The current dialogue on dialogue
Art by Sabrina Wise ’26
Having a dialogue on dialogue with a bunch of people way smarter than me seemed like the worst idea in the world. It brought up all my insecurities from young adulthood about not being smart enough in school or nimble enough with verbal repartees outside of school. Would having a dialogue on dialogue expose me, at long last, as the imposter I’ve always felt I am? Were these feelings of imposterhood just remnants from a time when I really had no idea who or what I was and if I’d ever find a cohort to welcome me despite my obvious flaws? All of these things were possible when this particular gathering gathered. But this, dear reader, is a prime reason COA is so valuable: the college constantly pushes you to move beyond what you think you’re capable of.
I began by contacting several COA colleagues working in different areas of the college: Faculty of Cultural and Political Anthropology, Postcolonial, and Feminist Theory Netta van Vliet, Cody van Heerden Chair in Economics and Quantitative Social Sciences Hien Nguyen, Faculty of Interdisciplinary Arts Anna Ialeggio, Co-Director of Thorndike Library Catherine Preston-Schreck, and Mitchell P. Rales Chair in Ecology Kara Gadeken. I then sent them Kenneth Burke’s “Unending Conversation” metaphor about how human knowledge and discourse is built on what has come before. Here is Burke’s metaphor taken from The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (University of California Press, 1974).
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
And with that, our conversation begins.
Art by Sabrina Wise ’26
Dan Mahoney: The theme for this year’s magazine is Dialogue. One of the reasons I started to think about dialogue in the country, and in higher education in particular, is I’ve noticed conversations in the classroom—and conversations students are able to have with each other—have turned in a weird way. There is a fear of discomfort in a classroom setting. We’re afraid of stepping on each other’s toes, and this is strange because I’ve always considered myself to be an expert toe stepper-oner. I was wondering if anyone has experienced this, inside or outside of the classroom?
Netta van Vliet: I’m curious to hear what people think dialogue actually is and what it’s not. How is dialogue different from other forms of expression? For me there’s a question here of what it is that we’re referring to when we’re talking about dialogue.
Anna Ialeggio: If you’re seeding this conversation in terms of academic dialogue, or dialogue that happens in the structure of a classroom, that is one of many different kinds. In my field, there’s a particular form of dialogue I hope for that happens through artwork and projects being presented in a public realm with the hope of some response, that could lead to a counter response, and so on. So, if we’re talking about in-classroom dialogue, then what I’m thinking about is an idea or ideas being exchanged, ideally because we’re looking for something new.
Catherine Preston-Schreck: There are, as Anna was pointing out, many different kinds of dialogues. In the world of a library, I think about dialogues in terms of simply creating a space for people to gather and exchange ideas. Extending this to Burke’s metaphor of a parlor, who owns those spaces, and who owns access to the information that might inform that conversation? It’s more clear, I think, in the work of a librarian, because we are literally giving money to a lot of different corporations and organizations in order to have databases and journals. That really defines some of those conversations and leaves a lot of people out.
DM: What is dialogue and who has access? Kara, when I think about access in the sciences I think about Sci-Hub, the questionably legal shadow library that allows access to scientific journals without the paywall, and how that site has helped spread information far and wide, especially in the developing world.
Kara Gadeken: There are structural barriers to accessing knowledge that, much of the time, students and nonstudents have already paid for with their tax dollars. In my view—and I write this on the board for them—they should definitely absolutely under no circumstances ever think about using Sci-Hub. I have my own opinions about accessibility in science. My musings when I read the email Dan sent were about the way scientific conversation occurs. The way I frame it for my students is that we can think about science through several different lenses.
One of the lenses we can use to view science is the lens of a conversation. It’s a long-running conversation between usually highly educated people in a very specific framework with rules of engagement for how you present information and how you engage with other people about the information presented. In a perfect world, that conversation would be free and open for everyone to view. That’s not the case. It’s by design, by historical design, curated and exclusive.
There are certain things that you need to have acquired, whether they are degrees or accolades or positions, in order to contribute, or you have to be associated with someone who has those metrics of expertise to contribute. The history of science is one of exclusivity.
NvV: As a non-scientist, that sounds familiar in an overlapping way to humanities and interpretive social sciences. I would also add that, as someone who’s not schooled in science beyond high school, to me there’s an element of exclusivity, but not necessarily by design but because I just have not learned as much as you have in biology. I might find it difficult to participate because I lack the language.
KG: Yes, language, that is what I was thinking about earlier and did not include. There are words that are given specific meanings that unless you are trained in that field, it is not immediately clear what it is that you’re talking about. Jargon, for lack of a better word… and I think it gets a bad rap because it can be exclusionary, but it’s double-sided. There are good reasons for jargon to exist. It can allow for the building of further understanding and complexity when you have that underlying structure. But for those who do not have access to that foundation, the whole thing seems like a forbidding tower they can’t enter. So that is where the years of training in how you actually talk about these things come into play. The language that you use, those common understandings that you have with other experts in your field, allows for further development of ideas, but it also can keep people out.
Hien Nguyen: I couldn’t agree more with Kara about exclusivity in the disciplines. Yet there is a tension here between the need to democratize access to scientific knowledge and dialogue, and the dangers of people without scientific training but with significant political or financial power spreading scientific misinformation. For example, I am thinking about the spread of vaccine misinformation, which has done enormous damage to public health and social welfare, and which is often propagated by wealthy or politically-connected individuals who exploit their platforms to undermine scientific consensus.
But I want to return to the original question about what happened to dialogue in the classroom. I want to challenge that idea that the classroom is necessarily the place to have a dialogue. Let me give an example from my own field: In economics, we’re experiencing what a colleague aptly called “paradigm stagnation in the midst of polycrisis.” The dominant theoretical frameworks are demonstrably incapable of addressing contemporary economic crises—climate breakdown, rising inequality, care infrastructure collapse. Yet there’s no material incentive to fundamentally change the paradigm, because these ongoing crises actually increase demand for economists using the existing tools. The system rewards reproducing the same conversation without resolution. This connects back to Burke’s Parlor: sometimes we keep entering the same room, having the same debates, not because we’re genuinely seeking truth, but because the material structures reward our continued presence in that space without transformation.
Art by Sabrina Wise ’26
DM: So the “parameters” of Burke’s metaphorical conversation have been baked in. The place, who is allowed to participate, and what can be said has been seeded from the start. There’s no changing it. This could be the classroom, the social media sphere, the workspace… Ouch.
Dialogue and discomfort
NvV: The Latin root of the word dialogue is “through words.” So, I’m thinking in terms of my job teaching college students doing work together through words, and that has become more difficult. Or maybe the challenges have changed in a way… It has become more of a challenge to figure out ways to create conditions in which we can do work together with words rather than the challenge being more in the work itself. Does that make sense? I’m seeing various ways in which people are more concerned with what is allowed to be said or what the consequences might be of using which words when and how. At COA post-COVID, I feel like I am hearing more anxiety about disagreement and about policing of speech, and I find myself reassuring students that it’s okay to disagree more than what once was the case.
It’s okay that we have different opinions and different interpretations of texts. Not only is it okay, but it’s actually a good thing. There’s a difference between being disrespectful and disagreeing, you can disagree and still be respectful.
AI: I would love to respond to Netta. I teach in a subjective area. Many of our discussions are in the realm of subjective responses. My students have to know they’re not being assessed on their conversation (or their creative actions) in terms of my personal taste. And what I’m interested in, what I want them to generate between each other, are thoughtful, specific responses to purposeful, specific choices that have been made—in objects, gestures, and propositions they offer to each other. Which comes back to not judging the person, but rather the action and being mindful of the word “judging.” That’s the job of an art professor. That’s the work as I see it.
DM: Have you noticed changes post-COVID?
AI: Around the time of the pandemic, a false binary started to emerge very powerfully in art classrooms: the idea that the basis for encountering or assessing artwork should be framed in terms of right and wrong, or in terms of liking versus disliking. Sometimes like/dislike was being interpreted as right/wrong. Those categories were muddled. It seems to be an even stronger inclination now… I agree with what Hien said about wondering exactly what kind of dialogue happens in the classroom. I’ve come to think of it more as a moderated conversation where my role is to constantly try to get us away from like/dislike and right/wrong, and back to what are our specific responses to specific choices that an artist has made. What are the effects of those choices on us, the individual and collective audience? And then, how can the person who made those choices learn to be in control of them, or harness the awesome chaotic accident that sometimes produces them?
NvV: What I hear from students is that they feel restricted or scared to voice an opinion in all kinds of contexts, including in seminar discussions, in large part because of social media, that someone will post something they said, and label them in a particular way. This, then, causes a sense of restriction when trying to think out loud together in the classroom.
HN: There are so many different things to talk about when it comes to social media. The like/dislike binary, but also increasing political partisanship and what political scientists are calling affective polarization—where you don’t just disagree with people who have different views, you find them morally repugnant. This happens across the political spectrum. I’ve noticed this among my students, some of whom talk about cutting off contact with family members over disagreements about controversial political issues such as abortion rights, climate change, or the Gaza conflict. Sometimes I myself have the same reflexive instinct, to cut off the conversation and disengage. So on dialogue, the question becomes: what kinds of dialogue become impossible in this climate? And what are we losing when political disagreement becomes grounds for severing relationships?
KG: I find it interesting to hear what you were saying, Anna, about how critique has changed in your classroom. A contrast I find between art and science (not at all to say that science is not political, because it is, especially at this current moment) is the scientific method. It is a thing that exists independent of any one person that you follow. You do the scientific method and the act of asking scientific questions and posing hypotheses is a dialogue in and of itself. Once students learn the scientific method, they discover that it’s not them on the chopping block. The hypothesis is doing the work. That relieves some pressure when we’re having discussions in the classroom. There is a sense of “removal” in the sciences that perhaps does not exist in other disciplines. It’s like you’re trying to remove yourself from the equation as much as possible, and it becomes objective—but, of course, it doesn’t. But the goal is objectivity, whatever that is. I find that in the dialogues I’m having with students in the classroom, we have the most effective discussions when we really key into that vibe of, it’s the science having the discussion, not the students.
Art by Sabrina Wise ’26
NvV: Part of my job as a teacher is to inform students about the current debates in anthropology and related fields. I teach the thinking behind some of those debates. For example, as an anthropologist how do you account for your subjectivity, your personal experience, your views, your interpretations? What does it mean to do that in relation to people who have different experiences, different questions, and different interpretations? And how can we focus on the thing at hand? It’s interesting to hear Kara talk about this in the sciences. There are students who come into anthropology classes thinking they can be objective and that objectivity is the goal when you’re observing human behavior. And there are some anthropologists who think you can be objective. I’m not one of them. I try to challenge students to think about what “objectivity” means, especially in the context of trying to understand social relationships, power, politics, etc. In many of my classes we often turn to Stuart Hall’s writing about discourse, which can be thought of as the existing frameworks around a certain topic. If we look at discourse in terms of framework, then as a class we are thinking about the limits of the sayable about a topic, any topic… The dialogue we can then have is one that allows us to recognize what the discourses are and what can interrupt or open or change those existing discourses.
DM: But it is difficult to get there if folks are afraid of speaking or even thinking a thought that might offend someone.
HN: There’s data showing that rates of self-censorship among Americans have increased dramatically—some research suggests it has tripled since the McCarthy era. Interestingly, self-censorship correlates with education level: those with higher education report more self-censorship, while those without postsecondary education are more likely to express opinions without filtering.
DM: That holds up if you look at who has power in the US right now. The book burners are back… if, indeed, they ever left.
CP-S: I feel very privileged to be in a place where we have a lot of creativity and freedom with how we do our work. Public libraries and university libraries exist in different contexts. The rates of book bannings have been tremendously high in the last few years, especially since 2020. There are organizations like the American Library Association that track these numbers, but a lot of things don’t get reported. This has been happening across Maine. I know school librarians who have been fired because materials deemed “inappropriate” were in their collections. A lot of librarians are leaving the profession. It’s a low-paying job to begin with, so there are other factors that don’t necessarily keep people motivated to stay on. It’s a real scary issue, but it’s not new. We certainly have gone through historical phases of this. Not just the current political forces trying to dictate what information people can access in terms of what books are on the shelves, but also who can even enter into a space. There’s the history of segregation, that libraries for people of color were either poorly funded or barely existent.
HN: I’m speculating here because I don’t have access to the data, but I think part of the reason we’ve seen a growing rate of censorship in the US is increasing economic instability and precarity. The consequences of losing your job have become so much higher in the current climate and so people proactively censor themselves. We no longer have the material conditions to have a free and open debate if everyone is desperately clinging to economic survival. Meanwhile, we witness with increasing frequency examples of wealthy and powerful people openly saying things that are outrageous or morally repugnant. They have freedom of speech because they can afford freedom of speech.
NvV: OK. Sorry, but because I’m a nerd, I looked up the Stuart Hall essay I mentioned earlier. This is taken from the middle: “For example, Palestinians fighting to regain land on the West Bank from Israel may be described either as ‘freedom fighters’ or as ‘terrorists.’ It is a fact that they are fighting, but what does the fighting mean? The language (discourse) has real effects in practice.” And then he goes on, and part of what he gets into is the way in which discourse has real material effects in the world. So even if something isn’t actually true, objectively, it can then have truth effects, so to speak.
Ways of knowing
AI: A form of dialogue at risk right now in the arts is the private dialogue an individual has with the material they’re engaging with, whether that’s a book or a blob of clay. This is different from being in dialogue with other human beings about that material.
But your relationship with material, whether that is an artistic preposition or a data set or a text, is not fixed, because it’s durational and will change over time as you do. Developing the capacity and interest to stay entangled with that specific material—in a way such that your relationship to knowledge is evolving and dynamic—is a skill you can learn really well in a classroom.
I see it come up in art; often someone’s like, I’ve got this idea, but I think someone’s done it before. And the answer has to be, well, but you haven’t! You haven’t done it yet so it will be different when you do.
KG: Something I try to impart to students is, yes, we have a method that ideally evidences itself. But also, the doing of it is a deeply and profoundly human endeavor. We made all of this up. It is a way for us to try to know things. And people will try to know things in different ways. That is part of where discussion and debate in science comes from. This is the reason why people disagree. They don’t just disagree when we don’t know things. They disagree when we have data and we’re trying to figure out what it means. Data is interpreted. Science is a way for us to tell stories about the natural world. Scientists are working with the natural world but all of this is being filtered through the human… it has to go through us, the people who are doing it. And we cannot be separated from it. The current trend of politicians trying to use science to their own ends or water it down until it becomes unintelligible is the product of science being wielded as a weapon rather than a practice and perspective, a lens through which you can view the world. A way of knowing.
NvV: That’s one of my most favorite definitions of science that I’ve ever heard.
HN: Let me be provocative: higher education can function as systematic, state-organized manufacturing of consent or as a tool for intellectual liberation. The structural reality is this: as educators and teachers, we hold significant power in shaping how young people understand the world, themselves, and what’s possible.
And so the intentional effort of cultivating dialogue and critical engagement with each other and with the world around us—this is a form of political resistance. It might not feel radical in the day-to-day, but fostering genuine critical consciousness is a political act, especially in a moment when critical thinking itself is under attack.
DM: I love that, Hien. I think it is important for students, staff, and professors to remember. It strikes me that we have been talking a lot about time and spending time as a way of knowing something. And time is something that we feel we never have enough of.
AI: Yeah. I teach material processes that require immense amounts of time. If you want to engage with clay, there’s no shortcut. It’s an entity you have to learn to interact with by just being with it. Every term I’ve taught clay, the feedback from students who are interacting with this stuff for the first time is: Holy moly, you told me this would take a long time, and it’s taking even longer than I thought, but now that I’m in it I’ve come to love that there is no shortcut, and no way to turn in a late paper, and that none of the coping mechanisms I’ve developed in the face of my digital reality make any sense in relation to this material. As they spend all this time with this stuff, they realize they’re thinking haptically about other things going on in their minds: the personal, the private, the public, the academic. If they put in the time, it all comes out in one way or another through their hands. In some ways maybe the only thing I’m really trying to teach is patience. Everything else is window dressing.
NvV: I feel like what you’re describing used to be the case with writing. It takes time to read well and to write well. It takes time. There isn’t a shortcut, except that now, technically, there are all sorts of different AI shortcuts available to students.
Art by Sabrina Wise ’26
CP-S: A month ago I had a student say to me, Wouldn’t it be great if we just had a whole class dedicated to reading in the library? So that’s all you did for that entire class is just show up and you sit quietly and then you have that dedicated amount of time to read. It was super revealing, the basis of so much of what we’re talking about is the pressure and stress of time.
The context of the library is rooted in articulations of time and the blending of past, present, and future as an expression of the everyday. Libraries are open, welcoming spaces that invite us to have conversations with thinkers over thousands of years. That’s powerful stuff.
DM: Mary Oppen has this great quote: “When Heidegger speaks of boredom he allies it very closely with that moment of awe in which one’s mind begins to reach beyond. And that is a poetic moment, a moment in which a poem might well have been written.” We’re too busy to be bored… If bored time is time wasted, when will students write poems?
HN: There’s well-documented research showing that student study hours have declined significantly over the decades. In the 1960s and ’70s, full-time students really treated studying in college as a full-time job, and typically devoted 30 to 40 hours per week to coursework. By the 2000s and 2010s, that dropped to 25 to 30 hours a week. Now it’s even lower. But the fact that students today don’t spend as much time studying reflects larger structural shifts: rising economic precarity forcing more students to work for longer hours, attention captured by social media algorithms, mental health crises, and increasing pressure to treat learning as a commodity.
NvV: Another aspect of dialogue is the relationship between product and process. An understanding of dialogue as an ongoing dynamic process where you’re all the time changing and being changed through your work of interpreting and engaging with material, and with other people, that is very different from an understanding of dialogue as being only or primarily about trying to reach a final position or declaration or claim. Those are really different things. And in some ways, everything that people have been saying in this conversation sounds to me like putting emphasis on process, like that it’s an ongoing, never-ending process of internal dialogue, of dialogue with an object or a product or another person, which is really different than trying to sort of solidify an outcome as the end goal.
DM: Others will say that time is money and you need a final product.
AI: Artists make a lot of so-called final products, but for me, money’s always been time. Money just means: how much time do I have in process, in relationship with people, with place, with ideas? And yes, that’s obviously a position that an artist might take, but it feels like it’s a fairly radical stance to insist on right now when everything, especially every second of one’s attention, is so deeply monetized.
CP-S: I certainly think and dream about endless time. Part of what I do outside of COA is volunteer in the libraries of regional jails and prisons. That is one thing incarcerated people have, they have a lot of time and they talk about it too. They are voracious readers. The best readers I’ve ever met are in Hancock County Jail. It’s really striking to think about in terms of COA: Why are we here? Where are we going? How will we get there?
