Explicating the relationally attentive approach to conducting engaged communication scholarship

ABSTRACT

As interest in engaged communication scholarship grows, so does the need for concrete examples of how such research is done. In this essay, we articulate an example of the how by presenting the work of the Purdue Peace Project, a locally led peacebuilding initiative based at Purdue University. We do so by (a) explicating the communicative choices in our approach to engaged scholarship and (b) relating these choices to the impacts that our approach has had on preventing political violence related to a chieftaincy dispute in Keperman (pseudonym), Ghana. Based on qualitative data from multiple time points, we unpack our communicative choices, relate these choices to the realization of engagement goals and setbacks, and reveal multi-level, interdependent, and communicative indicators of impacts. We present what we term the relationally attentive approach to engaged communication scholarship and discuss implications and recommendations for those doing engaged scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogue
• engaged scholarship
• peacebuilding
• relationally attentive approach

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Katherine Miller, the anonymous reviewers, and Larry Frey for their thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. The authors also thank Milton Lauenstein for his support of the Purdue Peace Project and our Ghanaian collaborators for their inspiration. The authors dedicate this essay to our dear friend and colleague, the late Rosaline Baatuolkuu Obeng-Ofori.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Milton Lauenstein, gift to the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University.