Taking Theories of Cultural Dialogue From the Classroom to the Street Corner

Abstract

This article contributes to the Communication Studies’ literature on cultural dialogue, based on challenges we faced when putting theory into practice in community-based research courses and local social justice struggles. Specifically, we attempt to elaborate theories of cultural dialogue on/in the streets—considering how Cultural Studies, Critical Intercultural Communication, Critical Pedagogy, and Performance Studies work synergistically to illuminate particular aspects of the process of applied cultural dialogue in new ways. As we engaged in discussions on race and immigration in Aurora, Colorado, our experience required us to theorize particular aspects of the process of dialogue in new ways. This article contains voices of multiple authors in conversation and addresses the negotiations of dialogue, identity, and power. Ultimately we address dialogue writ large as process that combines shared experiences in different yet connected sites of education, community conflict, and cultural differences.

Keywords

Cultural Dialogue Power Pedagogy Community Engagement

To teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak. The engaged voice must never be fixed or absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself.

hooks, 1994, p. 11

This article by a White teacher and a Brown doctoral student explores tensions faced in promoting critical dialogues about immigration in the diverse community of Aurora, Colorado. Our analysis of these encounters between disenfranchised groups and dominant social structures register across the classroom, the community, group work, and a student–teacher relationship. We highlight the infrequency of dialogic encounters concerning pedagogy, race, and privilege and the discomfort in their performance; tensions between pedagogical intentions, racial identity, and embodied knowledge of teachers and students; and the negotiations of race, power, and belonging in dialogic encounters. Ultimately we address dialogue broadly conceived as process that combines shared experiences in different yet connected sites: education, community conflict, and cultural differences. Our experiences in community-based work shed light on the complicated relationship between higher education, pedagogy, race, class, and communities—making the town–gown division more challenging and sometimes richer.

This article contributes to the Communication Studies’ literature on theories of cultural dialogue, based on challenges we faced when putting theory into practice in community-based research courses and local social justice struggles. Specifically, we attempt to elaborate theories of cultural dialogue on/in the streets—considering how Cultural Studies, Critical Intercultural Communication, Critical Pedagogy, and Performance Studies work synergistically to illuminate particular aspects of the process of applied cultural dialogue in new ways.¹ On/and in the streets can be understood through Giroux’s (1992) theorization of “border pedagogies,” both as antiracist pedagogy and as a political project, in which education is tied, “to the broader struggle for a public life in which dialogue, vision, and compassion remain critically attentive to the rights and conditions that organize public space as democratic social form . . .” (p. 134).

In the spirit of the cultural dialogue we theorize, we ask the reader to engage in the same practices of patience, discomfort in knowing and unknowing, hard labor, and grace that we have. In writing we have intentionally tried to avoid the privilege of scriptographic order in favor of privileging a “narrative rationality” (Fisher, 1984, p. 9) and inviting an embodied engagement of the reader. We follow Alexander and Warren (2003) in the use of Conquergood’s (1985) dialogic performance as “compositional strategy” (p. 329) that serves our desire to achieve dialogue in, across, and through our differences.

Our selection of entries are driven by the idea of choques: “both moments of contestation and creative production” (Torre & Ayala, 2009, p. 390). Drawing on Anzaldua (1987), choques are “produced from the violence of colonization, the experience of cultural collision, or choque, is fundamental to a Mestiza consciousness” (Torre & Ayala, 2009, p. 390). This Mestiza consciousness fits both the identity and lived experience of Jacquelynn and the specificities of the site we engaged. As an interpretive method for community-based fieldwork, choques “highlight the significance of incorporating conflict and disjunctures that arise in the research as potential analytical resources” to generate deeper understanding (Torre & Ayala, 2009, p. 390). We note the choques were not only between different people but also within ourselves. What follows is a “dialogic performance”—as different voices from various locations meet in sites of tension, disjuncture, and freedom, in the spirit of love and grace that a commitment to dialogue potentiates (Conquergood, 1985, p. 9). As we students, teachers, scholars, and community members journey to create new theories of cultural dialogue on/in the streets, we ask you the reader to join us there in spirit.

Communication Studies, Dialogue, and Immigration: Theory and Practice as Told by Kate

A critical pedagogical moment in my own education—my dissertation defense—inspired my interest in theorizing dialogue. In my dissertation Desegregation, Dialogue, and Difference, I employed communication theories of dialogue holistically from my interview method to the implications section. At one point my committee members, after pushing me toward a more complex understanding of dialogue, jokingly began to talk to each other: “Dialogue . . . diatribe . . . dialectic . . . they’re all the same!” At the time I was shocked. How could Communication Studies professors speak so flippantly about such a central communication concept?

Now I see their point. Dialogue is too often positioned in communication literature, classrooms, and conferences as the ideal outcome of communication—a “romantic pedagogical mode” (Freire & Macedo, 1995, p. 381). So ideal that its practice is often illusive, undertheorized, and rarely fleshed out. One can easily lose faith in the effectiveness of dialogue to solve pernicious problems.

As a scholar, teacher, and communicator, I desired more for dialogue in Communication Studies. And I wanted to teach students how to engage in dialogue in seemingly intractable community conflict. I wondered: Could students learn to negotiate cultural differences in more complex—and hopefully more successful—ways? What would happen if we aspired to study dialogue in what Pollock (2010) calls, “a classroom without walls . . . becoming vulnerable to what would otherwise be ‘outside’ forces, that is, becoming unfortressed, exposed”? (p. 466). To answer these questions, I began with what I knew about theories of cultural dialogue.

At the outset I believed dialogue is a process of knowledge creation in which interlocuters “project themselves socially and emotionally” (Caspi & Gorsky, 2006, p. 139), narrate, and negotiate shared meaning through conversation within power-laden contexts (Ziegler, Paulus, & Woodside, 2006). Often these interactions, driven by a desire to learn, generate dissonance, epiphanies, reflections, and new perspectives as experiences, ideas, and emotions combine in unexpected ways (Ziegler et al.). As Feito (2007) points out, “new thinking becomes real within social interaction before it becomes internalized in an individual’s cognitive capacities” (p. 1).² In the classroom, dialogue produces not certainty but a deeper, multiperspectival understanding that is ripe for change.

Dialogue calls on all participants to relate to others and to constantly reflect on their positionalities (Simpson, 2008). In communication classrooms, dialogue “is often a negotiation between boldly claimed positions of privilege and domination, and critiques of such privilege and inequitable social relations” (Simpson, p. 184). This form of dialogue may generate emotional responses from students (e.g., Yep, 2007) as it challenges much of their traditional education (e.g., Leonardo, 2008); implicates their embodied investments in privilege and social inequality (e.g., Chubbuck & Zembylas, 2008); introduces new knowledge and unfamiliar experiences into Whitestream classes (e.g., Urrieta, Jr., 2005); scrutinizes taken-for-granted norms of Whiteness, meritocracy, and color blindness (e.g., Chubbuck, 2004); and shifts the balance of power to include previously silenced voices. Because of firsthand experience and past mistakes, I knew I wanted to generate new experiences and knowledge of dialogue in my classroom.

My first fall in Denver, I received a request for proposals to collaborate in a community-based research project with a local nonprofit day laborer organization, El Centro Humanitario Para Los Trabajadores (El Centro). The agency’s mission promotes the rights and well-being of day laborers in Denver through education, job skills, leadership development, united action, and advocacy. The city of Aurora, Colorado and El Centro had been engaged in discussions to rent a building in the face of active resistance from different community interests. I saw an opportunity to use cultural dialogue as one possible tool to work through this conflict. I began an engaged intercultural communication graduate class that winter, with our course work and assignments tied directly to this community project. By engagement, I mean

being susceptible to the radical implosion of normative epistemologies and preferred forms of productivity and accountability, which are then necessarily reflected in emergent “scholarship” even as publication/presentation/grant acquisition folds back into, eventually becoming indistinguishable from, various modes of engagement—affiliative ethnography, interview conversations, performance/festival/ritual production, personal relationships, collective vision-building, critical-creative mobilization of common resources and interests. Their composite form is a multi-directional public pedagogy that in itself enacts a critique of linear and foreclosed modes of scholarly productivity. (Pollock, 2010b, p. 465)

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An Invitation to Dialogue in Contexts of Power and Racialized Identities as Told by Jacquelynn, a Doctoral Candidate

In the winter of 2008 I took an Intercultural Communication class entitled Intercultural Communication: Special Topic: Immigration & Community Engagement as a part of my doctoral program. Just prior to the start of this course I received an email from the professor:

This class is going to be a community-engaged class. We will engage in research and collaboration with El Centro. You will be required to carefully examine your own feelings about immigration. This work will be time and energy consuming and emotionally demanding, but also potentially very rewarding. Please be happily forewarned: this will likely prove to be a wonderfully inefficient, joyously vexing adventure.³

I had never received an invitation like that before. The letter surprised me—interrupting my usual educational experience of learning as passive receiver from the authoritative institutional voice. She was inviting us to be a part of a learning process where she conceptualized cultural dialogue through community-engaged work as the foundation for transformative learning. This was an invitation to participate in discovering what it meant to be an intercultural communicator outside of the classroom. Responding to the aches of a community actively living in oppressive conditions, she formed a partnership between herself, her students—who were graduate students of varying degrees of privilege—and the Aurora community.

She was working from a transformative pedagogical understanding, which I had no frame of experience to interpret. Using the cultural capital of students, classrooms become a forum in which students are able to voice opinions that have been silenced within practices of traditional pedagogy. The invitation to become an interlocuter in an ongoing community dialogue made me visible and gave me voice: “Some pedagogical practices crush the soul; most of us have suffered their bruising force. Others allow the spirit to come home: to self, to community and to the revelations of reality” (O’Reilley, 1998, p. 41). I accepted this role not really knowing what I would experience or what would be asked of me. I never imagined that I would be “realized in the process of dialogue” (Wood, 2004, p. xviii).

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Graduate Research in My Homeplace as Told by Jacquelynn

I’ve lived in the city of Aurora for nearly 16 years. I chose to raise my family here because this is the space that most resembles my homeplace (hooks, 1990) where belonging (Carillo Rowe, 2005) is held in both hope and reality. I was born and raised in San Diego, California where the people can be loud, sophisticated, colorful, and tend to walk about with an air of freedom. That land is culturally rich with narratives of native Mexicans whose children are now American citizens and other Americans who have staked that land as their homeplace through their contributions of values, traditions, and ways of knowing. There, your next-door neighbor could be an undocumented or documented citizen. And though English is the dominant language spoken, if you turn your ear with intention toward the sounds of the city you can hear communication flowing in many different tongues.

Aurora reminds me of that space. It is the third largest city in Colorado known for its ethnic and cultural diversity. Unlike other cities in Colorado when I look around I see people that look like me. I like that I can travel a short distance and go to the taqueria to get some fresh tacos at a locally owned family business. It ain’t the corner rolled taco stands of San Diego, but it reminds me of home.

Like San Diego, Aurora, even before its legal establishment as a colonized space, has always struggled interculturally. Several Native American tribes initially inhabited this land now politically, geographically, and legally settled as Aurora. This changed in Aurora after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 where visiting White gold miners dispossessed their Native American hosts of their land through acts of genocide.

Since that time Aurora has been politically and culturally dominated by Whites. Non-Whites, particularly those marginalized by language, legal citizenship, or economic class, are read as foreigners to an established and possessed White space. And though Aurora sometimes chooses to forget this violent historical memory, these histories of colonization continue to haunt contemporary struggles of land possession, inhabitance, belonging, and citizenship. The promises of negotiating these tensions lie within the potential of intercultural dialogue.

This was my first opportunity to be a part of a community-engaged research team. When I learned that there were immigrant citizens of Aurora who were encountering difficulty finding safety and belonging because of their documentation status, I felt an inner urge to get involved. El Centro was organized to defend the human rights of day laborers. This model is reminiscent of many centers across the country that work to address the issues of day laborers: Tonatierra (AZ), Central American Resource Center (NY), and Centro del Inmigrante (NY).

At the intersection of 16th and Dayton in Aurora is City Park. This neighborhood park and the adjacent public sidewalks are a site of contestation between a group of workers (day laborers) who for the past 16 years showed up every morning, often before sunrise, claiming this space as their office and business community. Historically this space has been a gathering location where everyday citizens find and hire day laborers.

Amidst a conflict between the city of Aurora and the day laborers over issues of human rights, belonging, and economy, our hope as communication researchers and practitioners was that dialogue could be a tool to open places of possibilities for these community members. Here the choice to not engage in dialogic conversations became normal for many people. As one nonprofit worker replied in interview, “There’s never been any conversations. That makes it difficult because it’s like, well why would I want to talk to the day laborers? . . . . They’re just gonna cause problems in the community?”

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Teaching on the Street: “Not-knowing” and Emotional Labor as Told by Kate⁴

To teach this class, I had to forward three levels of coursework: (a) theories of critical intercultural communication and dialogue; (b) theoretical and contextual material about cultural conflicts over immigration and in-depth information about the specific issues of day laborers in Aurora; and (c) preparation for fieldwork, from positionality and politics to interviewing. I divided the ten-week quarter into three sections: (a) Studying Culture: Community Engaged Learning, Context, and Participant Observation; (b) Talking about Culture: Listening, Interviewing, and Dialogue; and (c) Moving to Action: Interpretation, Analysis, and Action. To better understand the fieldwork and our community partner, our class made several early-morning site visits to El Centro—both their office in Denver and to the corner of Dayton and 16th where day laborers gathered on a park corner in Aurora . . . .

My class stood on the street corner on a bone-chilling Colorado morning to learn about the lives of male immigrant day laborers. We had come to meet the day laborers, who were members of El Centro, our nonprofit community partner. In effect, our class was visiting their place of employment—which to many in the community seemed to be a dispossessed, dirtied corner of the citizen’s public park. But in fact this makeshift, roofless, wall-less place of employment had been open for business in the same location for over a decade. These day laborers came here 6 days a week waiting for a chance to earn a day’s wages.

As a teacher, I still wonder if this one hour of feeling the contingency of immigrant day laborers taught some of my students more about their positionality than four weeks of discussing White privilege, power, and structural inequality, in a classroom. This lesson was not part of my “lesson plan” for the day. I think the students’ physical and cultural discomfort in this situation taught more than I could imagine— throwing into cold relief the material reality of our privilege. The students recognized the choices we had that the day laborers did not as a form of privilege—our ability to leave the corner to return to warm cars, warm homes, and more suitable, warmer shoes.

Through this course I gained insights into the pedagogy of community-based research. My graduate students were troubled by the lack of traditional structure and the amount of “not-knowing” that this work demanded. Students resisted engagement because of doubts that they could achieve anything meaningful in our short ten-week term. The emotional demands of confronting profound social problems on a personal level—some for the first time—amplified student discomfort. The unpredictability of community-based work can be destabilizing for students and teachers alike. I realized that the skills I was expecting in community-based research were not capabilities my high-achieving graduate students had previously developed in their formal education.

Our work in the community required the ability to respond creatively to the needs of diverse communities, the flexibility to do what presented itself real time and could not always be planned, and the need for them to invest their whole selves for uncertain success. I was asking graduate students to accept “not-knowing” in a contingent learning environment (Fieto, 2007). In the next class I worked to identify and address these fears. But the contingency and radical openness of this teaching and learning experience did destabilize all of us. Sometimes, especially when exhausted, I craved the comfort of a classroom with four walls and a definitive plan.

My course design was intentional and planned with our community partner. One group of students conducted a dozen interviews with identified local business owners, government officials, city council members, residents, and local community-based organizations that had a stake in the development of a day labor center in Aurora. Subsequently, they designed and implemented a one-on-one interview process to gather the multiple perspectives of these community members.

The interviews taught us more about the lack of successful and sustained community dialogue concerning day laborers and broader issues of immigration today. We also learned of the unwillingness of some power holders to enter into conversation about an issue that they seemed to hope would go away if they: (a) ignored it long enough, (b) received enough government blight funds to “clean it up,” or (c) waited long enough for the redevelopment of this impoverished neighborhood. The student group produced a research report that examined the negotiations concerning the development of the center and contextualized the problem within the immigration history of the City of Aurora and the recent economic development initiatives in the City.

The second student group organized a dialogue to gain community support for a day laborer center. The group described their activities in a final report:

The theme for our “friend-raising” event was Local Challenges, Local Solutions . . . . Our team endeavored to create an open space for dialogue by setting up tables and incorporating the idea of the World Café⁵ that our professor, Kate, introduced us to in class. We placed large pieces of paper and colored pens on each table and posed two questions: “What are your concerns?” and “How can we work together?” We invited guests into a dialogue regarding the resistance to and the support for an El Centro location in Aurora by encouraging them to express themselves on paper and by talking with them informally while they enjoyed the food and beverages we provided.

The event brought together a diverse group of community members, three city councilors, the police captain of the area, local nonprofits, and the media. Negotiating a dialogue among these differently positioned power-holders proved more challenging than getting them in the same room. The event—covered nationally by the Spanish speaking press and the Denver metro news—succeeded in shifting the typical anti-immigration and antiday laborer discourse, at least momentarily.

As a teacher, through this course, I became more aware of the challenges and possibilities of community-based research as a pedagogical approach to teaching communication and culture. Community-engaged learning often brings emotion into the class and teachers and students face challenges of negotiating these charged and sometimes volatile spaces. I came into this class expecting embodiment to be a solution. I quickly realized that embodiment alone does not guarantee learning. Embodied responses can be more unreflexive than theoretical engagements. This pedagogy required that I cultivate my ability to help students make sense of their embodied experiences. I needed to support students to engage their response-abilities⁶ deeply—in practical and theoretical ways—and to cultivate their self-reflexivity in action. As the teacher, this pedagogy called on me to maintain an abiding faith in the research and learning process, because at some point each student had doubts. While the course was one of the most rewarding teaching experiences in my career, it was also one of the most draining. I knew if I wanted to continue this work I needed to find a more sustainable way to do so.

My own struggles along with my students gave me insight into how and why people in the Aurora community resisted engaging in dialogues about race, immigration, and belonging. An employee of an Aurora food pantry explained,

It [Aurora] has always been big enough that people can just move to a particular area and never have to deal with anybody else . . . So you’ve got really rich areas in Aurora. In fact, I understand that one of the most wealthy zip codes in Colorado is in Aurora. And at the same time, I guarantee that one of the poorest ones is in Aurora as well. So when you get that kind of disparity it makes you realize that there’s been not much dialogue. I think they’ve just had enough space and other barriers that nobody tried to bridge those gaps. Nobody has ever done that.

Just as my students and I were accustomed to teaching and learning in traditional classrooms, community members felt comfortable with the literal and figurative distance of residential segregation in Aurora. It allowed them to avoid difficult discussions and their embodied response-ability to others. In both cases, this disengagement is not simply an unintended consequence. It is a means, at times deliberate, at other times unconscious, to avoid dialogue.

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First Perilous Steps of Dialogue as Told by Jacquelynn

The most significant project for the course was the creation of a social action initiative that promoted dialogue, understanding, and support for El Centro’s new office in Aurora. The class was split into two groups, I led the group responsible for conducting in-depth interviews about the existing conflicts surrounding civic institutional support for the day laborer community. We identified local business owners, government officials, city council members, residents, and local community-based organizations that through community membership had an invested stake in the creation of a day labor center in Aurora. El Centro wanted to rent a building near 16th and Dayton for the day laborers to organize their safety, employment, and legal needs, provide refuge from the cold, a bathroom to use, and a welcoming gathering space were this community could flourish relationally. This location was centered in a redevelopment zone. Existing plans for redevelopment imagined golf courses and hospitals, restaurants and shopping centers, offices and theaters—the organization and self-advocacy of day laborers promised an unwelcomed sustained presence. To learn more, we designed and implemented a one-on-one interview process to gather the multiple perspectives of community members.

A group of eleven students began this work with good intentions. But after a lot of uncomfortable moments debating what we were trying to accomplish and how we would work together, we gave up. Unable to resolve our differences, our original group winnowed down to three. I noted the irony that given the class topic we would have so many problems communicating interculturally—before even engaging the community conflict. For our final project, we produced a video narrative that documented the historical role of whiteness in the Aurora community and how its power was culturally negotiated in the local community conflict.⁷ Our work attempted to convey evocatively the findings from our research interviews. We wanted to highlight the underlying tensions that we found as barriers to successful dialogue. All of the interview participants openly acknowledged the tensions between different cultural groups, but the source of tensions remained unclear and elusive. We tracked one primary tension in the conflict to Whiteness, which by nature is normalized, ubiquitous, and invisible.⁸ A request from El Centro for dialogue with the city revealed existing operationalized strength of a hidden network of powerful constructs of Whiteness among city officials, developers, and community members. A choice to enter into meaningful dialogue with El Centro demanded that these power brokers give up some of their power as well as a formal acknowledgement of the intercultural conflict. Why would they choose to do this when the status quo of pretending the problem didn’t exist had worked fine for a decade and seemingly still benefited them? In this case, as well as many others where power, privilege, and race are salient factors, even a choice of acknowledgement and acceptance of an invitation to dialogue can be a huge power struggle. Many in power never make this kind of choice believing that dialogue could jeopardize their self-interests of maintaining the status quo.

As students, we saw these same tensions as we negotiated our own cultural differences. Our research process demanded many daily contact hours with each other discussing our research positionalities, problematics, and ethical entanglements. During the course of the ten weeks we shared more meals together than apart. There was a Brown girl (me), a White girl, and a biracial (Black/White) girl. We struggled to hear each other as we each labored with our own racial positionalities, our raced interpretations of the interviewees, and our past experiences in debates surrounding immigration. For me, this processual labor was essential for the integrity of a final research product. But the lack of success of the class’ large group dialogue revealed that many students were unwilling to invest this kind of time and energy into these initial steps. Similar to community dialogues it seemed that the work of explicating different racial positionalities and past experiences took too much time and required an intentionality and self-reflexivity that many did not see as a necessary part of dialogue. Instead many favored an immediate jump start that targeted our objective as efficiently and smoothly as possible.

In contrast to this more expedient approach to dialogue, one night my small group spent three hours over a home-cooked spaghetti dinner debating the presence of Whiteness in our group and our own affective investments. We committed time and energy to our own dialogue in the moment, never putting it off, even though it would have been easier to. As a result we were able to operate as one multilayered research voice emotionally sensitive to and racially positioned to recognize and honor the diversities of the stories of our research participants. Realizing a more satisfying enactment of intercultural communication in our research motivated me to continue this work though our dialogues remained far from perfect.

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Fraught Commitments to a Second Chance for Dialogue as Told by Jacquelynn

The next term I enrolled in the follow-up community-engaged course, where we analyzed the data collected during the previous term. When she called me into her office I had no idea what Kate was going to say. I eagerly anticipated our meeting after she had mentioned that she had some ideas about the direction of our next class and more specifically my role in shaping the class.

When I arrived at her door, my body immediately felt alien. She was my advisor, my mentor, and my friend. I trusted her. The dissonance in my body referenced a disruption I felt in the environment of survival that I had created for myself—a way to persist in an often-hostile educational environment.

With enthusiasm she had presented a carefully crafted proposal that would engage my prior learning experience and connect it to the current El Centro dialogue as a teaching assistant. If dialogue requires a willingness to be transformed and a willingness to abide tension within yourself or the environment, I had to ask myself, was I willing to do that? This particular invitation to dialogue was a call that would bring my invisible raced body into visibility.

Why didn’t this great opportunity immediately feel good—the chance to get extra course credit, to be part of the teaching process (something I had long desired), and work with my advisor? On paper it was a no-brainer. But I felt the potential costs and could not immediately embrace the invitation. Why? What she was asking me to do was similar to what we were asking El Centro to do. They were being invited to intentionally engage in a community dialogue on a polarizing issue—a dialogue that held risks and invoked painful memories of previous confrontations—for an uncertain outcome.

She was asking me to leave my safe bubble—my space that might not be the best—but that worked for me. It was an invitation to cocreate a learning environment but it held potential risks of unwanted visibility and loss of social, political, and cultural safety. I ended up saying yes—despite and because of all that I knew already and could not know in advance. I chose to persist into the next class where most of my student colleagues did not, motivated by my work from the first class and because of my own commitment to and personal implications in these community struggles. As a resident in the Aurora Community, a graduate student in Communication Studies, and a grandchild of Mexican citizens who shared similar struggles as these Aurora day laborers, to walk away from the possibilities of facilitating a successful, sustained dialogue, would have a negative material impact on my spirit.⁹

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Taking It to the Streets: Dialogue as Praxis as Told by Kate

It took me ten weeks of struggle in my first class to really hone in on what cultural dialogue would look like and how I could get the theoretical bounties of our discipline, the classroom, and the material needs and desires of our community to gel. Somewhere along the way I realized that while no one theory of dialogue or even area of our discipline could suture these tensions, a constellation of them could. I came to see that if I were to conceptually draw a Venn diagram of Critical Intercultural Communication,¹⁰ Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and Critical (+Communication) Pedagogy, the area of overlap of these fields could help me answer pressing questions: What are the dimensions of dialogic praxis in this community-engaged research? How can we use the richness of Communication Studies scholarship on cultural dialogue in concert with our experiences to elaborate theories of cultural dialogue on/in the streets? Can we translate the knowledge and ways of knowing of our fieldwork into pedagogical, cultural, and theoretical significance?

What follows is an explication of this Venn diagram. I proceed by addressing each circle in the diagram for what it distinctly contributes to discussions of dialogue and fieldwork that help us better understand dialogue in the street and the classroom. I hope to extend the work of Conquergood and many since him—such as Bryant Alexander, Judith Hamera, D. Soyini Madison, and Della Pollock—to forward the “intermingling of performance, ethnography, and cultural studies” along with Critical Intercultural Communication and Critical (+Communication) pedagogy (Conquergood, 1992, p. 80).

Critical Intercultural Communication and Dialogue

Critical Intercultural Communication highlights the importance of cultural difference and otherness play in dialogue. The critical turn in intercultural communication interrogates and challenges power’s role in creating culture and building relationships (Halualani, Mendoza, & Drzewicka, 2009). Critical Intercultural Communication also attends to how historical and structural power relations shape cultural dialogues (Halualani et al., 2009; Martin & Nakayama, 2007). Some critics within Critical Intercultural Communication argue that idealistic dialogue, often undergirded by White liberalism, perpetuates oppressive power relations and injustice (e.g., McPhail, 2004). While traditional intercultural communication has focused on pattern over particularity, more recent scholarship calls for attention to everyday communication acts that “recenter power and sustain normative relations” (Warren, 2008, p. 296). Warren argues, “this move to particularity will advance the level of our analysis and dramatically increase our ability to be agents of interruption, critique, and change” (p. 300). Intercultural communication has long explored theories of cultural dialogue but, historically there has not been much community engagement and critics argue intercultural communication has little to say about the actual politics of culture (Broome, Carey, De La Garza, Martin, & Morris, 2005, p. 165).

Cultural Studies and Dialogue

Like Critical Intercultural Communication, Cultural Studies focuses on issues of power. However, Cultural Studies uniquely tracks the circuits and circulation of power both structurally and within the everyday (Foucault, 1980). This approach enables a particular understanding and analysis of cultural relations and relationality. Cultural Studies also highlights the importance of subjugated knowledge, difference, and otherness within the context of globalization. In particular, Cultural Studies’s investment in studying the context of everyday life “somewhere and some time,” enables a deep accounting for politics, the economy, and cultural formations in all of its “dense particularity” (Grossberg, 2006; Mohanty, 1989). In terms of dialogue, a Cultural Studies approach highlights a processual, relational approach to how the dialogic is shaped by contexts and histories of communication. Given this layered approach to understanding context—“in a radically contextualist way,” Cultural Studies eschews assumptions about transparency, rejecting the presumption of clear and direct communication as well as universalist and essentialist claims: “Cultural studies seeks to embrace complexity and contingency, and to avoid the many faces and forms of reductionism” (Grossberg, 2006, p. 2). This methodological approach is critical in understanding the praxis of dialogue.

While Cultural Studies illuminates the complex, dynamic, relational, power-laden circuits of context, Cultural Studies has less to say about the encounter of dialogue, which is critical to theorizing cultural dialogue in/on the streets. What it does contribute is a focus on studying conjunctures—“conjuncture is a description of a social formation as fractured and conflictual, along multiple axes, planes and scales, constantly in search of temporary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and processes of struggle and negotiation” (Grossberg, 2006, p. 4). Conjunctures captures in necessarily complex and dynamic ways the struggles and negotiations in motion in/on the street, which is vital for those of us committed to cultural dialogue to understand.

Performance Studies

My engagement of performance studies relies both on general performance studies scholarship as well as critical performance ethnography in particular to theorize the praxis of dialogues. Critical Performance Ethnography draws from performance studies, Bakhtinian theories of dialogue, and Conquergood’s dialogic performance, in order to explore dialogic relations and interlocuters’ positionalities in the midst of cultural difference, unequal power relations, and forces of globalization (e.g. Madison, 2005; Denzin, 2003).

Performance Studies/Critical Performance Ethnography scholarship in its treatment of both subject matter and method makes central the experience of the body, which contributes particular understandings to theories of cultural dialogue in/on the street. Performance Studies focuses on embodiment and enactment, through theories of the flesh (Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983), situated knowledges, and an understanding of embodied persons, places, and topographies. This focus enables an understanding of dialogue as a performative accomplishment grounded in the act and encounter (Chawla, 2008; Conquergood, 1985, 1991, 2002). Here culture, understood as a “unfolding performative invention,” can come to life in cultural performance becoming as well a possible site of public discussion (Conquergood, 1991, p. 190). This processual, live, unfolding invention highlights the role of kinesis—the process of social movement, a critical dimension of the praxis of and struggle for cultural dialogue (Pollock, 2010b, p. 205).

The method for studying cultural performance and dialogue offered by Critical Performance Ethnography is “body-to-body” fieldwork (Madison, 2005, p. 323) including explorations of “bodied and embodied material performances” (Chawla, 2008) and the dramaturgy of everyday life (Conquergood, 1991; Goffman, 1967). Our fieldwork choices benefited from Critical Performance Ethnography’s attendance to the dialogic performance that emphasize speaking with and to, not for, others (Conquergood, 1985; Pelias, 1991; Spry, 2001). We understand Critical Performance Ethnography to be undergirded by a critical interrogation of tensions of the interstitial contestations of meaning, in which dialogic performance “struggles to bring different voices, world views, value systems, and beliefs, so that they can have a conversation with one another” (Conquergood, 1985, p. 9; Pollock, 2006). Such dialogues name social problems and begin a dialogue about them, manifesting power relations in the “poesis of their undoing” (Pollock, 2010a). In this construction, researchers become coperformers and cosubjects, in effect an invested part of this ongoing dialogue as well (Conquergood, 1985; Pollock, 2010a).

Critical (+Communication) Pedagogy

Communication Studies includes a robust collection of allied work—critical pedagogy, critical communication pedagogy, critical performative pedagogy (Denzin, 2009) and performance and education (e.g., Alexander, Anderson, & Gallegos, 2005; Cooks & Warren, 2011) to address “how bodies are figured by and figure into [formal and informal] pedagogical contexts” (Cooks & Warren, 2011). Taken together, these areas of study enable a rich critique of power and dominance as connected to the pedagogical and “look deep into the muscle of everyday life and see the fibers, the movement, and the invisible structures that make our everyday conversations possible” (Fassett & Warren, p. 45). This attention to how these muscles animate dialogue provides insight into the process of how bodies move and are moved by pedagogical forces.

Informed by a Frierian commitment to emancipatory goals and a faith in radical humanism, Critical (+Communication) Pedagogy argues that people can change the world in the present through dialogic encounters. Part of this dialogue involves “naming our social, material circumstances and acting together to change them” (Fassett & Warren, p. 55) in the interrogation of power and the examination of privilege emerging from ideological contexts (Fassett & Warren). Driven by a desire to achieve social justice in the world, Cho argues Critical (+Communication) Pedagogy, “should explore alternative visions of social structures and conditions so that ordinary teachers and students can practice, experience, and live a pedagogy of hope, love, equality, and social justice” (Cho, p. 135).

To engage in dialogue to its full transformative potential requires a border pedagogy where teachers and students invest in border politics and become border crossers (Giroux, 1997):

What border pedagogy makes undeniable is the relational nature of one’s own politics and personal investments. But at the same time border pedagogy emphasizes the primacy of politics in which teachers assert rather than retreat from pedagogies they utilize in dealing with the various differences represented by the students who come into their classes. (p. 158)

Operating in the space of the “tension of the border” (Haig-Brown, 2001, p. 251), border pedagogy requires participants to continue “engaging in the painful work of contextually and temporally situated coalition work” (Haig-Brown, 2001, p. 31). Among all of the contributions of Critical (+Communication) Pedagogy to understanding the praxis of dialogue in/on the streets, border work and pedagogy best captures our collaboration with El Centro, the Aurora Community, each other, and the different borders, with different valences, and different consequences we encountered. Our work was defined by both of these borders even when constructs of national borders seemed more pressing and significant.

***

Dialogic Foreplay as Told by Jacquelynn

For the second course we designed two group projects that would organize the bulk of the assignments. My teacher assistant colleague facilitated one group that created a performance based on the interviews we previously conducted (Zsohar, 2009). I facilitated a research group charged with writing a scholarly paper that analyzed the interview data. Students self-selected the group they wanted to join.

I remember feeling excited to be sitting at the table with my group members. As I looked around at each one of them I assumed that their choice to join the research group reflected a high commitment to scholarship. There was for me an unexpected kinship among these strangers. Not only did we seem to be like-minded, but I secretly wished we were like-hearted as well.

Our first task was to create and commit to a set of group collaborative norms. I listened carefully to each person as they shared their thoughts, looking for clues that would give me enough information to profile them and develop strategies for negotiating intercultural difference. Profiling was a survival mechanism I learned from previous group work, especially interracial dialogues. Interculturally profiling involves listening with your body. To do this, I quickly step into the space of the other person and engage in a private cultural performance that mimics them. I merely follow their performative cues, their dress, speech, affect, positionality, race, class, gender and the macro and micro historical references that I am aware of. After I have completed my own private performance I slip back into my own body, my own way of knowing the world. I imagine we all do some form of this profiling. Many times it works to my advantage; other times it does not. Savvy profilers know when to subordinate this way of knowing and suspend it long enough to be transformed by other cultural epistemologies. I consider that these internal conversations and motivations that we hold in our head and our heart—yet rarely disclose can get in the way of successful dialogue. . . .

I scanned Brett up and down looking for affirmations that fit my prejudgments of my profile of him. He spoke with quiet authority. This 6’2” slender-framed man with fresh crew cut hair was our group’s White male. He was a father, husband, and graduate student. He could not be stereotyped into the privileged White male, racially unconscious category. I had seen him in class only twice before but was already developing an appreciation for his willingness to be self-reflexive and to share some of that reflexivity publicly.

Emily introduced herself to the group next. Right up-front she disclosed details about her years of communal living abroad. Her way of knowing in the world were greatly influenced by her global experiences. Her textured and patterned bohemian skirt, her hand-sewn peasant blouse and wild curly red hair signaled that she was different—and that different felt comfortable for her. Her untamed spirit seemed out-of-place amidst the masses of young girls on campus wearing skinny jeans and Ugg boots. Immigration was an issue that touched her deeply. On the first day of class she had shared a painful experience of her separation from her partner who was forced to stay in a local immigration detention center before his deportation. When she talked about her apprehensions to entering dialogue I sensed in her a vulnerability that I wanted to attend to.

When Hillary introduced herself I was captured by how easily she presented herself as a sophisticated intellectual. She had large dark expressive eyes and dark brown hair that she wore under a cab style hat, the kind I imagined Ivy League graduate students would wear. She was soft spoken and sure-footed in her communication style. As she closed her introduction I made a mental note that I recognized a familiarity behind her confidence, which I read as a privileged identity. Based on my past intercultural encounters with privilege I put myself on notice that this difference might be a site of tension in the future.

Using theoretical frames of dialogue as an analytic tool, our research team turned the gaze on itself during the process as well as the community interviews we were analyzing. We used dialogue to negotiate the tensions and conflict that arose around our different and often conflicting ideas of how to analyze the data and what it meant. While we were tempted to sit in the same room all focused on the researched and their narratives, in the interest of performing dialogic research, we decided to look at each other, ourselves, and our group process as well. In the end, we abandoned a quest for efficiency and the straightest path to a good grade—a “collaboration” marked with individual strategy and diligence—in favor of a commitment to dialogue and process. We intentionally refused to make separate our own research process from the community dialogue we studied.

In this group, our process could not rely on shared assumptions about power, privilege, race, and immigration. We learned that each of us were positioned so differently that there was little common ground. Our group dynamics did not allow any operation of ideological dominance. We had to start from scratch building a network of trust as the foundation of our beliefs. The integrity of our work depended on our commitment to establish a set of assumptions that we would use together in our research. This order was tall. Maintaining the spirit of dialogue proved challenging to each of us. Below we present individual snapshots of our dialogic process as told by three members of the group.¹¹

***

Dialogue, Dissatisfaction, and Deadlines as Told by Hillary

I offer a slide show view of our group dynamics to convey significant moments in my learning to contend with not knowing, to negotiate space, and to invite dialogue in situations of conflict.

[First Slide] Not Knowing

It’s Tuesday evening, Week 9, and our group has decided to meet in one of the classrooms to project our writing onto a screen for better collaborative thinking. Our goal for the evening is to hammer out an analysis section. This evening and many others like it have challenged my need to have a grip on the efficiency of our progress. I have often stopped the group to ask if we are conducting our work in the most efficient manner, if there’s something I could do on the side to make us move faster, or if we are overanalyzing something that is less important than something else. These questions have usually resulted in frustration from the group and they have answered, “Process is everything. We’re doing the best we can with what we have right now.” I am required to sit in the unknown.

I had taken up and controlled the space that I thought I could excel in (data analysis and write up) without recognizing that this space could and should be inhabited by the whole group. I’ve discovered that in disengaging from the need to be in control of the process, to know where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, I have been able to hear better. I’ve been able to experiment with another’s way of doing things. I’ve been able to ride along rather than drive. Not knowing, for me, has meant having a quieter spirit that is more in tune with other people and their voices. It forces me to take a smaller piece of the collective space.

[Second Slide] Engaging Dialogue

Jacquelynn and I are spending a few extra minutes to engage in a dialogue about some recent conflicts that have arisen. We speak with intent to clarify, and listen with the intent to hear. I am learning that there are cultural differences in the way we express ourselves and that I am prone to take up more space in the group to keep up with Jacquelynn. We run out of time and promise to continue our conversation soon. I drive away feeling frustrated that such important loose ends are exposed. One thing I learned from our own personal dialogue that I could not have picked up as well in the readings or class discussions was the importance of recognizing the lack of satisfactory finality that comes with dialogue.

***

Preparation and Will in Dialogue as Told by Emily

Shelia McNamee and John Shotter argue,

preparation [to engage in conversation with another person] has to do with one’s orientation, with one’s background expectations, the kind of overall language-game one thinks of oneself as involved in . . . Often, people are responsive to what they imagine the other person will say based on a history of a relationship. (2004, pp. 93-94)

Their words address the inherent challenge of communicating, how we all come to a conversation with a slew of preconceptions about the conversation, a judgment of the intentions of the “other” and an ingrained conceptualization of the world. Because we are often unaware of the existence of these often rigid predetermined notions, communication becomes a “game”—where each person is bouncing an idea off the other person, but rarely making any substantial impact. That is to say, the exchange of conversation can be like a ball bouncing aimlessly back and forth between two solid surfaces.

I was thrown into a group project with four strangers with eight parts skepticism and two parts hope. The first few weeks were characterized by each of us performing our preconceived notions of what it meant to be working on a research paper. Some of us dove right into the data, others preferred to look at the overall picture while still others wanted to write the introduction to give us direction.

This process was characterized by one other, extremely important quality: willingness. Arnett (2004) writes that his question is, “What might communication look like that does not begin with a sense of will?” (p. 77). I would not say that we entered this group process without will, as we are all driven, high-functioning individuals. But, our willingness took form in us treating the other’s ideas, the metaphoric balls that we were throwing around, as something fragile.

***

Good Intentions, Whiteness, and Cultural Conflict as Told by Brett

Why is it that good intentions fail? Is it only because of the bad intentions of others? Or is it something more built into the good intention itself?

Walking into El Centro for the first time felt like all eyes were on me. I expected it to feel this way for me, but I always seem to convince myself that I will be able to somehow lay low and not be noticed. I tell myself that it is for their benefit that I remain obscure. I don’t want my presence to make them feel uncomfortable or self-conscious. The truth is I want to protect myself. I want to be able to avoid any attention and having to address any issues of power and privilege that I know I represent. I suppose you could call it guilt. It feels like that sometimes.

Whiteness is not easy to talk about. It is much easier for people, myself included, to talk about the oppressions of others or of ourselves in some way not having to do with our privilege. I have felt the power of being White on numerous occasions and it has never left me feeling particularly content with the world; however, I still feel myself resisting it when it comes up for several reasons.

I would be lying if I said this was the first time I found myself in such a situation. In fact, I have been in similar environments frequently for years now. You would think I wouldn’t revert to self-defense behaviors, but it seems that the familiarity always takes a little while to settle in. It also seems that the more I learn about social, cultural, and racial issues, the more self-conscious I become. I then have to work at transforming that self-consciousness into self-awareness and then into reaching out better.

Despite my hesitancies, I was anxious to learn what this place was all about and what the current conflict we were addressing entailed. What appealed to me about this class was the community involvement. What quickly became a point of discussion in my home was immigration. My wife feared I was embracing an all too liberal approach toward the legality surrounding immigration into this country. Though many claim that it is strictly a legal issue despite harboring prejudice due to race or ethnicity, my wife sees immigration as a privilege that is earned legally through much time and effort—the way it was for her family. Coming from South Africa, she feels it an injustice that some are crossing a border illegally to come to this country while others have to travel so far and pay so much with not only money but time and emotion. It helps her to see that the end result is not the same. Needless to say, we have both learned a great deal as we discussed the differences and similarities. People want to simplify a conflict into two opposing sides. It’s definitely easier to simplify a conflict into two sides, but when we do that we lose what it is truly involved in the conflict.

Our Concluding Thoughts as Told by Jacquelynn and Kate

Our community and group dialogues and our collaborative writing processes labored to cultivate successful intercultural dialogue. These reflections on our dialogic negotiations provide insights into the elements that we found necessary to succeed in a ten-week class. We offer no prescriptive formula. Instead we highlight preconditions of dialogue across difference—the mundane, imperfect, and often necessary attitudes and actions. We also attend to possible barriers, such as attitudes toward time and assumptions about power and space. These details, often ignored, are crucial to dialogic success.

This essay focuses on different enactments of cultural dialogue at intersections between—research participants, day laborers, and the community of Aurora, the coauthors, and the students involved in this community-engaged research. These intersections provide windows into the workings of cultural dialogue as well as an analysis of critical threads that deepen understandings of cultural dialogue. Understanding this within the framework of Critical Intercultural Communication, Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and Critical (+Communication) Pedagogy, further provides a sense of knowing all of the layered and complex ways that can pave the route of achieving success within the processes of cultural dialogue. In conclusion, we highlight three elements vital to the praxis of cultural dialogue: time and efficiency, space and power, and grace.

Time and Efficiency in Cultural Dialogue

Reflecting on our own dialogues, we note that people had conflicting agendas regarding time. Some of us valued efficiency and oriented our conversations toward the end goal, a perspective Hillary’s entry illuminates. Others valued process. Neither approach is implicitly correct. They contain different assumptions that often get in the way of meaningful dialogue, as Emily discusses. The first orientation assumes a shared end goal among participants from the start (often assuming more common ground than may exist). We found that frequently dialogues hold multiple goals in tension. Left unexplored, these competing goals can lead to divisive conflicts that could have been prevented through early explication and negotiation.

A utilitarian approach to productivity suppresses differences such as racialized memories of experiences. Unaddressed these differences can delay or deny meaningful dialogue as they become symbolic nonstarters and work to effectively silence some participants. In effect, the utilitarian approach highlights assumed similarities (e.g., “we all chose to be here,” “we are all students”). Often the ability to skip over certain topics is a move executed by those who have power and think they know better or want to avoid difficult discussions that question their authority and position within the group. This approach also assumes that the most efficient way to achieve dialogue is with a clear, product-oriented goal. Yet all participants may not agree with this process or share a common goal.

A common misunderstanding is to equate the lack of efficiency with a lack of direction. We found no positive correlation between the two. Expediency does not guarantee a group achieves its goal. In fact, privileging expediency in the name of making progress often serves the interests of power holders, obstructs necessary conversations (including explication of investments and renegotiation of goals) and damages the fragile process of dialogue. Some groups end up compromising the process to such a degree that achieving the end goal is meaningless, even harmful.

Yet valuing process alone is not a panacea. First, some participants lose faith in dialogue. They cannot understand how a prolonged dialogue better achieves the perceived goal. Others, despite their best intentions, prove unable or unwilling to dedicate the time necessary when the outcome is uncertain.

When we consider what was involved in our own negotiations of difference—the investment of time, energy, and personal commitment —we see clear connections. As coauthors, ourselves negotiating race, power, and difference, our dialogic success depended on spending time discussing ideas, reading each other’s works and listening to each other. When we engaged this process, we recognized new imperfections, saw more that we could do, or ran out of time for important conversations, as echoed in Hillary’s frustrations.

In U.S. dominant culture where time is treated as a commodity, we do not see investing this scarce resource as an act of personal generosity. Time is needed to realize intercultural dialogue (Freire, 1973). What would our project be if we gave in to time pressures? If we didn’t believe in the possibilities of our investment more than in the value of efficiency, what depth could have been reached? The kind of dialogue we as coauthors practiced (with its requirement of time, grace, and a willingness to be transformed) was a means to a deeper level of intercultural consciousness and embodiment with little fixation on a goal. Dialogue is an area of communication where commonality is highly valued. But we found great hope and accomplishment in our differences.

Space and Power in Dialogue

How we define space and employ power matters in the process of dialogue—from the classroom to the street corner. We first noticed this in Hillary’s complex invocation of space and in Brett’s discussion of his entry into El Centro. When we reread our own writings in this light, we realized that how our racialized bodies experience, control, and envision dialogic space shapes encounters. As Raka Shome argues,

Spatialities of power constitute and reconstitute our identities . . . we need to think of space and spatial relations not as inert backdrops against which the struggles of identity occur. Rather, these relations themselves must be seen as active components in the unequal and heterogeneous production and distribution of identities, politics, and actions. (Shome, 2006, p. 43)

Spacialities of power constrain and enable everyday performances of dialogue.

Space and power interconnect in key moments such as who has verbal control of floor and who “takes up time” in groups. As Hillary demonstrates, those who take up the most space in dialogue often occupy a privileged position (sometimes unconsciously) or are attempting to gain control of a space. Her frank discussion also reveals how struggles over power and space can get in the way of what we desire—in this case efficiency. When someone feels out of control in a dialogue, they may verbally create a commotion, which makes the group spin out of control as well. In other words, a need to take up space to keep up with the group can ultimately drive the discussion off course. That is, the group runs out of time to talk and doesn’t accomplish its goals.

Jacquelynn’s entries also highlight her fear and perceived risks involved as her raced body considered entering an intercultural dialogic space, complicated by relationships to power. Her initial resistance to further engagement as a teaching assistant reveals the ways in which occupying these spaces as a student of color can be a fraught experience with few precedents of student power and with multiple potential costs. Her tactic of profiling also shows how pedagogies of the flesh—learned outside of formal education—provide knowledge for students of color in negotiating cultural dialogues. Finally, these narratives show that despite attempts to teach in alternative ways, educational spaces are not egalitarian in nature (e.g., Fassett & Warren, 2007). If everyone is to have a space at the table, a commitment to struggling together to achieve intercultural dialogue is a necessary requirement.

Finally, we would add that these dialogic spaces are often uncomfortable and unresolved and sometimes unsatisfying— what Sommerville and Perkins (2003) call “the discomfort zone”: “The negotiation of the research process was the site where individual researchers struggled to work across differences to achieve a degree of true collaboration” (Somerville & Perkins, 2003, p. 261). While we may share a physical space, “individual coresearchers carry particular interests, agendas, and are differently situated with regard to resources and privilege” (Torre & Ayala, 2009, p. 288).

Grace in Intercultural Communication

A vital part of dialogue is the opportunity to speak for ourselves and articulate our assumptions, emotions, and experiences before and in dialogue. Interlocutors speak together in a Bakhtinian sense—having tasted each other’s words and coursing with other encounters and voices. By definition, dialogues do not speak with one voice. That would be boring and inauthentic. It would compromise the dialogic process and product. In our work, we identified grace as a primary tactic—a critical approach that underwrites dialogue.

For us, grace was a quieting of the structural in order to access the human spirit in communication. Grace allowed for a flexing of humanity in order to create a space where we were able to gain traction on common ground in the midst of power differences. Grace allowed us hope in the face of all that we know theoretically, materially, and in an embodied sense, about why dialogue matters even when corseted by the very real and uneven constraints on agency. And still we have not escaped power, privilege, and race. We never aimed for integration or postracial understandings. These fantasies only obstruct dialogue. Grace allowed us to cultivate a space of patience, understanding, listening, and care for each other in this process. Grace is a practice and a commitment. Every time we paused to question, explicate, and alter, we built this shared meaning. And we endeavored to pause to theorize particular aspects of dialogue in new ways—both in the class and on the street.

As people engage in creating their own distinct and unique paths to cultural dialogue, we encourage them to attend to the integrity of the process and to the spirit in which it is undertaken. For us this spirit was a willingness and commitment to transformation, alongside grace in our moments of failure, doubt, or misunderstandings. The outcome was a cascading of grace and instruction on cultural dialogue moving back and forth across the day laborers to El Centro to the city of Aurora, between the students of the first and second classes, the teacher assistants, the professor, and their own homeplace. This could not have been achieved within the confines of a classroom with four walls, even with the most carefully selected reading and eloquent instruction. As Giroux (1992) argues, dominant pedagogy can disable students and teachers, “silenc[ing] them in the name of methodological rigor or pedagogical absolutes,” while simultaneously diminishing the complexities of political, social, and cultural space (p. 140).

In this article we practice Giroux’s theorization of border pedagogy, attending to otherness as constitutive of political and pedagogical practices and possibilities. We mark time and efficiency, space and power, and grace as three of dimensions of practicing border pedagogy in order to create radical spaces of possibilities for teachers, students, and communities. The movement from the classroom to street corner undergirds the environment where it becomes possible to carry on a deeper and embodied experience of cultural dialogue and border crossing that abides and appreciates differences; allowing teachers, students, and communities to restructure pedagogical relationships through communication to reconstitute ways of knowing from a communal perspective.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the support of anonymous reviewers and the editor for their generous and generative collaboration on this article. The authors wish to thank the class of HCOM 4220, El Centro Humanitario Para Los Trabajadores, Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning, Eliana Schoenberg, and the many others who committed time, grace, and space to be in dialogue with them as this work was developed. Dedicated with love to Rebekah, Tiffany, and Hava, women in our lives who give us strength and affirm the value of solidarity and sisterhood.

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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Taking Theories of Cultural Dialogue From the Classroom to the Street Corner

Abstract

Keywords

Communication Studies, Dialogue, and Immigration: Theory and Practice as Told by Kate

An Invitation to Dialogue in Contexts of Power and Racialized Identities as Told by Jacquelynn, a Doctoral Candidate

Graduate Research in My Homeplace as Told by Jacquelynn

Teaching on the Street: “Not-knowing” and Emotional Labor as Told by Kate 4

First Perilous Steps of Dialogue as Told by Jacquelynn

Fraught Commitments to a Second Chance for Dialogue as Told by Jacquelynn

Taking It to the Streets: Dialogue as Praxis as Told by Kate

Critical Intercultural Communication and Dialogue

Cultural Studies and Dialogue

Performance Studies

Critical (+Communication) Pedagogy

Dialogic Foreplay as Told by Jacquelynn

Dialogue, Dissatisfaction, and Deadlines as Told by Hillary

[First Slide] Not Knowing

[Second Slide] Engaging Dialogue

Preparation and Will in Dialogue as Told by Emily

Good Intentions, Whiteness, and Cultural Conflict as Told by Brett

Our Concluding Thoughts as Told by Jacquelynn and Kate

Time and Efficiency in Cultural Dialogue

Space and Power in Dialogue

Grace in Intercultural Communication

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Notes

References

Teaching on the Street: “Not-knowing” and Emotional Labor as Told by Kate⁴