Maja Nenadovic holds a Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam, and is the co-founder of the Croatian Education and Development Network for the Evolution of Communication – HERMES and of Reflectory, a consultancy in the fields of conflict transformation, social cohesion and civic engagement.
Maya is a monitoring and evaluation specialist, dialogue facilitator, human rights & civic education specialist, debate coach, critical pedagogy practitioner, and program design consultant. She has worked in 40+ countries worldwide. Since 2012, she has implemented “Across Divides – Training Workshops for Depolarizing Communication,” a methodology that she developed and tested in the field through a series of workshops and dialogues with both individuals using discriminatory and hate speech rhetoric, and with people and groups targeted by it. In addition she serves as a Board member of the Global Dialogue Collective.
Work for CID:
Maja Nenadovic participated in a CID/UNESCO focus group for the Futures of Education Initiative, and is participating in an expert group organized by the Center.
Her research interests include material culture studies, intercultural communication, and digital humanities. Drawing upon her previous educational and working experiences, she is particularly interested in examining how to facilitate cross-cultural understanding in museums, so that audiences and the museum professionals alike could better engage with the museum collections and empathize with their originating communities that had experienced histories of disempowerments.
As a researcher and lecturer, she is now at the crossroads of tourism studies, humanities, and personal transformation, as a result of her earlier career in cultural tourism and tourism management in museums, while volunteering in education for adults and refugees. She also engages in academic activism. Although in the past she has had the opportunity to travel and live on different continents, at the moment she is choosing slower forms of mobility. This lowers her ecological footprint, but even more importantly it is a creative endeavour to engage differently with the world around her.
She provides strategic support for research and research training activities and develops and implements systems and processes that promote high quality research management, monitoring and reporting for both internal development and external reporting purposes. Dr. Townsin also undertakes research in Education and Health, focusing on intercultural communication and cultural contexts of learning, teaching and health and wellbeing. Her current research includes teacher professional development, stigma of mental illness, access to health services by culturally and linguistically diverse consumers, and community engagement in research. She uses qualitative methods, including participatory action research, to explore educational interventions to encourage sustainable attitudinal and behavioural change.
She is a writer, researcher, scholar, speaker and practitioner with expertise in mixed-methods research, media literacies, media and parenting, popular culture, civic imagination, and globalization. Her recent publications include three co-authored books: 
Jess researches at the intersection of critical discourse and disability studies. Her scholarship focuses on discourse around disability, neurodiversity, & social justice. Her most recent work analyzes digital activism in disability rights and justice movements. She is also working on open educational resources on inclusive pedagogy and communication studies. She has recently co-edited the anthology Disability in Dialogue for John Benjamins’ Dialogue Series (with Mariaelena Bartesaghi).
She was born and raised in Milan, Italy, and is an expat to the United States since her 20s, so intercultural dialogue is an everyday accomplishment for her. She is an associate professor of communication at the University of South Florida. She is a discourse analyst, who studies institutional discourse in social settings, such as psychotherapy, psychiatry, medicine, academia and crisis. She was the Editor in Chief of Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare from 2016 to 2021 and has published in Discourse Studies, Applied Linguistics in Professional Practice, The Review of Communication and Language Under Discussion. She has recently co-edited the anthology Disability in Dialogue for John Benjamin’s Dialogue Series (with Jessica Hughes) and is working on a book on crisis discourse. She is delighted to have introduced many graduate students to discourse studies, and the empirical study of dialogue. Many of her once doctoral advisees now study dialogue in their own work.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 