Call for submissions: Healing Divides and Elevating Connections Within Conflict & Peacebuilding, National Communication Association, 20-23 November 2025, Denver, CO, USA. Deadline: 15 March 2025.
In 2024, the Peace and Conflict Communication Division came together and explored how to find a balance between self-regard and greater regard in conflict. They welcomed nearly 20 scholars and many more audience participants to engage in this discussion as part of our 12th annual high-density panel. Last year’s theme encouraged us to examine the balance between empathy and compromise for others (greater regard) and maintaining self-regard, fostering meaningful dialogue and reconciliation through an awareness of individual, social, and cultural positionalities. By addressing these complexities, they highlighted pathways for navigating conflicts with both authenticity and mutual respect.
Building upon our conversations last year, they are excited to introduce the 13th annual high-density panel theme for the 2025 National Communication Association annual Conference: Healing Divides and Elevating Connections Within Conflict & Peacebuilding. Conflict presents a significant challenge to the stability of interpersonal, intergroup, and international relationships. A central concern lies in understanding how individuals and groups can navigate the often difficult, sensitive, and inherently unpleasant dynamics of conflict while preserving their shared connections. This inquiry calls for a reimagining of conflict, not merely as a problem-solving process aimed at achieving mutual agreement but as an opportunity to restore and heal relationships. Furthermore, this perspective emphasizes the potential for conflict to serve as a transformative process, fostering the elevation and deepening of shared connections across interpersonal, organizational, and international contexts.
Aligned with this year’s thematic focus—Communication to Elevate—this exploration seeks to illuminate the role of communication in healing and strengthening relational bonds during the conflict process. Specifically, we aim to examine how conflict and communication can transcend its traditional functions and become a vehicle for fostering relational resilience, growth, and elevated connection.
Several overarching questions emerge from this endeavor, cutting across diverse conflict scenarios: How can communication serve to elevate and deepen shared connections during moments of conflict? What communicative patterns and strategies threaten the stability and integrity of these connections? Lastly, how can stakeholders across various domains be encouraged to reconceptualize conflict in ways that prioritize and value the preservation and enrichment of shared relational bonds? By addressing these critical questions, we aim to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between communication and conflict, highlighting pathways for relational healing, elevation, and transformation.
NOTE: There is also a call for general submissions to this division; these often explore topics in conflict management, negotiation, mediation, and bullying. Peace and Conflict Communication scholars study processes and effects of communication using a variety of research methods, concepts, and pedagogical or andragogical approaches to understand and promote peace in personal, organizational, local community, national, and global contexts. They ask that submissions to the PCCD closely align with the overarching conference theme. The deadline for general submissions is 31 March 2025.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 