Elizabeth S. Parks – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

The sixth issue of Constructing intercultural Dialogues is now available, “The Privilege of Listening First,” by Elizabeth Parks.

As a reminder, the goal of this series is to provide concrete examples of how actual people have managed to organize and hold intercultural dialogues, so that others may be inspired to do the same. As with Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, these may be downloaded for free. Click on the thumbnail to download the PDF.

Parks, E. S. (2017). The privilege of listening first. Constructing Intercultural Dialogues, 6. Available from: https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/constructing-icd-6.pdf

If you have a case study you would like to share, send an email to the series editor, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz.

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

Elizabeth S. Parks (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. Elizabeth Parks

She has degrees in Communication (M.A., University of Washington), Deaf Studies: Cultural Studies (M.A., Gallaudet University), Communication Studies (B.A., Creighton University), Sign Language Interpreting (Iowa Western Community College), and a graduate certificate in Values in Society (University of Washington). She uses her many years of international fieldwork experience with diverse cultural communities to ground her scholarship in listening and dialogue, communication ethics, cultural studies, and disability studies.

Embracing a mixed method approach that draws from both social sciences and humanities, her current research focuses on the ways in which cultural diversity and embodied difference impacts perceptions and practices of “good listening” that ultimately promote ethical dialogue across difference. Fluent in American Sign Language, she pays particular attention to the ways that diverse sensory and linguistic experiences impact the ways that we conceptualize and experience listening in our relationships. She works actively with the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University to expand the ways that everyday dialogue and deliberation are practiced in everyday democracy. Her first book, The Ethics of Listening: Creating Space for Sustainable Dialogue, was published in 2019 and she is the recipient of a 2019-2020 J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award. She has twice served as a guest editor for Listening: Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture and her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, International Journal of Listening, Ethics & Behavior, Journal of Research in Gender Studies, Critical Issues in Language Studies, Journal of International Communication, Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, and Organizational Development Journal.

Her personal website can be found at www.elizabethsparks.org.

Work for CID:

Elizabeth Parks wrote Constructing Intercultural Dialogues #6: The Privilege of Listening First. She also served as a judge for the 2020 CID Video Competition.