In Your Shoes:ConvEmerResponse

1 Credit · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In a moment of particularly intense division within an already highly ideologically, socially, and politically polarized era, we find ourselves experiencing what we might call a "conversation emergency" in which meaningful, productive conversation itself is increasingly elusive. Yet so many of us yearn for alternatives that cut against the prevailing grain of silos and slogans, “us and them” thinking, retreat and avoidance, rigidity and the circling of wagons. In order to meet this moment with wisdom, these times call on us to nurture our resilience, fortify our empathy, double down on our search for unity of purpose while at the same time honoring our real differences, and build diverse communities equipped to forge new ways forward together. In this course we will cultivate the conditions - in terms of our own capacities, skills and connection among participants - for productive engagement across differences in ways that are both substantive and innovative. The course will feature a creative and supportive exploration of our own experiences of today's “conversation emergency” through the In Your Shoes performance technique-based process (https://globallab.georgetown.edu/projects/iys). We will also survey the diverse landscape of dialogic definitions and methodologies, and learn concrete dialogue skills derived from a range of different dialogic approaches.