Workshop Recordings

Online workshop recording about Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication (NVC) approach to conflict and relationships.

NVC is a practical tool that can help us have better conversations, but it also opens up space to talk about how unmet needs can be one source of conflict. This is one way we can respond to our own as well as the needs of others when engaging in dialogue.

A recording from an online workshop where we discuss the narrative approach to conflict resolution. It focuses on how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, others and situations can lay the basis for conflict.

We also talk about the "bucket error" technique as one way to can respond to the narratives that fuel conflict.

I was invited to give a lecture at the Saint Paul University undergraduate dialogue course, and I spoke about cases where dialogue might not be considered appropriate or safe.

Obviously dialogue isn't the right tool in all cases, and figuring out whether it's appropriate involves understanding what peace we're trying to build, who we find legitimate partners for peacebuilding, who seems unreasonable or impossible to work with and what barriers exist to the kind of dialogue we want to have. Such barriers don't necessarily mean that dialogue is impossible, just that we have to prepare even harder in order to make sure that it won't cause harm to participants or organizers.

This workshop gives a two-hour introduction on how to design, facilitate and follow up on a group dialogue.

Content:
0) Introduction: What is dialogue? How and where is it used?

1) Preparing for your dialogue: Defining and communicating your goals. Recruitment. Preparatory readings. Working on your opener. Coming up with open questions to get the conversation going. Two examples of more structured dialogue processes. Practice with open questions.

2) What to do during the dialogue: Three facilitation tips. a) Focus attention on personal experiences rather than facts, beliefs, narratives or theories. b) Repeat what you hear participants say and confirm for understanding. c) The art of interruption - how to gracefully let people know they're taking up a lot of space and including people who have not contributed so much to the conversation.

3) After the dialogue: Celebrate! Document it (if that's what you want) and post content about what went on, or create a report if you're looking to make a case study or report back to donors. Think about "transfer" (how you want your dialogue to impact a larger social context), and the mechanisms for it. Evaluation, follow up, extra material and donations.

A workshop on some of the psychological reasons why polarizing topics are hard to have conversations about.

In this session I look at three differnet models and how they can help us understand why we fight in a certain way: a) system 1/system 2 thinking (from "Thinking Fast and Slow"), b) social sorting and c) moral foundations theory.

This was an early attempt at talking about polarization and how it impacts us. I went on to do a lot more research on the topic and would present things quite differently nowadays, but decided to post the recording for archival purposes.

This presentation follows up on a dialogue I facilitated (report here) during the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, Canada. The dialogue was an opportunity for people on different sides of the divide to get to know each other better.

In this session, we talk about how a peacebuilding approach can help us better understand conflicts like those over the convoy and help us respond more productively and have better conversations with those we disagree with.

Questions explored include: why is it so easy for situations like these to escalate? What happens when we get triggered by conflicts? Why do people's self-worth/identity get tied up in their positions? Can we separate a person's problematic interests from their legitimate needs? What does it mean to build a future that includes all sides?

Times for different sections of the workshop:
0:00 - Introduction
7:55 - Being triggered, cycles of escalation, pausing to breathe
21:37 - Different types of peace (positive, negative), immediate vs. long-term needs
30:20 - Pause and discussion (legitimacy, being triggered, safety
48:28 - Conflict mapping (leadership, outside support, power, unequal access, narratives)
1:16:12 - Pause and discussion (is dialogue possible, do people want to dialogue)
1:33:12 - Coercion, interests and identity (needs- and identity-based conflict, dialogue as a response)
1:49:37 - Conclusion and discussion (dialogue with bad-faith actors, where were Ottawa's mediators, financial models for supporting dialogue and facilitation)

In this presentation, I talk about the policy brief Using Peacebuilding Dialogue to Address Sociopolitical Polarization in North America, published by Ottawa Dialogue.

I get into how, after working with peacebuilding dialogue in the post-Soviet context for a few years, I kept thinking about how the approach seems just as relevant when thinking about polarized sociopolitical conflicts in North America. While other forms of dialogue exist in the US and Canada, I talk about what peacebuilding interventions of this sort could look like on the continent, as well as what unique barriers practitioners could come up against in the field.

In this lecture, I talk about the psychological basis of ingroups and outgroups and why & how they lead to polarization, conflict and violence.

Groups can divide along national, ideological, religions and other lines. Each of these can result in conflict when they lead people to categorize each other into "us" and them," with loyalty given to the ingroup and hostility directed to the outgroup. If we're not careful, this can result in cycles of polarization, dehumanization and sometimes eventually to violence and repression.

The presentation followed up on a dialogue facilitation school hosted by CISR in Gori, Georgia.