Established March 2010 | Location Washington, DC, USA | |
The Center for Intercultural Dialogue (CID) was established by the Council of Communication Associations (CCA) in March 2010. Intercultural dialogue occurs when members of different cultural groups, who hold conflicting opinions and assumptions, speak to one another in acknowledgment of those differences. As such, it forms "the heart of what we study when we study intercultural communication." The goal of the CID is double: to encourage research on intercultural dialogue, but to do so through bringing international scholars interested in the subject together in shared intercultural dialogues about their work. The CID is creating an international network, including both scholars and practitioners. The CID broadly represents scholars in the discipline of Communication, but has a specific mandate to directly serve those who are members of any member associations of CCA. As of 2016, these include:
Contents
When CID was founded in 2010, two other associations were members:
History
The CID was created as a direct result of the National Communication Association's Summer Conference on Intercultural Dialogue, held in Istanbul, Turkey, July 22–26, 2009. Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, in her role as Chair of the International and Intercultural Communication Division of NCA, served as conference organizer, and Nazan Haydari, based at Maltepe University in Istanbul, served as local arrangements coordinator. Other members of the organizing committee were Donal Carbaugh (US), Tamar Katriel (Israel), Kristine Fitch Muñoz (US), Yves Winkin (France), and Saskia Witteborn (Hong Kong). Support for the conference was provided by both NCA and Maltepe University. Buzzanell (2011) describes one of the plenary presentations in some detail, and Leeds-Hurwitz (2015) provides a detailed description of the unusual conference design The Summer Conference resulted in a preconference at the International Communication Association convention in Singapore in 2010, organized by Evelyn Ho. The first publication resulting from the presentations appeared in 2011, in a special issue of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, edited by Prue Holmes and Shiv Ganesh. An edited collection resulting from the Istanbul conference appeared in 2015, edited by Haydari and Holmes. Broome & Collier (2012) praise the increased attention paid by intercultural scholars to intercultural dialogue as a specific focus, using the CID as evidence for this attention.
Participants at the Summer Conference wanted a way to encourage further international connections for intercultural research, and so a proposal was brought before the Council of Communication Associations' Board of Directors at their March 2010 meeting to create the Center for Intercultural Dialogue, which was approved. Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz was appointed Director of CID at that same meeting. The first Advisory Board was approved at the September 2010 meeting, and included: Donal Carbaugh, William Evans, Nazan Haydari, Barbara Hines, Janice Hume, Leena Louhiala-Salminen, Charles Self, Michael Slater, Katerina Sténou and Valerie White. New members of the Board were appointed in 2014. Together Board members represent all of the CCA member associations (through overlapping memberships), as well as the applied context of international non-profits. The CID website now serves as a clearinghouse for information on intercultural dialogue topics, and facilitates connections between international scholars by sharing information on publication opportunities, international conferences and positions, graduate school programs, and researcher profiles.
In December 2013, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the CID and the Waterhouse Family Institute, housed within Villanova University’s Department of Communication in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The two organizations intend to cooperate on, and seek joint grant funding for, several projects over the next few years. In March 2014, the CID co-sponsored a conference with the University of Macau, entitled "Roundtable on Intercultural Dialogue in Asia." A videotape briefly summarizing that event was prepared, and published online.
Dialogue generally, and intercultural dialogue specifically, have been discussed at multiple conferences, and served as the topic of consideration by many organizations over the past few years, becoming a key term and a "preferred form for human action," and Carbaugh specifically lists this CID as one such effort. Several other organizations have either the same or a similar name. The CID described in this entry is the only one designed to serve the Communication discipline specifically, and to facilitate the study of intercultural dialogue as a research topic by creating an international network of scholars. It is for this reason that the CID's slogan is "Bridging Cultures Through Research."
Publications
The CID began publishing Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue, a set of one page descriptions of technical vocabulary related to intercultural dialogue in various ways, in February 2014. The first few terms were: intercultural dialogue, cosmopolitanism, intercultural competence, coordinated management of meaning, intercultural communication, intercultural capital, and intergroup relations dialogue. As of November 2014, terms in languages other than English were added, including yuan (Chinese), conscientização (Portuguese), uchi-soto (Japanese), testimonio (Spanish), and interkulturelle Philosophie (German), among others. As of June 2016, concepts were added in translation into a wide range of languages, including Arabic, Belarusian, Chinese, German, Indonesian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Logo
Since the CID grew out of the NCA Summer Conference on Intercultural Dialogue, all concerned parties agreed to continued use of the logo File:Center for Intercultural Dialogue logo.jpg designed for that event by Ozer Karakus of Maltepe University. The multiple colors bound together represent cultural diversity and the need for intercultural dialogue. The bridge represents the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, connecting Europe to Asia.
Social Media
Due to the efforts of Minh Cao, then Assistant to the Director of the CID, a social media presence was established by 2014, and by 2016 there were thousands of followers in one platform or another. This includes a YouTube channel, a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, as well as Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.