ABSTRACT
Engaged communication scholars typically address issues of inclusion in terms of activities such as focusing on a problem or dilemma related to exclusion that needs to be solved, conducting research on this problem, creating analyses that then may be applied to help shed light on the issue, and developing diversity programs. This chapter outlines the limitations of merely “knowing about” inclusion at an epistemological level, as well as the restrictions of typical practical application activities for creating inclusion. As an alternative, they point to the promise of an ontological, phenomenological, phronetic, transformative “being” approach. Even when diversity programs are successful at including typically marginalized peoples, they may still result in “peripheral inclusion”, a term used to describe the experience of being neither included nor excluded, but rather somewhere in the middle or are relegated to provide the “marginalized perspective".
