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Intercultural Public Relations: Insights from the Middle East is co-authored by UMD COMM Associate Professor Dr. Ganga Dhanesh along with Dr. Ruth Avidar, Senior Lecturer at Yezreel Valley College. This book explores how culture shapes public relations in the Middle East, focusing on Israel and the UAE. Using the Global Public Relations Framework (GPRF), it examines how political, economic, social, and organizational cultures influence key PR practices such as identity, reputation, listening, and engagement. Through an interpretive, inductive approach, the book highlights the interplay between local and global cultural forces, offering fresh insights into PR in non-Western contexts. It’s a valuable resource for scholars, practitioners, and students of global PR, intercultural communication, and Middle Eastern studies.  

This paper offers a rhetorical analysis to read the San Francisco “Comfort Women” Column of Strength memorial within the context of the United States’ historical violence against Asian women with white sexual imperialism as a theoretical lens. Utilizing in situ rhetorical field methods and critical rhetorical criticism, I contend that the San Francisco “Comfort Women” Column of Strength memorial illuminates how the medium of a public memorial faces certain constraints and difficulties in being able to name and critique U.S. imperialism as a historical narrative to be publicly remembered in dominant national memory. I offer transnational global memoryscape, extending Phillips and Reyes’ global memoryscape, as a concept that necessarily draws our attention specifically towards unequal forces of power across borders, such as Western imperialist forces in Asia. Ultimately, a critical, transnational lens on public memory is imperative to situate national public memories within a global context as memories flow across borders.

In "Why Diplomacy Demands More Than Intelligence," Lamia Zia and Andrew Rolander grapple with important issues relating to diplomacy. Situating their arguments in historical context, the researchers describe how diplomacy and intelligence share a symbiotic relationship, where one informs the other and neither can operate alone. Zia and Rolander ultimately argue that, "Diplomacy’s true power lies not just in what you know, but in how you use it to connect, persuade, and lead."