Idea Of Dialogue Research Articles

From Outsider to Participant: Developmentally Disabled Dialogue in Socially Engaged Art

How can the museum incorporate the voice of the developmentally disabled artist? How can the very idea of dialogue be reconsidered through the interactions that the museum curator might develop with artists that have atypical cognitive abilities? I trace these questions through an examination of a video and the circumstances around it, entitled CREATE: The Artists Are Present (2011), which showcases a series of interviews with developmentally disabled artists from Creative Growth in Oakland, Creativity Explored in San Francisco and National Institute for Art and Disability (NIAD) in Richmond, California. The interviews were conducted by self-identifying physically disabled artists as a reaction against the lack of self-representation of the interviewed artists in the large-scale exhibition, CREATE (2011), co-curated by Lawrence Rinder, Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives (BAMPF), California, and Matthew Higgs, Director of White Columns, New York. This paper argues that the very nature of artist/curator dialogue and socially engaged art practices in the museum can be deepened and enriched by much more variegated forms of communication amongst those typically occupying the margins.

On interlistening and the idea of dialogue

Among the many analytical categories bequeathed by linguistics to the study of dialogue, some inadvertently conceal more than they reveal. In addition to instantiating such fictions as speaker and listener or langue and parole, these categories tend to privilege the study of syntax over semantics, utterance over gesture, speaking over listening, and words over everything else. Moreover, our underlying models tend to depict dialogue spatially as a series of sequential exchanges between individual subjects wherein voices are construed in terms of positions, utterances as message-objects, and time as a unidirectional linear sequence. To open up this seemingly solid spatiality, this article reckons with the polymodal, polyphonic, and polychronic aspects of human communication by introducing a concept I call interlistening: movements of dense interactional synchrony wherein listening, speaking, and thinking co-occur with rhythmically textured and cacaphonously con-fused temporality.

Amateur Work: Reader Participation and Dialogism in Late-nineteenth-century Domestic Design Advice

ABSTRACTThis article offers a rereading of Victorian domestic design advice that emphasizes its dialogic qualities rather than presuming its didactic or discursive status. Previous work on late nineteenth-century design advice literature has rightly identified its distance from everyday practice, but various publications demonstrate that domestic design was mediated by readers and often developed through an ongoing conversation with them. This article identifies the dialogic apparatus of one late nineteenth-century how-to magazine, Amateur Work (1881–96), edited by Francis Chilton-Young. Adopting Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism (how texts emerge from different authors and “extraliterary” contexts), this article shows how Amateur Work's editor and writers were in constant dialog with their readers, principally through the reader-response column in each issue entitled “Amateurs in Council.” Case studies on bookcase and fernery construction in this section serve as examples of how content was generated out of reader-to-reader interaction, how tips were shared, and how readers adapted advice to their particular circumstances. Such evidence challenges the presumption that readers of domestic design advice were passive, uncritically following prescriptions by authors or reading such literature for entertainment alone.

Dialogue as a Journalistic Ideal

Discussions and practices related to participatory and interactive journalism emphasize the dialogical aspects of journalism. However, throughout history, the idea of dialogue in journalism has taken a variety of forms. This paper places dialogue as a journalistic ideal under scrutiny. Our aim is twofold: first, we map out the development and different functions of the ideal in some decisive eras in the history of journalism and in the current context of digital journalism; second, we present a model of how to best capture and understand the significance of dialogue to contemporary journalism. The model is based on an exploration of philosophical preconditions for dialogue as an ideal in journalism. We will also look at the significance of dialogue in different genres and in interactive dimensions of journalism.

Truth, purification and power

Foucault’s 1970–71 lectures at the Collège de France, The Will to Know, highlight the significance of themes of purity and impurity in Western thought. Reflecting on these themes coincided with the emergence of Foucault’s theory of power. This article presents the first analysis of Foucault’s investigation of purity and impurity in The Will to Know lectures, identifying the distinctive theory Foucault offers of purity as a discursive apparatus addressing correspondence between the subject and the truth through the image of relative integrity or mixture. It then traces Foucault’s subsequent reflections on these themes in his later writings on disciplinary power. The implications of Foucault’s position are considered; the article will close by putting Foucault’s ideas in dialogue with those of Kristeva, and in considering the role that purity and impurity may play in resistance.

A Critique of Dialogue in Philosophical Hermeneutics

The idea of dialogue occupies arguably the most central position in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer 1960/1989). Dialogue is here not understood merely as the conversation between two subjects about something of common interest in a shared medium of understanding, but rather as the foundational phenomenon within which objects and themes, subjects and perspectives, and common interest and shared understanding are grounded. The foundational character of dialogue derives from the fact that all experience is understood to be linguistically mediated, while language as a medium exists in its true and essential form as dialogue. The strongest support for this approach comes from a phenomenological perspective on understanding, i.e. on what really happens when we understand something, when we make sense of something by interpreting it. Bringing together the encompassing and foundational role of dialogue with its concrete origin in the act of interpretation will yield, as I will show, a post- metaphysical concept of understanding as dialogue. Gadamer’s own philosophical-hermeneutic conception of dialogue both suggests and yet misses its full articulation, as our analysis of the idea of dialogue in philosophical hermeneutics, the question of the metaphysical grounds of understanding in language, and the issue of the epistemological significance of dialogue will show.

Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue: Self and No-Self Edited by Irena Kuznetsova, Jonardon Ganeri, and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (review)

Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue: Self and No-Self Edited by Irena Kuznetsova, Jonardon Ganeri, and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (review)

Dialogue and an advocate of dialogue – Dirkie Smit on dialogue

The essay explores Smit’s thoughts on dialogue. In the first instance, the essay reflects on Smit’s conviction on the need for dialogue in all human endeavours. Secondly, it explores Smit’s (together with Leon Fouche) analysis of four dominant discussants on dialogue, namely Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty and Jurgen Habermas. What the essay sees as Smit’s own idea of dialogue in relation to the four discussants is stated in the concluding part of the essay.

Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue: Self and No-Self. Edited by Irina Kuznetsova, Jonardon Ganeri, and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad.

Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue: Self and No-Self. Edited by Irina Kuznetsova, Jonardon Ganeri, and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad.

Constitutional reengineering: Dialogue's migration from Canada to Australia

Foreign sources affect the development of constitutional systems in a variety of ways. In this article, I examine the intentional modification, or reengineering, of foreign constitutional ideas. The study of constitutional reengineering offers insights into how and why actors use foreign constitutional ideas and informs analysis of convergence and divergence among constitutional systems. To highlight the process and implications of constitutional reengineering, I analyze dialogue’s migration from Canada to Australia. Canadians develop the idea of dialogue to differentiate its Charter of Rights and Freedoms from the United States Bill of Rights, suggesting that the Charter facilitates unique forms of institutional interaction, or dialogue, between courts and legislatures on the meaning of rights. Australians appropriate and reengineer the idea, expanding dialogue to include the executive and public and reorienting it to differentiate Australia’s statutory form of rights protection from the status quo ante, namely a system of legislative supremacy. This study of reengineering complicates existing comparative analyses of rights protection in the Commonwealth, which suggest these rights instruments establish a middle ground between the paradigms of judicial and legislative supremacy. First, debates about dialogue in Australia and Canada underscore the difficulty in what it means to establish a middle ground in the context of rights protection. Second, Australia’s reengineered idea of dialogue emphasizes the importance of examining not only which institution gets the final say, the typical means of conceptualizing the middle ground, but also the dynamics of the law making process.

Discovering Sovereignty in Dialogue: Is Judicial Dialogue the Answer to Constitutional Conflict in the Pluralist Legal Landscape?

Legal scholars have been inspired by the dialogic approach and rallied around it as the solution to constitutional conflict in domestic constitutional orders and the transnational legal landscape. This paper aims to show that the gravitation towards judicial dialogue in contemporary constitutional theory misses the point, given the ambiguities surrounding it. My investigation reveals that the dialogic approach does not succeed in guiding the inter-departmental or inter-regime interactions in a way that no single power would exert unilateral domination. The emergence of judicial supremacy in both national and transnational constitutional orders further suggests that underlying those ostensible examples of judicial dialogue is a transfigured conception of sovereignty. As it is the rise of judicial sovereignty that drives the move towards judicial dialogue in contemporary constitutional developments, I suggest that legal scholars shift focus of attention from the idea of dialogue to the enhanced judicial role in the new constitutional era.

Martin Buber, Empathy and Research Practice

Researching religion and spirituality raises issues about the position of the researcher and the relationship between researcher and researched. These can be explored using Martin Buber’s idea of dialogue involving Realphantasie, ‘imagining the real’. Dialogue requires a strong form of empathy, which can take place notwithstanding profound disagreement, whereas a more dialectical progress to agreement is more associated with sympathy, feeling another person’s feelings. Sympathy cannot be required of researchers, but empathy, as described by Buber, is a reasonable expectation of us all.

Dialog as interpersonal synergy

What is the proper unit of analysis in the psycholinguistics of dialog? While classical approaches are largely based on models of individual linguistic processing, recent advances stress the social coordinative nature of dialog. In the influential interactive alignment model, dialogue is thus approached as the progressive entrainment of interlocutors' linguistic behaviors toward the alignment of situation models. Still, the driving mechanisms are attributed to individual cognition in the form of automatic structural priming. Challenging these ideas, we outline a dynamical framework for studying dialog based on the notion of interpersonal synergy. Crucial to this synergetic model is the emphasis on dialog as an emergent, self-organizing, interpersonal system capable of functional coordination. A consequence of this model is that linguistic processes cannot be reduced to the workings of individual cognitive systems but must be approached also at the interpersonal level. From the synergy model follows a number of new predictions: beyond simple synchrony, good dialog affords complementary dynamics, constrained by contextual sensitivity and functional specificity. We substantiate our arguments by reference to recent empirical studies supporting the idea of dialog as interpersonal synergy.

Developing dialogue in co-produced exhibitions: between rhetoric, intentions and realities

In 2012 many UK museums were involved in Stories of the World, a national initiative aimed at working with young people to revisit world cultures collections in partnership with originating communities. At the heart of this programme were the ideas of dialogue, co-production and youth empowerment. This paper examines the different levels of agency that are created when museums are charged with ‘producing’ multiple participation and dialogue. Reflecting on the experience at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, UK, staff consider the gaps between intentions and the realities of the process as it developed towards the final co-produced exhibition. The paper considers what social relations and ethical considerations come into play when institutions are required to ‘produce’ dialogue. It examines this case in relation to wider practical and epistemological problems of participatory knowledge production.

Bóg i człowiek w teologii zorientowanej dialogicznie

The idea of dialogue in philosophical and theological anthropology emphasizes the dignity proper to each human being as a person, and also the human social nature. In the 20th century many humanists rediscovered the idea of interpersonal dialogue. In the philosophical thought this idea is present in the works of Jewish thinkers: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. But the notion of dialogue can also be useful in Chrisitian theological language. The article looks at the notion of dialogue in the definition of the relationship between God and human beings from the perspective of Christian Personalism. A “dialogically oriented theology” shows the relationship between God and man as a dialogue based on divine grace. The dignity of every human person is rooted in the vocation to dialogue with the persons of the Holy Trinity. This dialogue with God defines human beings in their relation to the world. The dialogue goes far beyond everyday life and finds its fulfillment in eternal dialogue with God and with the community of the redeemed.

From listening … to the dialogic realities of participatory democracy

The idea of listening offers a means of reframing contemporary media theory and the project of cultural studies in such a way that the ‘other half’ of communication can enter the picture on an equal footing. Many of the implications, both politically and conceptually, of such a move were canvassed in a special issue of Continuum in 2009.This paper engages with the themes of the special issue and elaborates on the implications through a consideration of core issues from perspectives not covered in that issue. We draw particularly on the traditions of hermeneutics, pragmatism and social constructionism to refashion the idea of communicating so that intersubjectivity and praxis are brought to the fore. This refashioning provides the basis for a critical consideration of what it can mean to engage in dialogue. Ideas of dialogue driven by the presumption of shared understanding are discarded in favour of a form of dialogic listening across difference. We proceed to show how these ideas contribute to the heart of the Listening Project's research agenda: understanding and meeting the challenges of democratic dialogue.

Chutnification : the recycling of canonical texts in the Indian English novel

Drawing from Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism, Julia Kristeva interpreted writing as a paragrammatic practice that incorporates reading. Using the concepts of genotext, phenotext and intertext that she put forth, this article studies the ways in which canonical texts, either religious or secular, from both the West (The Bible, Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare) and the East (The Ramayana, The Mahabharata, The Koran, The Arabian Nights, The Kama Sutra, The Pancha Tantra, the Jataka tales, The Katha Sarit Sagara, The Akbar Nama) are mixed with contemporary sources to produce the hybrid postcolonial variety of the Indian English Novel. It examines who among the Indian writers of English use this strategy of chutnification, at what precise moment in history, how and why they do so, and what the implications are for literary theory.

Beyond dialogue and antagonism: a Bakhtinian perspective on the controversy in political theory

The aim of the article is to show that the contradiction between dialogue and antagonism can be overcome with the help of the idea of dialogue as developed by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. The lack of such theory led to the rejection of liberalism or to the introduction of dialogical principle into the body of liberal politics. It was Jürgen Habermas who first understood the necessity of dialogical consensus as the basis of liberal democracy. On the other hand, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe developed the concept of agonistic democracy, claiming that conflict is inevitable in liberal democracy because consensual relations cannot harmonize contradictory political identities. The second part of the article is the elaboration of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue and its relevance for political theory. The main point is that dialogue leads to better understanding but not necessarily to consensus. If this is so, then both conceptions of the political are moments in never-ending dialogical relations. The significance of Bakhtin’s idea of dialogue for political theory consists thus in the recognition of the inevitable dialogical nature of society. However, this dialogical concept also has a normative character. Society has to find a balance between two extremes: excessive dialogue, which leads to anarchy, and the lack of dialogue, which leads to totalitarianism.

The Supreme Court of Canada, <i>Charter</i> Dialogue and Deference

For those concerned about the democratic legitimacy of Charter review by Canadian courts, the idea of dialogue offers a promising midway path between the extremes of judicial and legislative supremacy. Current dialogue theory, however, largely fails to live up to this promise of compromise. Instead of distinguishing democratic worries associated with US style, strong-form judicial review, it largely endorses the legitimacy of such review. For dialogue to live up to its original promise, a new theory that more clearly distinguishes Canada from the United States is required. In this article, which offers a new theory of dialogue, the willingness of the Supreme Court of Canada to defer to reasonable legislative sequels will be the key to success. As a result, section 33 of the Charter will play a valuable but largely background role in promoting dialogue. The advantage of this approach, compared to rival approaches that would weaken judicial review, is that it is more realistic and more in line with existing SCC practice. Moreover, it is normatively desirable when judged from the perspective of the courts’ capacity to counter blockages in the legislative process that might otherwise impair the enjoyment of Charter rights.

Breaking the frames – snapshooting the genre of family photography and ways of using it

This article is based on Ulkuniemi's key-note lecture in the Congress of Photo Therapy and Therapeutic Photography. The lecture dealt mainly with the history of family photography and the uses of family photographs in art education. Here Ulkuniemi has put her ideas in dialogue with some of the themes presented in the Special Issue (11.1) of European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling. Thus this article also serves as a commentary to some of the texts in this journal. The main approach of this article is to offer some hints about possibilities for using photographs in therapy by giving practical examples from the field of art education and art – Ulkuniemi's own visual-pedagogical installations. Another aim is to offer a general view of how a family photograph is constructed. Ulkuniemi will ‘break the frames’ by showing the various factors existing outside the frames that have influence on the outcome of the picture.