Social Justice Conversations: Using Critical Dialogue to Unpack Oppression

Using intergroup dialogue to promote social justice and change.

Intergroup dialogue is a public process designed to involve individuals and groups in an exploration of societal issues such as politics, racism, religion, and culture that are often flashpoints for polarization and social conflict. This article examines intergroup dialogue as a bridging mechanism through which social workers in clinical, other direct practice, organizer, activist, and other ro...

Towards Improving the Naturalness of Social Conversations with Dialogue Systems

We describe an approach to improving the naturalness of a social dialogue system, Talkie, by adding disfluencies and other content-independent enhancements to synthesized conversations. We investigated whether listeners perceive conversations with these improvements as natural (i.e., human-like) as human-human conversations. We also assessed their ability to correctly identify these conversatio...

Critical Conversations

The notion of assumption plays an important role in the literature on critical thinking. However, the critical imperative of revealing one’s assumptions forces one either to follow some predefined scheme in which they are defined—in which case it restricts thinking and runs counter to the critical ideal—or to recognise that one cannot know those assumptions— in which case it is impossible. In t...

Beyond cultural competence: critical consciousness, social justice, and multicultural education.

In response to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education mandate that medical education must address both the needs of an increasingly diverse society and disparities in health care, medical schools have implemented a wide variety of programs in cultural competency. The authors critically analyze the concept of cultural competency and propose that multicultural education must go beyond the tra...

Social Justice Through Civil Justice