Communication Praxis

Our Communication Praxis

Our center draws upon our training as Communication scholars to help cultivate new ways of public engagement, deliberation, and dialogue across difference in addition to learning from real public events. Through research, we hope to both improve the processes of gathering and engaging community input, generate collaboration and dialogue over public issues, and contribute to theories of deliberation, environmental communication, civic engagement, and democracy.

Our Focus

Our commitment to communication praxis—theory and practice—revolves around engaged scholarship and advocacy. In our research this entails taking stock of our assumptions and values so we can articulate best practices about what it means to be doing community engagement work. The topics that weave throughout our praxis—social justice, climate communication, local food, and more—all require we bridge the scales of global, national, and global imaginaries.

Current & Past Initiatives

We believe that everything we do is praxis, the synergy between theory and practice. Sometimes, one is more foregrounded than the other. CDE is regularly invited on campus and locally to share our expertise and experiences, some of these interactions have lead to deeper longer term foci of the center. Our work has involved several areas of engagement, some highlights include: training of Early Career Scientists, a Neighborhood Summit held in the city of Boulder, a series of workshops on uses and practices of community dialogue, and various projects that address cultures of civic dialogue through process design, facilitation, reporting, and deliberative forums.