Extending the Constitutive Project: Response to Cooren and Sandler

As Cooren and Sandler note in their paper, communication studies has largely received Bakhtin as a theorist of dialogue, but such a framing limits his potential contributions to our thinking. They argue that when we seek to understand the communicative constitution of reality, Bakhtin's work can lead us in novel and fruitful directions. I find their claims compelling, and thus this response is more appreciative critique and argument for extension than contestation. Here, I first discuss the significant contributions the paper makes, and then turn to 3 critiques that provide a capacity to extend the influence of Cooren and Sandler's ideas.