Speech at Dartmouth faculty will participate in the 76th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, held June 4–8, 2026, in Cape Town, South Africa. The 2026 conference theme, “Communication and Inequalities in Context,” invites scholars to examine the dynamics between communication and inequality across social, cultural, institutional, geographic, and political contexts.
Prof. Darlene Drummond, Associate Professor of Speech, will present “Conversational Repair in End-of-Life Consultations with Black Cancer Patients,” accepted by ICA’s Language and Social Interaction Division. Co-authored with Satveer Kaur-Gill, Amber Barnato, and Robert Gramling, the paper examines racially discordant palliative care consultations between Black patients with advanced cancer and white clinicians. Drawing on conversation analysis of 44 consultations, the authors identify misalignments, repair attempts, and trouble sources that may help explain how communication contributes to disparities in end-of-life care.
Prof. Yana Grushina, Senior Lecturer in Speech, will present two submissions to ICA’s Instructional and Developmental Communication Division. Her paper, “We Attend, We Respond, We Are Changed: The Case for Attentional Validation,” frames attention as a collaborative communicative achievement in the communication classroom and introduces “attentional validation” as sustained, thoughtful, and visible engagement with others’ ideas. She will also present “GIFTS: Harnessing Benefit of Peer-to-Peer Feedback,” a Great Ideas for Teaching Students submission that helps students give affirming, constructive peer feedback in public speaking and presentation-based courses.
ICA is a major international scholarly association for communication researchers, with more than 4,500 members across 80 countries.