Reimagining Dialogue on Identity, Language and Power

Book excerpt: In this book dialogue is used as a research, knowledge-sharing and community-building tool in which participants engage with each other in reflecting upon the perspectives of self and others: challenging, complementing and contradicting each other as critical peers. The book aims to be an enactment of sociological reimagination, as a way to reimagine public conversations that inspire criticality, innovation and multimodality around the intersection of identity (self), language (mediating mechanism) and power (sociocultural domain). Each chapter illustrates the use of dialogue as a participatory research tool as a way in which the sharing of knowledge and the growth of understanding occurs through meaning- and strategy-making processes. Together they present dialogue as an integrative model of self-inquiry and social activism and provide a valuable standpoint to understand the participatory nature of our very effort to question and investigate our sense of self in the world.