Profiles – Page 15 – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Fred Dervin Profile

Fred Dervin is Professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dervin also holds several professorships in Canada, Luxembourg and Malaysia. In May 2014 he was appointed Distinguished Professor at Baoji University of Arts and Sciences (China). Dervin has been visiting professor in Australia, Canada, China, Estonia, France, Hong Kong, and Portugal.

Dervin specializes in intercultural education, the sociology of multiculturalism and student and academic mobility. He defines his work as transdisciplinary, critical and reflexive. Inspired by E. Said (1993), he believes that “(…) giving up to specialization is, I have always felt, laziness, so you end up doing what others tell you, because that is your speciality after all.” His current definition of his approach to the ‘intercultural’ reads as follows: it is about giving the power to the powerless – ourselves included – to become aware of, recognize, push through and present/defend one’s diverse diversities, and those of our interlocutors”.

Dervin has widely published in international journals on identity, the ‘intercultural’ and mobility/migration in English, Finnish and French. He has published over 20 books: Politics of Interculturality (co-edited with Anne Lavanchy and Anahy Gajardo, Newcastle: CSP, 2011), Impostures Interculturelles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012) and Linguistics for Intercultural Education (co-edited with Tony Liddicoat, New York: Benjamins, 2013). The following volumes are forthcoming: Researching Identity and Interculturality (with Karen Risager, Routledge, 2014), Chinese Students and Scholars in the Global Community: Challenges of Integration (special issue of Frontiers in Education, 2014), Cultural Essentialism in intercultural Relations (with Regis Machart, Palgrave, 2014). Fred Dervin is the series editor of Education beyond borders (Peter Lang), Nordic Studies on Diversity in Education (with Kulbrandstad and Ragnarsdóttir; CSP), Post-intercultural communication and education (CSP) and Palgrave Studies on Chinese Education in a Global Perspective (Palgrave with Xiangyun Du). He is the Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Education For Diversities. His website: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/dervin

Larry E. Smith Profile

Larry E. Smith is President of Christopher, Smith & Associates, LLC, (CSA) a leadership institute of Hawaii. Before joining CSA, he was Dean and Director of Education and Training at the East-West Center in Honolulu.

He is the co-founder (with Braj B. Kachru) of the professional journal, World Englishes: Journal of English as an International and Intranational Language. He was the first President, the first Executive Director and presently the Chief Financial Officer of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE), Inc. His research interests include the intelligibility, comprehensibility, and interpretability of world Englishes across cultures as well as the consequences of the spread of English world-wide. He currently leads a program for university students called “Living World Englishes.” His most recent publications can be found in the second edition of The Handbook of World Englishes, published by Wiley/Blackwell.

NOTE: Larry Smith, co-founder of the International Association for World Englishes and also of the journal World Englishes, passed away December 13, 2014. He authored KC34: World Englishes. An obituary is available here.
-Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz

Ronald L. Jackson II Profile

Ronald L. Jackson II (Ph.D., Howard University) was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He grew up in a very proud working class family.

His mother worked during the day in the financial aid office at the University of Cincinnati, and then went to her second job as a courier for UPS. On the weekends she worked as a non-commissioned officer in the U.S. Army where she retired as a Sergeant First Class. His father is an ordained minister who worked as a salesman and, much later after earning his doctorate degree, as owner of a tutoring business.

In articles like “Mommy there’s a N***** at the Door” published in the Journal of Counseling and Development Ron recalls countless stories of how he was mistreated as a child and young adult in Cincinnati because of the mere color of his skin. This compelled him to write about racism and White privilege. It also led him to explore the social construction of identity. After dabbling a bit in theories of identity Jackson decided he would create a couple of his own. Because he was so enamored with Stella Ting Toomey’s work around identity negotiation he developed a theory that would try to make sense of what people are actually negotiating when they say they are negotiating cultural identity. With feedback from two of his mentors, Bill Starosta and Molefi Asante, he coined “Cultural Contracts Theory.” He reasoned that it is actually one’s worldview that is at stake in these daily and instantaneous identity negotiations. As he began to unravel the publicly assigned meanings inherent in his own identity as an African American male, he wrote extensively about Black masculinities, beginning with an essay called “Black manhood as xenophobe” published in the Journal of Black Studies. The logical next step was to conceptualize this, so he along with one of his Penn State students Celnisha Dangerfield created the Black Masculine Identity Theory.

Currently, Ron Jackson is professor of communication at University of Cincinnati, and author of 14 books. He has previously served on the faculty in the departments of communication at Xavier University, Shippensburg University, Penn State University, and University of Illinois. He is also developing digital education materials for popular consumption. His most recent books include Interpreting Tyler Perry, Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (which just won a Will Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Book in the Comics Industry), and Communicating Marginalized Masculinities. Ron is also a candidate for NCA 2nd Vice President. You can read more about his work at www.jacksonfornca.com.

Work for CID:
Ron Jackson wrote KC47: Cultural Contracts Theory.

Kristen Cole Profile

Kristen Cole (PhD, University of New Mexico) is Assistant Professor of Critical Health Communication at San Jose State University in California.

Dr. Cole’s research and teaching span Rhetoric, Media and Cultural Studies. Her interests include constructions of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, citizenship and immigration, conflict and community, and science and technology. She investigates formations of identity and enactments of agency within marginalized communities and how these are represented in publicly mediated spaces. She utilizes rhetorical, critical/cultural, feminist, and queer approaches to media texts in order to understand the ways power is exerted and negotiated and the ways change is enacted. Her research and teaching focus on how communication at interpersonal, social, and cultural levels restricts and promotes a multiplicity of lived experiences. Her recent publications can be found in the Sage Handbook of Conflict Communication, Review of Communication and Rhetoric of Health and Medicine.

Work for CID:
Kristen Cole wrote KC33: Moral Conflict.

S. Lily Mendoza Profile

S. Lily Mendoza (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is a native of San Fernando, Pampanga in Central Luzon, Philippines.

She grew up in the small barrio of Teopaco next door to calesa drivers with their handsome horses and their backyard stables. She shared with her five siblings duties feeding pigs and raising chickens and collecting horse manure for fertilizing the small family garden. Although she grew up colonized (tutored by American missionaries and Peace Corps Volunteers and Filipino teachers who taught strictly in English), she retains memories of sitting at her Lola’s feet listening to stories, making sampaguita leis, and watching her Apu Sinang prepare her betel nut chew with much fascination. Currently, she is a fourth year student at Martin Prechtel’s Bolad’s Kitchen School dedicated to “teaching forgotten things, endangered excellent knowledges, but above all a grand overview of human history…in the search for a comprehension regarding the survival of unique and unsuspected manifestations of the indigenous soul.”

Besides learning how to grow a small vegetable garden with her indigenous theologian hubby in the heart of Motown (Detroit), she is also a scholar and associate professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, with research interests in critical intercultural communication; indigenous studies; communication and ecology, cultural studies; colonial and postcolonial discourse and theory; theories of identity and subjectivity; cultural politics in national, post- and trans- national contexts; race and ethnicity; and the politics of cross-cultural theorizing.

Lily is especially known in the Philippines and beyond for her pathbreaking work on indigenization and indigenous studies. Her first book publication, Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities (Routledge, 2002; Philippine revised edition by UST Publishing, 2006) is the first comprehensive articulation of the movement for indigenization in the Philippine academy and is referenced widely in the fields of history, Philippine Studies, Asian American Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, and postcolonial and cultural studies. She is the recipient of several distinguished scholarship and top paper awards in intercultural communication and was elected Vice Chair (2011-2012), and consequently, Chair (2012-2013) of the International and Intercultural Communication Division, a division of the National Communication Association in the United States.

Prior to her current position as Professor at Oakland University, Lily served as Associate Professor and Graduate Director at the University of Denver where she headed the doctoral program in Culture and Communication for many years. Currently, she is part of the Core Group of the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS) headquartered in Sonoma County, California (the term “babaylan” referring to an indigenous healing tradition in many parts of the Philippines). CfBS is a Filipino and Filipino American movement dedicated to keeping alive the indigenous wisdom and healing traditions of the ancestors. Her current (co-edited) book publication, Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory (2013) is especially dedicated to this work.

To access some of her writings, check her out on Academia.edu

Work for CID:

Lily Mendoza wrote KC31: Indigenous, and translated it into Kapampangan and Tagalog.

Francesca Gobbo Profile

Francesca Gobbo has been Professor of Intercultural Education at the University of Turin (Italy), where she also taught Anthropology of Education until retiring in 2014.

She was Fulbright grantee (1969), Research Assistant at UC Berkeley (1973-74), Research Assistant with the Carnegie Foundation at Yale University (1974), Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (1995) and Harvard University (2001). She has lectured at the University of Reading (UK), Charles in Prague (CZ) and Amsterdam (NL).

She studies and teaches contemporary educational issues from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective that combines educational theory with methodological and theoretical approaches from the fields of cultural anthropology and anthropology of education. She coordinates research on Italian schools attended by immigrant pupils. Her own ethnographic research has been carried out among Italy’s “internal minorities” such as the Albanian speaking minority of Calabria, the Waldensian religious minority in Piedmont and the occupational minority of travelling fairground and circus people. Her contribution to the understanding of these Italian minority group’s meaning of education and schooling experience is relevant to the widening of the discourse and research on intercultural education, as it questions definitions of multiculturalism and interculture as exclusive results of the migratory flows, underlines the problem of power balance (or lack of it) as a fundamental one for an intercultural perspective and singles out the political as well as educational strategies that foster the idea of a homogeneous national culture while continuing to produce minority culture’s persistence.

Her long standing professional interests in the cultural and social changes obtaining in complex societies (particularly in the North America and in European countries) and in their schools developed first from her studies and research in anthropology of education at UC Berkeley, and it continued with her participation into associations such as the “International Association for Intercultural Education” (IAIE) and the “European Education Research Association” (EERA). She was elected Board member of IAIE in 2005 and 2010. In EERA she was linkperson for the network “Social Justice and Intercultural Education” from 2003 to 2007, and was one of the founding members of the network “Ethnography”.

She was Associate Editor in Chief of Intercultural Education from 2005 to 2007, and again in 2014. She is on the editorial boards of the following journals: Intercultural Education, European Educational Research Journal, Ethnography and Education, and International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning.

Her involvement into educational research at the international level is indicated by her participation into the following Comenius projects:
2007/2009 – DG Education and Culture proposal “Strategies for supporting schools and teachers to foster social inclusion”
2007/2009 – Comenius P7 Multilateral proposal “Teacher In-Service Training for Roma Inclusion” (INSETRom)(134215-2007-IT-COMENIUS-CMP)
2004/2006 – Comenius 2.1 Project entitled Effective teaching and learning for minority-language children in pre-school.
1997/1999 – Comenius 3 Project entitled Cooperative Learning in Intercultural Education in Europe (“CLIP”).

In the field of intercultural education and anthropology of education, she has published Radici e frontiere (Padova, 1992), Pedagogia interculturale (Roma, 2000) and A proposito di intercultura (Padova, 2011). She edited Antropologia dell’educazione (Milano, 1996), Cultura Intercultura (Padova, 1997), La quotidiana diversità (Padova, 1998, with M. Tommaseo Ponzetta), Multiculturalismo e intercultura (Padova, 2003), Etnografia dell’educazione in Europa (Milano, 2003), Etnografia nei contesti educative (Roma, 2003, with A. M. Gomes), Processi educativi nelle società multiculturali (Roma, 2007), La ricerca per una scuola che cambia (Padova, 2007), L’educazione al tempo dell’intercultura (Roma, 2008), Il Cooperative Learning nelle società multiculturali (Milano, 2010), Antropologia e educazione in America Latina (Roma, 2010, with C. Tallé).

In English she edited Social Justice and Intercultural Education (Stoke on Trent, 2007, with Bhatti, Gaine and Leeman). She contributed chapters to the Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education Interculturalism (J. Banks ed., Sage, 2012) , Education and Dialogue (T. Besley & M. Peters eds., Peter Lang, 2012), Anthropologies of education (K. Anderson Levitt ed., Berghahn Books, 2011), Travellers, Nomadic and Migrant Education (P. Danaher, M. Kenny and Leder eds., Routledge 2009), International Handbook on Urban Education (Pink and Noblit eds., Springer, 2007), Transmission of Knowledge as a Problem of Culture and Identity (Kučera, Rochex, Štech eds., The Karolinum Press 2001), Educational Research in Europe, Yearbook 2000 (Day, van Veen eds., Garant 2000), and (with R. Ricucci) to International perspectives on countering school segregation (Bakker, Denessen, Peters, Walraven eds., Garant 2011). She is Section Editor (with Kathryn Anderson-Levitt) for the Smeyers P., Bridges D., Burbules N. C., Griffiths M. Eds., International Handbook of Interpretation in Educational Research Methods, Springer, Dordrecht, 2015 forthcoming, to which she also contributed a chapter (“People ‘of passage’: an intercultural educator’s interpretation of diversity and cultural identity”). She will contribute a chapter to a forthcoming anthology by W. Pink & G. Noblit Eds, Education, Equity and Economy: Studies Toward the Future of Socially Just Education, Springer, forthcoming, and act as Section Editor for Western Europe of the second edition of the W. Pink & G. Noblit Eds., International Handbook on Urban Education, Springer, forthcoming. She has published many articles in international journals.

Cynthia Stohl Profile

Cynthia Stohl is a Professor of Communication and an affiliate faculty member in the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1982. Prior to joining the UCSB faculty in 2002, Professor Stohl was the Margaret Church Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Communication at her alma mater. A Fellow of the International Communication Association, a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association and Past President of the International Communication Association, Professor Stohl is recognized as a leading scholar and teacher in the area of globalization and organizational communication.

The author of two award winning books and more than one hundred articles and book chapters, Professor Stohl’s research focuses on global organizing and “connectedness in action.” Her studies are grounded in questions of social responsibility and empirically explore the ways in which organizations and their members constitute models of citizenship and develop stakeholder networks in the new media environment. Her most recent book Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change published by Cambridge University Press (2012) was co-authored with UCSB Professors Bruce Bimber and Andrew Flanagin.

In 2007 Professor Stohl was a recipient of the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award and in 2011 she received the New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women Scholar Award. She has been a visiting professor in Denmark and New Zealand and a featured speaker at conferences and universities throughout the world.

Work for CID:
Cynthia Stohl co-authored KC27: Globalization.

Robyn Penman Profile

Robyn Penman (PhD, University of Melbourne) is an independent communication scholar and consultant to government on communication and social policy matters.

Robyn Penman She was a Founding Director of the Communication Research Institute of Australia (1987-2000) and an Adjunct Professor in Communication at the University of Canberra (1999-2005). Robyn is a past President (1985-6) and Life Member of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, has served on the International Communication Association board (2002-3) and is a Visiting Senior Member, Linacre College, Oxford (1987). She was also the Associate Editor of the Australian Journal of Communication (1984-2003) and has served on the editorial boards of Communication Theory and Human Communication Research. She is currently a board member of the CMM Institute, Co-Director of the Cosmopolis2045 project, and General Editor of CMMi Press.

Robyn has devoted her scholarly career to the development of a practical-theoretic approach to understanding communicating as a relational practice. She has been equally as focused on asking questions about what makes for good communicating, especially in the public, civic sphere, and how this understanding can be used to make better social worlds. She is the author of five books—Communication Process and Relationships, Not the Marrying Kind (with Yvonne Stolk), Reconstructing Communicating: Looking to a Future, Making Better Social Worlds (with Arthur Jensen) and Justice in the Making: Relating, Participating, Communicating—along with many book chapters and journal articles.

Robyn welcomes contact via email.

Work for CID:

Robyn Penman has written KC4: Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), KC8: Public Dialogue, KC15: Cultural Pluralism, KC29: Dialogue Civility, and KC37: Dialogic Listening. She has also written two guest posts, Feeling Felt: The Heart of the Dialogic Moment? and Dialogue in the Interests of Justice. And she provided a book review of The coordinated management of meaning: A festschrift in honor of W. Barnett Pearce. Finally, she served as initial graphic design consultant for CID, establishing the format for Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue.

Andrew R. Smith Profile

Dr. Andrew R. Smith is Professor and Graduate Program Head in the Department of Communication Studies at Edinboro University (PA), where he has been teaching since 1993.

He also coordinates the web-based Graduate Certificate in Conflict Management. He served, for the 1998-99 academic year, as Senior Fulbright Fellow in Communication and Culture at the Faculty of Letters, Department of English, Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco.

He returns regularly to Morocco to conduct seminars and research as a member of Research Group on Language, Culture and Development at the Center for Doctoral Research, Mohammed V University, supported by various granting agencies. In 2011 he was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to continue this work. Other faculty appointments include Villanova University, Southern Illinois University, Lewis and Clark College, and The Tokyo Center for Language and Culture. In 2009 he was inaugurated as a Fellow in the International Communicology Institute.

He is coeditor (with Lenore Langsdorf) of and contributor to Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty and the Philosophy of Communication (SUNY Press), and recently authored the monograph Epistemology and Ethics in Human Science Research (a primer for graduate student research). He has published essays in Communication Theory, Human Rights Quarterly, Cultural Critique, Russian Journal of Communication, Human Studies, Text and Performance Quarterly and other journals and edited volumes. Recent publications concern freedom of expression, assembly and movement in authoritarian regimes, intercultural conflict, and public discourse in Morocco specifically. Forthcoming essays address issues pertaining to the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” with regard to the mass displacements of people of many nationalities throughout North Africa and the Middle East, and the increasing presence of “cyber-baltagiya” that sabotage websites of dissidents in the Arab world generally. Current research focuses on developing a theory of intractable conflict from a communicological perspective. Many of his papers are available for download.

Andrew teaches courses in intercultural and intractable conflict, language and human conduct, the language of war, freedom of speech, communication ethics, critical/interpretive and qualitative research methods, and related courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He has directed over 30 Masters theses and co-supervises dissertations through the Fulbright joint supervision program in association with the Moroccan American Center for Educational and Cultural Exchange.

Work for CID:

Andrew Smith wrote KC18: Intractable Conflict.

Paola Giorgis Profile

Paola Giorgis teaches English Language, Literature and Visual Arts in Italian high schools and holds a PhD in Anthropology of Education and Intercultural Education.

Paola Giorgis

She is co-founder and member of wom.an.ed – women’s studies in anthropology and education. Her main interest interest regards a critical and intercultural approach to Foreign Language Education, that is, how Foreign Language Education can be used to develop an awareness of different languages, representations and cultural conceptualizations able to favor intercultural communication. All through her teaching years, she has observed many episodes which confirm the capability of (foreign) language(s) to foreground many aspects connected both to personal and collective identities, dynamics and representations, displaying how learning and using a non-mother tongue can question, challenge and problematize meanings, assumptions and representations taken-for-granted, thus remoduling the perception and the representation of the self and others. Therefore, she believes that Foreign Language Education should undergo further several radical shifts, definitively abandoning an essentialist view of the target language/culture to foster a more nuanced, and critical, view of the relation between language and culture.

In her PhD research, she investigated cross-linguistic interactions among adolescents in multicultural and plurilinguistic contexts from the perspective of Linguistic Anthropology, Intercultural Education, and Critical Linguistics and Pedagogies. Her findings show that cross-linguistic interactions reshape personal and collective identities, constantly moving and recombining the (narrated) borders of language, identity and ethnicity: bottom-up language practices can facilitate intercultural encounters and create spaces in-between for trans-cultural affiliations, and are also able to reveal aspects linked to language creativity and to the personal agency of speakers as social agents.

She also focuses on the issue of power connected to languages, and on how Critical Pedagogies can address them, examining in particular the challenges and the opportunities advanced by the English language(s). At the intersection of global phenomena and local appropriations, of norms and variations, of homogenization and subversion, English has triggered fierce debates on the linguistic, sociocultural, political, ideological and pedagogical implications of its widespread, but also on the potentially creative and critical appropriations from below that it can elicit. She assumes that, precisely for its multifaceted quality and the controversies it arises, English language(s) can represent the ideal site to observe how individual and collective representations of culture and identity move through language affiliations and appropriations. She is also interested in what could be called ‘Applied Literary Criticism in L2’, as she examines the experience of the literary text in L2, and in particular of Poetry in L2, as an open space for a renewed imagination able to disclose one’s emotions and empathize with others’, in a way less conditioned by memories and (self-appointed or given) roles connected to one’s linguacultural background.

She is affiliated with ALTE (Association of Language Testers in Europe), ESTIDIA (European Society for Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Dialogue), IAIE (International Association for Intercultural Education), I-LanD (Identity, Language and Diversity), lend (linguistica e nuova didattica), Researching Multilingually at the Border, and VAC (Visual Arts Circle). She is referee for Rhetoric and Communications E-Journal, an online journal on Applied Linguistics, and a referee and book reviewer for Intercultural Education, a journal published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis

She has published the monograph Diversi da sé, simili agli altri. L2, letteratura e immaginazione come pratiche di pedagogia interculturale (Different from One’s Self, Similar to Others: L2, Literature & Imagination as Practices of Intercultural Education), Roma: CISU (2013), as well as chapters in collective volumes, articles in international journals, and participated at several international conferences. She has published a book as well:

Giorgis, P. (2018). Meeting foreignness: Foreign languages and foreign language education as critical and intercultural experiences. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

More recent publications:

Giorgis, P. (2025). Otherness/Othering. In • P. Moy (Ed.), Oxford bibliographies in communication. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Giorgis, P. (2023). Critical Cultural Linguistics (CCL): Challenging the cultural (re)production of Otherness. In F. Polzehagen & M. Reif (Eds.), Cultural linguistics, ideologies and Critical Discourse Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Giorgis, P., & Valente, A. C. (2023). Intercultural Education, Otherness, and Collaborative Literacy. In Other Words Dictionary: A Case Study. In N. Palaiologou (Ed.), Rethinking intercultural education in times of migration and displacement. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

and she co-edited a special issue on Rhetoric of Otherness for Rhetoric and Communications Journal, 50 (2022).

Paola Giorgis may be contacted via email.

Work for CID:

Paola Giorgis is author of KC51: Critical Discourse Analysis, and KC88: Critical Cultural Linguistics, and translator of KC1: Intercultural Dialogue, and KC51: Critical Discourse Analysis into Italian, as well as co-translator for KC14: Dialogue, KC37: Dialogue Listening, KC39: Otherness and The Other(s), and KC81: Dialogue as a Space of Relationship. She also serves as a frequent reviewer for Italian translations.

She has written 3 guest posts: On translation as an intercultural practice; Intercultural communication or post-cultural communication? Reflecting on mistakes in intercultural encounters; and Teaching EFL with a hidden agenda: Introducing intercultural awareness through a grammar lesson.

She was interviewed about critical discourse analysis, translation as an intercultural practice, and intercultural dialogue.

Her students won 2nd place in the 2018 CID Video Competition, and prepared a video about the process, “The Making of…”: A Path between Cultures to help competitors in the 2019 competition. In 2020, a different cohort of students prepared the video We Rise, in response to COVID-19.

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