Call for Submissions

Communicating Diversity 2023:

SUBMISSIONS DUE MARCH 24, 2023

The Communicating Diversity Conference started in 2012 as an event aimed at Texas A&M undergraduate and graduate students and has expanded over the years. 2012 was a half-day conference with about a dozen Aggies presenting their scholarship. 2015 included a full day’s schedule with about 35 students from six different universities. During the 2019 conference, before the pandemic, presenters from across Texas, the neighboring states, and from a variety of disciplines were in attendance. This year, we aim to respark our in-person growth by inviting submissions from scholars across different regions and disciplines.

The conference theme this year started with an acknowledgement that the routines of our everyday lives can bury meaningful messages and rush important conversations. For some, it can be easy to be content with social progress that has already been made. For others, continued inequity, inaccessibility, and injustice are the very stuff of daily life. To provide a platform for these marginalized perspectives, the theme of the 2023 conference is “Sit and Listen.” With this theme, we seek to create a space outside of the routine shuffle where people will be able to pause and take in the diversity-related conversations which some of the newest scholars think are most important. We invite scholars from all disciplines to submit abstracts for a variety of projects related to our theme of “Sit and Listen.” 

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In developing or workshopping a project about the conversations that we need to listen to, scholars may consider these questions: Where do these conversations need to happen? How do we adapt them to the multiplicity of communication contexts? Where have they already been happening? Who should take part in these conversations? Who needs to be listening? Who needs to be speaking? What can make these conversations most effective? What aspects of the timing of the conversation are most important? Why haven’t these conversations happened before? What in the past needs to inform the conversation today? Beyond the theme, We invite submissions related to, though not limited to, communicative processes in issues such as power, privilege, social justice, and climate and inclusion, in a variety of contexts (e.g., rhetoric, media, health, organizational, intercultural, political).

Scroll down to see submission guidelines.