Engaging Dialogue at CU
The CU Dialogues Program supports the campus community by offering dialogues across differences, dialogue facilitation skill development, and providing strategic support to campus partners in building capacity for successful organizational culture change. Additionally, we collaborate with campus units to engage staff, faculty, students, and community members in dialogue mixers.
What is a Dialogue Mixer?
CU Dialogues understands dialogue mixer as a semi-structured interactive dialogue session designed to encourage participants to engage in meaningful conversations with a variety of people in a short amount of time. The goal of a dialogue mixer is to facilitate the exchange of diverse perspectives, promote radical listening, and foster a sense of community.
2024 Juneteenth Address and Dialogue Mixer
Dr. Danielle Hodge
Dr. Danielle Hodge is an Assistant Professor of Communication at CU Boulder, where she specializes in African American Studies, critical race theory, and critical hip hop studies. As an award-winning scholar-teacher, Dr. Hodge's work is a profound exploration of how racism and its intersecting oppressions are embedded in our everyday talk, communicative practices, institutions, and overall society.
Dr. Hodge is a 2024-2025 Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) Faculty Fellow and a 2024-2025 Andrew W. Mellon Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholar. In 2023, she was named the Inaugural Lecture Series Speaker for The Center for African and African American Studies.
In 2021, Dr. Hodge delivered a Juneteenth Keynote titled "Liberatory Love and Freedom: Radical Reenvisionings” for the University of Colorado Four-Campus System. This year’s address builds on that foundation and introduces humanizing imagination as a transformative approach to shared equity leadership. Dr. Hodge presents humanizing imagination as a framework that merges humanizing equity with radical imagination, offering sociopolitical possibilities for achieving equity.
Participants were asked, what was the most impactful part of Dr. Danielle Hodge’s Juneteenth address for you?
"The idea that we all have the agency and ability and obligation to engage in collective imagination and action to shift our communities beyond anti-blackness."
"Dr. Hodge's address was very meaningful for me. I was impacted by Dr. Hodge's invitation to imagine as a revolutionary act. Her description and imagery of Black joy was beautiful, powerful, and moving."
"The presentation and delivery was top notch incredible. I loved how she used narrative stories to bring the viewers in and candor that really grounded the address and made it thought provoking and inspiring."
A dialogue mixer followed the Juneteenth Address
Thank you to our event co-sponsors:
The Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS), Finance and Business Strategy, The Office of Information Technology, The College of Media, Communication and Information, The Department of Communication, The School of Education, The College of Arts and Sciences’ Office of Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, The Center for Teaching and Learning, Strategic Relations and Communications, and CU Engage.
Film Screening of ‘Origin’ and Dialogue Mixer
On February 18, 2025, 100 students from Colorado’s Front Range high schools, ranging from Ft. Morgan to Denver, along with 12 CU Boulder and community facilitators, came together at the Dairy Theater in Boulder to watch the powerful and thought-provoking film Origin by Ava DuVernay and engage in a Dialogue Mixer. The film is inspired by the groundbreaking work of Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, and “draws a compelling line between India's caste system, the hierarchies of Nazi Germany, and the historic subjugation of Black people in the United States” (Mosley, 2024, p. 1).
Through intimate storytelling and historical grounding, Origin challenges viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about power and oppression while encouraging reflection on our own roles in shaping a more equitable society. This compelling film serves as a call to action, urging us to embrace new concepts and constructs as we reimagine a more equitable future in our ongoing conversations about race and power (Mosely, 2024).
CU Dialogues facilitators introduced students to dialogue—not just as a skill, but as a tool for building bridges across differences and imagining a more inclusive and just world. Dialogue is distinct from other forms of conversation, such as debate or discussion, in that its primary purpose is not to persuade or win an argument but to create a space where diverse perspectives can be shared, heard, and understood. This requires participants to engage actively, practicing skills such as active listening, asking questions of curiosity, and reflecting critically on their own assumptions and experiences. Through this process, dialogue encourages participants to move beyond surface-level exchanges and explore the complexities of social identities, power dynamics, and shared and divergent values.
The Dialogue Mixer that followed the film screening had students from across schools engaging in dialogue in small groups led by a trained Dialogues Facilitator. In their groups, students were asked to reflect upon their own social identities and perspectives, and the ways in which they have experienced or witnessed themselves or others defying caste. This created space to exchange diverse perspectives/experiences, practice radical listening, foster a sense of community, and inspire actionable change.