Addressing Communication Keywords Communicatively: Multicontext Exemplars and Interrogations of the Uses of Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology
If examined through the typical lenses we use in our field, this preconference is a mess. Its 39 presenters come from myriad discourse communities: audience reception, collaboration, communication and the arts, environmental communication, fan studies, game studies, health communication, information seeking and use, intercultural communication, interdisciplinary communication, knowledge creation, knowledge management, human computer interaction, literacy studies, media use, peace communication, pedagogy, philosophy of communication, political communication, religion and communication, rhetoric, social justice, social theory, software design, surveillance studies, and web design. The presenters also use myriad methods: qualitative, quantitative, empirical, discourse-analytic, political, and economic. They make different foundational assumptions. Some come with research interests; some with practical interests. Some are academics; some are corporate researchers; some are consultants. Some do only research; some do only training or communication interventions; some do both.
Why would such a diverse set of 39 people come together? Why do they hope some other adventuresome souls will join them? Because, in fact, the diversity represented in the presentations is representative of the diversities that mark and divide the study of communication into separate discourse communities each with its own specialized vocabularies and assumptions, and its own conference divisions as well as journals. The participants presenting at this workshop are this diverse. But, they have something in common in addition to the core interest in communication phenomena that miraculously coheres communication as a field.
What these presenters have in common is that they all focus on, use, and/or interrogate Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) in some way. SMM has been in development for some 35 years with the aim of being a general communication-based methodology for the conduct of research, the design of system interfaces with users (by whatever name), and the implementation of communicative-communication. SMM treats research, design, and dialogue all as dialogic, as communicative. SMM also assumes that for communication to be communicative it can not be left to chance and spontaneity. It must build in systematic yet at the same time flexible procedures that facilitate the crossing of bridges between persons, spaces, and times -- e.g. between discourse communities and across suibstantive interests and the many ways in which we partition our interests in communication.
The preconference is designed as a working workshop. The aim will be not merely to describe, as usual, what each person has done in their project, how, and with what results. Rather, the aim will be to find communicative commonnesses across the projects. Core questions of focus will be: 1) How each participant used SMM in their own project's metatheory, research, and/or design; and 2) How each participant attended to SMM's mandated emphasis on treating communication communicatively. The workshop itself will be conducted applying SMM's dialogic procedures. The core of the workshop will be built around small groups of 4-6 members each reporting on their projects. Trained facilitators will lead these groups practicing SMM's principles of communicative communication involving multiple layers of participant involvement: intrapersonal and interpersonal; journal writing, turn taking, and discussion. Two sets of debriefing sessions will involve participants as a whole. Dervin will present an opening keynote entitled: Communicating as if communication matters: How Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology reaches beyond media and messages, context and content. She will also present a closing commentary.
