Center for Intercultural Dialogue

CFP Conference on Comm and Management (Greece)

International Conference on Communication and Management (ICCM2015)
30 March-1 April 2015
Athens, Greece

The Communication Institute of Greece (COM.IN.G.) organises the International Conference on Communication and Management (ICCM2015) 30 March-1 April 2015, in Athens, Greece. The conference is under the auspices of the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, Greece and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

The aim of this cross-disciplinary conference is to bring together academics, students and researchers from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds, encourage them to present their work, exchange and collaborate. Academics can participate by presenting a paper, chairing a session, organising a panel, or even by being an observer.

For more information please visit the conference website or send an email to Dr. Margarita Kefalaki, President of Communication Institute of Greece.

Communication Institute of Greece (COM.IN.G.) was established as an independent academic association with the mission to become a forum, where academics and researchers – from all over the world – can meet in Athens to exchange ideas on their research and to discuss future developments in their disciplines.

Margarita Kefalaki Profile

Dr. Margarita Kefalaki is the founder and current President of Communication Institute of Greece (COMING).

She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Communication and a Master degree in Communication from Pascal Paoli University in Corsica (France). Additionally she holds a Bachelor degree in cultural communication and organization of events from Vauban University in Nimes (Montpellier III).

Her research focuses on intercultural communication, particularly the role of music and dance to connect people and nations. Margarita is also interested in communication and its connection with media, tourism, marketing and management. Margarita has taught in several universities in Greece and France, and has published widely in academic and policy journals such Journal of ‘Business and Management Research’ and the ‘International Small Business Journal’. Moreover, she has successfully led several intercultural projects inclluding the creation of a musical disc in three languages (Action3 of the European Program for young People of INJEP). Margarita believes that we can better communicate through intercultural comprehension, communication, exchange and education Academics can contribute to this exchange process. This is what she is trying to achieve with the establishment of the Communication Institute of Greece and the organization of International Academic Conferences.

Work for CID:

Margarita Kefalaki wrote a guest post, Intercultural Dialogue via Organizing International Academic Conferences. She also translated KC1: Intercultural Dialogue into Greek, and has reviewed translations into Greek.

CFP Communication, Postcoloniality and Social Justice conference

Call for papers:
Communication, Postcoloniality, and Social Justice: Decolonizing Imaginations

A four-day conference: Sponsored by the Waterhouse Family Institute for the study of Communication and Society (WFI) at Villanova University, PA, 26th-29th March, 2015, Location: Villanova University (Specifics to be announced later)

Conference Organizers: Bryan Crable; Raka Shome (Biographies of organizers presented at the end of call for papers)

Keynote Speakers: Arjun Appadurai (New York University, USA), Inderpal Grewal (Yale University, USA), and Ravi Sundaram (Center for the Study of Developing Societies, India)

Plenary Speakers: Ramesh Srinivasan (USA); Mohan J. Dutta (Singapore); Shanti Kumar (USA), Ramaswamy Harindranath (Australia); Nitin Govil (USA); John Erni (Hong Kong); Aniko Imre (USA); Radhika Parameswaran (USA); Soyini Madison (USA); Raka Shome (USA); Boulou Ebanda De B’Beri (Canada) (These are confirmed so far; we are awaiting confirmation from other speakers.)

Three Plenary Sessions: 1) Significance of postcolonial studies for communication and media research 2) Postcolonial feminist and queer approaches 3) Postcoloniality and the Global South: Logics of Modernity beyond the West/North

In the past two decades, postcolonial theory has become increasingly influential in various spaces in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Recent communication and media scholarship has also shown some interest in postcolonial frameworks. However, there has not been a focused and sustained conversation in Communication/Media Studies in the United States and we think, even outside, that has engaged the ways in which communication and media studies, and postcolonial studies can mutually inform each other in the advancement of social justice projects. The conference emerges from the recognition that diverse logics, networks, and trajectories of communication and media today (as well as in the past) play a significant role in the production of colonial power relations in contemporary globality.

The organizers of Communication, Postcoloniality and Social Justice: Decolonizing Imaginations thus invite proposals from scholars who employ postcolonial frameworks to study various communication and media phenomena—including their embedded-ness in various logics of transnationality. We are interested in exploring how communication/media scholarship, with its varied rich perspectives, may make contributions to broad field of postcolonial studies by foregrounding the importance of communication/media frameworks for understanding colonial cultures, and transnational relations. At the same time we recognize that many of the core concepts and assumptions in the fields of Communication and Media Studies are rooted in Western/Northern exclusionary intellectual frameworks. Thus, we wish to explore how postcolonial analytical frameworks may productively enrich our understandings of various communication and media phenomena and enable us to decolonize normative frameworks in the field so as to be responsive to various struggles engendered by contemporary (and past) post/colonial logics. The conference aims to provide a productive space that can facilitate dialogue and interconnections amongst scholars conducting postcolonial scholarship in communication and media studies. We also hope that this conference can provide a space for building intellectual solidarities amongst scholars in Media and Communication who are concerned with the politics of colonialisms (including their varied transnational logics) as they inform our research and influence our social, economic, cultural, and academic practices.

REGISTRATION FEES: $250 (includes some meals and coffee; specifics will be confirmed in fall, 2014)

FORMAT: We welcome proposals from scholars, activists, and researchers from various parts of the world. Papers must demonstrate an engagement with the field of postcolonial studies. (Just any descriptive study of colonialism, while suitable for other venues, will not fit the goals of this conference). Submissions must be made by August 30, 2014. Acceptance of papers will be announced sometime in October 2014. PLEASE EMAIL SUBMISSIONS SIMULTANEOUSLY TO: Bryan Crable and Raka Shome. In subject heading please write: “Submission for Communication, Postcoloniality and Social Justice conference.” Given the volume of submissions we expect to receive, we will not be able to acknowledge receipt of every submission.

Please choose any one format:
1) Panel proposals: Panels on a theme relevant to the conference are welcome. A panel should have between 3-4 panelists (including discussant. Chair may be one of the presenters, or you may select your own Chair/moderator who is not a presenter). Please submit title, panel abstract (which should include names/affiliation of participants, description and justification of panel). REQUIRED: 350 word panel description/justification, and approximately 200 words abstract of each paper to be presented.

2) Individual paper proposals: Please send an abstract of around 350 words. Name, paper title, and institutional affiliation must be included.

A statement of commitment to attend is required of all participants. Please include that in your proposal submissions.

Potential topics of interest are (and these are not exhaustive). Postcoloniality and the Global South; Feminist and Queer Approaches; Transgendered subjects and/in colonial cultures; Gay imperialism; Homonationalism; Heterosovereignities; Modernity beyond the West/North (Papers dealing with Islamic modernities from a postcolonial/transnational perspective especially welcome); Memor(ies) and Postcoloniality ; Diaspora (especially new logics of diaspora) and Hybridity; Media and Migrations; Post/colonial Visual cultures; Cultural Studies and the Postcolonial; Nation, nationalisms, national identity; Asylum and Exile; Colonial Necropolitics; Colonial Biopolitics; Subalternity and Communication (e.g., the ‘impossibility’ of communication in the politics of subalternity); Cosmopolitanism(s); Politics of Cultural Translation; Engagements with works of key postcolonial scholars in terms of their relevance for media/communication studies; Communication of “human rights;” Consumption, Cultural Industries, and Postcolonial/Transnational Power relations; Environment and the Postcolonial (papers on mediations of “climate change” are particularly welcome); Intellectual and Cultural Property Issues; Affective regimes and post/colonial relations; Celebrities and Colonialism; Materialities of colonialism; Fashion, Identity and Colonialisms; New Media; Postcolonial Urbanisms; Traveling technologies and colonial circuits; Techno-cities; Transnational Temporalities; Postcoloniality and computer cultures; Postcolonial Piracy; The “global” city; Technological Colonialisms; Science and the Postcolonial; Electronic Others; Postcolonial Securitizations; Politics of Representation; Global health and colonial relations; “Humanitarianism,” “Natural Disaster” and Contemporary colonial logics; Decolonizing Pedagogy and the field of Media/Communication Studies; The contemporary university and (the possibility of) postcolonial interventions.

Key Concepts #14: Dialogue by John Stewart

The next issue of Key Concepts in intercultural Dialogue is now available. This is KC14: Dialogue by John Stewart. As always, all Key Concepts are available as free PDFs; just click on the thumbnail to download.Lists organized chronologically by publication date and number, alphabetically by concept in English, and by languages into which they have been translated, are available, as is a page of acknowledgments with the names of all authors, translators, and reviewers.

Stewart, J. (2014). Dialogue. Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, 14. Available from:
https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/key-concept-dialogue.pdf

The Center for Intercultural Dialogue publishes a series of short briefs describing Key Concepts in intercultural Dialogue. Different people, working in different countries and disciplines, use different vocabulary to describe their interests, yet these terms overlap. Our goal is to provide some of the assumptions and history attached to each concept for those unfamiliar with it. As there are other concepts you would like to see included, send an email to the series editor, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. If there are concepts you would like to prepare, provide a brief explanation of why you think the concept is central to the study of intercultural dialogue, and why you are the obvious person to write up that concept.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Rosanne Teniente Micro Grant Award

Rosanne Teniente has been awarded a micro grant for international travel, funded by the Association for Business Communication through the Center for Intercultural Dialogue. The following is her description of herself and the project. You can also read the main article describing all award winners.

I am a Rhode Island native who has been transplanted around the world. As an undergraduate at Simmons College in Boston, MA, I studied economics and international relations, focusing on development economics and Middle Eastern politics. After my undergraduate studies, I moved to Egypt for several years as a Gilman Scholar at the American University in Cairo studying Arabic and interned with the US Foreign Commercial Service, and then worked as an English instructor at an international school. I am now a master’s candidate in the public administration program at Northeastern University, while working in the field of social services. I currently reside in Southwest New Mexico with my husband who is serving in the US Air Force. I embrace new adventures, foreign languages, and cross-cultural learning experiences.

With the support of the CID grant as well as Northeastern University, I will be traveling to Baar, Switzerland to attend a ten-day conference in August hosted by the Institute for Peace and Dialogue, a nongovernment organization that is dedicated to strengthening institutional dialogue between civil societies, international peace and state institutions. The conference is IPD’s International Summer Academy in Peace-building & Intercultural Dialogue, which will feature experts and practitioners in the field of conflict resolution and peace building. Through different workshops, lectures, interactive group work, and negotiation activities, the knowledge gleaned with help me to build upon my past empirical research on the effect of conflict on GDP per capita in developing countries.

September 2014: This project is now complete, and Teniente’s final report is now available.

Inga Milevica – Micro grant award

Inga Milevica has been awarded a micro grant for international travel, funded by the Association for Business Communication through the Center for Intercultural Dialogue. The following is her description of herself and the project. You can also read the main article describing all award winners.

Dr. Inga Milevica is a researcher and teacher in Latvia, author of more than 90 scientific papers. Her main research interests are: gender communication, business communication, mass communication and translation problems, in particular, problems of translation in films. Milevica has been working at Alberta College since 2008 in all its fields of study: Legal foundation of the business, Entertainment management and production, Cultural tourism management, Marketing and marketing′s innovations, Staff work organization, Business accountancy and taxes, Information technology, Game development, Economics and organization of small companies and Public relations. She teaches the following courses: Rhetoric and Presentation Skills, Introduction into Communication Theory, Corporate Culture, Business Communication and professional Ethics, Stylistics and Culture of Latvian Language.

The first and the main scientific-practical task of the project is to participate in the international forum and represent one of the private colleges of Latvia – Alberta College. The international forum “Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Aspects in Educational and Scientific Context” will take place in Kyoto (Japan) in Kyoto Sangyo University, September 25-29, 2014. The paper “Naive Argumentation of Authority” is being prepared for the section Intercultural Aspects in Pedagogical Activity. There will be basic peculiarities of the argumentation and especially of an argument authority discussed in the paper, based on the verbal and written discourse of the students.

The second task deals with methodical planning. The partners of the forum are such famous and respected educational institutions of the world as Kyoto Sangyo University (Kyoto, Japan), Middlebury College (Vermont, USA), University of Bologna (Bologna, Italy), Sangmyung University of South Korea (Cheonan, South Korea), Almaty Institute of Power and Communication (Alamty, Republic of Kazakhstan), International Centre of Scientific-Educational Platform of Interaction of Cultures (Yekaterinburg, Russia), Institute of Foreign Languages and Multimedia at University of Greifswald (Greifswald, Federal Republic of Germany). The author intends to discuss with the representatives of the universities possibilities of the programme Erasmus+, which starting from 2014 will expand both geography of the trips and scientific and educational profiles, both for the students and teaching staff.

In addition, this project will help to perfect practical knowledge about the distinctive culture of Japan. For example, such important categories for successful communication and overcoming potential barriers as time (monochrome or polychrome perception) and place (public or private – and to what extent) should be felt already on the airplane, in the hotel, on the streets, at the university, etc., and such a category as argumentation (linear or holistic) also can and must be experienced in real communication.

ABC Micro Grants Awarded

Three scholars have been awarded micro grants for international travel related to research, funded by the Association for Business Communication, in spring 2014. Brief descriptions of the award winners and their projects are below; click on the name of the grant winners for further details. After each project is completed, a link to a report will be posted to the CID website as well.

Inga Milevica, who teaches at Alberta College in Latvia, will travel to Kyoto, Japan, to connect with colleagues from the Ukraine as well as Japan, working on the topic of the naive argument of authority.

October 2014: Milevica’s report of her activities is now available.

Olena Zelikovska, who teaches at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, will travel to California State University of Los Angeles, working on the topic of intercultural competence.

Rosanne Teniente, a graduate student at Northeastern University, will travel to participate in the Institute for Peace and Dialogue, in Switzerland.

September 2014: Teniente’s report of her activities is now available.

Olena Zelikovska Micro Grant Award

Olena Zelikovska has been awarded a micro grant for international travel, funded by the Association for Business Communication through the Center for Intercultural Dialogue. The following is her description of herself and the project. You can also read the main article describing all award winners.

Dr. Olena Zelikovska is an Associate Professor in the Department of English for Economic Specialties at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (NULESU). For the last 10 years she has been working as a focal point in developing curriculum of “Business English” and ‘Translation of Commercial Correspondence and Business Communication’ for undergraduate and graduate students majoring in Economics, Management of International Affairs and Linguistics as well as in supervising students’ research projects with the focus on intercultural communication issues.

In 2010, Zelikovska defended the thesis: ‘Developing intercultural competence in the students of higher economic educational institutions’ (adopted by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine). She has been chairing the Student’s Research Group “Business Environment and Intercultural Communication” since 2011.

Zelikovska has been constantly seeking for international cooperation to provide the students with valuable practical experience. She is interested in project-based programs designed to connect American and Ukrainian students in a distance learning opportunity that is grounded in intercultural dialogue and exchange.

Project background: The growing importance of English as an instrument of international communication on the global scale and its increased use in Ukraine has triggered research about improved methods to develop university students’ intercultural competence (ICC). This has promoted changes in both the teaching and learning process. However lack of students’ cross-cultural communication experience has resulted in low sensitivity of intercultural issues. The initial discussion has shown that the NULESU students majoring in Management of International Affairs or in Linguistics have very little idea about intercultural communication (IC). For instance, they are unaware of the privacy zone character of the American culture and can easily use the patterns of direct language imposing their ideas and feelings on the interlocutor as they commonly do in Ukrainian culture with higher power distance and no privacy space. Moreover English classroom communicative behavior of the majority of faculty staff unfortunately does not often correlate with such behavior of their American colleagues. That is why the traditional teaching practice does not achieve the expected results on developing ICC.

The key to the solution may be the application of the 3-component intercultural development model that provides knowledge (cognitive element of the model), foster awareness (affective element of the model) and develop skills (behavioral element of the model). The proposed project seeks to assess the interrelated issues: How to fill each component of the model with the intercultural communication content tailored to the particular needs of the individual student? How do these components correlate with each other? What issues should be submitted for Student’s Research Group? How to launch distant projects between American and Ukrainian students to enrich each other with learning by experience? The development of classroom communicative behavior of the department staff is the issue of special importance. The project will provide the unique opportunity for the grant holder to study all these processes as a system at the Californian State University by classroom observation, students and faculty staff surveying and discussions with further analysis of the data collected. The ultimate goal of the research is to empower Ukrainian students with intercultural awareness enabling them to develop empathy, tolerance and mutual understanding with their American peers.

The Netherlands 2014

One of the great pleasures of directing the Center for Intercultural Dialogue is meeting people in person who I have only “met” previously online. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to meet Marieke de Mooij in person, at her home in The Netherlands. She graciously invited me and my 3 traveling companions to visit, fed us an excellent traditional lunch including a wide variety of smoked fishes and other seafood, and recommended which small towns to visit on the drive to and from Amsterdam.

A long-time consultant in cross-cultural communication, Marieke’s books on global marketing and advertising are used around the world. We talked generally about overlaps in our research interests, and especially about her newest book, Human and Mediated Communication around the World: A Comprehensive Review and Analysis (Springer, 2014). One of her goals in the book is to recombine interaction and media as parts of the study of communication; another is to take a truly global perspective.

My thanks to Yoshi Miike for introducing us last fall!

Belarus book on Intercultural Dialogue

Любоў Уладыкоўская. Міжкультурны дыялог: амерыканская парадыгма / Л.Уладыкоўская. – Мінск, Установа “Міжкультурны дыялог”, 2014. – 92 с.

The scientific monograph Intercultural Dialogue: American Paradigm by Liubou Uladykouskaja has just been published. This is the first book in Belarus devoted to intercultural dialogue issues. The book is written in Belarusian, with an introduction and information about the author in English. The book reveals the essence of the American paradigm of intercultural dialogue (including mention of the Center for Intercultural Dialogue) in its comparing with the European conceptions. Uladykouskaja explains why the American approaches in the field of intercultural dialogue are important for Belarus. She believes that the secret to American success with intercultural dialogue is the precondition for, and has the result of, democracy.

According to Uladykouskaja, the American paradigm of intercultural dialogue includes the following characteristics:
— Universality, inclusiveness, and tolerance;
— Global standards of life of persons;
— Organic interaction of technology, traditions, and nature;
— Unconditional priority of freedom, life, equality, and justice;
— Dialogical thinking;
— Human and national dignity;
— Simplicity, expediency, functionality; and
— Strive for achievements, buoyancy.

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