If it's not too much trouble, can you link to the research centres you're talking about?
* Pragma-dialectic school (Amsterdam, F. van Eemeren) [1]
* Argumentation Schemes & Informal logic, Univ. of Windsor, D. Walton [2,3]
* Rhethorics and Argumentation, Univ. of Waterloo, C. Tindale [4,5]
* Switzerland, Lugano Group (IALS) [7]
* Lisbon ArgLab Group, New Univ. of Lisbon, M. Lewinski, F. Macagno [6]
* Germany, Research Group for Nonmonotonic Logic and Formal Argumentation, Univ. Bochum [8]
* Germany, KIT Group, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology [9]
The last two groups are more to my taste, and there is also Chris Reed and his team in the UK. The prevalent theoretical traditions are argumentation schemes and informal logic in Canada, developed by Walton and his scholars, and the pragma-dialectic tradition in Amsterdam, developed by van Eemeren and his many scholars.
[1] https://gsh.uva.nl/content/research-masters/argumentation-rh... [2] https://www.dougwalton.ca/ [3] http://www.uwindsor.ca/crrar/ [4] http://www.uwindsor.ca/argumentationstudies/ [5] http://www.uwindsor.ca/crrar/ [6] https://www.arglab.ifilnova.pt/en [7] https://search.usi.ch/en/organisational-units/332/institute-... [8] http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/defeasible-reasoning/inde... [9] http://debatelab.philosophie.kit.edu/
I gather it's a mix of sociology,philosophy,communication and logic?