The Strength of Assertion

This chapter analyzes how both communicative and cultural practices can foster the emergence of common ground and a sense of community. It explores specific approaches that emphasize common ground and community as crucial components for managing intercultural conflict. There are several approaches that build upon community such as Dai's interculturality, Bauman's liquid modernity, Haslett's development of face, and Ury's Third Space. It is from these perspectives that a growing trend toward relying on communication and community for engaging in effective conflict management has emerged. Culture and communication are inextricably linked because people learn our culture via communication, both verbal and non-verbal. Communicative practices framed by an Asiacentric or Afrocentric perspective have also been modeled so as to be geared toward community, and they have been extended to apply to humankind in general. This perspective involves searching for common ground on which to resolve disputes, and it acknowledges the importance of community in both communication and culture.

Ethics are the driving force of the humanitarian field, a domain that has been governed by general and universal ethical principles. Researchers have largely focused on studying the organizational commitment to these principles, paying less attention to the role-specific ethics of this field. Moreover, researchers who consider the humanitarian field from a media studies lens have often focused on media representation, while questions about communication as practice are sidelined. In this paper, I approach humanitarian ethics with a particular focus on role morality and communication practices. With a particular focus on the role of a humanitarian communications specialist, I argue, in this paper, that the feminist ethics of care is a useful ethical framework that can guide communication specialists to better practices when they are in the field of operation. I also answer the following research questions: What are the main ethical principles that humanitarian communication specialists are expected to observe as humanitarians? Why are these principles insufficient? How might feminist ethics of care fill the gap left by current humanitarian principles and what would be the added value of this framework for practicing humanitarian communication? To answer, I ground my approach in an experiential understanding built from my personal experience as a humanitarian communications specialist. Second, I offer a literature review to highlight the common ground between humanitarian ethics and the feminist ethics of care and the added value of the feminist ethics of care why applied by humanitarian communication specialists. Third, I provide some examples of communications practices that may follow the feminist ethics of care model.

Informal learning in a physical work context requires communication and collaboration that build on a common ground and an active awareness of a situation. We explored whether mobile video conversations augmented with on-screen drawing features were beneficial for improving communication and remote collaboration practices in the construction and facility maintenance services sectors. We used field studies in actual work contexts to map how participants solve physical tasks with remote help powered by augmented video calls, and examined how the drawing feature was used in these contexts. The research data were collected from interviews and job shadowing. The results suggest that augmented video calls enhance remote collaboration by allowing workers to point at task objects and locations, thus potentially improving informal workplace learning.

David Ring MD, PhD (left) and Ana-Maria Vranceanu PhD (right)The International Musculoskeletal Mental and Social Health Consortium (I-MESH) brings together clinicians and researchers with a passion for reducing the global toll of musculoskeletal disorders. United by a desire to break down the silos between those who care for people with musculoskeletal conditions, we developed I-MESH in 2020 to share knowledge and resources and develop actionable strategies to transition musculoskeletal care toward a biopsychosocial model. I-MESH includes more than 60 international clinicians and researchers who are trained as orthopaedic surgeons, social workers, psychologists, nonoperative specialists, athletic trainers, as well as physical, occupational, and hand therapists. We welcome new members who share our mission! I-MESH started with developing working definitions of mental and social health. We believe mental health includes thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that help us thrive, and that social health encompasses role, relationship, job, financial, home, and food security. Social health also is affected by educational access and quality, economic stability, healthcare access and quality, neighborhood and built environment, and social and community context including racism, discrimination, and violence. In the initial I-MESH meetings, we used a consensus-based decision-making approach to identify three key priorities for I-MESH. First, we sought common ground on the terminology and language to help foster quality patient care and research. Second, we set out to conduct qualitative and mixed-methods research to gain a nuanced understanding of the barriers and facilitators to implementation of psychosocial care at the level of patients, providers, and organizations. Third, we aimed to develop clinical and research resources to foster interdisciplinary collaborations. For example, we developed special interest groups within I-MESH focusing on research, communication, and clinical practice. Our first white paper delineates details on I-MESH’s mission, vision, and values [1]. We are proud to share the selected proceedings of the inaugural I-MESH meeting in this month’s Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research®. These papers were presented at our virtual meeting in March 2021, which included qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research. These papers not only draw attention to the notable influence of unhelpful thoughts, feelings of distress, and circumstances of insecurity on symptom intensity and the magnitude of capability (how one feels and what one can do), but they also hit on areas that have the potential to enhance overall health through collaboration and coordination of biopsychosocial strategies. Collectively, the papers in these selected proceedings add to the evidence that unhelpful thinking (such as worst-case thoughts and fear of painful worry or despair have notable associations with symptom intensity and magnitude of limitations. The I-MESH papers in these selected proceedings show that orthopaedic surgeons can identify unhelpful thinking using a number of easy-to-employ measurements and communication strategies, and that specific barriers can be lowered as we craft care strategies that take advantage of this knowledge. We hope that these selected proceedings in CORR® and I-MESH can help increase the momentum toward adoption of the biopsychosocial paradigm in musculoskeletal health and in medicine more generally. We plan to hold the second I-MESH meeting in Spring 2022 and welcome abstract submissions, which individuals can send to [email protected]. Selected proceedings from that meeting will again be published in CORR.

Among the preconditions for establishing colonial authority was communication with the colonised. Verbal exchanges depended on a shared communicative praxis providing common ground on which unilateral claims could be imposed. Use of, and control over, verbal means of communication were needed to maintain regimes - military, religious-ideological, economic - in power. In the Belgian Congo brutal physical force never ceased to be exercised. In this study Professor Fabian examines the more subtle uses of power through controls on communication, by looking at the history of Swahili as it spread from the East Coast to Central Africa and demonstrating connections between -changing forms of colonial power and the development of policies towards Swahili. Using a wide range of sources, including numerous and sometimes obscure vocabularies, he combines concepts derived from literary theory and sociolinguistics to uncover, through the flaws and failures of these texts, deep-seated attitudes to language and communication.