Department of Communication

Professor Donal Carbaugh, (communication) spoke to the Honorary Consuls at the United Nations on April 2-3, 2006. Carbaugh’s talk explored dynamics in face-to-face and televised contacts between people from Finland, Russian, and various residents of the US, including Native Americans, the Blackfeet in particular. The talk was based on his longstanding research in international and Intercultural communication, most recently published in his book, Cultures in Conversation, and covered in Indian Country Today (the largest newspaper in the US for Native Americans), Vapa Sanaa (the largest Finnish newspaper in North America), and the Finnish American Reporter (the largest English newspaper in North America about Finnish matters). Carbaugh was invited to the UN by Osmo Lipponen, Ambassador and Consul General of Finland.

Communication professor Donal Carbaugh will be honored Oct. 20 by the University of Washington when he is inducted into its communication department’s alumni hall of fame.

Carbaugh, who received his Ph.D. at Washington in 1984, is one of 11 graduates who will be enshrined. Nominees for the hall of fame are evaluated by a committee of faculty and alumni on the basis of career achievements and support for the department.

Carbaugh is being cited as a “leading Communication scholar, author of books, book chapters and scholarly articles on culture and communication, cross-cultural communication, and language and communication.” The department also calls him a “leader in linking culture to communication and in demonstrating that communication is the vehicle by which meanings are conveyed, identify is composed and reinforced and feelings are expressed.”

Carbaugh, who taught at UMass Amherst since 1986, recently returned from the Plains Indian Seminar on Native People and Sacred Lands at the Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody, Wyoming. He was one of three non-native plenary speakers at the four-day conference, where he presented his research comparing Indian and non-Indian portrayals of the same physical sites in the northern Montana landscape.

In December, he is scheduled to present a keynote lecture on “Intercultural Dialogue” at the Nordic Intercultural Communication conference in Tampere, Finland.