CFP Dialogue and Medicine. Deadline for abstracts: 15 October 2023.
Book Editor: Mariaelena Bartesaghi, University of South Florida, USA.
The notion of dialogue in medicine is institutionalized as an ideal, effective, and skillful interaction between provider and patient. Dialogue is in vogue in health professions education (e.g., medical humanities, narrative medicine, communication skills training, etc.) and incorporated into medical licensing, as well. The institutionalization of dialogue in medicine reflects commitments to industrialization and capitalism with the construction of the need for medical services being entangled with social and financial gain. This anthology is born out of empirical work in clinical settings, personal illness experiences, and the pursuit of a livable philosophy of dialogue.
Is dialogue a state to be achieved or a goal to be obtained? Can dialogue be planned for? Are there certain positionalities one might foster to encourage an organic unfolding of dialogue? Or must dialogue be entirely spontaneous? What does it mean to know it is happening?
As the editor sees it, dialogue in everyday communicative practice extends beyond oral exchanges to encompass multimodal and multigeneric practices. The medicalization of society extends dialogue to contexts beyond the conventional clinic, including technology, therapy, education, and more. We hope to include work that examines medical encounters, discourses of medicalization, philosophical inquiries of dialogue, and medicine more broadly conceived, including allopathic and alternative medicine, veterinary medicine, mental health counseling, speech language pathology, etc.
Asked whether the volume is open to those examining specifically intercultural dialogue and medicine, the editor’s response was: “Of course intercultural dialogue is dialogue!”






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.