Communication Studies Professor Eddah Mutua has been selected to serve as a member of the National Communication Association’s (NCA) Task Force on Fostering International Collaborations in the Age of Globalization.
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The task force will lead the organization’s efforts to support members in international collaborations in research, teaching and service through 2018.
“It is an honor to serve on the task force,” Mutua said, who is excited to work toward the organization’s focus on global, instead of only national, concerns.
The move resonates with Mutua’s focus at St. Cloud State where she has concentrated on merging local, national and global concerns in the field of intercultural communication in her teaching and research.
“I also want to learn from other scholars who work in different regions of the world,” she said. “Bringing our experiences together is of great benefit to our students.”
Mutua’s work focuses on peace education and communication that starts in St. Cloud, expands to Central Minnesota communities and all the way to East Africa.
Her Communicating Common Ground program started in 2008 in local high schools to teach them principles of peaceful co-existence in diverse communities. In 2013 she expanded the program to Kenya where students are sharing their concerns with students from St. Cloud and Central Minnesota via Skype.
She’s also conducted research in East Africa and plans to use her connections with institutions, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies to benefit the goals of the task force and help spread awareness about African knowledge.
“Africa has been marginalized in many ways. The fact that little or no attention is paid to the continent unless something really bad happens means that we miss out on some valuable lessons that can enrich the study of communication and in particular international and intercultural communication,” she said. “For me to be a member of this task force is really to bring to the fore African knowledge as valid in the global era.”
The task force will survey research being done on communication in the age of globalization and present its research at the NCA conference in November. They will also research and summarize best teaching practices related to globalization in a handbook and present their findings in workshop-style presentations at NCA conventions in 2016 and 2017. The task force’s final goal will be to organize international communication conferences to support the study of communication and globalization elsewhere in the world.
