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Students

Faculty

Staff

Community

Student Involvement

The Civil Dialogue Project Brightspace Course

• The Brightspace course is a central location to access supplemental content related to the Civil Dialogue Project and the 2024 Common Read Experience. This interactive platform allows students to learn about civil dialogue, this year’s common read, and have access to a calendar of dialogue programs held on campus each fall.
• This Brightspace course also serves as a content hub for students seeking to complete the Constructive Dialogue and/or Constructive Debate microcredentials. Students participating in the UNIV 101/103 course or the Emerging Leaders Program will achieve the Constructive Dialogue microcredential through this platform. Students who do not wish to complete a microcredential will find helpful information about upcoming events on campus.
• All first year students are automatically enrolled in this Brightspace course when they matriculate to ��ñ��. If you are a student who wishes to have access to the course, please reach out to cce@binghamton.edu.  

Constructive Dialogue Microcredential

• The Constructive Dialogue microcredential is tailored to equip students with essential skills for engaging more effectively and empathetically in conversations within the academic environment and broader social contexts. Rooted in the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, this research-based program uniquely blends psychological insights with practical communication strategies, aiming to enhance interpersonal interactions across diverse social landscapes.
• LEARNING OBJECTIVES Students participate in the Perspective online modules and in-person workshops designed for students to:
  • Enhance their metacognitive awareness of polarizing thought patterns
  • Connect through constructive listening
  • Share their perspective using non-polarizing language
  • Learn strategies to handle difficult moments

Student Organization Uncommon Grounds

• • Uncommon Grounds hosts weekly meetings open to all students with unique activities to practice civil dialogue
  • Fall semester meeting time: Wednesdays, 7 – 9 p.m.
  • for updates and meeting locations:
  • Follow Uncommon Grounds on to stay up to date!
  • “A genuine conversation with another person, face to face, is something a lot of students are craving right now. Especially conversations about the massive challenges we face as a society and especially when those conversations lead to possible solutions. We don't have enough of that in our lives. Have you ever sat and talked with a group of friends for hours, falling down a conversational rabbit hole together and hardly feeling the time pass? This club has captured that feeling—the eboard has done an excellent job developing a welcoming atmosphere that fosters endless dialogue and embraces and respects newcomers.”  

Faculty Involvement

Civil Dialogue Teaching Fellows

• The Civil Dialogue Teaching Fellows program is a new initiative that guides faculty in the design and implementation of course content that facilitates student practice of civil dialogue. Selected faculty will receive a stipend and meet several times throughout the academic year to explore how classroom activities can support student development of skills necessary to engage in dialogue about meaningful topics with people holding different points of view. Sessions will focus both on understanding relevant theoretical frameworks and on applying practices within the classroom setting. The program is open to full-time faculty of every rank and discipline. Fellows will receive a stipend of $2,000 and are expected to integrate civil dialogue into at least one of their courses at the conclusion of their fellowship experience.

• Civil Dialogue Teaching Fellows

  Sean Dunwoody
  Associate Professor
  History and Medieval & Early Modern Studies
  Sean Dunwoody is a historian of early modern Europe, with a research specialization in the German-speaking lands (Holy Roman Empire) in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century. His current book project examines the role played by religious and political emotions in securing and challenging peaceful coexistence between Protestants and Catholics in the imperial city of Augsburg in the later sixteenth century.

  Stacey Shipe
  Assistant Professor
  Social Work
  Stacey Shipe is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work. Using her practice experience as an administrator in an urban child welfare system, Shipe’s research focuses primarily on organizational culture and its influence on the decision making of front line caseworkers and how these decisions ultimately impact family outcomes. 

  Lubna Omar
  Lecturer
  Anthropology
  Omar is a zooarchaeologist whose research and teaching interests broadly focus on the archaeology of human and animal relations, including complex societies in the Near East and the emergence of Urban economies and subsistence resources in prehistoric and historical settlements. 

  Cheri Robinson
  Lecturer of Spanish
  Romance Languages and Literatures
  Cheri Robinson’s research is transnational and interdisciplinary in nature with primary foci in cultural studies, film and literature in 20th and 21st-century Latin America. Other relevant research has focused on physical and theoretical aspects of borderlands and frontiers, representational strategies using child and adolescent protagonists, and intersections between the Holocaust and Latin America. 

  Dana Stewart
  Associate Professor of Italian; Collegiate Professor of Mountainview
  Romance Languages/Res Life
  Dana Stewart received her PhD and her MA in Italian from Stanford University and her BA in French from the University of Southern California. She is an active member of ��ñ��’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) and serves on the Advisory Board for the Center’s journal, Mediaevalia (for which she previously served as Editor-in-Chief). 

  Chris Davey
  Visiting Assistant Professor
  Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention
  Davey has been involved in Utah Valley University's Peace and Justice Studies program as Associate Director. Davey’s dissertation addressed the relationship between genocide, narrative and identity formation among Banyamulenge soldiers from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. From 2021 to 2023 he have conducted research and taught at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University as the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor of Genocide Studies and Prevention. 

  Matthew Cole
  Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences
  Source Project (External Scholarships and Undergraduate Research Center)
  Matthew Cole is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences. He received his PhD in Political Science from Duke University and his BA in Political Science from Carleton College. Before joining ��ñ��, he taught at Harvard University, Emerson College, and Duke University, where his classes covered topics in political science, history, ethics, interdisciplinary studies, and expository writing. 

  Megan Benson
  Assistant Head of Instruction and Outreach
  Libraries
  Megan Benson joined ��ñ�� Libraries in August 2018 as the Instructional Outreach Librarian. She teaches UNIV 180A Critical Research Skills and is in charge of the Libraries social media accounts, @bingulibraries. Prior to coming to ��ñ��, Megan received her master’s degree in history from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln where she studied Medieval and Early Modern British women. 

  Sarah Ford
  Lecturer
  Digital and Data Studies
  Dr. Ford is a lecturer in digital and data studies at ��ñ��. Her work focuses on the way that online spaces shape people's behavior, particularly the way that online spaces shape the social behaviors and political beliefs of fans.
  

  John Cheng
  Associate Professor
  Asian and Asian American Studies
  John Cheng is a historian of modern America and the history of science and technology. His book, Astounding Wonder (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), explores the emergence of science fiction as a popular cultural genre in interwar America and its relationship to popular science, and was selected by Locus Magazine for its 2012 Recommended Reading list.

  Tina Chronopoulos
  Associate Professor Classics and Medieval Studies
  Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies
  Tina Chronopoulos is a British-infused Greco-German transplant whose research and teaching interests range all over the Mediterranean and span more than a millennium, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the medieval period and beyond. Trained by old-school philologists, she enjoys deep dives into libraries and archives, as well as close readings of texts, contexts, and medieval manuscripts. 

  Will Glovinsky
  Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities
  External Scholarships and Undergraduate Research / Source Project
  Will Glovinsky is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities. Before arriving at ��ñ��, he was a lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he received his PhD. A specialist in 19th-century British literature, he is revising his first book on the regulation of feeling in realist novels and imperial culture. His next project explores how the idea of universal basic income—or giving cash regularly to everyone—emerged in 18th- and 19th-century tavern ballads, dialogues, essays, and novels.

  Gina Glasman
  Lecturer
  Judaic Studies
  Gina Glasman is a London born American immigrant, now resident in ��ñ��, New York. She has had a life-long interest in the study of Yiddish society and its urban culture, that has roots in her own biography, as the grandchild of Yiddish speaking immigrants to London

Civil Dialogue Faculty Teaching and Research Grants

• Civil Dialogue Faculty Teaching and Research Grants are available to support full-time faculty of any rank and discipline with up to $5,000 in funding for expenses that contribute to and expand upon the civil dialogue initiative. Grants are intended to strengthen student skill-building to engage in meaningful dialogue across differences, provide opportunities for students to put these skills into practice, support faculty in the development of relevant pedagogical approaches, contribute to research on civil dialogue, and more.
• Allowable expenses include but are not limited to: supplies or materials for events, research stipends, research participant incentives, honoraria for speakers, training expenses, travel or field trip expenses, and more.  
• Grants applications are accepted on a rolling basis. To apply, complete .
• For more information, contact Alison Twang, PhD, director, Center for Civic Engagement at atwang@binghamton.edu. 

Staff Involvement 

Critical and Conscious Conversations (CCC) hold space for faculty and staff across divisions to come together and engage in active, collaborative discussions each month. The goal is to promote relationship-building and improve the campus climate through a social justice lens. Research indicates that this type of learning community can reduce microaggressions, increase micro-affirmations and lead to positive systemic changes through ground-up engagement (Madison, 2020; Young & Anderson, 2019; Jones & Rolón-Dow, 2019).

Community Involvement

The Civil Dialogue Projects is working on initiatives to collaborate with the community. The following resources are readily available to all:

• Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
• Interfaith Council
• Common Read + Common Read Debate
• The Office of the University Ombudsman
• ��ñ�� Center for Community Schools (BUCCS)
• Harriet Tubman Center for Freedom and Equity