Workshop papers are listed in alphabetical order by title and available in PDF and Microsoft Word formats. All papers are copyrighted by their individual authors, and available on this website with their permission. However, none of these publications may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or tansmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the individual author/s of the paper. Individual authors should be contacted in the event that an individual wants to use their paper.

• Building Community in a Protracted Conflict Situation: Applications of Interactive Design Methodologies with Citizen Peace-building Efforts in Cyprus
• Civic Discovery and the Three "Cs" of Public Participation: Consultation, Consensus, and Collaboration
• Diagnosing a School Board's Interactional Trouble: Toward a Theory of Blame Reconstruction
• Enlarging the Meaning of Group Deliberation: From Discussion to Dialogue
• Extending the Theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning ("CMM") Through A Community Dialogue Process
• Practical Theory and a Naturalistic Account of Inquiry
• Practical Theory For the Conflict Assessment Process: The Trinity of Voice, Legitimacy, and Influence
• Practically Theorizing Theory and Practice
• Pride and Prejudice: Considering the Role of Contempt in Community and Conflict
• The Public Dialogue Consortium's School-wide Dialogue Process: A Communication Approach to Develop Citizenship Skills and Enhance School Climate
• Reclaiming Indeterminancy and the Deliberative Process
• Reconfiguring Borders: Health-care Providers and Environmentalism in Cameron County, Texas

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Building Community in a Protracted Conflict Situation: Applications of Interactive Design Methodologies with Citizen Peace-building Efforts in Cyprus by Benjamin J. Broome. PDF Format | Word Document.

ABSTRACT: We have given more attention to improving dating relationships of college sophomores than to helping societies torn by war to rebuild an infrastructure for peace. Since the demise of the Cold War that pitted Western Europe and the United States against the Soviet Union, the world's attention has been dominated by smaller interstate and intrastate conflicts often centered on ethnic differences but with roots in superpower rivalries. An instructive example of such conflicts exists in Cyprus, which arose during the height of cold war politics and has outlasted both the cold war and many of the disputes that have consumed the majority of the world's attention in recent years Bosnia, Ireland, South Africa, and many of the Israeli-Arab disputes. One of the reasons that little movement has been made in bringing the Cyprus conflict to a successful resolution is that until recently, there did not exist a citizen pace-building movement on the island. I resided in Cyprus from 1994-1996 as a Fulbright Scholar in conflict resolution, where I had the privilege of working with citizen groups of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots as they struggled together to form a broad-based peace movement. My role was to help the two groups develop a heightened mutual understanding of the situation in Cyprus, to develop a collective vision for the future, and to design an integrated set of activities for moving forward together effectively. To accomplish these tasks, we used a set of interactive design methodologies that were developed to help participants co-create mutual understanding, shared views of the future, and joint strategies for action. In this workshop, I will describe the activities involved in these efforts, showing how they exemplify a practical theory at work in a protracted conflict situation that has defied for 35 years the attempts of the world's best diplomats to forge a political agreement.

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Civic Discovery and the Three "Cs" of Public Participation: Consultation, Consensus, and Collaboration by Gregg B. Walker. PDF Format | Word Document.

ABSTRACT: Writing in The Power of Public Ideas, Robert Reich has urged policy decision makers, organizations, and citizens to seek civic discovery: processes through which "citizens debate their future." This essay examines the extent to which decision makers and organizations, such as agencies, foster civic discovery through public participation. Public participation processes of consultation, consensus, and collaboration are compared. The three processes' different techniques and philosophies influence communication interaction and learning, and consequently, the role of citizens in policy decision making.

Diagnosing a School Board's Interactional Trouble: Toward a Theory of Blame Reconstruction by Karen Tracy and Heidi Muller. PDF Format | Word Document.

ABSTRACT: Communication, Craig argues, is and should be a practical discipline: a field whose scholarly work would be helpful in improving the communicative practices it studies. Following explication of Craig's notions of practical theory and communication as a practical discipline, the paper analyzes the interactional trouble in one community's school board meetings. Drawing upon three theories relevant to this school board site -- proposals about argumentative processes, rhetorical action and moral conflict -- we show how each of the theoretical lenses leads to a different diagnosis of the community's "school board problem." The second part of the paper inverts the analytic focus. Based on study of this school board's troubles, we critique the usefulness of the three theories. Finally, in the paper's conclusion, we draw out linkages between problem naming and blame allocation.

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Enlarging the Meaning of Group Deliberation: From Discussion to Dialogue by Kevin Barge. PDF Format | Word Document.

ABSTRACT: Group communication scholars have long been interested in the relationship among group discourse and democracy. Historically, this relationship has priveleged the language of debate and discussion as the primary linguistic form for promoting democracy. Recent theoretical moves emphasizing more appreciative and dialogic forms of discourse have emerged as a counterpoint to the traditional discourses of debate and discussion. I take the position that the language associated with small group discourse needs to be enlarged to include both discussion and debate as well as appreciative inquiry and dialogue. A case study illustrating how these appreciative and dialogic forms of discourse may be created in groups is provided and the implications for our understanding of small group communication when these forms are adopted is highlighted.

A Preamble…. While this paper will not be presented at the workshop. I wanted to include it on the website to illustrate some of the issues that I am presently working through regarding issues of public participation. This essay was written for Larry Frey's forthcoming book, New Directions in Group Communication (Sage). This essay suggests that group communication needs to move beyond focusing exclusively on forms of communication grounded in debate and problem-centered language in order to foster democracy toward including forms of communication that are more dialogic and appreciative in nature. The impulse for this essay grows out of my involvement with America's Promise-a nationwide initiative to develop the capacity of our youth. In 1997, Waco held the Central Texas Youth Summit for over 1200 youth at Baylor University. Along with other members of the Public Dialogue Consortium, we designed a process that was grounded in dialogic and appreciative forms of communication.

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Extending the Theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning ("CMM") Through A Community Dialogue Process by W. Barnett Pearce and Kimberly A. Pearce. PDF Format | Word Document.

ABSTRACT: CMM informed the work of the Public Dialogue Consortium in a multi-year, citywide collaborative community action project. This was the first time CMM had been applied as a practical theory in the context of public communication. This essay describes some of the effects of the Project on the theory that guided it. The usefulness of several central tenets of CMM was confirmed, including foregrounding communication, attending to the forms of communication, and defining communication as "coordination." Several other concepts were significantly extended, including the idea of logical force, the person position of facilitator, and the importance of creating contexts. Three new models were developed, including the Community Dialogue Process Model, the LUUUTT model, and the Daisy model. Reflecting on the effects of the Project on the theory raises provocative questions for further exploration.

Practical Theory and a Naturalistic Account of Inquiry by Vernon E. Cronen. PDF Format | Word Document.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes what the author calls "Practical Theory." It is based on John Dewey's naturalistic understanding of inquiry introduced in 1938. In Dewey's view, all living creatures inquire. That is, they find ways to achieve better mutual adaptions and accommodations with other creatures and the world. A theory is a set of instrumentalities for achieving that. Practical theory thus rejects the traditional theory-practice dualism. Practical theories have the form of a heuristic for guiding action in the world. This paper presents a definition of practical theory, identifying features of it, and criteria for evaluating particular exemplars.

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Practical Theory For the Conflict Assessment Process: The Trinity of Voice, Legitimacy, and Influence by Susan L. Senecah. PDF Format | Word Document

ABSTRACT: Environmental conflicts are typically contentious, multi-stakeholder, resource disparate, multi-objective, science and technology based, statutorily constrained, and high profile. Consequently, organizing and launching a consensus building process to address an environmental conflict is daunting. Conducting a conflict assessment is an effective way to gather information to support critical early decisions regarding consensus building process as well as build stakeholder capacity to engage the process. This paper offers the practical theory of voice, legitimacy, and influence and their grammars to guide the conflict assessment process to enhance its value for all involved.

Practically Theorizing Theory and Practice by John Stewart and Karen Zediker. PDF Format | Word Document.

INTRODUCTION: Our goal in these pages is to explore the central relationship that this workshop "works," the connection between theory and practice. It is clear that the received view-that the two are separate, that theory guides practice, and that practice applies and tests theory-helps create the problems that this workshop is designed to mitigate. We've learned that another view-that theorizing is articulate praxis-can substantially enrich the communication experience of professionals and laypersons.

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Pride and Prejudice: Considering the Role of Contempt in Community and Conflict by Tricia S. Jones. PDF Format | Word Document.

INTRODUCTION: For the past twenty years my primary focus of scholarship, consultation and practice has been conflict processes in interpersonal, organizational and community settings. My experiences, some of which will be discussed in more detail in the following sections, have led me to wonder why, as a field, we have done so little to study and appreciate the role of emotion in these processes. Recently, I have speculated about the reasons for this oversight and have argued why I believe that emotion and emotional communication is fundamental for any understanding of conflict dynamics (Jones, in press).

This paper affords me an opportunity to further reflect upon perhaps the least studied and most virulent emotion of them all-contempt. The upcoming conference on practical theory also affords an opportunity to learn new ways in which constructive processes in conflict management and community building may inform our efforts to constrain the corrosive consequences of contempt in practice. To that end, this paper presents several points of discussion that will hopefully serve as a starting point for a much-anticipated conversation.

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The Public Dialogue Consortium's School-wide Dialogue Process: A Communication Approach to Develop Citizenship Skills and Enhance School Climate by W. Barnett Pearce and Kimberly A. Pearce. PDF Format | Word Document.

ABSTRACT: The School-wide Dialogue Process is a preventive, capacitating, facilitative program for enhancing school climate and developing citizenship skills. Intended as a sustained program, it provides opportunities for students, administration and parents to discuss sensitive and difficult issues, and institutionalizes patterns of communication that enrich the participants' abilities to describe their perspectives, listen to the perspectives of others, and move forward collaboratively.

The theoretical/practical question addressed by the Public Dialogue Consortium is "how can we bring about sustainable development of cosmopolitan communication in a variety of contexts?" Our answers comprise an evolving grammar of concepts and practices, or a practical theory. One answer is the School-wide Dialogue Process.

This essay describes the School-wide Dialogue Process at Cupertino High School. The grammar of our theory is expressed in the HEDD model (Hearing the voices, Enriching the conversation, Deliberating options, and Deciding and moving forward), and we address some practical issues involved in implementing the Process.

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Reclaiming Indeterminancy and the Deliberative Process by Stanley Deetz. PDF Format | Word Document.

ABSTRACT: Most traditional theories and conceptions of communication, and consequently community deliberation, like the liberal democracy model with which they are associated, assume a relatively determinant or determinable world as a starting point for interaction. Personal identities, interests, information and values are treated as discoverable and sharable rather than as inherently constructed, fluid and contestable. Many contemporary theories have shown that individuals, events and community are boundariless, complex, internally conflictual. Rather than this being a problem, these same theories argue that a rediscovery or return to indeterminacy is key to developing a more satisfying mutual redetermination. Such theories have remained relatively philosophical and few applications to community deliberation are present. This paper will explore the prospects for an open decentering discourse following these models.

Reconfiguring Borders: Health-care Providers and Environmentalism in Cameron County, Texas by Tarla Rai Peterson, Susan J. Gilbert,z Kathi Groenendyk, Jay Todd, and Gary E. Varner. PDF Format | Word Document.

INTRODUCTION: This essay explores the attempts of female health practitioners to communicate the connections between human health and the natural environment in Cameron County, Texas. Flew, et. al. (1999) argue that, globalization has brought an increase in the competition for cheap labor, depletion of natural resources, and cultural penetration from the west. They suggest it may also, however, open new possibilities for positive exchanges. Few people are so uniquely positioned to examine this phenomenon, as are residents of Cameron County, the southernmost county in the United States. Their experience in the borderlands offers a unique opportunity for understanding experiences and contexts from both a local and a global perspective.

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