Improving Dialogue With Communities

This practical manual is written in a clear, concise manner and addresses many unanswered questions about communication and the community. The book is special in that it focuses on the "hows" rather than the "whys." It reveals how to be a better communicator, how to explain technical information in lay terms, and how to find ways to reach out to the community. Industry Risk Communication Manual provides you ready access to current thinking and practice on environmental risk communication. This manual will allow you to think through risk communication problems and plan risk communication strategies. It also will provide you with examples and instant experience from over 30 experts who have found themselves in similar situations. Developed by one of the leading programs on risk communication, this book provides easy-to-follow guidelines, checklists, and examples for plant managers, public information specialists, technical staff, executives, and managers who need to deal with the public regarding how their company's business relates to environmental risk issues.

Prepared for State and local government officials, LEPCs, and other community groups that want to make Title III of the Superfund Amend. and Reauth. Act of 1986 work. It is intended as a practical guide for those who have little or no previous experience in the field of communication, and whose time and resources are limited. Discusses planning, which is vital to the success of a communication program. Suggests ways to get and keep people involved, especially important because Title III affects so many sectors of the community. A how-to-do-it section talks about specific tasks, such as giving a speech or writing a press release.

On November 3, 1979, five protest marchers in Greensboro, North Carolina, were shot and killed by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. There were no police present, but television crews captured the shootings on video. Despite two criminal trials, none of the killers ever served time for their crimes, exposing what many believed to be the inadequacy of judicial, political, and economic systems in the United States. Twenty-five years later, in 2004, Greensboro residents, inspired by post-apartheid South Africa, initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to take public testimony and examine the causes, sequence of events, and consequences of the massacre. The TRC was to be a process and a tool by which citizens could feel confident about the truth of the city's history in order to reconcile divergent understandings of past and current city values, and it became the foundation for the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States. Spoma Jovanovic, who worked alongside other community members to document the grassroots effort to convene the first TRC in the United States, provides a resource and case study of how citizens in one community used their TRC as a way to understand the past and conceive the future. This book preserves the historical significance of a people's effort to seek truth and work for reconciliation, shows a variety of discourse models for other communities to use in seeking to redress past harms, and demonstrates the power of community action to promote participatory democracy.

Fighting Toxics is a step-by-step guide illustrating how to investigate the toxic hazards that may exist in your community, how to determine the risks they pose to your health, and how to launch an effective campaign to eliminate them.

Corporations are among the most powerful institutions of our time, but they are also responsible for a wide range of harmful social and environmental impacts. Consequently, political movements and nongovernmental organizations increasingly contest the risks that corporations pose to people and nature. Mining Capitalism examines the strategies through which corporations manage their relationships with these critics and adversaries. By focusing on the conflict over the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea, Stuart Kirsch tells the story of a slow-moving environmental disaster and the international network of indigenous peoples, advocacy groups, and lawyers that sought to protect local rivers and rain forests. Along the way, he analyzes how corporations promote their interests by manipulating science and invoking the discourses of sustainability and social responsibility. Based on two decades of anthropological research, this book is comparative in scope, showing readers how similar dynamics operate in other industries around the world.

The chapters in this edited volume raise important issues of the relation between research and its various external "publics".

Dialogue in Multilingual and Multimodal Communities contains a collection of new articles that approach the study of dialogue through the construct of the ‘community’, that is, a group of people who come together for any number of reasons; e.g. geographical location, a common goal, a search for unity or bonding, or a particular set of circumstances. The authors address a wide range of topics such as dialogic skills as situated practice, the learning of culture, and the negotiation of identities between native speakers and L2 learners. This volume also investigates how native and non-native speakers learn various community-based aspects of dialogic interaction, such as how to interpret social contexts, stances, frames and gestures. Despite different methodologies and frameworks, the studies demonstrate that native speakers and L2 learners alike use multiple ‘vocalizations’ of a language.