Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Transformative Power of Dialogue

Review of:
Stephen W. Littlejohn & Sheila McNamee (Eds.). (2014). The coordinated management of meaning: A festschrift in honor of W. Barnett Pearce. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

by Robyn Penman

In 1980, Barnett Pearce and his colleague, Vern Cronen, published Communication, Action and Meaning, a seminal work introducing scholars to the theory of the coordinated management of meaning (CMM). Over the ensuing decades, CMM theory has continued to grow, reaching a wider and wider audience as the practical and theoretical relevance of Barnett’s work became increasingly acknowledged.

In recognition of Barnett’s outstanding scholarship, a conference, entitled the Transformative Power of Dialogue, was held in his honour in January 2011. The essays in this book collection emerged from that conference. I am one of the contributors to this volume and, as such, this review is more of a commendation than any conventional critical review.

The book opens with an essay written by Barnett shortly before his death, reflecting on what it could take for personal and social revolution to be brought about. As he put it, he has “bet my professional life” on following the risky, high stake path that this evolution “could be promoted by explicit attention to what we are making together in the forms of communication in which we engage” (p. 44).

Barnett’s bet has reaped its rewards, not the least of which is the extent to which he has inspired, encouraged and collaborated with an extraordinary range of scholars and practitioners, a sample of which is contained in the current volume. The very breadth, scholarship and wide-ranging practical import captured in the 15 essays bear witness to the rich offerings to be found in CMM and its broader communication perspective.

For those interested in intercultural dialogue, the central importance placed on dialogue in Barnett’s work, and in the essays in this volume, makes the book especially pertinent. One part of this volume is specifically devoted to the theme of dialogue. The topics include the role of systemic questioning (Victoria Chen), moral conflict and managing difference (Stephen Littlejohn), framing and conflict transformation (Linda Putnam), and generative community dialogue (Stanley Deetz).

Dialogue also emerges as a powerful theme throughout the other parts in the book. For example, I (Penman) consider the core relationship between dialogue and presence and what this means for understanding participation in mediated life. John Lannamann explores the key role of dialogue and its practice in cosmopolitan communication in making better social worlds. And Kim Pearce sums up the volume by talking about the pathway to personal and social evolution in terms of the “life of dialogue…that holds in tension, and compassion, the various stories, actions and people who loves us, or don’t, who are like us. . . . , or aren’t and who may challenge us to the core to remain civil and open” (p. 328).

For anyone interested in dialogue and its role in making better social worlds, this book should be a rewarding read.

IAMCR 2014 India CFP

REGION AS FRAME: POLITICS, PRESENCE, PRACTICE

The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) invites submissions of abstracts for papers and panel proposals for the 2014 IAMCR conference to be held from 15 -19 July, 2014 at Hyderabad, India. The deadline to submit your abstract is midnight GMT on 10 February 2014. This deadline will not be extended. For details about submissions, go to the IAMCR 2014 website. The conference is co-hosted by the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, and the School of Communication, English and Foreign Languages University, both in Hyderabad, India.

Conference Theme:
The breaking down of some the world’s walls has created an uncertainty about the geographies and substantive nature of the regions they had once defined. This includes physical boundaries such as the Berlin wall, ideological ones such as those in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, economic ones such as those that had once separated India and other socialist economies from the capitalist West, and cultural ones such as those that had hidden the lives of people in the Middle Eastern and Soviet bloc.

Mobility, migration and disembodied interactions by cyberspace further complicate the notion of region as a conceptual and experiential category. New regional hierarchies, such as the economic power of emerging economies (BRICS) are taking shape, serving to decentre traditional loci of power, while different forms of identity politics are creating fissures in the modern nation state. Corporations have acquired the power to dictate politics through their ownership of forms and channels of expression, and this has created a new urgency to re-think old political economy arguments around media control and dispersal in a regional rather than global framework.

The conference theme seeks to explore the dynamics of media systems, communication patterns and organizational relationships within this new “framing” of region as a physical and conceptual category. The theme thus lends itself to panels and papers dealing with a wide range of specific sub-themes and topics. These may include:

• What are the politics that drive media discourse, organization and economics?

• What kind of presence is at all possible in this redefined regional space, and how does region become a real and imagined construct across new media presences?

• What sorts of practices then become key to media and communication spaces enclosed in or defined by this new frame?

Int’l Colloquium on Comm 2014 Germany

International Colloquium on Communication 2014

University of Muenster (Germany)
Sunday, 27. July 2014, 18:00 h to Friday, 1st. August 2014, 12:00 h

Theme: “Communication as Performance and the Performativity of Communication”
The International Colloquium on Communication (ICC) is an interdisciplinary conference that invites scholars from the U.S. and Europe to present and discuss new results of research on communication. The ICC was founded in 1968 and takes place every other year. A specific feature of the ICC is its small size, with only about 25 participants. Each scholar presents a paper that is followed by a discussion among the entire group. The length of the colloquium allows additional time for interaction and dialogue. The conference will be held in English.
The general aim of the ICC is to discuss current results of research on communication and to emphasize a critical view on institutional and political contexts.

A specific aim of ICC 2014 is to stimulate research on performativity and the performative turn in communication scholarship. The focus on performance and performativity emphasizes communication as behavior, acting, and event. This focus brings attention to the material practice of doing communication, what is done in communication, and the difference it makes in our lives and institutions. The focus on Performance and Performativity can include such topics for presentation as:

(1) Performance as technical term for “actio” in the field of rhetoric: e.g. research on verbal and non-verbal communication and factors that construct meaning, and linguistic research on patterns of behavior in communication.

(2) Performance as cultural performance: to broaden the research on social interaction as cultural performance (Goffman) as well as the research on the concept of habitus by discourse analysis (Foucault, Bourdieu).
a. Investigations on the role of the Internet and social media such as Facebook and blogs in the performance of the self and social movements.
b. Investigations in journalism, photography, and in health communication drawing on the performative turn, such as alternative news sites on the Internet, interactive news discussions on the Internet, health care communication through interactive modules, discussion boards, and blogs, performativity and intercultural health communication
c. Investigations on the performative in political discourse, especially as influenced by the new media.

(3) Performativity as a linguistic term: research on performative utterances (Austin/Searle) to understand utterances which have performative functions in language and communication.

(4) Performance and Performativity as terms in theatre and art:
a. Research on Performance Art from the perspective of Performativity: The “Esthetics of Performativity” (“Ästhetik des Performativen”, Fischer-Lichte) turns the involved audience into participants and brings about a transformation for both, the performer as well as the audience. This is due to the process of their experiencing the performance.
b. To investigate communication as Performance with the analytical tool of performance analysis used by dramatics (see the keywords “staging – physical presence/ corporeality – perception – representation”) and Performativity as paradigm used by cultural studies to focus on the processes of semiotic expression, action, perception and constructing reality. What new ideas are provided by this paradigm for research on patterns of communication?

(5) Didactics of communication, connected with “Pedagogics of Performativity” analyzes processes of interaction and dramatic actions as well as physical presence, media, and texture of the materials in education. How does this research influence the understanding of communicative competence?

Those interested in presenting a paper at the ICC should submit an abstract of 150-200 words to the Program Chairs listed below, by 31 January, 2014. U.S. based scholars are asked to submit to Kevin Carragee, while European scholars are asked to submit to Annette Moennich.

Submission opening: 20 January 2014
Submission deadline: 1 March 2014

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Kevin Carragee, Program chair (USA) (Department of Communication and Journalism, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, USA)

Dr. Annette Moennich, Conference and program chair (Europe) (Germanistisches Institut, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany)

CFP Comm and Social Justice

Call for Book Manuscripts

Social justice is a powerful political and ideological concept in the 21st century; it has become an increasingly central idea for those trying to gain a fuller understanding of national and international grassroots politics. An implicit assumption of a social justice perspective is that the integrity of any community is violated when some of its members are systematically deprived of their dignity or equality. This assumption often leads to research whose findings are not comfortable for the status quo: governments, institutions, and disciplines. Troubador’s Communication and Social Justice book series maintains that the relevance of scholarship should be judged by the degree to which scholarship advances social democratic values, and that these values must advance by way of valid research that provides honest critique and redescription of those institutions that promote and reify poverty, hierarchy, and/or social inequality. Books in the series recognize that concern for underprivileged and under resourced groups is becoming an increasingly important topic about which to theorize and for which to develop interventions. The goal of this series is to explore the theoretical and practical ways that communication scholars can reconceptualize national and international societies so as to enable inclusive and equitable communities to emerge; to seek to construct communities that protect individual freedom while insuring equality and dignity for everyone. Specifically, this series takes the position that potential contributors are intellectual laborers who view their professional commitments as indistinguishable from their social and political identifications. From varying perspectives, each book published in the series will illustrate the vitality of engaged scholarship and the claim that a scholarship of social justice is not incompatible with more traditional “ivy tower” research. A fundamental assumption of the books is that there is no worthier end for measuring social utility than the abolishment of social injustice.

Other books in the series include:

Rodden, J. (Forthcoming). The intellectual species: Post-Gutenberg prospects.

Wander, P. C. (2014). Shadow Songs: History, Ideology, & Rhetorical Responsibility.

Gorsevski, E. W. (2014). Dangerous women: The rhetoric of the women Nobel peace laureates.

Ralston, S. (2013). Pragmatic environmentalism: Toward a rhetoric of eco-justice.

Dougherty, D. S. The reluctant farmer: An exploration of work, social class, and the production of food.

Kiewe, A. (2011). Confronting anti-Semitism: The rhetoric of hate.

Callahan, K. J. (2010). Demonstration culture: European socialism and the second international, 1889-1914.

Rodriguez, A. (2010). Revisioning diversity in communication studies.

For information on how to submit a manuscript proposal, please contact series editor Omar Swartz (Omar.Swartz AT ucdenver.edu) or visit us online.

Clarifying Conversations: Race and Identity

REPRESENTATIONS OF RACE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE

Responding to ongoing public discussions about race and identity, this panel is an interactive dialogue about how race and identity are represented, articulated, constituted, and enacted in various ways in American culture, from political discussions to popular culture, in the news media and among citizens in everyday conversation.

Richard West’s NCA Presidential Initiative
A Public Program of the National Communication Association
Held at Emerson College

Important questions to be addressed include:
* How do we talk about race and identity?
* What are the consequences and effects of how we communicate about race and identity?
* How do our interactions about race and identity include and embrace, exclude and oppress?
* How can we clarify, through conversation, our public understanding and enactment of race and identity in the American context?

Thursday, March 20, 2014
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
BILL BORDY THEATER
216 Tremont Street, First Floor
Emerson College, Boston, MA 02116

MODERATOR
HARVEY YOUNG, Department of Theatre at Northwestern University
An award-winning author and an internationally recognized authority on African-American culture and performing arts, Professor Young is the author of Embodying Black Experience and Theatre & Race, and co-editor of Performance in the Borderlands and Reimagining A Raisin in the Sun: Four New Plays.

PANELISTS

ANNE DEMO, Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University
Professor Demo’s work explores the relationships between visual/digital rhetoric and U.S. cultural politics. She is the co-editor of Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory.

KIMBERLY McLARIN, Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College
Appearing regularly on the Emmy Award-winning show Basic Black, Boston’s long-running television program devoted to African-American themes, Professor McLarin is the author of four books, including Jump at the Sun, which was chosen as a 2007 Fiction Honor Book by both the Massachusetts Center for the Book and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her new memoir, Divorce Dog, was published last year.

TOM NAKAYAMA, Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University
Professor Nakayama studies intercultural communication and whiteness. A former editor of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, he is a co-editor of the Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication.

JEFF SCHAFFER, Executive Producer, The League
Mr. Schaffer is a producer, writer, and director for television and film. His writing credits include episodes of the television programs Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and the films Bruno and The Dictator. He is also the creator, writer, and director of The League and writer and director of the 2004 film EuroTrip.

ANGHARAD N. VALDIVIA, Media and Cinema Studies at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In examinations of media studies and contemporary mainstream popular culture, Professor Valdivia combines the areas of gender studies with ethnic studies and transnational studies. She is the managing editor of the International Encyclopedia of Media Studies.

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Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award

The Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award recognizes an outstanding book that exhibits excellence in addressing issues of urban communication. It is given out every year by the Urban Communication Foundation and is named in honor of the late social activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The award brings with it a $500 prize.

To nominate a book, please send a short letter of nomination or self-nomination (in the form of an email attachment) to Steve Macek, chair of the Jane Jacobs Book Award review committee, at the email address below by August 15, 2014. The letter of nomination should describe the book and explain how it addresses issues central to the field of urban communication. Nominees for this year’s award must be published between January 1, 2012 and June 30, 2014. Finalists (or their publishers) will be asked to send three copies of the book to the award committee. For more information on the field of urban communication, and to determine if your nomination fits the award call, please review our mission statement and look at the list of past Jane Jacobs winners.

Dr. Steve Macek
Associate Professor of Communication
Coordinator of Urban & Suburban Studies
North Central College Naperville, IL 60540

COMM 365: NCA is 100 years old

COMM 365: Celebrating 100 years of communication research

In honor of the National Communication Association‘s Centennial, COMM 365, a project celebrating 100 years of communication research, begins this week. Five times per week brief, accessible write-ups of impactful concepts, theories, and research findings from our discipline will appear. The entries began on January 13, 2014 and run throughout the year.

The daily entries were created by NCA interest groups and represent the breadth of our discipline. Entries on topics related to intercultural communication were posted between January 27 and February 4.

The entries will be interesting for NCA members to read and can serve as a resource for undergraduate students enrolled in basic theory and research methods courses. For example, instructors may assign students to review the findings, which will be posted daily and neatly archived by topic, to generate research ideas for papers or extra credit projects. The entries have been written and edited in such a way as to be useful to teachers in secondary educational settings who have an interest in drawing from the discipline for class instruction or related activities.

COMM 365 is Chaired by Zac Gershberg of California State University Stanislaus and sponsored by the Centennial Committee.

The National Communication Association (NCA) is one of the member organizations of the Council of Communication Associations, the parent organization of CID.

Qin Zhang Profile

Qin Zhang (Ph.D., University of New Mexico, 2005) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Fairfield University, USA.

Her research interests span across intercultural, instructional, and interpersonal communication. She has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Communication Education, Communication Quarterly, Western Journal of Communication, Communication Research Reports, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, Business Communication Quarterly, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, China Media Research, Ohio Communication Journal, Journal of International Communication, Pennsylvania Communication Annual, Texas Speech Communication Journal, and Human Communication. She also has articles in press in Human Communication Research and International Journal of Communication. She has won the Outstanding Article of the Year (2009) Award in Business Communication Quarterly, as well as several top paper awards or top-four paper awards in intercultural communication, instructional communication, and organizational communication at ECA or NCA. She serves on the editorial board of Communication Education, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, and Communication Teacher. She was the 2012-2013 President of the Association for Chinese Communication Scholars (ACCS) affiliated with the NCA.

Selected Publications

Zhang, Q., Ting-Toomey, S., & Oetzel, J. G. (in press). Linking emotion to the conflict face-negotiation theory: A U.S.-China investigation of the mediating effects of anger, compassion, and guilt in interpersonal conflict. Human Communication Research.

Zhang, Q., Andreychik, M., Sapp, D. A., & Arendt, C. (in press). The dynamic interplay of interaction goals, emotion, and conflict styles: Testing a model of intrapersonal and interpersonal effects on conflict styles. International Journal of Communication.

Zhang, Q. (in press). A U.S.-China investigation of the effects of perceived partner conflict styles on outcome satisfaction: The mediating role of perceived partner conflict competence. Communication Quarterly.

Zhang, Q. (in press). Emotion matters in serial arguments: The effects of anger and compassion on perceived resolvability and relationship confidence. Communication Research Reports.

Zhang, Q. (2014). Assessing the effects of instructor enthusiasm on classroom engagement, learning goal orientation, and academic self-efficacy. Communication Teacher, 28, 44-56.

Zhang, Q., & Zhang, J. (2013). Instructors’ positive emotions: Effects on student engagement and critical thinking in U.S. and Chinese classrooms. Communication Education, 62, 395-411.

Zhang, Q. (2010). Asian Americans beyond the model minority stereotype: The nerdy and the left out. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 3, 20-37.

Zhang, Q. (2009). Perceived teacher credibility and student learning: Development of a multi-cultural model. Western Journal of Communication, 73, 326-347.

Zhang, Q. (2007). Teacher misbehaviors as learning demotivators in college classrooms: A cross-cultural investigation in China, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Communication Education, 56, 209-227.

Postdoc in Media @ Macquarie U (Sydney)

Postdoctoral Fellow in Media
Macquarie University, Sydney

Macquarie University is seeking a postdoctoral fellow to be attached to Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley’s ARC Future Fellowship project, Switched-On Audiences: Australian Listeners and Viewers.

In this role you will be asked to:
Work on a research project about an aspect of Australian newspaper, magazine, radio or television reception history since 1930;
Play an active role in the Centre for Media History’s activities;
Produce excellent research in line with the research strengths of the Faculty and Department including publishing in peer reviewed journals and applying for research grants;
Engage with external stakeholders, the media and the public to disseminate your research.

Selection Criteria
To be considered for this position, applicants must address the selection criteria below and then upload the response as a separate document during the online application process.

Essential
A submitted PhD in media history, Australian history, communications and media, or a related field.
An excellent research and publication track record relative to opportunity.

Salary Package:
Academic Level A salary AUD $62,526 – $84,193 p.a. plus 17% employer’s superannuation and annual leave loading.

Appointment Type:
Full-time, 2-year fixed term contract position.

Specific Role Enquiries:
Specific enquiries related to this position should be directed to Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley.

Intending applicants are strongly encouraged to discuss the position with Professor Griffen-Foley before applying.

Applications Close:

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