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Student Involvement

Constructive Dialogue Skill Badge

  • The Constructive Dialogue Skill Badge equips students with knowledge and skills to engage in better conversations even when you disagree. Through online and in-person training along with personal reflection, students will better understand the psychological and metacognitive factors that shape how and why people disagree, learn skills to engage in conversations across differences and put those skills into practice.
  • LEARNING OBJECTIVES Students will:
    • Better understand why we disagree
    • Better understand why it's hard to have good conversations when we disagree
    • Develop skills to better listen to those you disagree with, including showing respect, curiosity and non-judgement
    • Develop skills for better conversation, including asking curious questions
  • To earn the skill badge, students will:
    • Complete online Perspectives modules
    • Participate in a one hour in-person workshop to develop and practice skills for better conversation
    • Submit a short reflection on their learning
  • If you are interested in completing the badge as an individual or offering the badge through a course or program, please email cce@binghamton.edu. 

Student Organization Uncommon Grounds

    • Uncommon Grounds hosts meetings open to all students with unique activities to practice civil dialogue. Join thier to stay up to date on meeting times!

    • for updates and meeting locations:
    • Follow Uncommon Grounds on to stay up to date!

Faculty Involvement

Applications for Civil Dialogue Teaching Fellows

2026-2027 Applications coming soon!

  • The Civil Dialogue Teaching Fellows program 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.

    For more information, contact Alison Twang, PhD, director, Center for Civic Engagement at atwang@binghamton.edu. 

  • 2025-2026 Civil Dialogue Teaching Fellows

    Sandra M. Casanova-VizcaínoSandra
    Associate Professor of Spanish
    Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
    Sandra M. Casanova-Vizcaíno holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research centers on Gothic and horror literature and film from Latin America and the Caribbean. In her publications, she analyzes the use of horror tropes and representations of extreme violence as they intersect with issues of gender, race, and class in contemporary Puerto Rican fiction. Her teaching and scholarship engage with topics such as neocolonialism, economic inequality, racism, classism, and homo/transphobia, among others.

    Carina de KlerkCarina
    Assistant Professor
    Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies
    Carina de Klerk is a philologist specializing in ancient Greek literature. Her current research focuses on the representation of enslaved people in fifth-century Athenian comedy. At ßÙßÇÂþ»­, she teaches Latin and Greek language and literature.

     
    Lauren DulaLauren Dula
    Associate Professor
    Department of Public Administration and Policy
    Lauren Dula teaches primarily in nonprofit management and public service. Her research focuses on gender, equity, and diversity both in the nonprofit and public sectors. She combines traditional public administration themes, such as representative bureaucracy, with social theories from psychology and sociology in the study of nonprofits and the public sector. Her work in nonprofit studies focuses on the impacts of board gender composition, philanthropic messaging in light of gender and other identities, and, more recently, she is working with a research team on justice philanthropy. She is co-founder of the Equity Lab, which produces scholarship on the experiences of women of color in federal and state government.

     
    Divya GuptaDivya Gupta
    Assistant Professor
    Department of Environmental Studies
    Divya Gupta is an environmental social scientist and interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges natural resource governance, development, and justice in South Asia. Her research spans diverse themes, including democratic decentralization, adaptation to global change, and rights-based approaches to conservation. Her empirical work in India and Nepal investigates how systemic marginalization and climate-related changes interact to create and amplify vulnerabilities in forested landscapes. She collaborates with scholars, practitioners, activists, and community members to explore circumstances in which networks of multiple actors and organizations create synergies for the emergence of just and sustainable governance practices for addressing the complexities of global change.

     
    Melissa HallerMelissaInstructor and Undergraduate Director of Digital and Data Studies
    Department of Geography
    Melissa Haller received her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches courses on data science and geospatial analysis, and her teaching has a strong emphasis on data ethics, social justice, and community engagement.

     
    Brittany RaceBrittany Race
    Assistant Professor
    Department of Psychology
    Brittany Race joined the faculty of ßÙßÇÂþ»­ in Fall 2025 after earning her PhD from the University of Arkansas. Her area of focus is the intersection of psychology and law. She teaches courses in this area, as well as general psychology and social psychology.

     
    Kaitlyn SorensonKaitlyn Sorenson
    Assistant Professor
    Department of Comparative Literature
    Kaitlyn Sorenson is Assistant Professor of Contemporary European Thought and Literature. Her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on the former Yugoslavia. At ßÙßÇÂþ»­, she teaches courses that interweave voices from both the center and periphery of Continental theory and literature.

     
    Marina SitrinMarina Sitrin
    Associate Professor
    Department of Sociology
    Marina Sitrin holds a PhD in Global Sociology and JD in International Women’s Human Rights. She is the co-author of They Can’t Represent US: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (Verso 2014); Occupying Language: The Secret Rendezvous with History and the Present (Zuccotti Park Press 2012); author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (Zed 2012); Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (AK Press 2006); and Global Societies in Movement (Palgrave MacMillian, forthcoming). Her forthcoming book with Pluto Books, We Make Our Own Justice: Beyond Police and Prisons, examines experiences of alternative forms of adjudication grounded in movement and community experiences from Argentina and Mexico to Rojava (NE Syria) to Kenya. Her work focuses on societies in movement, specifically looking at new forms of social organization such as autogestión, horizontalidad, prefigurative politics, and new affective social relationships. She grounds much of her work in ethnography, oral history, and sociological narrative.

     
    Wendy StewartWendy Stewart
    Lecturer and Director, Writing Center
    Writing Institute
    Wendy Stewart has a master’s degree in English literature and pursued further graduate studies but found her vocation only when she gave up lecturing and started teaching, shortly after her arrival at ßÙßÇÂþ»­ from Canada in 2008. She taught the pilot course of what would become WRIT 111 and has been with the Writing Institute (formerly Initiative) since its inception. She is committed to supporting students as they come to voice in their academic and civic writing and other communication. She considers it a privilege to continually learn from her students and the Writing Center tutors as they navigate new ways of being and interacting during uncertain times.

     
    Saumya TripathiSaumya Tripathi
    Assistant Professor
    Department of Social Work
    Saumya Tripathi’s research examines the intersection of gender roles, caregiving, socio-economic inclusion, health equity, and gender-based violence, with a particular focus on advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5. Through research, teaching, and policy engagement, she is committed to advancing social justice and inclusive development across local and global contexts.

     
    Dalhee YoonDalhee Yoon
    Associate Professor
    Department of Social Work
    Dalhee Yoon’s research investigates the impact of child maltreatment across a range of adolescent risk behaviors (e.g., substance use, risky sexual behaviors, and internalizing and externalizing symptoms), with a specific focus on the role of peer relationships. Her published articles and previous work experiences have laid the groundwork for describing the sequence of child maltreatment on adolescent peer relationships and risk behaviors. Her research seeks to advance the understanding of adverse consequences of child maltreatment and to bridge research and practice.

     

  • 2024-2025 Civil Dialogue Teaching Fellows

    Sean DunwoodySean
    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.

    StaceyStacey 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. 

    LubnaLubna 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 RobinsonCheri
    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. 

    DanaDana 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 ßÙßÇÂþ»­â€™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). 

    ChrisChris 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. 

    MatthewMatthew 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 ßÙßÇÂþ»­, 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. 

    MeganMegan Benson
    Assistant Head of Instruction and Outreach
    Libraries
    Megan Benson joined ßÙßÇÂþ»­ 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 ßÙßÇÂþ»­, Megan received her master’s degree in history from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln where she studied Medieval and Early Modern British women. 

    SarahSarah Ford
    Lecturer
    Digital and Data Studies
    Dr. Ford is a lecturer in digital and data studies at ßÙßÇÂþ»­. 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.

    JohnJohn 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.

    TinaTina 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. 

    WillWill 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 ßÙßÇÂþ»­, 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.

    GinaGina Glasman
    Lecturer
    Judaic Studies
    Gina Glasman is a London born American immigrant, now resident in ßÙßÇÂþ»­, 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 $3,000 in funding for expenses that contribute to and expand upon the civil dialogue initiative. Civil dialogue goes beyond general classroom discussion and requires intentional planning and preparation to create spaces where students are comfortable engaging in meaningful conversation on important topics, sharing their own perspectives and experiences, and attending to multiple points of view.

Grants are intended to strengthen student skill-building to engage in meaningful dialogue across difference, 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. 

are accepted on a rolling basis. 

For more information, contact Alison Twang, PhD, director, Center for Civic Engagement at atwang@binghamton.edu.