Join us for the 2025 Difficult Dialogues National Resource Center Conference from Monday, June 30 through Wednesday, July 2. We are pleased to hold our biennial conference at Washington University in Saint Louis and are grateful for Wash U's generous sponsorship of our event. For more information about the Difficult Dialogues National Resource Center, visit our website here.

Refunds for tickets/registrations will only be available until the end of the day on April 24, 2025. If you need a refund, please contact info@difficultdialogues.edu. If you register for the conference after April 24, 2025 your registration will be non-refundable.

The DDNRC is committed to sharing knowledge, skills, stories, and practices that illustrate how dialogue can be a catalyst for envisioning new possibilities for collaboration and solidarity across differences. We value dialogue that is open, sustained, and structured within and across identity groups to critically engage participants toward greater understanding.

This year’s conference theme is The Weight of Words: Navigating the Evolving Role of Dialogue in Polarized Times

We are living in an age of increasing polarization and anger in our public discourse often reinforces hostile modes of interaction with people who hold different viewpoints. This polarization has impacted our ability to work within and between communities. Dialogues help deepen understanding of personal, group and intergroup relationship issues. Many people across the nation and world are wrestling with questions about how to engage with others who do not share the same values and/or identities and feel helpless around authentic engagement when we can’t even agree on basic facts for an informed dialogue. Further, many wrestle with how we can support respectful, transformative dialogue in face-to-face meetings, online contexts, and in physical and virtual classrooms.

Early bird tickets will be available through May 1, so act quick to secure your registration while rates are low. Registration rates increase by $50 after May 1, 2025.

In addition to conference registration, check out our pre-conference option available as an add-on. This pre-conference sessions will take place in the afternoon of Monday, June 30 before regular conference programming begins that early evening with registration and a welcome social.

The pre-conference option is the following:

Using Dialogue in Professional Spaces:

Join this interactive pre-conference workshop designed to strengthen your dialogue skills and advance transformative change in higher education. Tailored for professionals committed to justice, equity, and sustainability, this session equips you with practical tools to navigate challenging conversations, foster collaboration, and create inclusive spaces. Together, we’ll explore how dialogue can be a powerful catalyst for meaningful institutional and societal impact.

At our conference, you can expect programming ranging from workshops to roundtables, and presentations to keynotes centered around the following themes:

Building Community. In the aftermath of national elections, our country is more polarized than ever before. We invite proposals that help conference participants learn about how dialogue and dialogic methods can encourage people with differing values and identities to enter and remain engaged in dialogue, even when they do not go smoothly. We invite proposals that help us create space and opportunity for developing trust in an effort to build stronger relationships within and between communities.
Dialogue to Foster Change. As our country, and institutions of tertiary education, continue to reflect on the impacts of structural racism, climate change, and other social issues, we invite proposals that assist conference participants in using dialogue and dialogic methods to foster social change.
The Benefits of Dialogue. Research has documented the educational impacts of the presence of diversity on college and university campuses, as well as how dialogue (e.g., Intergroup dialogue or IGD) amplifies these benefits. We invite proposals that help identify the benefits of dialogue so that practitioners can continue to ground their work, and justify the acquisition of institutional resources to build infrastructures to support dialogue within differing institutional settings.

Lodging:

The DDNRC has a conference block on hold at The Knight Center, Wash U's executive education and conference center right on campus. To book a room as part of this block, use this link (https://reservations.travelclick.com/14327?groupID=4478064).

We hope to see you in Saint Louis.

DDNRC Conference 2025

The Weight of Words: Navigating the Evolving Role of Dialogue in Polarized Times