Introduction: Outlining and Casing the Terrain

This unusual but timely chapter explores the intersection of three areas of investigation— (1) conflict (resolution), (2) civic/community engagement, and (3) practical communica­tion ethics.

Of course, it is important for us to visual­ize what we are talking about: especially, how scholars of conflict—and by extension, dia­logue and peacemaking—can consider prac­tical ethics in their work with and within communities. Part of the issue is the insularity of these arenas, as exemplified by scholarly and practical networks, publication outlets, and vocabularies. Thus, these three literatures have developed largely independently, in both academic and community circles. Given the maturation of all three areas, the time is right for their integration.

AUTHORS’ NOTE: The first two authors contributed equally to this chapter. The third author was invited to join the effort in the important but final stage to offer a profile of an in-depth case study featuring the three major subtopics addressed here.

The literature on conflict, as represented by this volume, is vast; we emphasize our selected treatment of it here. In addition to concern for sources, punctuations, and trajectories of conflict, we note that well- established lines of research on specific aspects of language, interaction, and rhetoric related to conflict—notably under headings like “dialogue,” “neutrality,” “reframing,” “facilitation,” and “reconciliation”—are rel­evant here. The two terms alternative dispute resolution and mediation are more precise in their points of reference than the five listed above, that is, at least to the extent that professional certification is often involved or implicated. This family of techniques and the accompanying perspective do not neces­sarily suggest strict neutrality. However, they invoke a strong commitment to airing mul­tiple viewpoints and especially to allowing important sources of conflict to come to the table and be worked through (e.g., Wilmot & Hocker, 2010).

Engagement—in multiple senses of the term, including related concepts of outreach, partnering, service learning, and community­based research—is quite developed within and beyond communication studies. Community­based research as under this rubric has a 20-plus-year history that allows for some consolidation of findings about deliberate efforts to engage communities, on both small (e.g., university class-based) and large (pro­gram- or center-based) scales (Myers-Lipton, 2009). No longer of a marginal status in the academy, the serious “engagement of engagement” is making its way into program development, the profiles of universities and colleges, and reward systems for faculty (see, e.g., Harriger & McMillan, 2007). In com­munication studies, we find reports and pub­lications on major, long-term projects related to community engagement. These address a variety of topics including racial relations, environmental protection, political participa­tion, access to higher education, and commu­nity economic development (see, e.g., Spano, 2001).

Applied or practical ethics is at the point of sophisticated applications and adapta­tions to many different areas, including the interrelationship of academic and com­munity affairs, brought into the foreground in this review. Applied ethics is relevant to concepts and practices involving the com­munication process itself (Craig, 1989; see also the first discipline-wide collection in Cheney, May, & Munshi, 2011). However, applied ethics is also relevant even when communication itself is not the focus as when we consider the ways certain kinds of content (e.g., about aspects of difference, environmental classism, and racism) are framed and presented to community mem­bers and students. In other words, we may speak of both implicit and explicit ethical concerns and both communication-based and communication-related concerns.

Reflexivity enters into our discussion in that central to the traditions of community engagement, conflict resolution, and com­munication ethics is a reflection on the communication process itself (e.g., Hedges, 2008; Kendall, 2011). Finally, ethical con­cerns automatically come into play when considering community intervention. Even if research is not expressly framed as interven­tion, the capacity to effect change—and by implication, harm—should be acknowledged, as we discuss extensively below, in bring­ing together the three major themes of this chapter via a longitudinal, multidimensional case study.

Reconsidering Communication and Conflict at the Community Level, With an Eye Toward Academic Engagement

This section of the chapter first addresses the arenas and sources, then the punctuation and trajectories, of conflict encountered at the community level. We draw principally from the conflict/dispute resolution and mediation literatures, and related applications, especially in psychology, sociology, political science, and education.

In this section of the chapter, our pri­mary concern is c onflict itself, with an eye toward how scholar-practitioners encounter it. We extract only a few highlights from the conflict literature and explain some links to engagement and ethics, especially in terms of community-based and -oriented research. We focus attention on (a) sources and origins of community-based conflict; (b) the punctuation and trajectories of community-based conflicts; and (c) the most relevant findings from the conflict management/resolution literature for engaged scholarship in situations where com­munity conflict is present or emerges.