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Designing With a Dialogical Sensibility

A burning issue for conflict scholars is how to design forums and practices for dialogical forms of communication that enable people to respond to these tensions in a constructive manner and enable them to work through the conflict.

We suggest that a profitable approach to working with dialectical ten­sions in dialogue is Aakhus’s (2007) notion of communication as design. Designers of dialogue must develop a dialogical sensibility that allows them to attend to the here and now of the present situation in order to develop structures and tools that foster dialogue and fit with the unique qualities of the situation. We use Aakhus’s (2007) perspective toward communication as design and integrate it with Barge and Little’s (2002, 2008) notion of sen­sibility to provide a framework for designing dialogue. To help illustrate these concepts, we use Barge, Lee, Maddux, Nabring, and Townsend’s (2008) essay that examines a mul­tistakeholder dialogue process for managing conflict and engaging in strategic planning.

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Source: Oetzel John, Ting-Toomey Stella. The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice. SAGE Publications,2013. — 912 p.. 2013

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