Concepts, Practices and Resources for a Dialogic Era

This will be a blog where I reflect upon and share concepts, practices and resources I consider possibly useful to actualize a dialogic era. Dialogic is a word perhaps most simply understood when contrasted with its antonym: monologic. Whether considering interactions in micro, or societal or technological interactions in macro, a dialogic approach avoids imposing/colonizing/ domesticating/ demanding (I could go on) one version of how things should be irrespective of responses to that version. Monologue comes in many forms, but central to how it operates is that responsiveness or resistance to it is to be overcome, ignored, or crushed in both the short term and the longer term. Recognizable as odious to everyday conversation, a bigger picture version of monologue has been failing humans and the world they share, bringing us to why I think we need a dialogic era.

Humanity seems to oscillate between dialogue and monologue. Monologues thrive in an environment when a person or society thinks they have a better way of thinking and doing things. I live as a settler on the land of the Quw’utsun First Nation in a time my government tells me will bring ‘reconciliation’ between settlers and First Nations people. The Canadian government’s stated intention to reconcile could be seen as an effort to repair a long monologue associated with non-indigenous settlers’ treatment of indigenous peoples. Much harm was done by previous governments who thought their ‘better way’ could be imposed (‘for their own good’) on First Nations peoples. To turn elsewhere to the harm of what I am calling monologic ways of thinking and doing things, in the past six months my part of Canada has seen two ‘once in a century’ kinds of weather events: a record-shattering ‘heat dome’ and torrential rains which wiped out key parts of my province’s highway infrastructure. Our extractive relationship to our environment seems to be getting its come-uppance. Whether it is people or the environment, monologic ways of relating never fully shut down responses to them over time. They instead distort, drive underground, and do violence to relations that could be more open and harmonious. To borrow a favourite phrase from Michael Billig, “The possibility of dialogue has not been ended by those who plan continually for monologue to be followed by cheers of acceptance.” (Arguing and thinking, 1996, p. 109).

In this blog I aim to pull together ways to reflect on taken for granted monologic aspects of human life, while putting forward some ways to live dialogically with each other within elements of the world we find ourselves answering to. My privileged academic journey was largely focused on helping conversations in micro and in macro but it increasingly brought me to recognizing that dialogue meant engaging with the surprises that come from responding to otherness, in all its human and nonhuman forms. In some cases this responding is about respecting and coordinating differences with the people and nonhuman elements of life we encounter. In other cases, it is about being included, surprised, and changed by our encounters. Harmony in music, for example, is only possible by having differences in sound. I don’t know how often I’ll come back to this blog, but I’ve got a new website and this is part of how I will launch and update it. Dec. 2, 2021