Diversity & Difference Praxis

Our Diversity & Difference Praxis

Our center prioritizes the needs and concerns of Indigenous communities, working families, and communities of color by pairing it with communication practices that enable listening and co-production. Our projects are committed to affective engagements and artistic and cultural productions that promote mutual understandings. We argue that direct practice and engagement with the world can create, extend, and sustain the possibility of drawing on cultural knowledge to design public participation from locally-relevant forms of strategic action.

Our Focus Areas

Community-Building Through Dialogues

Democracy as we know, means “rule by the people.” In practice, however, it is messy. CDE helps design more productive community engagement, to facilitate more constructive dialogues, and to increase the capacity of marginalized perspectives.

Commitment to Inclusive Excellence

Our work responds to the contemporary context, taking significant steps to frame the current political landscape as a complicated but robust site for enacting our community’s ideals around diversity and inclusion.

Indigenous Perspectives

Communication projects in dialogue with Indigenous Studies scholarship can assemble a more comprehensive narrative to promote mutual understandings, kinship, and engagement with our world. CDE considers pedagogical and research approaches to explore how contemporary indigenous communities are relating knowledge and communicating resilience.

Current & Past Initiatives

We believe that stories and knowledges from underheard and underrepresented groups offer a central foundation for community-based adaptation actions. Our work has involved co-hosting the 30th anniversary of the Public Address Conference 2018 on the theme of Embodying Justice, a focus on indigenous perspectives and online toolkits to educate and advocate about pipeline controversies, a public Teach-in on Engaged Citizenship (featuring panels on public discourse and social polarization, issues of Expertise, Truth, and Evidence, and environmental history across political divides), and facilitating Post-election Dialogues in response to tense local and national discourse.