Tag: Profiles

Polina Ivanova Profile

ProfilesPolina Ivanova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, in Germany.

Polina Ivanova

 

Her research interests lie in the areas of migration and migrant integration, focusing on international students, refugees and asylum seekers, and highly skilled migrants. She is also interested in intercultural communication, particularly in the context of higher education. Her work primarily centres on Japan, with comparative analyses extending to Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her recent books include Civil Society and International Students in Japan: The Making of Social Capital (Routledge, 2023) and Refugees and Asylum Seekers in East Asia: Perspectives from Japan and Taiwan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Work for CID:

Polina Ivanova will be participating in an expert group for the Center.

Yehuda Silverman Profile

Profiles

Yehuda Silverman is a peacebuilding pracademic (practitioner/academic) who specializes in conflict prevention, analysis, and transformation. He is currently an Instructor at Northwestern University’s Civic Education Project (in the US) and occasionally teaches at Brock University (in Canada).

Yehuda Silverman

At Acquaint, he serves as a Cultural Exchange Assistant, with an emphasis on cultivating partnerships to foster inclusivity on their free online global platform, where people engage in one-on-one conversations with individuals from over 100 nations. He has also developed and facilitated micro-courses on intercultural communication, along with mentoring many participants.

He is additionally a Facilitator at Civic Synergy and the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy in collaboration with AMIDEAST, and a Transatlantic Educators Dialogue Fellow at the University of Illinois: European Union Center. He also mentors emerging peacebuilders through UNESCO Global Youth Community, Initiatives of Change, and United People Global. He previously had a postdoctoral academic appointment as the Faculty Diversity Fellow at Ursuline College, where he developed and taught the course Intrapersonal Peace and Conflict Prevention.

Some of his research interests connect directly to his previous United Nations fellowships, which includes being a UNAOC Fellow, UNESCO MGIEP Fellow, and WFUNA Peace Fellow. In these capacities and beyond, he focuses on understanding the root causes of conflict and reimagining peace, particularly in transforming education. His specialization also comprises advancing autoethnography in the peacebuilding field to cultivate social cohesion. Yehuda’s Ph.D. is in Conflict Analysis and Resolution with a concentration in International Peace from Nova Southeastern University, and he is also a certified Facilitator in Intercultural Dialogue from the UN Habitat and Kingian Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation from the University of Rhode Island.

Selected publications:

McIntyre, S., & Silverman, Y. (2024). Reimagining the 9/11 aftermath: Transforming violent extremism in a case study about youth, prevention, heritage, and resiliency. In L. Lixinski & Y. Zhu (Eds.), Heritage, conflict, and peace-building (pp. 206-223). Routledge.

McIntyre. S., & Silverman, Y. (2024). Cultivating social cohesion through conflict transformation in educational environments. Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference, 2(1), 9-18.

Silverman, Y. (2020). The dynamics of intrapersonal conflict resolution. The Eurasia Proceedings of Educational and Social Sciences, 17, 18- 23.

Lee, K. S., Silverman, Y., Fouda, I., Stalter, S., Corvalán, A., Ferreira, E., & Cvetković, K. (2019). Recommendations made by the alumni of UNAOC programs to the United Nations Envoy on Youth, UNAOC, Summary Report.

Silverman, Y. (2018). Addressing the root causes of violent extremism: Analyzing intrapersonal frameworks to avert radicalization, United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, Final Report.

Georgakopoulos, A., Duckworth, C., Silverman, Y., & Redfering, K. (2017). Supporting literacy and peace education with youth: A community mentorship study. Peace Studies Journal, 10(2), 24-41.

Work for CID:

Yehuda Silverman participated in the CID/UNESCO focus groups for the Futures of Education Initiative, and is participating in an expert group organized by the Center.

Abdeslam Badre Profile

Profiles

Abdeslam Badre is is a policy development expert, and associate professor at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco.

Abdeslam Badre

His research seeks to analyze current norms that hamper the progress and livelihood of migrants, women, and youth as social groups. He aims to generate evidence-based recommendations to inform national and regional policies, and provide comparable data across borders for key countries in MENA and Southern Mediterranean regions, while addressing the causes of entrenched marginalization and socio-economic transformation. Badre has worked with/for a number of international organizations (including Fulbright, EU-JRC, ERASMUS+, InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), Konrad-Adenaeur Foundation (KAS), Global Young Academy (GYA), Next Einstein Forum (NEF), African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD), ECSA Global, Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS), American Political Sciences Association (APSA), and EDU4U, among others, on various projects. He has also held visiting professor positions and research fellowships at Alfred University in New York, Monterey Institute for International Studies in California, University of North Carolina, all in the United States, as well as Aalborg University in Denmark, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Germany, and Babes Bolyai University in Romania. He is an Editor of the Social Science Section for Elsevier and the journal Scientific African.

Recent publications include North-South Economic Diplomacy: EU-Morocco Free Trade Negotiation (Germany, 2020); Enjeux Culturelles (Morocco, 2020); Voices of Early Career Researchers in and out of the Academy: A Pan- African Perspective (coauthored book, Germany, 2020). Currently, he is a coordinator of and author for the EuroMeSCo Joint Study Group 2021: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: A Comparative Perspective on Maghreb Countries Migration Cooperation with their West African Neighbours.

Work for CID:

Abdeslam Badre is part of an expert group organized by the Center.

Janny H. C. Leung Profile

ProfilesJanny H. C. Leung is Dean of Liberal Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she is also Professor of Law and Society and Professor of English. She was Professor of Linguistics in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her M Phil and PhD in English and Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, an LLB from the University of London, and an LLM from Yale Law School.

Janny Leung

She was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Yenching Institute, the Faculty of Law of McGill University, and a Luce East Asia Fellow at the National Humanities Center (USA).

Broadly speaking, her research has revolved around the study of meaning. Her first line of research, developed from her doctoral work, focuses on the mapping between meaning and linguistic form in the acquisition and processing of language, using a psycholinguistic approach and a quantitative methodology. She was a founding member of the University of Hong Kong’s Speech, Language and Cognition Laboratory.

Her second and most current line of research lies in the emergent interdisciplinary area of language and law. She has published a monograph and a series of papers on challenges, ideologies and paradoxes in multilingual legal practice. She has also written about language rights, legal interpretation, unrepresented litigation, courtroom discourse, legal translation, and representations of law in the media. Her current government-funded project deals with the evolution of law in the modern communication environment.

Selected publications:

Leung, J. (2019) Shallow equality and symbolic jurisprudence in multilingual legal orders. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Leung, J. (2019). Does the world need more Canada? Legal multilingualism and strategic pluralism. Sherbrooke Law Review / Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 47 (2-3), 193-226.

Leung, J., & Durant, A. (Eds.) (2018) Meaning and power in the language of law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Durant, A., & Leung, J. (2016) Language and law. London, UK: Routledge.

Work for CID:

Janny Leung wrote a guest post on COVID-sensitive kanji.

Melita Garza Profile

Profiles

Melita M. Garza is associate professor in the journalism department in the Illinois College of Media at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana.

Melita GarzaShe is an American journalism historian who studies news as an agent of democracy, specializing in English- and Spanish-language news, the immigrant press, and coverage of underrepresented groups. Garza is the author of the award-winning They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression (University of Texas Press, 2018). They Came to Toil examines English- and Spanish-language news coverage of immigrants during the longest economic downturn in the United States. She is a founding faculty member of TCU’s interdisciplinary department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES). Her work has been published in Journalism History, American Journalism, and the Howard Journal of Communications.

She earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012 after two decades reporting for the Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg News, and the Los Angeles Times. At the Chicago Tribune, she pioneered the paper’s ethnic affairs beat, and covered immigration, among other topics. Dr. Garza also holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Harvard University. She teaches journalism history, media literacy, business journalism, and diversity and the media.

Work for CID: Melita Garza serves on the CID Advisory Board.

Yecid Ortega Profile

ProfilesYecid Ortega is a Ph.D. candidate in the program of Language and Literacies Education (LLE) and the specialization program in Comparative International, and Development Education (CIDE) at OISE – University of Toronto, Canada.

Yecid Ortega

His general research interests are within decolonial critical ethnographic and case study approaches to research. Yecid explores how globalization, capitalism and neoliberalism influence language policy decision-making processes and their effects on classroom practices and students’ lived experiences. He has over 20 years of experience in the field of language teaching in Colombia, USA, and Canada and has worked with teachers in curriculum and syllabus design. His research looks at how plurilingualism and pluriculturalism (PLPC) juxtaposes with concepts of race and his most recent work is related to the English language teaching using social justice lens in different international contexts. His also interested in community-based approaches to understanding the lived experiences of immigrants and refugee secondary students from international perspectives.

Work for CID:
Yecid Ortega has served as a reviewer for translations into Spanish.

Sasho Ognenovski Profile

ProfilesSasho Ognenovski (Ph.D.) is a Communicologist, writer, and theater director. He is President of PERUN ARTIS, an Association for Art and Multiculturalism, in Bitola, North Macedonia.

Sasho Ognenovski

His primary interest is in the multicultural landscape and environments, especially researching the so-called “invisible nations,” that is, those communities without a nation-state, displaced around the world. His doctoral research was in Public Relations.His professional career can be divided into two streams: artistic and scientific. Sasho is a writer and translator with five poetry collections (a sixth in production), four children’s plays staged in theatres in Macedonia, two plays for adults, of which one has been translated and published in the USA, and one novel (published in 2019), with a second in production. He also translates between English, Serbian, and Bulgarian.

In addition to PERUN ARTIS, he is chief editor of Literary Elements, a literary magazine dedicated to the world contemporary literature, produced in Macedonian in hard copy format; next year he expects to produce an electronic version in English.

Sasho earned his M.A. from the Institute of Sociological, Political and Juridical research in Skopje, and his Ph.D. from the Institute for Media and Communications of the Faculty of Law “Iustinianus Primus” in the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, in Skopje, North Macedonia. He worked as an assistant in the Pedagogical Faculty in Bitola, and as a professor in the Slavic University “G. R. Derzhavin,” also in Bitola. As a scientist, he attended numerous congresses, conferences, and symposia dedicated to multiculturalism around the world, including Gothenburg, Oslo, Milan, Sofia, Belgrade, and London. He has collaborated with societies and foundations such as SIETAR, NIC, and SPARK. He has had short study visits at York University in Toronto, Canada, and The University of Santiago del Compostela, Spain. He has published in multiple scientific journals in North Macedonia and abroad. In the field of Communication and Media, he has written articles connecting theatre as a medium with other types of media. He writes literary, film, and theatre reviews for Macedonian and Serbian magazines and portals, and he is a member of ITI (International Theatre Institute) and to IACT (International Association of Theatre Critics). He’s also a member of the Macedonian Scientific Association in Bitola.

Partial listing of publications and conference papers:

Ognenovski, S. (2019). The Ransom Riggs’ trilogy of the peculiar children as a hybrid of realism and fantastics. The Childhood, International Center for Literature for Children Zmaj’s Children Games, Novi Sad, Serbia, ISSN 0350-5286

Ognenovski, S. (2019). Children’s creative reception of a theatre play: The contribution to the preschool education in the achieving of the goals in the education. The College for Preschool Educators, Aleksinac, Serbia, ISBN 978-86-7746-755-5

Ognenovski, S. (2018). Multiculturalism and Macedonian cinematography. SIETAR, Fondazione Intercultura Onlus, Milan, Italy, ISBN 978-88-942887-1-1.

Ognenovski, S. (2017). The migrating movements and the multicultural landscape in the post-communist countries. Annual of Institute of Sociological, Political and Juridical Research, 41(2).

Ognenovski, S. (1999). Paralinguism in the theater and international theater festivals. Journal of Intercultural Communications.

Work for CID:
Sasha Ognenovski has reviewed translations into Macedonian.

Shanoy Coombs Profile

ProfilesShanoy Coombs is a decade rich Development Communications Specialist based in the Caribbean with local, regional and international expertise spanning several industries in the public, private and International NGO sectors.

Shanoy CoombsHer MA research at the University of Sheffield, UK focuses on the role of Intercultural Communication in Multi Stakeholder platforms and will complement her prior work experience in multicultural and intercultural settings.

Shanoy has consulted with International organizations such as the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization for Jamaica, The Bahamas and Belize as well as the European Union and has worked on projects funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Caribbean Development Bank and Grand Challenges Canada.

She has also served as Communications Chairperson for the United Nations Communications Group Caribbean cluster where she provided oversight for joint United Nations activities in the caribbean that require communications support as a part of the One UN Strategy.

Shanoy also teaches Public Speaking sessions via the University of Sheffield’s student union and has led communications training sessions on behalf of several clients.

For more about her visit her website.

Publications prepared on behalf of organizations while an employee:

Work for CID:

Shanoy Coombs won a prize in the 2020 CID Video Competition. She also wrote KC98: Essentialism.

Salma T. Shukri Profile

Profiles

Salma T. Shukri (Ph.D., University of Denver) is an instructor of communication in the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Salma ShukriHer areas of interest include intercultural communication, interpersonal communication, and conflict management. Specifically, she explores how communication—specifically, how we communicate about difference—serves as both an instrument and a barrier to inclusion and belonging. Along with having taught several intercultural communication courses at various institutions, Salma has also held several non-academic, professional positions with local and international organizations in the field of conflict mediation and cross-cultural dialogue.

Additionally, Salma engages in methodological research, advancing qualitative research methods through her work. She has published this work in top-tier journals, including the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication and in Text and Performance Quarterly. 

Recent publications:

Shukri, S. & Willink, K. (in press). Interpretive discernment: Feeling our way toward a performative understanding of interviewing. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 9(3).

Shukri, S. (2019). Review of Muslim women and white femininity: Reenactment and resistance. Text & Performance Quarterly, 39(4), 414-416. doi: 10.1080/10462937.2019.1657935

Willink, K., & Shukri, S. (2018). Performative interviewing: Affective attunement and reflective affective analysis in interviewing. Text & Performance Quarterly, 38(4), 187-207. doi: 10.1080/10462937.2018.1526409

Willink, K., Gutierrez-Perez, R., Shukri, S., & Stein, L. (2014). Navigating with the stars: Critical qualitative methodological constellations for critical intercultural communication research. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 7 (4), 289-316. doi: 10.1080/17513057.2014.964150

Work for CID:
Salma Shukri translated KC22: Cultural Identity, KC33: Moral Conflict, KC35: Media Ecology, KC53: Conflict Management, and KC68: Social Justice  into Arabic. She also has served as a reviewer for Arabic translations.

Emilija Jovanovska Profile

ProfilesEmilija Jovanovska is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho. She is also an ESL and English Composition instructor at the Global Students Success Program and the English department at the University of Idaho.

Emilija Jovanovska

Additionally, she enjoys the privilege of contributing to World education by teaching English Composition at the University of the People to students from all over the world. Her research interests are in the fields of Intercultural Communication, Academic Socialization, Leadership Studies, EdTech, and Curriculum Design. Her project “Language Socialization of Balkan Graduate Students into the Universities of the Palouse” was given an award by the Palouse Culture and Language Symposium, held annually at the University of Idaho.

Since one of her passions is educating educators, she dedicates part of her time to creating professional development projects for university educators, such as Navigating Academic Culture at US Universities by International Students, a lecture that she collaboratively delivered to the faculty at the University of Idaho and published on the Navitas Teaching & Learning website.

For more information about her, please follow the link to her website.

Work for CID:

Emilija Jovanovska has translated KC2: Cosmopolitanism, KC3: Intercultural Competence, and KC5: Intercultural Communication into Macedonian, and participated in a CID/UNESCO focus group for the Futures of Education Initiative.