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Co-sponsored by Higgins School of Humanities and IDCE (International Development, Community and Environment). Funded by a major grant from the Ford Foundation

Difficult Dialogues is about creating a culture of dialogue on campus in which the practice of dialogue is recognized, appreciated, and practiced both inside and outside the classroom. We hope to do this by: building skills of dialogue among a sizeable number of faculty, staff, and students; creating opportunities for the community to engage in dialogue around significant and controversial issues common to us all; and integrating dialogue into a number of academic courses across the curriculum, thus ensuring its continued practice.

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Discussion

N A T I O N A L
National Difficult Dialogues Initiative

 

spring 2010


Our culture is saturated with and shaped by issues and images of gender, often in its polarized forms. This semester we ask what gender is, and explore both its biology and the ways we construct it. We engage the volatile and painful concerns that arise in its wake – violence, inequity, intolerance – as well as the subtlety of gendered assumptions. We consider gender in pop culture, its increasingly fluid and ambiguous definition, the questions of power that surround it, both the “hysterical” and the sacred dimensions of sexuality, and ask how we might become more conscious and intentional about its role in our own lives and community.

We’ll be gathering people through a wide range of events to consider gender. We’ll explore pop culture notions of gender in Sex and the City (with popcorn provided), hold brown bag lunches on parenting and workplace issues, and a community-wide dialogue on how we “construct” gender here on campus. We’ll have conversations on gender and science with Barnard scholar Rebecca Jordan-Young, issues of gender and power with Cynthia Enloe, and the history of black women in America with Smith historian Paula Giddings. Please join us!

For a full listing of events, please download a PDF of our Spring 2010 Calendar

 

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John Sarrouf & Kristen WilliamsCan We Talk Across this Divide?

This past semester, Professor Kristen Williams (Political Science) volunteered to teach a dialogue seminar on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Two DD fellows and DD Assistant Director, John Sarrouf, joined Professor Williams in facilitating the seminar. Read more here.

" The challenge we faced was to teach a course on the Israel-Palestine conflict entirely through dialogue — all the content came as outside assignments, no lectures, and very little in-class questions of the professor-as-expert. The knowledge we built was a shared responsibility and sought to accomplish the dual goals of teaching the conflict itself and how to dialogue about such a difficult issue. The class was made up of Israelis, Palestinians, passionate American partisans on both sides, and a handful of students curious about the issue and approaching it for the first time."

 

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Contact us

Sarah Buie

Director, Difficult Dialogues Project
Director, Higgins School of Humanities
Professor, V&PA
sbuie@clarku.edu

John Sarrouf

Assistant Director, Difficult Dialogues
jsarrouf@clarku.edu