bridges between literary traditions) and Revista Timpul (where he is contributing with interviews and essays on various themes).

Work for CID:

Gabriel Furmuzachi wrote a guest post, Migration, Language and Dialogue, and conducted an interview: Vienna Coffeehouse Conversations: An interview with Eugene Quinn. He also translated KC1: Intercultural Dialogue, KC3: Intercultural Competence, and KC16: Migration into Romanian.

Emin Yiğit Koyuncuoğlu Profile

ProfilesEmin Yiğit Koyuncuoğlu is part of the European Solidarity Corps for Fundacja EkoRozwoju, an environmental organization in Wraclaw, Poland.

He has a BA in Communication Design and Management from the University of Anadolu (Turkey), including a year of studying Tourism Management at the University of Primorska (Slovenia). After graduation, he spent a year as Communications Assistant to Darüşşafaka Society, the oldest educational NGO in Turkey, providing high quality primary and high school education to students whose parent(s) are deceased.

While a student, he completed a Marketing internship in Tallinn (Estonia), and worked as a tour guide and as a staff member with Tourcon Turizm ve Kongre Hizmetleri in Antalya (Turkey), helping that organization prepare for national and international conferences. As a travel enthusiast and hitchhiker, he manages a Facebook page about his experiences, improving social media and video editing skills. He considers himself a linguaphile currently learning the art of translation.

Work for CID:

Emin Yiğit Koyuncuoğlu translated KC78: Language and Intercultural Communication, and KC94: Cross-Cultural Kids into Turkish.

Amparo Huertas Bailén Profile

ProfilesAmparo Huertas Bailén (Ph.D., UAB, Spain) is professor in the Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and director of the Institute of Communication at UAB (InCom-UAB).

Amparo Huertas

She is also a member of the Table for the Diversity in Broadcasting (Audiovisual Council in Catalonia-Spain). Her research is focused on the relationship between culture and communication from the perspective of social minorities. The objective of most of her projects is to understand the cultural consumption of migrant population and its influence on their adaptation process in a new country with gender perspective.

Selected publications:

Huertas, A. (2020). Interreligious dialogue in public service broadcasting. A case study in Catalonia (Spain). Religions, 11(9), 441.

Huertas, A., & Peres, L. (2020). Migrantes que se autoproclaman autoridades discursives: “¿Qué pasa con Venezuela?” Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals, 124, 147-169.

Huertas, A. (2019). Migrantes en el entorno digital: Espacios y conexiones. In V. Rocco Lozano (Ed.), Éxodos y geopolíticas (pp. 119-137). Madrid, Spain: Editorial Dykinson.

Huertas, A. (2016). Culturas que conviven, ¿pero se interrelacionan? In G. Lobillo, A. Castro-Higueras, A. Sedeño, & M. Aguilera (Eds.). Prácticas culturales y movimientos sociales en el Mediterráneo: ¿Un cambio de época?  (pp. 13-22). Málaga, Spain: Universidad de Málaga.

Huertas, A., & Martínez, Y. (2016). La adaptación de la población migrante desde sus consumos culturales. In F. Gervasi (Ed.), Diversidades: Perspectivas multidisciplinarias para el estudio de la interculturalidad y el desarrollo social (pp. 185-210). Coahuila, México: Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila; Ediciones de Laurel.

Huertas, A., & Martínez, Y. (2013). La educación mediática como herramienta de integración social en contextos migratorios: estudio de casos a partir de mapeados de proyectos. In D. Aranda, F. Sánchez & S. Creus (Eds.), Educación, medios y cultura de la participación. (pp. 263-278). Barcelona, Spain: Editorial UOC .

Huertas, A., & Martínez, Y. (2013). Maghrebi women in Spain: Family roles and media consumption. Observatorio (OBS*), Special Issue , 111-127.

Cogo, D., Elhajji, M., & Huertas, A. (Eds.) (2012). Diásporas, migraciones, tecnologías de la comunicación e identidades transnacionales. Bellaterra, Spain: Institut de la Comunicació, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Leila Monaghan Profile

Profiles

Leila Monaghan (Ph.D., UCLA) teaches linguistic and cultural anthropology at Northern Arizona University. Leila Monaghan

Her research interests are broad and include the history of Deaf communities, the impact of HIV/AIDS, the narrative construction of disability, and the role of Native women in the Plains Indian Wars. Co-edited books include Many Ways to be Deaf, and Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability. She is also editor of the new journal Language, Culture and History.

Selected publications:

Jarman, M., Monaghan, L., & Harkin, A. Q. (Eds.). (2017). Barriers and belonging: Personal narratives of disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Monaghan, L. (2012) Perspectives on intercultural communication and discourse. In C.B. Paulston, S. Kiesling & E. Rangel (Eds.), Handbook of intercultural discourse and communication (pp. 19-36). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Monaghan, L. F., Schmaling, C., Nakamura, K., & Turner, G. H. (Eds.). (2003). Many ways to be deaf: International variation in Deaf communities. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Monaghan, L., Goodman, J., & Robinson, J.M. (Eds.). (2012). A cultural approach to interpersonal communication: Essential readings. Malden, MA: Wiley/Blackwell.

Senghas, R.J., &  Monaghan, L. (2002) Signs of their times: Deaf communities and the culture of language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31(1), 69-97.

Work for CID:

Leila Monaghan wrote KC11: Intercultural Discourse and Communication, and Constructing Intercultural Dialogues #5: Intercultural Dialogue and Deaf HIV/AIDS, as well as a guest post on Intercultural Challenges of the Deaf HIV/AIDS Epidemic.

NOTE: Leila Monaghan passed away in February 2022. She was one of the first to mention the Istanbul conference on intercultural dialogue in 2009 in print, a delight to correspond with, and she will be sorely missed.
– Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz

Elizabeth S. Parks Profile

ProfilesElizabeth S. Parks (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University.Elizabeth Parks

She has degrees in Communication (M.A., University of Washington), Deaf Studies: Cultural Studies (M.A., Gallaudet University), Communication Studies (B.A., Creighton University), Sign Language Interpreting (Iowa Western Community College), and a graduate certificate in Values in Society (University of Washington). She uses her many years of international fieldwork experience with diverse cultural communities to ground her scholarship in listening and dialogue, communication ethics, cultural studies, and disability studies.

Embracing a mixed method approach that draws from both social sciences and humanities, her current research focuses on the ways in which cultural diversity and embodied difference impacts perceptions and practices of “good listening” that ultimately promote ethical dialogue across difference. Fluent in American Sign Language, she pays particular attention to the ways that diverse sensory and linguistic experiences impact the ways that we conceptualize and experience listening in our relationships. She works actively with the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University to expand the ways that everyday dialogue and deliberation are practiced in everyday democracy. Her first book, The Ethics of Listening: Creating Space for Sustainable Dialogue, was published in 2019 and she is the recipient of a 2019-2020 J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award. She has twice served as a guest editor for Listening: Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture and her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, International Journal of Listening, Ethics & Behavior, Journal of Research in Gender Studies, Critical Issues in Language Studies, Journal of International Communication, Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, and Organizational Development Journal.

Her personal website can be found at www.elizabethsparks.org.

Work for CID:

Elizabeth Parks wrote Constructing Intercultural Dialogues #6: The Privilege of Listening First. She also served as a judge for the 2020 CID Video Competition.

Michael Steppat Profile

ProfilesMichael Steppat has been Chair of Literature in English at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where he also served as Academic Dean of the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies for many years until he achieved Emeritus status in 2015.

Michael Steppat

He also holds a Professorial position of honor in Moscow from the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Higher Education and Science, having been coordinator of a cooperation network of five universities and becoming moderator of a research seminar at Moscow City University. In recent years he has been appointed regular visiting professor and external advising faculty member at Shanghai International Studies University, as well as visiting professor at Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei (Taiwan); in earlier years he was invited as visiting professor at institutions in the UK and the USA. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Münster (Germany) and later his ‘Habilitation’ both from there and from the Free University of Berlin, he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, then research professor at Arizona State University. He has repeatedly been awarded the Myra and Charlton Hinman Fellowship of Amherst College and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. To move in a new direction, he developed an internationally cooperative graduate program of Intercultural Anglophone Studies.

His book publications include Americanisms: Discourses of Exception, Exclusion, Exchange (2009); editions of several Renaissance Latin dramas (1991); Chances of Mischief: Variations of Fortune in Spenser (1990); co-editorship of the New Variorum edition of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1990); The Critical Reception of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1980); and a monograph on the early work of St. Augustine of Hippo (1980). Thus one research interest has been in the constructions of Orientalism in early modern literature. A collaborative volume on Writing Identity: The Construction of National Identity in American Literature (Moscow Region University Press, 2016) extends the research focus to identity discourses in American culture. As appointed member of the Modern Language Association of America’s editorial team for the International New Variorum Shakespeare, he continues to edit assigned plays. Spurred by an invitation from the London School of Economics and Social Science in 2011 to organize a workshop, based on the cooperative graduate program, Steppat has increasingly devoted attention to intercultural studies in connection with literature. The chief research interest in this regard is extending intercultural scrutiny of literature as well as film beyond historical comparison, and toward a processual or interactive notion of culture as practice and meeting ground. Imaginative representation of migrant situations and cultural minorities is especially pertinent in exploring the fertile terrain where literary and intercultural study discover each other.

In 2012 Steppat became Primary Investigator in a Bavarian government-sponsored Sino-German cooperative program on “Identity and Intercultural Communication: Perspectives on America”, which has enabled a symposium, the delivering of papers, and the conducting of workshops on intercultural literary study at various international institutions and conferences. The program has widened to considering Intercultural Communication as a resource for literary research. Connections between the range of research interests keep emerging, sometimes in unanticipated ways. Steppat has produced three volumes on Literature and Interculturality in the Intercultural Research book series, of which he is a co-editor (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2019). He has been appointed a member of the national Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple”. Apart from theoretical and conceptual orientations, major focal areas in this context are diasporic discourses, representations of cross-cultural identities, as well as variations of cross-cultural transfer. A key concern is to understand difficult meanings in the artifacts we study not as a mental act but rather as a social practice and a communicative achievement.

Work for CID:

Michael Steppat wrote the guest post, Literature for Intercultural Awareness: A “Key to Perception”? He has also served as a reviewer for translations into German.

Sachiyo M. Shearman Profile

ProfilesSachiyo M. Shearman (Ph. D., Michigan State University) is an associate professor in the School of Communication at East Carolina University.

Sachiyo M. Shearman

She teaches courses such as Cross-Cultural Communication, Conflict and Communication, and Research Methods both at the undergraduate and the graduate level.  Her research interests include cross-cultural comparative studies in communication styles and preferences, individual differences (such as dogmatism) and cognitive information processing in conflict resolution and intercultural communication in various contexts such as work and family.  Her research has been published in journals such as Communication Quarterly, Communication Research Reports, Human Communication Research, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, Journal of Family Communication, The International Journal of Human Resources Management, and Asian Journal of Social Psychology.