Engaging contested community issues

Abstract

Abstract This article presents an analysis of dialogue as an alternative to debate and argument for engaging contested community issues. Treating dialogue as a communication practice, I draw on ethnography of communication, cultural communication theory, and cultural discourse analysis to describe and interpret how participants practiced community dialogue as a communication event comprised of sequences of listening and verbally responding. When topics and identities were elaborated upon and socially negotiated through personal communication in the form of narratives and emotional responses, participants reported effective dialogue. These sequences were dialogic moments partially due to the dialectical tension between Americans’ once predictable civic routine of public expression of individual’s beliefs and the process of dialogue featured in our War and Peace dialogue workshop.