CMMi Press – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Penman, Robyn. (2022). Racial justice, relational responsivity and responsibility. CMMi Working Papers, No. 2.

Perhaps it’s important to emphasise here that we are not using the term “dialogue” loosely. We are, in fact, using the term from a very specific perspective — the prescriptive approach that draws on the work of Martin Buber…Amongst other things, this form of dialogue is characterized by the participants acting authentically and genuinely engaging in the process in a mutually collaborative way that ensues the participants can go on together…And most importantly, this approach to dialogue is fundamentally orientated to the call of the other. (p. 16)

This is the first paper to emerge from discussions in the CMMi Social Justice Working Group. In this paper, Robyn Penman considers the issue of racial justice within a relational framework, that includes a relationally-responsive, and responsible, form of understanding emerging from an “us”. Drawing on the various models and heuristics of the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), she shows us how we can develop a different sense of racial justice and how we can expose the pervasive relational dynamics at work in perpetuating injustice.

The CMMi Press will become the publishing arm of the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution.

The Institute is committed to making better social worlds through paying particular attention to the quality of the communication patterns in which we participate. The CMMi Press will publish books that promote this approach with the intent of inspiring better communication practices for making social worlds we would all want to live in.

Their first publication, Making Better Social Worlds: Inspirations from the Theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning, has just been published. Robyn Penman and Arthur Jensen have written this book as a companion volume to the Cosmopolis2045 website and it serves as a fitting flagship for the new press promoting the making of better social worlds. Penman and Jensen are also planning a second volume on A Cosmopolitan Sensibility.

If you have a publishing idea or a manuscript in preparation that you think will fit the aims of the Press, please contact Robyn Penman, commissioning editor.