CFP Communication & Race

“Publication

Call for submissions to a new journal: Communication and Race. Inaugural Editor: Armond R. Towns (Carleton University, Canada). Deadline: Ongoing.

Launching in 2024 as a journal of the National Communication Association, Communication and Race welcomes submissions that address theorizations of race infrequently published elsewhere. Communication and Race rejects the idea that race is relevant only in reaction to recently publicized events of racism. Instead, the journal’s point of departure is that race plays a significant role in the global circulation of epistemological, political, social, and economic relations. Communication and Race assumes that the serious study of race is of value for a collective push toward thinking about new forms of humanity, far beyond Western race, while also developing a rigorous understanding of Western racial practices. Communication and Race strives to play a central role in imagining a different world, which does not ascribe a higher reality to Europe and its limited classifications of humanity.

While emerging from the field of communication studies, Communication and Race encourages submissions from across the disciplines, with an eye toward fresh theorizations of race. Such approaches may be rhetorical, media analytic, quantitative, qualitative, philosophical, historical and historiographic, (auto)ethnographic, performative, and more. Topics and areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Global poverty and debt
  • (Neo)colonialism and decolonization
  • Climate crises
  • Robotics and AI
  • Information economies
  • Migration, borders, and refugees
  • Militarism and (anti)imperialism
  • Finance and consumer capitalism
  • Labor and unionization
  • Media archaeology and ecology
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Law and legal studies
  • Nuclear power
  • Health communication
  • State-sanctioned violence
  • Mass incarceration
  • Nationalism
  • Fascism
  • Religion and secularism
  • Education and knowledge production
  • Intellectual histories
  • Literature
  • Media technology and infrastructure

Essays will be peer reviewed, and should be submitted in MS Word, be no more than 9,000 words long, and should adhere to the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style in bibliographical endnote format. They must not be under review elsewhere or have appeared in any other published forms. The journal’s submission site is forthcoming. For any questions about the journal or the submissions process, or to submit a piece, please email the Editor Armond Towns.

Intercultural Teaching and Learning in the UK

“Associate

I will be directing and teaching a short-term summer study abroad program for New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, and Human Development. Entitled “United Kingdom: Intercultural Perspectives in Teaching and Learning,” the program will be based at NYU London (July 4-18, 2022).

I have invited four distinguished colleagues to share their insights with students from NYU’s main campus on Washington Square in New York City. They include Nicky Busch (NYU London) on The Intersectional Dynamics of Immigration, Intercultural Education, and Intergroup Relations in the UK; Myria Georgiou (London School of Economics and Political Science) on Remote Teaching and Learning during the COVID-19: Challenges and Opportunities; Dina Mehmedbegovic-Smith (University College London) on Language Education in the UK; and Maria Tsouroufli (Brunel University London) on Gender Inequality in Education in the UK.

In addition, a number of co-curricular activities such as guided field visits to various schools and community-based NGOs have also been arranged. These venues include London Chinese Community Centre, Mayflower Primary School, Islington Centre for Migrants and Refugees, Parliament Hill School, St. Andrew’s (Barnsbury) CofE Primary School, William Ellis School, etc. Our activities will center around learning about how these academic and community stakeholders in London address issues related to the role of (English and foreign) language education and multicultural program offerings in their constituencies’ intercultural education.

I will report in a number of forthcoming posts some of my intercultural teaching and learning experiences on this trip.

Casey Man Kong Lum, Associate Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue

 

U Glasgow: Curator of Unfinished Conversations (UK)

“JobCurator of Unfinished Conversations, Museum and Gallery, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK. Deadline: 13 July 2022.

You will deliver The Hunterian’s three-year programme, ‘Power in this Place: Unfinished Conversations’ funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. Building on the transformational ‘Curating Discomfort’ project, the Curator of Unfinished Conversations will work across collections and organisation to embed anti-racist, participatory approaches in The Hunterian and the wider university communities with which the museum and gallery work.

The post will seek to restore social capital appropriated through two centuries of collecting to communities, locally and internationally and will ensure that The Hunterian’s own processes undergo fundamental and permanent re-alignment around race and equality issues. Impacts will be delivered beyond The Hunterian, facilitating new critical strategic dialogues at senior levels across the University of Glasgow and in Scotland’s cultural sector and beyond.

Institute for Study Abroad: Sr. Programmes Manager (UK)

“JobSr. Programmes Manager for England and Wales, Institute for Study Abroad, London, UK. Deadline: 15 August 2022.

IFSA (Institute for Study Abroad) is looking for an individual to administer core parts of IFSA study abroad programmes in London and throughout England and Wales. This position is physically based in the IFSA London Centre, working with students and faculty for both student support and program delivery. Responsibilities include supporting academic management of programmes, including the course registration process, appreciative advising, and student learning plan consultations.

IFSA, a US-based nonprofit organization, creates global learning environments to help students gather the critical perspectives, knowledge, and skills essential for future success. IFSA delivers study abroad options in 19 countries and 48 cities around the globe. 

CFP Re-Thinking Interculturality

“PublicationCall for abstracts: Special Issue of Interculture Journal: Re-Thinking Interculturality in Work with Clients, Customers, Volunteers, and Teams.  Deadline: 30 August 2022.

Research on intercultural communication identifies professional work with clients, customers, volunteers and teams as areas of intervention for which the discipline’s scientific findings are of immediate relevance and for which the field can develop constructive concepts of application. Forms of counselling, training and further education in which a responsible approach to interculturality plays a role can be found in numerous and very different professional and social contexts, such as human resources development, health and social services, communication with public authorities, business communication and legal counselling and legal communication.

These professional fields of activity, accompanied by paradigm shifts in cultural theory, have undergone a radical transformation in dealing with interculturality and reorganised themselves in an entirely new way. Sensitisation of the role of postcolonial power imbalances in empirical research practice and the effects of othering and epistemic violence have stimulated new methodological approaches in research and have also led to new and different places and forms of working with clients, customers, volunteers, and teams.

In the scheduled issue, articles may be published in English, German, French and Spanish as well as in more than one of these languages. The editorial team is therefore accepting abstracts in any of these languages; follow the links to see the full call for submissions in each language.

Building on interdisciplinarity, Interculture Journal is designed to foster and advance theoretical and practical findings in the area of intercultural research. Interculture Journal publishes papers by researchers and practitioners addressing questions and issues arising from different cultures living and working together. In line with its online format, Interculture Journal is devoted to the idea of open information ex- change. All volumes can be downloaded for free (just click on the journal name, above).

Dreaming of Words Documentary

Resources in ICD“ width=Dreaming of Words is a documentary film about Njattyela Sreedharan, a fourth standard [grade] drop-out, who compiled a dictionary connecting four major Dravidian languages in India.

Travelling across four states and doing extensive research, he spent twenty five years making the multilingual dictionary. This unique dictionary offers a comparative study of Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. Dreaming of Words traces Sreedharan’s life, work, love for languages and the struggles to get the dictionary published. The film also explores the linguistic and cultural diversity in India.

Dreaming of Words had its world premiere at the International Mother Language Day Celebrations 2021 organized by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and the Ministry of Education (India) in partnership with UNESCO. It was an official selection at the DC South Asian Film Festival, RapidLion Film Festival and Micheaux Film Festival. It won the Kerala State Television Award for Best Educational Documentary. It has been screened at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association and the annual conference of the Linguistic Society of America in January 2022.

The film was directed and produced by Nandan. For further information about him and/or the film, find him on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

U Tartu: Expatriate Estonian Visiting Professor’s Scholarship (Estonia)

FellowshipsExpatriate Estonian Visiting Professor’s Scholarship, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia. Deadline: 1 October 2022.

Application is open for the scholarship for an expatriate Estonian visiting professor. The scholarship fund aims to make sure that renowned researchers and teaching staff of Estonian descent who work in other countries can take part in the activities of the University of Tartu at least for one year or, as an exception, for one semester. The amount of the scholarship is 50,000 euros for one academic year. It is very important for the university that the visiting professor is ready to be physically present in Tartu; this is one of the main selection criteria.

The scholarship may be applied for by a researcher or teaching staff member of Estonian descent who works at a university or research institution outside Estonia. The application is open until 1 October. Applicants are expected to submit an electronic application with all the required supporting materials on the home page of the University of Tartu Foundation.

Intercultural Yoga Podcasts

PodcastsIntercultural Yoga Podcasts, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. Eight episodes already posted in Season 1.

Intercultural Yoga is provocative conversation, hosted by Robin Kelley, associate chief diversity officer, and created by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,  at Gonzaga University. Yoga means “union” and is a practice to sustain mental and physical harmony with one’s cultural context. In these conversations, host and guests provide an opportunity to breathe into new spaces of knowing, related to the intercultural encounter of “the Other.”

Gonzaga is a Jesuit, Catholic, Humanist university established in 1887. If the term “the Other” is new to you, see Key Concept 39: Otherness and the Other.

Dall-E (AI) Interpretations of Intercultural Concepts

Applied ICD

I was curious, given all the current attention being paid to Dall-E and Dall-E Mini, and Craiyon, to see what any of these would come up with if I input concepts related to intercultural dialogue.

Dall-E mini intercultural dialogue
Craiyon Intercultural Dialogue
Craiyon Intercultural Dialogue
Craiyon intercultural competence
Craiyon intercultural competence
Craiyon multiculturalism
Craiyon multiculturalism
Craiyon dialogue
Craiyon dialogue

Obviously, the very first term I input was intercultural dialogue. You receive 9 images for any text, and most of them were blurred and distorted beyond much use. But I’m attaching the images both Dall-E Mini and Craiyon created. Interestingly, related terms, such as multiculturalism or intercultural competence, look much the same: a group of evidently diverse people – but never two individuals.

Whereas dialogue looks quite different – just speech bubbles. And many of the images created at my request, such as that for peacebuilding, were quite useless (nearly all of the designs for that simply showed a badly distorted vision of the UN logo, for example).

I thought others might find it interesting to see what the results looked like. Clearly, given that these AI programs simply search the internet for relevant text and images, we all need to be posting more content for it to discover that includes both descriptions and visual depictions that come closer to what we think it should find.

For those who are not yet familiar with these programs, Dall-E is a tool to turn words into images using AI, but it is in beta and not yet publicly available. Dall-E mini is the less competent but publicly available version. And that has already morphed into Craiyon. All of them work by looking to see what images are attached to words across the internet, and then editing those images into something new. Apparently, so long as you credit the source, the images are yours to use and post.

If others try any of these systems and obtain interesting results, send them along in an email, and I’ll create a later post to showcase them.

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Queen’s U Belfast: TESOL & Applied Linguistics (Northern Ireland)

“JobLecturer in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. Deadline: 11 July 2022.

The School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work (SSESW) at Queen’s University Belfast, is currently seeking to appoint an exceptional candidate to the post of Lecturer in TESOL & Applied Linguistics.

The successful applicant will undertake research relevant to Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Applied Linguistics in line with the school’s research strategy, to teach at postgraduate level, undertake scholarly activity and to contribute to the school’s administration/outreach activity, in the subject area of (TESOL) and Applied Linguistics and particularly in relation to the School’s TESOL, Language Education, and Applied Linguistics courses.