Tag: intercultural dialogue

Intercultural Dialogue issue of JIIC

The special issue on Intercultural Dialogue in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 4(2), co-authored by Shiv Ganesh and Prue Holmes, consolidates emerging interest in intercultural dialogue. The special issue emerged from the NCA Summer Conference on Intercultural Dialogue held in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2009. The four selected articles build upon, expand, and critique current understandings of intercultural dialogue, in particular, the important definition established by the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue (2008). This definition locates intercultural dialogue beyond mere tolerance of the other and situates deep shared understandings, as well as new forms of creative and expressive communication, as dialogic outcomes.

The four articles elaborate the terrain on intercultural dialogue in five important ways: 1) by drawing on key theorists of dialogue and intercultural communication; 2) by understanding dialogic encounters as intercultural, embedded in national, political, economic, religious, and historical interests, in order to view social problems in new and creative ways; 3) by engaging reflexively in the dialogic processes occurring in intercultural settings and encounters; 4) by situating the study of intercultural dialogue as an applied and pragmatic endeavour, using theories as resources for good practice; and 6) by explicating ethics as central to dialogic processes, for example, in contexts of social justice and colonization.

Witteborn’s paper “Discursive Grouping in a Virtual Forum: Dialogue, Difference, and the Intercultural” investigates how participants, in this case, Uyghur diaspora, construct difference in a virtual forum where difference is an opportunity for dialogic transformation. Witteborn’s analysis reveals that interlocutors mostly confirmed group locations through identity terms, truth talk, and distrust, which prevented dialogue. In reflecting on the meaning of intercultural, she thus cautions not to overemphasize the cultural at the expense of other meanings of group location important to interlocutors.

LaFever’s article “Empowering Native Americans: Communication, Planning, and Dialogue for Eco-Tourism in Gallup, New Mexico” emphasizes the importance of finding ways to meet the participartory needs of a marginalised (Navajo) community to engage and support them in public dialogue. Her study highlights the need for continued development of dialogic practices, and for closer ties among communication and planning scholars.

Carbaugh, Nuciforo, Saito and Shin, in “’Dialogue’ in Cross-Cultural perspective: Japanese, Korean, and Russian Discourses,” explore terms and practices relating to dialogue in the three discourses identified in the title. Their analysis of the term “dialogue” reveals distinctive goals for communication, implicit moral rules for conduct, and the proper tone, mode, and interactional structure within each discourse. They conclude that cross-cultural knowledge of this kind can clarify and address vexing problems such as the cultural balancing of information and truth with relational concerns.

MacLennan’s essay “’To Build a Beautiful Dialogue’: Capoeira as Contradiction” examines the dynamic dance-fight-game of African-Brazilian origins as a metaphor for dialogue. Through text, literature and personal experience, MacLennan reveals how dialogue is constituted through contradiction and paradox. Drawing on co-cultural theory, she reveals the importance of five key contradictions occurring in capoeira that have relevance to intercultural dialogue among cocultural groups.

Together, the articles in this collection expand current understandings of dialogue as they seek to explore the potentially dialogic role of conflict as well as consensus and collaboration. As such they inaugurate a productive exchange between scholarship on dialogue and intercultural communication studies, thereby setting an agenda for studies of intercultural dialogue.

Nazan Haydari Profile

ProfilesNazan Haydari is Associate Professor of Media School at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. Her research and teaching areas consist of alternative media, feminist media, critical pedagogy, intercultural communication, and radio studies.

Nazan HaydariDuring her work years at Maltepe University, she was involved in the organization of NCA Summer Conference on Intercultural Dialogue with Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. Among many outcomes of that Conference was the establishment of this Center for Intercultural Dialogue in 2010. Since the founding, she has served on the CID Advisory Board. In addition, she served as co-editor, with Prue Holmes, of the collection, Case Studies in Intercultural Dialogue published by Kendall Hunt in 2014. She is particularly interested in collaborative research on the practices of critical media pedagogy in various contexts and  the relationship between radio, gender and identity, has participated in the development of various media projects with street-involved children and youngsters, and serves as a Board Member of the Research and Implementation Center on Street Children (SOYAÇ) at Maltepe University as well as a member of Women’s Radio in Europe Network (WREN).

Currently, she has been working towards the completion of an oral history project with women radio producers of TRT (Turkish Radio and Television) from 1960s to 1990s. Her recent publications appear in Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to Old Media (edited by Golo Föllmer and Alexander Badenoch, Transcript Verlag Publications, 2018), The Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication and Feminist Media Histories Journal. In addition, she prepared the bibliography on intercultural dialogue for Oxford Bibliographies in Communication (2023). Haydari holds a Ph.D. in Communications and MAIA in Communication and Development from Ohio University, USA.

Contact her by email if you share interests.

Work for CID:

Nazan Haydari served on the Organizing Committee, and then was the Local Arrangements Chair for the National Communication Association’s Summer Conference on Intercultural Dialogue in Istanbul, Turkey, which led to the creation of CID. She co-edited the book resulting from that event, Case Studies in Intercultural Dialogue. She is a member of the CID Advisory Board.

In addition, she served as a reviewer of micro-grants distributed by CID (funded by the National Communication Association), and has been a reviewer for translations into Turkish. She also helped to organize and moderate the CID/UNESCO focus groups for the Futures of Education Initiative.