Dialogic Engagement Research Articles

The influence of dialogic engagement and prominence on visual product placement in virtual reality videos

To identify effective strategies of visual product placement in virtual reality (VR) videos, an experiment was conducted to examine whether dialogic engagement, prominence, and perceived control of VR videos affected brand perception and recall. The experiment revealed that perceived control of VR videos significantly influenced interest in a brand and willingness to consider it. Prominence moderated the effect of dialogic engagement on brand recall. Dialogic engagement was positively associated with a co-creating experience. The findings suggest that product placement in VR videos resembles that of interactive media. Unlike traditional films, prominent placement is generally preferred in VR videos. Prominent placement that is highly engaging maximizes brand exposure. The current study is of significance since it differentiates VR videos from other similar interactive and/or visual media, extends the concept of dialogic engagement to VR, examines perceived control, co-creation, visual prominence, and brand perception in a new context, and offers strategic recommendations.

The interlingual translation between premodern China and Japan: Bai Juyi’s poetry and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji

ABSTRACTMurasaki Shikibu (c. 973 or 978 – c. 1014 or 1031) was a Japanese court lady, who wrote The Tale of Genji about a millennium ago. Her Genji is the most popular and widely read fictional narrative in the Japanese literary canon. Genji has been revered as expressing the aesthetics and identity of Japanese. Bai Juyi (772–846), one of the most admired poets from China’s Tang Dynasty (618–907), left numerous verses and influenced East Asian Literature. This paper intends to explore Murasaki Shikibu’s dialogic engagement with Bai Juyi to show a journey of literary translation and creation. It is argued that Murasaki Shikibu transforms the senses or the essence of Bai’s poetry into a poetic realm for her prose. The author argues that the interlingual translating practice of Murasaki Shikibu is not simply a matter of borrowing from literary sources; it is a rewriting that goes beyond indigenous aesthetics and then expands the possibilities for literary creation. This approach will also enable researchers of translation studies to trace tangible evidence of influence as a thread that connects traditional Japanese and Chinese literary studies with contemporary translation theories.

“I Solemnly Swear that I Am up to No Good”: Mapping My Way through TESOL Teacher Education

ABSTRACTThis article documents my 2-year sojourn from voicelessness – in the face of normalizing discourses about race, privilege, and difference in teacher education scholarship – to an authentic voice capable of addressing normalizing discourses from a position of inclusivity. This journey has involved my face-to-face and even mediated engagement with a critical community of human scholars. In difference to most self-study work, it has included my dialogic engagement with literary (Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa) and popular (J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series) textual critical partners. In highlighting the role of these textual partners in my self-study research, I draw upon the field of cognitive poetics and reader response theory to push against the boundaries of self-study practice and methodology.

"Who's There?": A Vulnerable Reading of Hamlet.

Vulnerable reading asks how literary works can be useful as companions to people who suffer; its focus is literature as solace. Questions of why we should turn to Shakespeare to express suffering, and why to poetic literature, are considered. An exemplary reading of Hamlet discusses three levels of vulnerable reading: the play as mirror in which readers can see reflections of their own troubles and gain new expressive possibilities for themselves; the play as training in acquiring a new voice to resist these troubles; and the play as a pedagogy of engagement in dialogue with others in relations of care. Hamlet proclaims that the "readiness is all." How does the play mentor that readiness?

Stakeholder engagement via Facebook: an analysis of world’s most popular museums

Over the last few years, social media (SM) have been emphasised as a means for organisations to foster stakeholder relationship with particular stress on their potential to promote community building and dialogic engagement with online audiences. These potential benefits of SM have been claimed also with respect to cultural organisations. However, the available research evidence on SM and museums suggests that museums still struggle to exploit these tools to their full potential. This paper adds further evidence on this issue by empirically investigating whether museums are using Facebook to promote follower engagement using a sample of top-attended museums worldwide. Results suggest that the frequency and content type of posts correlate to some extent with the degree of follower reactions. Nevertheless, sample museums predominantly use SM to publish promotional contents and as a result fail to achieve a true 'dialogic' follower engagement.

An occupational therapy community of practice within pediatric acute care: fostering professional, social and cultural capital in resource challenged settings

Introduction: The need to address the way professional knowledge is produced and delivered, has led some occupational therapy scholars to advocate for the creation of communities of practice (CoP) where practitioners may find a generative environment to engage in reflection with others, to collectively share their knowledge, and to develop professional practice knowledge. CoPs may result in the development of social capital by strengthening practitioners’ social connections and advance cultural capital by improving collaborative forms of reflection and knowledge exchange. Objective: This article presents findings from a participatory action research project regarding the creation of a (CoP) with the aim to implement and examine its affordances among pediatric occupational therapists working in acute care in a Brazilian context. Method: This participatory action research involved nine occupational therapists in 10 face-to-face meetings and in virtual interaction through an e-learning software platform. The community of practice group sessions were recorded, transcribed and coded. The hermeneutic and dialectic method was used as the basis for interpreting the results. Results: Five major themes concerning the affordances of the Occupational Therapy CoP in this context were identified: (i) dialogic engagement; (ii) reflective opportunities; (iii) a sense of belonging; (iv) affirming professional identity; (v) cultivating professional practice knowledge. Conclusion: Developing a CoP in occupational therapy may be a fruitful way to cultivate professional, social and cultural capital amongst occupational therapists who work in resource challenged settings.

The Opportunities and Challenges of Using Photo-Elicitation in Child-Centered Constructivist Grounded Theory Research

In the last three decades, there has been a growing interest in listening to children’s voices in child health research. Ensuring an appropriate level of dialogical engagement with children calls for participatory methods. Auto-driven photo-elicitation interviews (PEIs) are a powerful approach to obtain rich data from children. This article discusses the opportunities and challenges of using auto-driven PEIs in a health-related child-centered constructivist grounded theory study conducted in a poor-resourced country. Our experience shows that while the approach is effective for facilitating co-construction of data with children and for addressing the ethical and methodological issues associated with child-centered research in the context of a developing country, it is narrow on its own. Broadening the term to “picture-elicitation interviews” to allow for the inclusion of other forms of images would make the method more adaptable and inclusive. This would give children the flexibility of choosing pictorial options that best suit them and also help child participants and researchers address the practical and cultural challenges associated with the use of auto-driven PEI in a poor-resourced country.

Disintegrating the Hyphen: The “Judeo-Christian Tradition” and the Christian Colonization of Judaism

Jewish dissent to the concept of a “Judeo-Christian Tradition” reveals it to be a political assemblage offering conditional, incomplete access to structures of white, western Christian power. While the concept offers pragmatic benefits to Jews, it does so at the expense of Jewish distinction from Christian beliefs and purposes and to the exclusion of Islam and Muslims. The supersessionist foundations of the “Judeo-Christian” concept inspire and perpetuate Christian settler-colonial domination of Jews and Judaism. Destabilizing this concept promotes new levels of liberative dialogical engagement, moving us beyond present systems of theological, political, and economic injustice.

Water is life – an indigenous perspective from a Standing Rock Water Protector

This chapter is structured as a dialogic engagement. Dialogue presents itself as more compatible with the exploratory, flowing character of water and with the preferred rhetorical approach of an indigenous mode of discourse. Speaking from a Lakota perspective, and specifically female perspective, Jewett situates the concept of water commons within a wider narrative of oppression, which is both gendered and racist. The control of water is equated with the drive to control women, indigenous ‘others’, and material and cultural resources more generally. The specific cultural perspective she expresses centres on notions of water as a relative to which/whom we must relate in a mutual engagement of care and responsibility. We are within a living web of beings dependent on each other and intimately connected to each other. Water cannot but be a communal phenomenon connecting the individual to all of life across space and to our ancestors and descendants across time. Water flows in and out of us. This sense of visceral connection with water is exemplified in the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota pipeline. The re-affirmation of indigenous perspectives revived by this engagement is explored and the argument made that the recovery of these primary modes of relating to natural elements is crucial to healing current ecological and social stresses.

Research as hope-intervention: Mobilising hope in a South African higher education context

It is written that hope is contagious: once ignited it gains momentum, and is self-sustaining. My research project sought to stimulate dialogue and critical thinking with second year education students about what hope and hopeful schools mean to them as future teachers. The aim of this critical transformative study was to explore how the research process itself, i.e. engaging the students through multiple participatory visual methods (via collages, drawings, Mmogo-method, photovoice) on the topic of hope, might mobilise a ‘practice of hope,’ thereby mobilising student-led hope initiatives in the Faculty of Education. The key findings of this on-going study show that bringing hope explicitly into the research dialogue mobilised the participants’ hope on a personal, relational and collective level. Further, discussions took an agentic turn as the participants formed the Hopeful Vision Gang, designed a logo and slogan, and initiated a hope activity to inspire fellow students and staff before having to face the challenge of exams. This study shows that threading hope with participatory dialogic engagement holds positive transformative value in teacher education programmes, and thus has implications for the possibilities of student-led agency through ‘research as hope-intervention.’ Keywords: agency; dialogic engagement; higher education; hope; humanising pedagogy; participatory visual methodology; positive psychology; research-as-change; transformative student citizenship

Engaging and Co-authoring with Science Publics Online: Interactive Documentaries as Emergent Models of Science Communication

Online science communication can often be categorized into various expository formats (graphics, videos, or written articles) that are accompanied by brief spurts of dialogic engagement (commenting on social media, tweets, etc.). However, such fleeting examples of digital engagement lack what is needed for durational interactions between experts and publics in non-prescribed formats. We argue that a new form of web-based documentary, which designs for participatory sensibilities, can help fill these gaps by aligning with the goals of Horst and Michael’s emergence model of science communication (2011). By exploring the interactive web documentary, ​Aurator,​ as a case study, we discuss the benefits and challenges afforded by participatory media to science communication practitioners and scholars who may consider interactive media projects as new sites for investigation.

What’s hard work got to do with it? Diversity course impact on meritocracy beliefs and dialogue about race

ObjectivesDiversity courses aim to help students navigate a pluralistic society, and meritocracy beliefs are thought to be central to this effort. The purpose of this study was thus to explore the impact of diversity course enrollment on both meritocracy beliefs and interracial dialogue attitudes. MethodsBoth at the beginning and end of the semester, quantitative survey data were collected from 435 student respondents: 274 were enrolled in one of two non-diversity courses, 147 participated in one section of an Intercultural Communication course, and 14 were cross-enrolled. The survey included measures of prescriptive and descriptive meritocracy, as well as two measures of dialogue assessed in relation to testimonies of social suffering provided by two African-American students: speaker trust and imagined dialogue receptivity. ResultsData confirmed that, among racial outgroup participants, descriptive and prescriptive meritocracy are connected to racial dialogue measures in antagonistic ways. In addition, the diversity class succeeded in decreasing student beliefs in descriptive meritocracy, increasing meritocracy discrepancy, expanding speaker trust, and engendering greater dialogue receptivity relative to the control classes. Lastly, changes in both meritocracy discrepancy and diversity course enrollment independently predicted changes in the racial dialogue measures. ConclusionMeritocracy is a multidimensional, ideological belief that appears linked to racial dialogue engagement in its prescriptive form and avoidance in its descriptive form. Findings underscore the need to distinguish between these forms of meritocracy, encourage the use of meritocracy discrepancy scores, and confirm the promise of diversity course enrollment.

Psychology and human mobility: Introduction to the special issue and ways forward.

In this introduction to the special issue on psychology and human mobility, we begin by outlining the particularities of the European sociopolitical context to which the studies included in this special issue refer. We discuss internal European mobility, overseas migration to the European Union, the refugee ‘crisis’, and its sociopolitical implications for the European Union. Subsequently, we discuss the ways that the different studies relate to and extend existing literature to new directions, focusing on three different facets of immigration addressed by the studies: (a) the ideological resources used in discourse to achieve certain political ends in relation to immigration, (b) the ways that a dialogical engagement with the social other is established or blocked, and (c) the perspectives of mobile people themselves in experiencing different forms of immigration. As a conclusion, we argue that the studies contribute to the field of human mobility by offering a methodologically plural, processual, and critical analysis of immigration and by showing four different directions as ways to advance the field further. These are: (a) the importance of understanding processes rather than states in the study of immigration, (b) the value of studying discursive practices but also moving beyond discourse to achieve methodological pluralism, (c) the need to engage with multiple perspectives involved in immigration and to understand how they relate to each other, and (d) the need to problematize the taken-for-granted categories that researchers use in studying immigration (e.g., locals/migrants, us/them).

Bernard Manin lector de la democracia antigua

Este artículo analiza las fuentes que Bernard Manin recupera de la filosofía antigua y sobre las que sustenta los argumentos de una parte de su teoría política, contenida fundamentalmente en su obra: Los principios del gobierno representativo. Tanto en sus reflexiones como en el diálogo con otros, Manin volverá en ocasiones, casi siempre de forma poco explícita, a lecturas de la democracia ateniense sobre las que surgen controversias por el sentido de su trabajo, manteniendo de ese modo su vigencia para la comprensión del presente. En este artículo se mostrará que tanto el autor como su obra están atravesados por una tensión intelectual de un marcado carácter filosófico y político y que, entre dicha tensión y las disputas por una definición de qué es una buena democracia, se dibuja un espacio que arroja luz sobre tales controversias. Las controversias, concluiremos, no son resultado de malos entendidos; o si lo son, cobran sentido en el propio texto de Bernard Manin.

Universal, Normative, and Indispensable: Exploring the Emphasis on Eurocentric Literary-Critical Perspectives in the Criticism of the Black Zimbabwean Novel

Literary-critical discourse on the Black Zimbabwean novel constitutes one of several platforms on which the self-other dialectic in Zimbabwe finds expression. This is especially the case at the level of literary-critical theory where the tendency is to advance arguments that frame Afrocentric and Eurocentric literary-critical theories as mutually exclusive. In this article, I explore the scholarship of Flora Veit-Wild and Ranka Primorac on the Black Zimbabwean novel with a view to discoursing the ways in which it can be argued that in their discussion of the corpus, the two scholars are anchored in the Eurocentric framework. In pursuing this objective, I focus on the critics’ reliance on Eurocentric literary-critical theories and apparent discomfiture with Afrocentric benchmarks in their criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel. Thus, I argue in this article that while the version of critical discourse discussed here speaks to the complex and contradictory ways in which cultures find places of translation and dialogic engagement where history is made, the overall impression created by Veit-Wild and Primorac in their criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel is that Eurocentric perspectives are universal, normative, and indispensable.

From ‘listener’ to ‘speaker’ museum visitors: guest book as a means of dialogue

ABSTRACTMuseum visitor studies acknowledge guest books as a potential source of information and a means of dialogue both among visitors and between visitors and museum staff. Nevertheless, the guest book is still under-used in the Italian museum context. Assuming this gap, this study aims at enlarging the understanding of that audience development method by an exploratory case study. More specifically, the guest book related to the main temporary exhibition, managed by an Italian Civic Museum in Lombardy, has been carried out through sentiment analysis. Findings introduce the taxonomy of ‘non-active’, ‘pre-active’, ‘active’ and ‘pro-active’ users, with the last two categories representing dialogue and visitor engagement in the museum evaluation process. Additional research paths on the correlation between the guest book form and the active users’ attitude are suggested. The case study also encourages more investigation on accountability and reporting within museum discourse.

Shattering the silence: dialogic engagement about education protest actions in South African university classrooms

ABSTRACTThis study explores how academics create safe spaces in university classrooms to engage in dialogue about education protest actions in South Africa. Utilising the research methodology of narrative inquiry and the theoretical framework of Pedagogy of Compassion, this paper explores how academics reflect on their responses to change and protest actions and how they co-construct knowledge with students in light of this change. Data capture included a mix of focus group interviews, participant reflections, field notes and a researcher journal and was analysed by means of the content analysis method. Findings reveal that lecturers had to navigate through the institutional quagmire and were confronted by polarised thinking of students. Furthermore, it seemed that student protest actions had a negative effect on lecturers. However, despite the tide of negativity and resistance, lecturers became transformative intellectuals and created safe spaces for students to engage in dialogue and to shatter the ‘normative’ silence.

Emotional Experiences and Reflexive Leadership Development

In this paper we ask: “What patterns of formational leadership learning are developed through reflexive engagement with emotional experience, and how do these patterns vary within the dimensions of individual versus dialogic engagement, and everyday versus confronting emotional experiences”? We employ a relationally reflexive method in which the authors take dual roles as researcher participants. We build on a framework of emotional experiences and reflexive learning that is comprised of: attention to emotions as triggers of reflexive practice; discussion, as reflexive engagement to explore and open up aspects of emotional experiences; transgression, experiencing extreme emotional experiences that disrupt everyday attention; and realization, recovering from traumatic circumstances through reflexive personal emotional work. We conclude that difficult emotional experiences are likely to have the potential to support useful leadership development learning, but learning from them requires resilience to ‘stay with’ distressing experiences longer than would be normal and that this can be aided by the engagement of others who are supportive, yet constructively critical. The leadership development lessons that can be supported may be closely tied to difficult contexts as the development of personal resources to cope with and lead others in coping with in similar traumatic circumstances. But perhaps more usefully, individuals may develop better practices of attention that enable them to address situations – at least sometimes – before uncontrolled, traumatic circumstances can unfold.

The uneven terrain of dialogical encounters and the spatial politics of listening

The contributions to this forum have highlighted how the limits to scholarly dialogue are multiple and have had serious consequences for the ways in which knowledges are produced and debated in the academy, the media, and wider society. In this rejoinder to the commentaries on our article, ‘The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue’, we embrace the stance of affirmative critique in order to constructively engage with the important issues that our interlocutors raised. In particular, we consider questions of dialogical recognition, refusal, and the politics of listening as well as the need to strive not only to engage in dialogue but also to work toward changing the terms and terrain of dialogical engagement in order to produce a more equitable and just space of dialogical encounters in the academy.

Public sociology, social justice and struggles in the era of austerity-and-crises

This article examines the potential for dialogic engagement between the academic disciplines of sociology and social work, on the one hand, and political/social struggles for equality and social justice, on the other. Particular strands of sociology engage with, connect to and articulate struggles of marginalised, oppressed or exploited communities. The article draws on global debates to examine the potential for a public sociology of social justice and equality, which is intimately connected to social work. It illustrates how knowledge from struggles and what is labelled as mobile commons can and must inform sociology, social work and emancipatory praxis.