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In:Dialogues of the Clinic: Encounters across medicine and beyond
Edited by Mariaelena Bartesaghi and Shelby Forbes
[Dialogue Studies 36] 2026
► pp. 1–17

Introduction

The dialogues of the clinic

 | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
 | University of South Florida
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This introduction to our anthology finds us dazzled and unsteady inside a labyrinth of flowers, searching for dialogue as something other than mere communication or interaction. We examine how dialogue has come to function as a moral and epistemic ideal in medicine — one that promises understanding, care, and participation, even as it risks becoming prescriptive and rendered routine. As discourse and dialogue scholars who study clinical exchanges, we find, together with the authors in these pages, that approaching dialogue means engaging in empirical analysis as much as reflection about our pedagogical practice and lived experience. The voices and dialogues of the clinic are opportunities that emerge in spite of, and maybe because of, constraint — a dance between action and reaction in which meaning, ethics, and understanding are choreographed in the context of embodied vulnerability.
Article outline
  • 1.Searching for dialogue
  • 2.The problems with (and of) dialogue
    • 2.1Conceptual ambiguity
    • 2.2Positive associations
    • 2.3Paradoxes
  • 3.Dialogue in and as medicine
  • References
References (42)
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