ABSTRACT
My favorite theorist, the 1930s Russian scholar of culture and language, Mikhail Bakhtin, put it this way:
In what way will the event be enriched if I succeed in fusing with the other? If instead of two, there is now just one? What do I gain by having the other fuse with me? Let him rather stay on the outside because from there he can know and see what I cannot see or know from my vantage point, and can thus enrich essentially the event of my life. (quoted in Todorov, 1984, p. 108)
Said differently, it does no good simply to mirror Other; we need to have a unique vantage point. In the context of this book, the ability of Communication Studies to contribute to the interdisciplinary conversation is contingent on our collective ability to give voice to perspectives not yet heard. The context for my remarks is interpersonal/ family communication, the area with which I am most familiar. I will first discuss more broadly the possible bases upon which a claim to distinctiveness can be made, then I will launch into a discussion of my own research program in developing and applying relational dialectics theory (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996) to the study of relationship challenges, particularly in the context of families.
