Transforming Conflict and Building Peace : Community Engagement Strategies for Communication Scholarship and Practice

This inaugural volume in the Peter Lang Conflict and Peace series brings together works that richly depict the tensions between the promise and reality of applying communication principles and theories to conflict transformation and peacebuilding around the world and in the United States. Each chapter provides concrete examples of the doing of engaged scholarship in this context. Chapter contributors explain how their on-the-ground work has contributed to theorizing in communication and beyond as well as to conflict transformation and peacebuilding practice. Importantly, they also unearth the challenges in designing and implementing techniques and practices. As a collection, this edited volume underscores the communicative nature of conflict transformation and peacebuilding in particular, and engaged scholarship, in general. The collection also reveals tensions in doing engaged scholarship that are applicable to other contexts beyond conflict transformation and peacebuilding.

PETER M. KELLETT (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale) is Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His scholarly work focuses on narrative approaches to analyzing and transforming relational conflict to create more just and fair relationships. He is also active in narrative scholarship relating to health communication, as well as disability.

STACEY L. CONNAUGHTON (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is Associate Professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University. Her research examines leadership and identification in geographically distributed contexts, particularly as these issues relate to virtual teams/organizations, political parties, and peacebuilding. Dr. Connaughton is the Director of Discovery Park’s Purdue Policy Research Institute (PPRI), and she serves as Director of the Purdue Peace Project (PPP). As PPP Director, Dr. Connaughton led the relationship building, project development, and monitoring and evaluation for locally-led political violence prevention initiatives in Ghana, Liberia, and Nigeria. Dr. Connaughton is the recipient of Purdue’s 2017 Faculty Engaged Scholar Award, and Purdue’s 2018 Trailblazer Award―an award given to a midcareer tenured faculty member for innovation and impact in research.

GEORGE CHENEY (Ph.D., Purdue University) is Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. His teaching and research interests include identity in organizations, professional ethics, quality of worklife, globalization and localization, alternative ways of organizing, peace, and sustainability. Working solo or collaboratively, he has published ten books and over 100 articles, chapters, and reviews. He has held several administrative positions, including serving as director of Peace and Conflict Studies and the Tannewr Human Rights Center at the University of Utah. Cheney is a committed practitioner of service learning and has served on several non-profit boards or in a consulting capacity with them. He is a regular contributor of op eds to newspapers. Currently, he is at work on a series of articles about how cooperative structures can serve goals of economic justice, social transformation, and environmental sustainability.