New Book by Professor Louise Phillips: The promise of dialogue
It has become commonplace to employ dialogue-based, collaborative approaches in producing and communicating knowledge in diverse fields such as planned communication and campaigns, science governance and research, and organizational and community development. Implicit in all cases is a normative promise to further human co-existence across differences (eg those of ethnicity, organisational position, social class, politics and gender), harnessing “difference” as a dynamic and positive force rather than treating it as an obstacle to co-existence.
The Promise of Dialogue presents a novel theoretical framework for understanding and analysing the dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge that builds bridges across three research traditions - dialogic communication theory, action research, and science and technology studies. It also provides an empirically rich account of the dialogic turn through case studies of how “dialogue” is enacted in the fields of planned communication, public engagement with science and collaborative research. A critical, reflexive approach is taken that, at one and the same time, interrogates the complexities, tensions and dilemmas inherent in the enactment of “dialogue” and is oriented towards further developing dialogic practices from a position normatively supportive of dialogue.
Phillips, Louise (2011). The promise of dialogue: The dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 198 p.
For further information, please see http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/ds.12/main.