Journal of Dialogue Studies Vol 9

During this paper I will consider the role of Faith-Based Organisations (FBOs) in connecting and resourcing communities through partnerships with the public sector, and the potential for partnerships of these kinds to inform curation of new spaces of hope, engagement, and practice, in a post-COVID society, using intra-communities dialogue. First, I will explore intra-communities dialogue (ICD). I will present ICD as the process of mapping and listening to shared matters of concern and socio-material practices that emerge from secular and religious actants who share and shape the same postsecular public spaces. Second, I will argue that to use ICD a new understanding of FBOs is required. Therefore, I will consider the deficit of understanding of FBOs within the literatures and propose a synthesis of different typologies of FBOs through the production of a new paradigm of FBOs, called Spaces of Hope. Third, I will use Spaces of Hope to open up the socio-material nuances of space within three FBOs, Mustard Seed, Beacon Community and Old Town Church (OTC) and address four matters of concern for FBOs: different practices, different spheres, different scales and different beliefs. This will show how Spaces of Hope can resource and support ICD within and between FBOs. Finally, in light of the capacity of Spaces of Hope to engage in ICD and map postsecular spaces, I will conclude by questioning how Spaces of Hope might support postsecular partnerships through ICD within a post-COVID society.

Read this articleCite

Dialogue is a concept replete with great potentiality for the re-orientating process towards the more inclusive transformation of society, which indeed the Covid-19 pandemic has made even more urgent. This study verifies this statement, while also identifying the specific factors which have had a meaningful impact upon the engagement of people, embedded in their various communities. The undertaken research shows that these factors –related to the agents’ own role in the community, to their personal relationship with others and to their own perception of the general context– are interdependent and intersubjective. Indeed, feedback loops have emerged with an evident impact on the well-being of the community members and, therefore, of the community itself. The analysis of the data shows that a genuine dialogic culture, defined as a culture of acknowledging differences, embracing them with respectful openness and facilitating their expression through a non-hierarchical attitude, fosters positive feedback loops and, therefore, the development of sustainable communities. Communities, on the other hand, in which exclusion is tolerated place themselves in danger. The widespread reproduction of subtle discriminating practices, which were observed also in the framework of this study, remain thus alarming. Underlying the research design is indeed the formation process of international online communities in the context of an online simulation game. The crossmatching of the individual reflections of the members and the observation of their behaviour shows how their actions and interactions are entangled with handed down power structures, such as racism and sexism. Establishing an inclusive community implies therefore one fundamental condition: tackling the reproduction of power dynamics through conscious power-sharing.

Read this articleCite

Dialogue has a unique place in Dutch society. In 2001, in response to the 9/11 attacks in New York, the first Day of Dialogue was held in Rotterdam. The event was organised by the municipality with the aim of creating greater social cohesion and mutual understanding between local people of different backgrounds, using the principles of Appreciative Inquiry (AI). In 2008, this became a week-long event, which has since been replicated in 100 municipalities throughout the Netherlands by a network of local dialogue organisations. In some cities, these organisations now hold dialogue meetings all year round. Utrecht in Dialogue (UID) is one of these organisations, working with government, business and civil society partners to create events that speak to Utrecht residents since 2008. True to its mission, UID welcomes loyal participants, first-timers, speakers of different mother tongues, long-time Utrecht residents, newcomers: anyone who wants to engage in this dialogue practice. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, UID moved all dialogues online and continued to coordinate Zoom dialogues on at least a weekly basis. Thanks to the online format, a growing contingent joined meetings from other places in the Netherlands and even abroad. Several participants would never attend a face-to-face meeting. Yet even as the virtual format gives rise to a more geographically dispersed audience, UID remains highly local in its focus on community cohesion and mutual understanding; the community-building strategy is centred around the city districts, as are the topic choices and partner network. This article explores these structured online dialogues as a place-based practice, by means of ethnographic observation of ten dialogue meetings. The research thus contributes to an understanding of the role of online dialogue in creating local community cohesion, of online and offline dialogue and to the specific practice of AI dialogue in the Netherlands.

Read this articleCite

This paper explores an argument for community-situated spaces of encounter – acting as thresholds – between community and academia, through which: learning can be enhanced; a greater sense of identity and efficacy can be fostered, and a defined agency can be enabled. This proposition prioritises a dialogic relationship in a shared ground of agency and discourse, whose potential is reinforced through a rediscovery of the local arising from the COVID pandemic. The rediscovery of the local has pushed civic-minded universities pre-existing interrogation of their community-based learning practice in the context of marginalised communities; a key challenge is how to foster a dialogic relationship with a community when academia is not really part of the community? A concurrent question considers the spatiality of such practice? Proposed here is a situating of the civic university directly within the community offering opportunity for everyday dialogue on and experience of local life. This proposal re-sites the university’s civic initiatives outside the academy in community-based campuses. Central to this campus would be the coming together of the community and academia to envision and action joined-up approaches to multivalent issues. This initiative would simultaneously afford an innovative education while enabling students and staff to contribute to the wider community; at the same time the community campus would serve as an active agent in bringing the community together and reshaping its future. The community campus would act as a dialogic threshold between academia and the community, a space grounded in its social nature, mutual embrace and exchange.

Read this articleCite

Protracted conflicts like those in the South Caucasus and Moldova stand as examples of the limits of international peace-building practices in addressing conflict transformation in various ethnic-marked conflicts, and in promoting reconciliation across the deep divides that these long-standing conflicts have generated within and among societies. A major challenge to supporting the transformation of protracted conflicts is that the conflict settings have been solidified as a new normality, and the polarised division between neighbours and within societies has been institutionalised. To address these challenges, we conceptualise cross-regional dialogue as a third-party facilitated process that brings together actors from various protracted conflict settings thus ensuring a greater diversity of opinions and societal standings. Cross-regional formats of dialogue, in our view, provide a space for suspending the dominant mutual antagonisms and for creative thinking about new horizons for the shared future. They enable participants and organisers to break away from the problem-solving paradigm as well as from the bilateral format of dialogues concentrated on one conflict, and thus they can be seen to provide safe spaces for dialogue in the midst of protracted conflicts.

Read this articleCite

The classroom can be a community of dialogic practices where personal and cultural identities are constructed and negotiated and a key context for integration of children with migrant background. However, for the first time in many decades, children across Europe, and globally, have been removed from their primary contexts of socialisation in the public health scramble to contain the pandemic, primarily through extended lockdowns. The consequences of the management of the COVID-19 pandemic on the cohesion of schools as intercultural communities of learning impacted on teachers, children and families. Public health measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic affect the quality of children’s learning experience and deny access to the classroom as a space of socialisation and intercultural dialogue. Developing from the analysis of 50 focus groups with children in Italian and English primary and secondary schools, this contribution discusses the perspective of children on how the management of the pandemic: 1) impacted on the learning experience, in particular the progression of children with limited access to suitable spaces and resources for home learning; 2) affected the networks of social relationships and intercultural dialogue that have the classroom as their substratum.

Read this articleCite

As the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic intensified, displaced learners faced increasing challenges to accessing the learning online that they were attending offline before the start of the pandemic. It is these learners’ and their teachers’ dialogic relations which are at the core of the Covid-19, migration and multilingualism (CV19MM) project, run in partnership with stakeholders offering language lessons in Jordan. In our paper, we respond to the question ‘Did the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns result in new types of community connections as refugee learners and teachers came together online?’ We examine NGOs’ shift to working online and the shift in data collection procedures when recording refugees’ ability to navigate online spaces through the lens of New Literacy Studies which foregrounds the analysis of culture and identity in the literacy practices of migrants (Barton and Hamilton 2000). Darvin and Norton (2015) recognise that the spaces in which language socialisation takes place have become increasingly deterritorialised. We focus on the dialogic engagements which emerged from increased online interactions, the dialogic pedagogies which one NGO draws on in its work with displaced learners and teachers and the challenges faced when carrying out research with refugee communities during Covid-related restrictions. We end with discussion of how our findings shed light on working with stakeholders across borders and how this approach enhances research on language, dialogue and migration when carrying out impactful research which is of use to NGO stakeholders.

Read this articleCite

How can we learn and experience dialogue within and between communities? Inspired by the methodological ideas of David Bohm, William Isaacs and Paulo Freire, as well as by the professional experiences of the first author of this article in the field of education and the environment, our aim in the present text is to present in detail a method, which has been developed, tested, and analysed in recent years, to learn and experiment dialogue, which can be used within and between communities. The method is composed of two major interdependent cycles that alternate. The first is a reflexive one, without agenda, composed of four practices that constitute a junction and a transformation of the procedures of suspension of assumptions, by Bohm and Isaacs, and codification and decodification, by Freire, with the purpose of stimulating interpersonal understanding and connection. The second is a deliberative one, with agenda, inspired by Freire’s ideas of dialogic collaboration and the principles of educative intervention for sustainability, as suggested by several authors in the field of education for sustainability and social learning, with the purpose of promoting structural changes. We recognise that there is still a long way to go to verify the efficiency of the proposed method and that numerous research and experience reports are needed based on its application.

Read this articleCite

This paper engages in a reflection on how, and under what conditions, dialogue can contribute to local transformative change towards climate neutrality, based on the case of the German city of Marburg which has engaged in a collaborative governance process to steer climate mitigation since 2019. The research findings are drawn from the work of the 2020-created Franco-German Forum for the Future. The project seeks to increase dialogue among states, citizens, and the economy to foster learning, mutual understanding and ultimately collaboration for an inclusive socio-ecological transition. Hence, dialogue plays a central role in both objectives and the methodology in our work with the city of Marburg, based on a collaborative action-research approach. Central to the Forum’s approach are different forms of tailored dialogic engagements, including reflection sessions with our research partners, interviews and theme-based peer-to-peer dialogues between various local initiatives to create space for experience-sharing and knowledge transfer. In this paper, we show how dialogue can create space for self-reflection among stakeholders to recognise some of the structural barriers of designing and implementing local climate policy. Findings offer insights into how multi-stakeholder exchanges can ease conflict in working relationships, by making divergent role understandings and institutional constraints more explicit. We also reflect on the framework conditions dialogue requires to enable collaborative implementation of local policies.

Read this articleCite

Read this articleCite

Read this articleCite