Okay we are reconvening for
our second round.
The title of this section
is Public Opinion and
Dominant Discourses in Conflict Dynamics.
Our first presenter has
a prerecorded presentation,
somewhat like the Oscars when
they have to be somewhere else.
That'll be Sara Cobb's Narrative
Intersections of Hate and Gender.
And then we will have Solon Simmons
with Narrative Profiling: How to take
the Other's Suffering Seriously,
followed by Mara Schoeny,
Historic discourses in conflict and
I will give, I think we're doing.
Still doing 12 minutes?
And I will give you five, two,
and one minute countdowns.
So, I guess we are now ready for
Sara's presentation.
>> Concerned about the role of the Left in
producing violent narratives about
the Right and wanting to avoid,
basically, delegitimizing
practices that foment conflict.
I did a little analysis of
the narrative on the Left, and
found that it basically displays the
characteristics of a violent narrative,
externalizing responsibility,
constructing the other as evil,
and blaming the set of conditions and
being victim and
blaming the other as victimizer.
So, I wanted to learn more about
these groups, hate groups,
and of course the main resource for
this is mounted by the Southern Poverty
Law Center, which hosts a hate map.
And has defined hate group
as an organization base on
its official statement of principles,
the statements of leaders or
its activists, that has beliefs or
practices that attack or
malign an entire class of people for
their immutable characteristic.
There's a growing concern that
these groups are increasing and
that they're increasing
their recruitment as well.
Now this is a snapshot of
their website which shows they
have 954 groups that have been identified,
but
it's interesting, very interesting
the role they're playing socially.
They circulate this report to
55,000 law enforcement agencies.
So they are known in law enforcement
as the sort of gold standard for
understanding hate in the United States.
And all these groups are on
the radar of law enforcement teams.
And of course, the people who are named as
hate groups are extremely upset about this
and experience it as
itself an act of hate.
It's interesting to see that
these hate groups themselves
generate what might be called
a hateful harmonic in the sense that
they are more than the sum
of their given positions.
They add up to something more than the sum
of their parts in the sense that there is
a resonance across them that
builds to a fever pitch or
they're more able to get
traction in social media and
elsewhere because of
this harmonic phenomenon.
We decided to use Butler, picking up on
Butler to think about the body politic
basically as a place like the body
where you could do analysis and
intervention by studying the signifying
practices that are present there.
And on the presumption that
these are highly gendered.
We did research,
we looked at the way in which what we
do we know about women in hate groups.
And we see that women have been
undervalued in hate groups.
They're considered masculine spaces,
but they're actually not.
Women recruitment is up.
Women come in through the side
door of these organizations and
then pick up the ideology, after they
get in and they often have conversion.
After they get in,
they tell conversion stories about
the the role of these groups in their
lives and what it's meant to them.
And here you see the W KKK back in 1920 or
so, and
you see a woman who was
interviewed by Kathleen M.
Blee say it's not so
much as I am in the Klan,
it is the fact that the Klan is in me.
And by the Klan being in me,
I have no choice other than to remain.
I can't walk away from myself.
Then we looked at the discourse.
Basically that really shows
that integration of the group
with the women's identity.
Then you look at the research
on discourse and
narrative, and you see that there's
some that focus just on speech.
For instance, metaphors that are tied to
the production of social identity and
discriminatory practices.
But basically, it's not dynamic,
that research, and
it's basically missing attention to power.
Then there's research on
narrative positioning and
the production of white identity.
And again, it's more functional in
nature and doesn't address power.
Then there is research on what's
called games of truth and
how subject positions are produced
in discourse and narrative.
And this research treats narratives
critical to the performance of borders and
boundaries around subject positions.
And it examines the process of objection
itself, and sees it as central to
regulating production of both subject and
agency, what it takes to be a human.
And we picked up this
latter chunk of research,
and particularly three main authors,
one, a Hilde Nelson,
who's written about damaged identity.
Della Rocca,
who builds on her work helping us
define privilege from a narrative lens.
And Winslade, who's looked at lines
of force and lines of flight.
The grid lines along which narratives
cruise, and what people do to escape them.
Della Rocca,
building on Nelson, notes that,
let's see.
We've been interested in the way in which
women are using these signifying practices
to construct their sense of self, and
the agency in the way they move around,
how they navigate in these groups.
And to do that,
you have to pay attention to agency and
Della Rocca looked at Nelson's
work which presumes that to have
agency you have to control your actions
but you have to have normative competency
which means other people have to see you
as capable of making moral decisions.
Della Rocca, building on Nelson,
Nelson said when you don't have moral
agency, you have a damaged identity and
Della Rocca went on to say that
actually narrative inflation which is
the narrative equivalent of privilege,
it's another form of damaged identity.
He says privileged identity could be
one in which the dominant narratives
are composed of elements that increase
the opportunities of the individual that
bear it, instead of deprivation of
opportunity, there could be an inflation.
Here, the stories that come out of the
dominant narrative justify this inflation.
And that creates, he says, a go,
no-go zone by which people
make the other abject and, in the process,
restrict the space of the subject itself.
So this privilege of
which narrative inflation
actually doesn't necessarily increase
the space of operations for the speaker.
But actually, in a sort of a ironic way,
Is negatively impacted by the way in
which they have excluded the other.
The larger the objection,
the larger the group that's excluded,
the less space there is for self.
So he says the uninhabitable,
the abject zone, the other,
is the no-go zone for the dominant agent.
It's my argument here that the relative
size of the no-go zone compared to the go
zone, that is accessible to the agent
will determine the degree of freedom.
So basically, the more you abject,
the more you people you push out, the less
space there is for one to operate and the
deeper the lines of force we would argue.
So what we're going to do,
what we did was look at the no go zone,
no go zones and
the nature of the exclusionary matrices
that are used to create these.
Then we looked at the differences
between these exclusionary matrices that
are performed by the women, and the gap
that it might have in the group itself.
How these exclusionary
matrixes may be different.
Then, we looked at the contours of this
narrative inflation as a way to make sense
of how women are experiencing
privilege and
enacting it narratively.
And then, the last thing we did was
look at how they navigate these lines of
force that are laid down by the group
about what they're supposed to do and
not do and how they navigate that.
And we are very aware of our
own privilege as white women.
We have a Middle Eastern Student person
in our group but we talked about race and
gender and our own privileges and our
attending to the own, our lines of force
and exclusionary practices that we have
ourselves are enacting this process.
We've created a database.
We've gone multiple rounds of IRB because
we don't want to commit deception, and
let me tell you,
recruitment has been extremely difficult.
Let me tell you about one woman.
So when we wrote this paper,
we only had one woman complete,
basically representing
the theoretical framework to you.
Now we've got about a dozen
interviews done and more set up.
And this woman, she does lobbying,
she's pro-life, and anti-Muslim.
She's being challenged by
two of her seven children,
all of them she's homeschooled because
they've got either Muslim boyfriends or
they got tattoos, things like that.
And she's working across
political lines as a lobbyist.
We looked at her go/no go zones.
What can she be and what can she not be?
And basically she cannot engage
in conflict with others.
It's not appropriate, it's not kind,
it's against God's will.
So she must compose your self,
navigate conflict in ways
that doesn't escalate it.
She always got to be kind and
her faith is,
she is got to be faithful and
that's a requirement for her life.
So prayer is also a requirement.
Legislative practices is
advanced based on facts.
It's not about ideology.
It's about these are the facts,
and let me share them with you.
And those facts, if I do my job right,
will convince you.
And democracy is place where
all opinions are legitimate,
but because she has relationship
to God through faith.
Her obligation is to bring forward
the facts which would advance
God's position, not just hers.
She's got an exclusionary matrix here
which is Muslims and what she calls
keyboard activist people and
just you know, ranting and raving online.
Human traffickers,
confused women that have abortions and
women who don't spend time
raising their children.
There's a big moral gap that she set,
that she describes between herself and
the group.
The group has been having lots and
lots of internal conflict and
she is not having it.
She's actually created a division of
the group with a separate division of
the group, split off from the main group
because she wants to work differently.
And she struggles to balance work
family things that so many women do.
You can see the narrative
inflation is central to her life.
She presumes she'll always be able
to take care of her children.
She's always gonna have
resources to do that.
So she does that as a matter of choice and
doesn't contemplate the path that that
discourse sets her up to see the issue
of taking care of children as an act
at will, or as a choice one would make.
Also narrative inflation keeps her
visible in the way in which she
harnesses basically,
her own prayer to stay close to God and
this proximity to God gives her privilege.
And we've looked at her infiltrated
consciousness that which she sort of
accepted about herself based on
the grid line she is part of.
It's about being a mother,
and a wife, and a Christian.
And that you'll always have the money and
support to
be a good wife and mother and
because she also has a good father
who's providing for the family.
And finally I would say that yet
she has these lines of flight where
she's multiplied her roles, basically
by being a lobbyist, escaping
the gridlock or grid lines of motherhood.
And she also escapes and disobeys
the rules of the game by the grid lines
of lines of force by working with
the other side on a regular basis building
relationships, making connections.
And this is because she's very, she
describes very practical not ideological.
So this is just an interesting little
glimpse into some of the complexities
based on this first interview.
We've got more, as I said, more coming.
and a paper that offers
the theoretical framework.
I look forward to your feedback and
thank you so much for listening.
Okay, our next presentation
is Solon Simmons.
>> Okay, I can, my own.
So wonderful to see everyone and
welcome to Point of View.
I wanna echo everyone elses'
comments about Dennis Adonnell.
I remember Dennis extremely well and
I consider Dennis a friend of mine and
I remember Dennis in his prime
which is hard to remember.
He was an incredible figure,
vigorous intellectual and exciting.
And I must say I liked
Karina's suggestion and
I'm happy to participate in the first
annual Dennis Research Conference.
So anyway,
I'm really happy to be here in that sense.
To remind myself of why I love this place.
Also, Sarah opened with a very helpful.
I'm intrigued by Sarah's research and
always learned from her,
and it made me wanna read a quote
from [INAUDIBLE], which is not in my
presentation, but I think it helps
to characterize what I'm doing.
And just so you know,
I'm gonna be speaking very quickly.
This is a 50-minute presentation done in
12 minutes, so think of it as a kind of
a preview for the movie, okay?
>> [LAUGH]
>> So that's the way to imagine it.
So we're kinda running an origins
of totalitarianism set.
Ideologies are harmless and
critical in arbitrary opinions only as
long as they're not believed in seriously.
Once their claim to total validity is
taken literally, they become the nuclei of
logical systems, in which, as in the
systems of paranoiacs, everything follows
comprehensively and even compulsorily,
once the first premise is accepted.
So that's important to me
because I've been on this quest.
And you can call me Ishmael.
For figuring out what ideologies are and
how to measure them and
how to characterize them
in a comprehensive way.
That is not to speak about one ideology.
Not to speak about a couple of them.
Or even as Rich mentioned earlier,
thinking about the class discourse, if you
will, in conversation with others around
identity, which are gonna be critical.
But thinking big picture,
I think I began this question in 1996.
When I was thinking about Ross Perot
in the economic stories he was telling.
And why it was that the white
working class seem to be rising up
against his interests, and
that was quite fascinating.
And it's only gotten more
interesting since then.
I won't run through all of these features
of what I'm calling Root Narrative Theory.
One of the biggest challenges has been
settling on a nomenclature, if you will.
And I think,
since I'm dealing with identity, and
narrative, and values, and ideology,
all of those things being relevant and,
I think, critical to the school.
Nevertheless, I decided narrative
storytelling in elections was what was
interesting to me, storytelling in
popular culture and political culture.
And so what I'm calling,
this is the root narrative theory, and
you'll see in a bit why.
I won't go through all of
these things other than to say
that I'm thinking about moral conflicts,
which is an old concept by
Pearson Littlejohn that was really
interesting about incommensurability.
Thinking about different
structures of root narratives,
how they develop in response to
countervail abuses of social power.
So power is going to be
critical to this and
how the narratives emerge
as a reaction to power.
And that social power is
not free-floating, but
it derives from institutional structures.
So the sociologist in me is
gonna be critical in all this.
That these institutional structures,
I say as they come in, we can characterize
them in a thousand different ways.
What I'm gonna do is settle on four, the
kinda Bavarian ideal, typical approach.
To say there are four approaches here,
four major forms which I steal
from the sociologist Michael Mann.
Well what's interesting about that, and
each one can be thought of as a mean.
So the means of production
would be the classic, right.
But my favorite use of the term
the means of administration to talk
about bureaucracy.
So keep in mind that the idea
of state power is anchored in
what Weber already had called
the means of administration.
There there are others that
I'm gonna say that emerge,
what I'm gonna called the means of
defense and the means of socialization.
Because I think these point to two other
large domains that each produces it's own
paradigm, if you will,
that produces Root Narrative.
The Root Narrative's developed to
counterveil abuses of social power.
And just as there are four forms of these,
institutional structure that I'm
going to say there are four forms
of families of Root Narratives,
not the Root Narratives themselves.
And these can be easily remembered as
the securitarian, the libertarian,
the egalitarian, and
the dignitarian, okay?
So it's a lot of the big, so
if you walked away with that,
you'd have a big sense of what
he was talking about, okay?
So from this, and
just cuz I love these kind of acronyms.
When you look for these narratives and
any discourse you're gonna find this,
it's gonna work anywhere.
Their best performed when they're EVIL,
that is emotional, vivid, intense,
and literary.
That is if you look for EVIL in the
narrative, you're gonna find the stories.
Okay, that's gonna be one of the premises.
That the kinds of stories that
stick are gonna be emotional,
they're not gonna be rational.
You're gonna be able to see them.
They're gonna have an emotional
intensity to them,
and there's gonna be a literary element of
symbolism, figures of speech, and so on.
That's the stuff that you're
gonna be looking for,
to know that you've got what I call
ideological or narrative content.
In any narrative source anywhere,
when we're talking about politics.
I'm not going to through all of this but
other than to say,
that the whole goal of this approach maybe
in 1996, I was thinking impurity about
political science in sociology
now it's about, what do we do?
So how do we engage in practice?
And what I think the exciting
thing about this is,
is that it can produce tools when I
call it critical narrative profiling.
Cause all you need is
someone talking about,
what it is they care about in a conflict?
You could use this tool, this approach to
characterize their moral standpoint and
a mixture is gonna be
a blend of the intersections.
And therefore you have kind of
a tool which would allow you
to engage that person at their pain, as I
sometimes say, where they're suffering.
Now, I won't go through all these.
Here's a quote from Thomas Hobbes.
Another way to think about
this theory in short hand is,
it's the Thomas Hobbes, John Locke,
Karl Marx, and Frantz Fanon theory.
[LAUGH] That is each one of those that
go through that again, Thomas Hobbes,
focusing on Predation and Security,
John Locke on Legal Coercion.
So it's about the abuse of power
embedded in the law itself, okay.
And the sanctioning
power of the law itself.
And the corresponding value of liberty
which emerges in response to that.
Karl Marx, who's one of our other great
theorists, as we said his birthday is now.
Focusing on exploitation and equality.
But I wanna say, some of the vulgar
forms might be most interesting in Marx.
And so if you're into Marxism and
you know critical theory, some
of the sort of practical forms of Karl
Marx's theory I thought is interesting.
And Frantz Fanon, focusing I think
most what is interesting to us,
the notion of colonization on status,
on humiliation, on domination.
Where domination,
not part of bureaucratic,
but as a cultural domination and
the concept of dignity.
It looks like we're gonna lose this
presentation soon, low battery.
And it's not mine [INAUDIBLE].
>> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH]
>> So this in case, so here's one way.
The overall theoretical
framework is deep structure.
And so this goes, I borrowed this
concept from Yardis Greenmus who
is a great structural
thinker in the literary area.
Well, what I'm going to say
is that each one of these,
you can think of each of these as, so
we've got our Hobbes,
worried about intercommunal violence.
We've got our Locke, worried about legal
coercion as a kind of paradigmatic abuse.
You've got Marx, thinking about economic
exploitation and you've got Finone,
who's this sort of virtuoso theorist,
thanks to Kevin Edward for
giving me this language
on intergroup domination.
But what happens is each one of
these things has it's own paradigm,
intersects with all the others.
So meaning is derived from how they
work against one another through
the conversation and dialog of these
great pragmatic approaches, okay.
So what happens is these complex theory
which you're just gonna be like that's
interesting that's where it comes from,
okay.
Cuz I'm gonna zip through
that very quickly, just so
you get a sense of how this works.
So here is a great but that emerges,
you've got military power, legal power,
economic, and status power,
the same kind of constructions.
You've got the great theorists,
each representing a various value system.
And then you've got the whole
history of Western civilization,
at least, west failing state formation,
Atlantic revolution,
socialist revolutions, and decolonization.
And outside,
you've got a set of Root Narratives, okay?
Those blue in the outside, they correspond
to Shalom Schwartz's value system.
So what I like about this is it's
an institutionally based value system.
So it's not like
Jonathan Height's moral emotions.
It's based on our almost sociobiology.
It's not even function of brain,
although I love work, but
I never found it fully satisfying.
And it's not Shalom Schwartz's
ideas of personal values.
But instead, it emerges from this deep,
I think, deep institutional analysis.
At least it's been deep for me.
The structure of how you
generate these things, and
I'm gonna really whiz through this, is
what are called Greimas Semiotic Square.
If you don't know what it is,
you can find it on various sources online.
But what's interesting is this.
Is that you take two things and
contrast them, and through their
contrast you get the meaning.
So take the words peace and
violence, okay?
They're contrary, they're different.
In the bottom section,
the non-peace is the opposite of peace.
The non- violence is
the opposite of violence.
Non-violence tends to imply peace,
but it's different from peace.
Non-peace is different from violence but
it tends to imply peace, I mean violence.
So that is you get a whole structure
of meaning, if you will a kind
of signifying structure through this thing
and you can do this again and again.
This is where you're going to hun and
wonder about it.
Okay, so then what we have is we've
got defense and, we've got two kinds
of things, predatory Hobbesian approach
versus the phenom domination approach.
Two Root Narratives emerge from it,
what I'll call liberation and defense.
Again, you can do this again and again.
What you find is you've got the contrast
of security and liberty produces unity and
consent.
That between liberty and
equality is property and reciprocity.
That between recognition and loyalty.
That marks of recognition and
loyalty, and then there's two more.
But the point is,
there are six of these things.
Just go back here for a second.
There's six of them, they merge
out of these four basic paradigms.
Right?
I told you you weren't gonna be able to
get the whole thing.
But before these big paradigms, through
their intersection the meaning emerges.
It's all about the violation of social
power and how ideologies are grounded in.
Well, why would you care
about going through all that?
Well what it does is it gives you
a very simple profiling technique.
What it means is that you can go through
and take every sentence in a document and
you can say,
is this person working within the space?
Remember of defence or of unity or
of humanity and so on.
Each one of these things, two minutes,
is a way to characterize the,
let's say the kind of
point they're making.
The ideological,
let's put it in very simple terms.
The ideology they're using
in that sentence, okay?
So what you have at the end of the day
is a document which is characterized by
sixty percent of this kind of thing,
thirty percent of that,
twenty percent of this and so on.
So that is you've got is a profile
of the kinds of moral language,
the moral grammar that they're
using in each one of the documents.
So, what can you do?
Well I use this on looking
at the Nobel Peace Prize.
So I went and I characterized all of
the speeches given by the winners of
the Nobel Peace Prize and then I sorted
them into these narrative profiles, and
then I went through
Acadian's cluster exercise.
I tried other clustering, but
just to generate a set of types.
Just to say what are the different
kinds of peacemakers.
How would you characterize these things?
Well it turns out the biggest
type is what I call the unifier.
Next is what I call the libertarian,
next the dignitarian, then a defender,
a humanitarian, a egalitarian.
And then the moment yet
is his own kind of guy and
is also her own kind of peacemaker.
What is the, again,
just the basics and idea.
These are the six
different kinds I've got.
What you see is that they're very
different kinds of profiles,
that they rely on different aspects of
these moral grammars if you will
the unifier tends to rely on unity.
The libertarian tends to rely
on concerns with the lacking
the concerns of government and so on.
So let me here just I'll quickly
go through these examples.
Here's Linus Pauling, who won in 62.
He emphasizes unity and
a little bit of humanity, but
he's focused on this concept
of can't we all get along?
Can't we all get over our partisanship?
The Libertarian is a quite
different orientation.
1977, we see Amnesty International wins
and it's all based on consent, that is,
the government is the aggressor.
The government is the villan.
The government is what you
need to be worried about and
we need to confront that.
Which matters because when you talk to
this person which is the idea of negative
profiling, that you should not lead
with unity if you're talking to
Amnesty International.
You should talk about the abuse
of power of governments, period.
And don't do much else.
That's an important thing.
The dignitarian,
a lot of us are gonna be dealing with
these kind of identity conflicts.
What I call liberation and
inclusion are the two main characteristics
of Desmond Tutu's speech, okay?
And then unity, okay?
Unity is important for all of them but
you have to recognize that if you're gonna
talk to Desmond Tutu,
you probably wanna be attentive.
Now it's just a sample of one important
speech, but you probably wanna be
attentive to that, or any of
the people you're dealing with as well.
Jimmy Carter we think of
him as the great Uniter.
But what it turns out is that he's
the guy who talks about defense,
the danger of the violent other,
those people who wanna kill us.
More than anybody else
in the entire sample,
more than Obama,
more than Theodore Roosevelt,
it's Jimmy Carter who's talking about
making sure the bad guys don't kill us.
Now, he does it in a nuanced way.
He's a very progressive kind of guy,
but he focuses on unity.
But anyway, so
another one is the humanitarian which
as you might imagine is
concerned with humanity.
Lech Walesa,
now this is what's interesting,
is it only three of them I think, if I'm
right come up with any focus in what I
call reciprocity which is
the class narrative, okay?
People don't talk about equalities,
it's not structural violence in
that sense is not part of peace.
And that's quite interesting, okay?
Now let me finish up here.
So I'm still in quest of this thing.
I can't decide if I'm Ahab or Ishmael.
But I'm one of those two.
And something's gonna turn out,
I hope I survive.
But the key issue is that if you want to
understand where those you are dealing
with, where their pain is, you've
got to recognize the root and areas.
You've got to be able to,
and you do this already,
and it's called hitting the right
notes in the conversation,
because if you lead in the wrong way,
you don't get it done.
And the most important thing
of all is that policy and
values are logically separable.
Any kind of policy can be associated
with anyone of these root narratives.
So just to be focusing on root narrative
is not to say you're ignoring the policy.
The policy can be associated and reframed
and repositioned in any one of the 12,
I count about 12.
So that the idea that you're ignoring
the person probably says more has
more to do with the narrative, that you're
using, the more grammar you're using,
then the actual policy, the actual
technical argument you're making.
And that's the most critical
point of the theory.
So more to be, more to come later.
>> Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[LAUGH] [INAUDIBLE]
>> Yeah.
[LAUGH]
>> All right,
all right.
>> Okay, Mara,
the floor is yours.
>> And before I start, so
I know how I'm advancing this.
You learned this?
>> I use the arrows.
>> Use the arrow?
>> Yeah, the side arrows.
>> Okay, I can use the arrows.
So I'm gonna switch
the focus here a little bit.
And to get, in many ways,
a hyper-local focus set against
a backdrop of contemporary tensions and
issues.
So in contrast to the theoretical and
the generalizing perspectives,
my interest, starting about two years ago,
was looking at how are local communities
engaging what, in many respects,
is a reactivation of interest
in Confederate commemoration.
And how communities, local communities
are grappling with local histories,
especially a legacy of racial violence and
what the confederacy means in history.
So I'm gonna walk through, this is at
the very beginning of a research study.
And the research study,
the focus is a case study.
But the methodology is oral history and
grounded theory, so at the very beginning
of data collection, and assembling the
documents and the narratives out of which,
and understanding of how
communities are encountering, and
resisting, and actively engaging
some of these controversies.
So the case at the heart, currently,
of my effort is the J.E.B.
Stuart High school/Justice
High School renaming conflict.
It's a local high school located in
Falls Church, part of Fairfax County.
So it is an accessible case.
Part of that becomes important because
this is also a student learning project.
So one of the methods for data collection
is through an advanced practice class for
the undergraduates in our program.
Who are part of the Arlington
Peacebuilding Fellows program.
And so this is using research and
practice-based,
practice linked research as
a component of their learning.
And so this project has a whole
bunch of different goals,
because the audience is also intended
to be conflict practitioners who
are engaging at a local community
level and deliberative processes.
Around some of these
commemorative conflicts.
So just to remind you of events
that you're probably aware of.
And also to re-illustrate
some of the events
that are being re-referenced in many of
the local communities that are engaging in
debates about what to do with
confederate monuments and memorials.
Confederate flags,
as well as the names of schools.
There are two events that bracket
many of the local community efforts.
And they represent both
a spike in organizing and
an acceleration,
a precipitation in organizing,
as well as a reference point and
a motivation for organizing.
They are not the only things that
are referenced, but these are two that
are emerging out of looking at multiple
case studies that are important.
So the two events that bracket
much of this are both Charleston,
South Carolina as well as Charlottesville.
There’s no text on these slides so
I’m gonna scroll through them relatively
quickly just to remind you what it is that
that people are referencing
in their organizing efforts.
So in 2015 in June Dylann Roof
killed nine church members
of the Emanuel African Episcopal Methodist
Church in Charleston South Carolina.
One of the things that was discovered
upon investigation relatively quickly and
these circulated online very rapidly,
were both white supremacist
writings as well as pictures of him
with guns and Confederate flags.
And this rapidly focused some of
the conversations around this.
Another piece that was reported
especially locally and became highly
relevant was that that one of those who
died was the Reverend Clementa Pinckney.
He was also a state senator,
former state representative.
He laid in state at the state capitol and
one of the photos that circulated
especially locally, regionally and
then in activist networks,
was of his coffin passing the Confederate
flag that then was located on
the grounds of the State House.
The flag has a long history of organizing,
so this represented another
punctuation point in the activism around
the appropriateness, location of the flag.
It had been on top of the state capital
since 1961, originally raised at
the anniversary of and commemoration
ceremonies around the confederacy.
It was taken down after,
this isn't when it was taken down,
but in response to renewed organizing and
is the reassessment of the meaning of
the flag shifted in a way
that hadn't happened before.
So, Nikki Haley shortly after
Bree Newsome had done a direct action and
removed the flag in cooperation
with other activists.
Two days later, Nicki Haley called for
the removal of the flag.
And on July 8th the Legislature actually
voted for the removal of the flag and
it's now an exhibit within the local
Confederate relic room and
in military history museum in Charleston.
So a long history of activism against,
and around, and
about the flag,
resulting in its eventual removal.
That same event sees the spike in many
local community efforts to challenge,
to move, to grapple with confederate
symbols within the community.
There is a two year period where
many many school districts,
many many communities are looking
at a variety of monuments and
other kinds of efforts, excuse me.
Then this summer, this was
originally one of my case studies.
But things got very complicated
very quickly in Charlottesville.
Charlottesville had engaged in a process
to examine, relocate, reinterpret,
remove, with a commission that had
been established to decide, what
do we do with two statues, in particular,
Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson?
This is Robert E Lee
in two parks downtown.
Recommendations were varied
from the commission,
the decision had been made
to remove the statues.
Following that, Charlottesville became
a locus of attention in many respects.
Between May and August,
there were four separate events that were
the focus of, depending on one
how characterizes movements, and
I'm sensitive from
Sarah's presentation of,
how do we talk about the current climate?
How do we talk about what's happening
when we see these activated protests?
There was both,
I don't have a picture of the first one.
The beginning of June
there were gatherings.
KKK organized in Charlottesville at
the Stonewall Jackson statue in July.
And perhaps more well known
was the organizing for the so
called Unite the Right rally which
brought many of the groups that
are tracked by the Southern Poverty
Law Center as Sarah referenced.
And variously described as white
nationalists, white identitarian,
white supremacist, a whole.
One of the features that was very notable
was the extent to which the Confederacy
iconography was a component of
the organizing of the day itself and
a merging of narratives in many respects.
And the statues became there,
and in many other places,
a locus of organizing and
part of the narratives.
So on August 11th,
there was a torch-lit rally through
the grounds of the University of Virginia.
And on August 12th was
the actual rally itself.
Which, as analysts,
if we look at the varieties of tension and
violence that that represented
from a high militia presence
to a lot of symbolism,
the convergence of many groups and
the eventual street level
violence that this emerged
into as well as the eventual
death of Heather Heyer,
one of the activists who had
been part of the events.
Those images are in part what fueled and
what we can see in local
communities who are talking,
then, about what do we do?
What is our local response?
So one of those things that happens
bracketed by these two events is
a conversation about
what do these represent,
a reactivation of local groups
who are organizing to remove,
shift, change, reinterpret names,
monuments, and memorials.
What the study that I'm doing
that I think is important is to
bring this down to,
what happens at the local community level?
What do these events look like when we
see the intersection between activism and
organizing and deliberative processes.
Most of the memorials, and, certainly,
school names,
are covered to various degrees by
legislative rules and guidelines.
So how these progress,
locally, is highly variable.
And the history that they
reference is also different.
No all of the statues are Robert E Lee.
Not all the schools are named
after what we would consider
dominant Confederate symbols.
Many of them reflect
a deeply local history.
And so understanding the material,
the narratives that local communities
are using to make sense of Their
relationship to what is the churn and
the larger conversation here is important,
in particular because
the efforts to address or
have a conversation are often very binary.
The deliberative processes
that I have been looking at so
far, are often organized
as a competitive process,
with a very stark narrative in the Jeb
Stuart case, keep or change the name.
And the processes of understanding or
exploring when the narratives
do not overlap.
Most of these cases,
there is no sense of, let's see,
on one side we have a lost cause narrative
which values the confederacy and what
we're talking about is the preservation
of history and often heritage.
And on the other side is the conversation
about a legacy of racial violence.
In room 10b at the American University
calls the monuments an unloaded gun,
they cannot kill you but
the threat is obvious.
Those narratives in most of these
communities have little to no overlap.
In some they do and
in some we see as shift and
a interpenetration of the two narratives.
And that's what the case study is about
is an opportunity to look
at how people are living.
The conflict and
the strategies and efforts and
lives that are involved in looking for
community responses.
Did I make it one minute?
>> Thank you.
>> Okay.
>> Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> It's
time now to hear from our discussants.
We have Lauren Kinney and Elena, can you
please teach me how to say your last name?
>> Samezi or
Cirmizi.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Samezi, I think,
is something I can do with
more dignity for you.
[LAUGH] Whoever would like to go first,
please go ahead and
jump on in.
>> So
we're just splitting our time equally.
I just wanted to take a moment to echo
the sentiments that have all ready been
expressed, today about Dr. Sandoli.
On a personal note, when I was working on
my master's, I had my own health issues
that one point, I thought were gonna
prevent me from even finishing my degree.
And he was a central source of support for
me.
And in fact,
was the person that planted the seed of
even considering to go back and do my PhD.
So I can say that he's single-handedly
the reason why I even thought about going
down this route.
And so I think that, not only has he
left an imprint on our community for
his research and scholarship, but
also, as it was mentioned earlier,
because of his kindness and compassion.
So he will definitely be missed.
So regarding the panelists, I felt that
all three presentations today were
really interesting take on the role of
discourse and shaping conflict dynamics.
Discourse is not just reflecting,
it doesn't just reflect reality,
it shapes reality,
it's a form of meaning making.
And so, it seems like all the panel
members have demonstrated different
approaches for analyzing discourse in
ways that tend to power dynamics and
that approach conflict as a fluid
process versus a static entity.
And so, they've also demonstrated
different processes for
identifying discourse of patterns, and for
developing nuanced typologies that enhance
our ability to understand how
discourse functions in conflict.
Drawing from the presentations, it seems
to me that there are two central issues
that are very important to consider
in any form of discourse analysis.
Attending to agency, and also legitimacy.
So, discourse often can function to convey
agency or to strip someone of agency.
It can serve to legitimize the self and
delegitimize the other.
And in Dr. Cobb's work you saw how she
had developed the exclusion matrices and
that typology based on the role
of exclusion and discourse and
what it functions to do in conflict.
And then with Dr.
Simmons you saw he looked
predominately at morality and values.
He talked about moral grammar and
whenever his profiling technique
which also I think speaks to issues
of legitimacy in conflict and
how people feel or
justify their actions and conflict.
And then with Dr. Chaney, what I think
was a very also interesting take is she
looked at confederate statues as symbols.
And that I think is a very interesting
way of demonstrating the intersection of
rhetoric and action in conflict.
And so I just wanted to pose
a question to all of you,
considering the structural constraints
that are imposed on our ability to
create discursive shifts as
conflict resolution practitioners.
What do you see as the key
structural constraints that limit
the discursive parameters of the conflicts
that your work is focused on?
And structural can be used loosely,
that can be institutional,
social norms, whatever,
however you choose to define
that.
>> Do you want to answer first?
Yep, okay.
>> No, no,
let's get this.
>> Okay, so
first of all I would like to thank you for
wonderful presentations,
they were great and
very interesting research.
I think it outlined how complex
the negative question is,
that it's complex not only on a grassroot
level, on story telling level.
But it's also on a theoretical
level that Sarah outlined.
So, I think what is interesting
about all of this works,
is how it has been highlighted
that how the narratives
emerge as a reaction to power,
to personal experiences, and
to the entrenched levels
that exists in the society.
I think although we talk primarily
about the US issues here,
it's also important to
point out that all of this
work is transferable on
the international level.
Questions about memory history and
memory is important in every country.
And what Mara is doing in regards to the
memorials, to the confederate memorials,
are transferable very easily
to my country of Moldova.
For example or what Sarah was doing with
the interviews of the far right members.
Also is extremely important
when we're talking about
conflicts all over the world I think.
And in this regard,
I have a question about also
how can you see your research or
the results of your research
to be translated into
change in some kind of innovative ways?
How we can translate all
of this research into
tools that would reach
the younger population.
That would reach a new incoming
generation that will be
engaging in conflict in a year or
two, or in five years.
What we can do to complicate
the narratives or
to show the younger generation how to
see the Evil in narrative [LAUGH].
But to be able to determine
that this is just a story,
or this is not just a story, thank you.
>> Okay.
>> Well,
let me start with Lauren
since we began there.
So the sort of fire hose in this
perspective that I threw out there.
What I call the circle of
power because it's about,
I think we're all thinking about power and
we're thinking about its limits.
So each one of these four domains for
me is a structural constraint.
I think what's different about
that current moment now that
we're living through,
this is why I represent this as a circle,
is that we closed the loop in a way.
And it's not meant to be a simple
stage theory and it's not meant to be
an approach which in any way cleanly
demarcates things off from one another.
But I don't think there's any one of
these structural constraints that
predominates right now.
I don't think that, for example,
the issues of systemic humiliation
are more important than the issues
of economic inequality.
I also don't think that the issues
of government power and
its abuse are any less important either.
I think we see plenty of
examples of democracy in crisis.
I think probably in five years,
we'll be thinking a lot about that,
maybe next year.
And that is,
how do we prevent democracies from dying,
as has recently been written in a book?
But also I think that the security issues.
So what I would say that the main
challenge that we're facing structurally
comes from is different in
different parts of the population.
And there's a discursive issue here, so on
the left, the main challenge is going to
be, if things like democracy
are becoming critical, and
economic inequality are becoming critical
issues to address within policy terms.
They're gonna come up against the
narrative framework that we all have, and
I think Mara's example was perfect.
I mean, talking about the evil stuff,
the vividness, the story is so powerful.
You can see the issue of humiliation and
how central it is.
And it's not to say that it's any way not,
but it's gonna be hard for
the left to become concerned about
security issues in a serious way.
It's gonna be hard for the left to become
concerned about the questions about
democracy and classic liberalism that
the right is gonna start to occupy.
And it's also, and it's been
demonstrated demonstrably hard for
the left to be concerned
about economic inequality.
I mean, it's amazing to be living
through this period of time and yet
still with much not being done.
But on the right, there's a similar
challenge, because the right is so
immersed in its classical liberalism, and
it's concerned about
the government's power.
Then that structure is gonna drive out its
ability to see these actual challenges
coming up.
And for me, the question becomes, this
is a little bit to Alana's question too.
Is when you want to address
these audiences and
you want to deal with
the radical disagreement.
How do you speak in a way that both sides
can hear, especially when it's public,
right, now everything is public,
is being streamed.
Everything is public,
there's no local community anymore.
To have those conversations
which allow for
the opening of space
that Sarah talks about.
I'm really intrigued by what she's
doing here, that allow for agency.
Because even from a position of privilege,
there's an inflation which narrows your
moral scope, and
it makes it very difficult to see.
So I think the structural barriers for
all of us,
it's gonna be the security nerve
is gonna drive things out,
because there's gonna be a lot of
security concern, and that dominates.
Whenever you see it, this fear of violent
death tends to drive all these things out.
Especially if the collective against
the other, but each, the left and
the right, has its challenge.
And then, just to the issue of,
how can your work be useful?
I think, for me, that's been the biggest
challenge in these, what now, 11 years or
so, that I've been here.
Is thinking, okay, well,
how do I take my interest and
research in a very abstract sense, but
translate it into something meaningful?
But that was always what
was interesting to me.
That's why I try to generate things,
so we have conflict maps.
That's why I thought a profile would be
interesting to say, who am I talking to,
how do they reason, what sort of
justifications do they tend to use?
And what I love about this approach,
what's been intriguing me,
is you don't have to have some
sort of depth encounter with them.
You just have to look at
the way in which they justify
their opinions to an audience
they respect or care about.
And from that, you can reconstruct
the moral grammar they tend to use.
It doesn't mean that the sample is good,
it doesn't mean that it's meaningful.
They're not sort of playing with you or
being duplicitous.
But I think that this is at least a way,
what I'm hoping it could be,
in addition to the kind of conflict
mapping techniques that we have.
And we can have some way of categorizing
ideologies that weren't policy based.
Because so much of the political
science literature is policy based.
Some of these greats, [INAUDIBLE]
had this wonderful approach, but
it's all based on what
policies you're approaching.
And so we've opened the field for
the psychologists and
the cognitive scientists to dominate
the emotional landscape of this.
And I think that's in a way helpful and
in a way distracting.
And I think that kind of structural
analysis could be very interesting to
activists as well.
Let me take your question in
a slightly different direction,
as far as reading what's meant by
structural [INAUDIBLE] parameters.
But I think it also addresses how
do you translate this [INAUDIBLE].
For me, one of the challenges have been,
where's the opportunity to do work with
people around some of these issues?
In that there are real challenges for
having platforms and
access as well as an audience
to examine some of these issues.
And much of this can't be and
isn't, thinking back to Arthur's
presentation, it can't be short term.
that the relationships that are built
within a community to actually engage in
a reexamination of assumptions.
And the ability to hear
the quite different narrative,
the quite different worlds
that people are occupying, and
understandings and
motivations that are happening.
That I think which is part of what draws
me to the community deliberative efforts.
A school based conflict draws
in a very different audience
than a more distant or, I might even say
academic understanding of what are some of
these battles being fought over a school.
Especially a public school based community
brings in a level of, it touches people,
people who would not otherwise become
involved in the conversations.
Which complicates the process, but
also represents an opportunity.
Because it's a place where who we are as
a community is being both represented and
contested at the same time.
And it's an engagement with community
values and community articulation of and
understanding of history,
but also moving forward.
And so there's a constant
moving forward and back.
And so I think that constraint
of being able to find the places
where the debates and the concerns and
ideas are instantiated.
And I think the symbology of monuments and
of school names has been
a place to Instantiate.
It both shows and sharpens the differences
in the debate and the discourses, but
it also has potential to open them up.
>> I think
this is a good time to go and
talk to the audience, Karina.
Okay, do we have
a microphone to bring her?
>> I could be that person, okay.
>> Well, with this section,
I really love it, so
it's really 3D for me.
Because of usual this of for
the means of perception, and
more ideally show how historic
narratives and historic symbols are used
to justify particular practices,
and particular positions of power.
So my question for you,
this 3D type of question,
how we can use this historic
narrative to create regimes of truth,
to colonize spaces within
these four domains?
Well, I think this is an interesting
thing to think about over the.
My sense is that historical narrative
is the currency of these conversations.
And so, I think the critical piece for me,
it depends on, if you're engaging in a
conflict process, I think it'd be helpful
to get the parties to recognize
the narrative that the other's going to.
I think that's one of the reasons
in problem-solving workshops,
[INAUDIBLE] where you have people just
yell at each other the first day.
>> [LAUGH]
>> So that those things get kinda aired,
so you have the framework of that.
So that the narratives
are laid on the table.
And so that, when you start to encounter,
before you can sort of peel them open and
think about what the actual
issues you're addressing are,
you allow the narratives to dominate.
And then the setting makes it possible for
people to recognize the narrative
without being wounded by hearing.
So, the important thing about the
narrative is when someone tells a story
about the same objective facts, from the
dignitarian versus the libertarian point
of view, both sides are deeply wounded.
And they're using different history and
their different stories.
But even all their language
comes pre-coded and
is a gun pointed at the other.
And that's really interesting to me.
So I think that there's so
much to be said.
But my answer would be that that is the
very currency of the research itself, or
the practice,
is to engage in historical narratives.
And punctuation,
when you begin the narrative, and
when you end it, and all those things
are the critical features of history, and
so I agree with Rich that the historical
element is really an important part of
what we ought to be doing.
>> [INAUDIBLE] question?
>> Thank you.
>> [CROSSTALK],
anyway, you want-
>> So I think that the regime,
the idea of a regime of truth is
intriguing and challenging at the moment.
I think one of the things that I've
seen so far is how difficult it is for
deliberative processes to be constructed
in a way that allow examination and
that ability to have the narrative, but
then also be able to engage with it and
challenge it.
And I think about dialogue processes,
especially Bohmian processes that
talk about a suspension of and
the ability to walk around what
people are bringing to a process.
And that is largely absent
in deliberative processes,
especially if they're not
actually deliberative.
If they are majority-vote based,
or are reinforcing,
in many ways, of the status quo, or the
loudest voices, or the strongest effort.
So, I think creating that space
to reexamine and, perhaps,
find a multiplicity of truths, and then,
to commit to something that fully
recognizes a desired future.
So I think there are some challenges
in construction of these processes.
There are also huge constraints
to resources and funding and
knowledge and timing and
inability to engage with these.
And so I think, but
getting that in, and so
that people can learn through a process,
has been one of the real challenges,
I think.
>> A rich and
deep [LAUGH] set of presentations
among all three, so
then there's no way I can understand
all of everything happen.
I've got my listening isn't
as fast as your speaking.
But there was.
I really just applaud your
elevation of framing of a category
of conflicts as the moral conflicts.
We have intractable, we have all these
different categories that we privilege.
And within that framing, I just wanna ask,
kind of offer an observation and
a question.
You had categories of injustice.
You had different forms of injustice,
which I think are so riveting.
And some people, some philosophers and
philosophical thinkers say that in these
conflicts, the groups define themselves so
strongly in their conception of
the injustice with a very weak,
shallow sense of justice.
So it's a form of irrationality,
or arationality.
And so, my question,
are those forms of injustice your evil?
>> Yeah, well.
>> So, evil, again, I wrote this down,
emotion, vivid, integral,
intent, and literal.
Literary, excuse me.
>> Well,
so that just,
there's a lot to this philosophically, and
I've been learning from my colleague for
many years now, and continue to do so.
One of the things that I would say is
that this perspective is based not
on a summum bonum, but a summum malum
interpretation of moral philosophy.
That, it seems to me that the conflict
narratives that are most,
likely to produce these
intractable conflicts,
these moral conflicts,
have this conception of evil.
But then the corresponding form of good
becomes probably as caricatured too.
What's critical for
me is the way in which the policy aspect
of the technical aspect of the
conversation is separable, not separate,
but separable from the values aspect.
And so, the conception of the good
falls to the virtuoso theorists,
of which there are thousands.
So my bookshelf, I have one bookshelf
at home, which has great theorists, and
whenever you mention something like,
where does that fit,
I put it in one of my categories.
And these become ways in which people,
I think, magine the positive future, but
always within a space constructed by
the conception of the summum malum.
And that's what, for me,
what's interesting about Hobbes,
that he's the first who articulates
a philosophy in that way, and
I think that's the beginning of a kind of
a science of institutional abuse of power.
So I think the positive view is,
at the aspect of the technical work.
But the problem with the technical work
is that no one listens to your facts and
your technical arguments unless
they can hear your narrative.
And so, there's no way to answer your
question, right, in a brief span, but
these are some of the reflections I have.
>> Thank you.
[INAUDIBLE] I appreciate your paper,
as well as the rest of the papers.
I want to say that
the structural imagination seems
to me to be a tool for,
say, conflict analysis.
And then,
it would be something that will empower
such an analyst to be able
to view conflict situations,
and maybe rhetorics, from like a bird-eye.
So how would you say that
Sarah Cobb's work could relate with
these structural imaginations?
>> Also's Mara's, too, because,
as full disclosure,
I live in the district she's studying,
so my children will go
to Justice High School.
But not Justice Thurgood Marshall high
school, because we didn't win that fight.
But I think, well my sense of this is
that nobody gets outside the narrative.
That's my kind of
approach to these things.
And no matter how technical you are,
and I include,
John Mearsheimer is one of my favorites,
because he's this securitarianr thinker.
And in my class, we read these things.
But even these people who say,
I don't do morality.
I just do science.
I just do facts.
I just do technical.
You scratch a little bit, and
everything they're doing,
all of those technical arguments, in fact,
presuppose a normative infrastructure.
They're situated in a context.
So what is it that John Mearsheimer
is concerned about?
Violent death.
Okay, there's a very good, there's a good
that he presupposes, which is you don't
want to be killed by somebody else,
or dominated and destroyed by them.
And that's just given in
the Mearsheimer and he admits as much.
And he has a prescriptive theory too.
This is what you should do,
given that you're afraid of violent death.
This is the best way.
You have the Korean War today, because
China is gonna be more powerful in 30
years and you better do it now and
get it over with, right?
So that's the Mearsheimer defense of
realism but it's not just descriptive,
it's a normative argument, and
it presupposes a world view.
So I think it translates down directly.
I think that there's a scale
in variance to any of this.
I think you can take a conflict, watching.
It was a great presentation, by the way.
Those images are so riveting, and
what they do is they tell a story, and
I immediately saw things, that I, and
I felt things and
I started thinking in certain ways.
And Sarah's I think is getting inside.
What Sarah's neat about, so
here's what's different between
the work that Sarah and I do, I think.
Hers is more symptomatic analysis and
mine's more paradigmatic,
to put it in structural terms.
That is, she's interested in sequences
of how people tell stories within
a particular context.
She's not here to defend herself, but
this is something I sometimes think.
Lauren helped me to see this that is,
looking from a point of view,
you look at how these things
build within a context.
I don't actually care how
they're sequenced at all.
I mean, I do, but I don't really.
That's not what I study.
I'm just interested in
the relative mix of these things.
That is, I just wanna say,
okay, Amnesty International,
what do I need to know about
Amnesty International?
By the way, if you talk, if you've done
this, you see start talking peace and
get shut down.
Don't talk about unity.
So I think in that case is that I can
imagine a conversation where I was having
if someone from Amnesty is here.
But I'm gonna start talking about
the danger of the government and
then how governments are abusive and
how autocratic systems.
And I'm just gonna pepper
that in there because I know
that that's what people need to hear so
they can hear what I'm saying.
So I think it's scale invariant in that
way that you can apply it to them.
My goal, this is the Moby Dick of it, is
that you could take any conflict discourse
anywhere in the world at any point in
history and you could analyze it this way.
That's my goal, and that's why it's
such a challenge for me to deal with it.
>> I think we have time for one more.
>> Thank you.
I wanna go back to the local that Mara
brought us with all those riveting photos.
And you speak about the local responses
and reactivation of local groups.
And I guess I wanna ask you,
what kinda comes to mind for
me is more Dugan's nested model.
And that there's this very local conflict
going on in this broader social conflict,
national conflict, etc.
So what is special about
this very local response?
What's unique when people claim
that it's my community, my school,
my history, my heritage?
Is there something that comes out
that's different than this national I'm
part of a big thing?
Yeah, what's special about the local part?
>> I think in a very pragmatic
sense what's special about the local part
is that's where things are happening.
That's where people are grappling with,
and living with, and
working out what their
community is going to do.
Very few of these local conflicts have
a federal opportunity to come in and
say, this is how something
should be handled.
So this is where people
are living the conflict.
This is where it's being enacted and
decided.
And there is also a cumulative effect.
Communities talk to each other.
Efforts in Virginia to successfully
change a school name in Roanoke,
then affect the ability or
the conversations that this
activates then in Falls Church.
So it's not that these
things happen in isolation.
Especially with social media and
some of what we've seen as the effect
of people talking to each other.
And activists referencing each other and
talking to each other on many sides.
It's at the local is where
people are living the conflict.
And this is where for
me Dennis Andoli's voice comes in.
I was very struck by students since this
semester of how messy the conflict was.
And part way through feeling a sense
of despair where before they had felt
clarity.
And I considered that as success
because they recognize that to
actually do anything, to work with this.
To have an eye for change or
decision making or engagement around this
was extraordinarily difficult, even to the
effect do people wanna talk about this?
Will they consent to interviews?
And so I think the local piece is
where people are living conflict.
And it does have generalizability, and
it does have echoes in
relationships to other settings.
And tracing those relationships
is part of the project.
But for me,
locating the local helps bring it to life.
And is also the place where we
can see both the complexity and
the chaos of how this manifests
in a particular place,
because the solutions are going to
be local in most of these cases.
What matters, the creativity of lack
thereof that is brought to bear,
very much has dimensions that
are grounded in locality,
and historical experiences,
current experiences, demographics.
So there are real tangible lived
realities that affect this,
even to the extent of how much of
an activist community have they had.
How much of recent tragedies or
past tragedies
left the community with a reservoir
of people who know how to organize?
So there's all these elements
that make up a complicated story,
that what's the story that
this community is gonna tell.
And I think that's why the local matters.
>> And
one last question from-
>> So Solon, this is a question about,
well I don't know if it's internal
validity, external validity,
really having you think about.
So all of the paradigmatic thinkers
have come out of a Western tradition,
even Fenknown who by virtue
of the wounds of colonialism
was deformed by it, by Western tradition.
So I wonder if there, and there's
something neat about those matrices and
six paradigmatic figures, but
if you thought about, say,
a paradigmatic Buddhist thinker.
There are other visions of the world,
maybe.
Now, I know that in your
Nobel Prize corpus,
those data,
you have people like Desmond Tutu.
And you could see him speaking,
maybe about Ubuntu, but
in a way that is assimilable.
But just imagine for
a moment had Gandhi won a Nobel Prize.
What would his speech have looked like and
what could be taken out of
a Gandhi-an speech, that maybe escapes
some of the Hermeticness, the kind
of elegant Hermeticness of your analysis?
>> That's a great question, Kevin.
It's that the core of what I'm doing and
it's what I'm trying to do is I'm trying
to get my own house in
order before I tackle that.
So our next great project,
I woke up one night in China,
I was the vice-president trying
to promote programs overseas.
And I said, what we need is
a comparative conflict resolution.
That is, we need even Khaldun,
we need Confucius.
It was clearly, in that context,
it was at the Confucius Institute, so
of course one's thinking
about Confucius a lot.
But what I would say is this, is that all
these emerging in a Western context don't
limit their potential application.
And I haven't found when I go to Gandhi's
speeches that I couldn't address in what
he's dealing with.
Much of what you see,
what's interesting about the western,
there's a way in which the western
conversation being not about,
what I would call values in
a deeper spiritual sense.
But being about power might be
an interesting point of opening for
this conversation.
That is, it's about power itself and
how it's abused.
And so I think there's a richer
tradition that one finds,
especially in the Confucian tradition,
that it's not as explicitly and
analytically focused
on the kinds of power.
But what you see in Confucian
thinkers is something much similar.
Everyone knows what humiliation is,
and don't like it.
And that's what interesting and why this,
it's a value system that
survives after Nietzsche.
That is, so when God is dead,
what are your values?
They come out of human suffering,
that's my point.
And human suffering is in fact not
all that different wherever you look.
So that no one likes to be humiliated.
No one likes to be exploited.
No one likes to be coerced by
an illegitimate legal authority.
And no one likes to be killed, and
that is by someone they consider to be
an outsider and dominated in that way.
And I find, so each one of those
things as I've tested myself,
I don't think that it's
specifically a western point.
But I have not had the capacity frankly to
think about this with a sufficient breath
to do justice to those alternative
traditions, but it doesn't mean that.
I think that's the third book that I
wanna do after these two are done, so
that's where I wanna go.
>> Well, thank you all,
we are now going to, thank you for
everyone's presentations.
Thank you for the discussion, and
for kicking off great questions.
And thank you, audience members.
We're going to have lunch now,
and returning at 12:30, okay.
