Call for Papers
ESTIDIA (European Society for Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Dialogue)
3rd ESTIDIA Conference
Dialogue as Global Action: Interacting Voices and Visions across Cultures
25-26 September 2015
Department of Modern Languages for Specific Purposes and Communication Sciences
‘Ovidius’ University, Constanţa, Romania
in partnership with
University of Cyprus, Nicosia
Zayed University, UAE
Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences, University of Bucharest, Romania
ISA (International Sociological Association)
AISLF (Association Internationale des Sociologue de Langue Française)
Ovidius University (Constanta, Romania), a modern and vibrant research university on the Black Sea coast, welcomes dialogue-oriented researchers and practitioners to the 3rd ESTIDIA conference, to be held on 25-26 September, 2015. The conference serves as a discussion forum for researchers and practitioners to showcase their dialogue-oriented work on current societal and community-related issues, and on methodological approaches to dialogue analysis. The aim is to bring together senior and junior scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines and professional orientations to critically explore, through dialogue, different perspectives on human thinking, communication strategies, interpersonal relations, socio-cultural traditions, political processes and business interactions by means of theory-based and practice-driven investigations.
Conference Theme
Due to its engaging, emulating and exploratory nature, dialogue is an essential form of human communication, action and interaction. According to Vygotsky (1978), any true understanding is dialogic in nature. As social human beings, we participate in a wide range of dialogues in various contexts and at different levels, in a shared search for increased understanding of issues and phenomena, for questioning ideas and actions, for joint problem-solving. These multi-layered dialogues have dramatically increased with the widespread use of social media, which now enable members of any social, gender, ethnic, racial or cultural group to raise and make their voices heard while articulating current concerns and addressing critical issues of inequality, discrimination, socio-political underrepresentation and misrepresentation. The aim of this conference is to take the local and global dialogue to a higher level by extending its scope and empowering role as a springboard for critical reflection and self-reflection, for in-depth issue problematisation, for multi-voiced interpersonal resonance, for constructive polyphony of intersecting, contradictory and complementary voices. In the Bakhtinian (1981) theoretical tradition, these social voices not only represent the world, they also convey societal norms and moral values. In other words, multiple voices express not only how people see the world, but also how they feel about it.
For a better understanding of how meaning is created through the mechanisms and strategies of dialogue, it is important to investigate how voices are woven in discourse, how themes and voices intermingle in a polyphonic way. One way of understanding the shifting qualities of individual voices as multiple agencies or roles is provided by Goffman’s (1981) concept of participation framework (based on the distinction between author, animator and principal). At the same time, as has been pointed out by Couldry (2010), having a voice is not enough: we need to know that our voice matters, i.e. it has legitimacy. Hence, following Wertsch (1991), we need to realize that in internalizing forms of social interaction, the individual takes on and interrelates with the voices of others, which accounts for the complexity of ‘multivoiced’ dialogues. While joining in a dialogic polyphony of voices, each voice shares a particular experience, viewpoint, or sets of attitudes to reality, all of which are instrumental in shaping actions, interactions and relationships. As a result, dialogue is the locus where different beliefs, commitments, ideologies come into contact and confront each other through the intermediary of intersecting voices.
Authors are invited to present papers on a broad spectrum of research topics (both discipline-specific and multi-disciplinary) that include, but are not restricted to the following:
– Glocal voices in inclusive or exclusive dialogues
– Multiple voices crisscrossing in online dialogue
– Voicing viewpoints in multimodal communication
– Dialogue genres in multi-party interactions (debates, disputes, controversies)
– Voices in dialogue across time and space
– Converging vs. diverging voices in dialogue
– Gendering voices in public and/or private dialogue
– Voices shaping inter-ethnic dialogue
– Voices interacting in cross-cultural dialogue
– Voices that clash, dialogues that break down
– Voices in institutional and non-institutional dialogue
– Inclusive vs. non-inclusive dialogue across cultures and continents
– Public and private voices in sustained dialogue
– Face-to-face and/or virtual trust-building dialogues
– Speaker roles vs. listener roles in dialogic interactions
– Competing and collaborative voices in dialogue
– Legitimizing and delegitimizing voices in dialogue
– Polyphony of voices in harmonious or disharmonious dialogue
– Intertextuality in multi-voiced dialogue
We welcome contributions from diverse fields of enquiry, including linguistics, media studies, journalism, cultural studies, psychology, rhetoric, political science, sociology, pedagogy, philosophy and anthropology. More…