Newsletter Nr. 34 (December 2019, subsequent to our 34th Annual Conference, our 2019 NY Workshop)
Compiled by Evelin Lindner, in Germany (December, 2019)
Contents
• Pictures
• Thanks!
• Announcements
• What Is the Aim of Our Work?
• Messages from You
• Welcome Again!
Pictures
(Important note to our conference participants: During our conference, we asked for your permission to include your pictures here. In case you have changed your mind since our workshop took place, please let us know! We want to make sure we have your permission. Thank you! Since we wish to walk the talk of dignity, it is very important for us to do our utmost in respecting everybody's privacy. We could gather written permissions from you during our conferences, yet, since we value the building of mutual trust in relationships, we would like to refrain from contributing to an ever more bureaucratic and legalistic society. We encourage everybody who does not wish to have their pictures or videos on our website to take pro-active responsibility and inform the photographer to refrain from taking pictures of her, and stay out of any video-tape. This will make the post-workshop editing work feasible, as also this is a voluntary work of love that is already overstretched.)
Dear Friends!
We had a wonderful workshop in New York City! It was titled:
2019 Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict "Can We Teach Dignity? Becoming Lifelong Apprentices of Dignity from Childhood Throughout All Ages"
(representing the 34th Annual HumanDHS Conference)!
All our events are part of an ongoing effort to build a global dignity community.
Thanks!
Linda and I would like to express our sincere gratitude and appreciation to all of you who co-created our 2019 Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict representing the 34th Annual HumanDHS Conference! You ALL contributed so that our workshop became a unique and exiting experience!
What a gift Teachers College of Columbia University gives to the world by hosting a global dignity workshop! We have no words to thank the new President of Teachers College, Thomas R. Bailey, together with Portia Williams, Joe Levine, Peter Coleman, Danielle Coon, Charlott Macek, Keenan Powers and Keerthana Hirudayakanth, as well as our friends from media, facilities, and security at Teachers College, Kofi Asare, Jasmine Ortiz, Hua-Chu Yen, Kevin Waldron, Corine Best Campbell, Yeremy Chavez, James Kearney, Sandra Afflick, Audrey Hurley, Yocasta Brens-Watson, Patricia Gibson, Jennifer Govan, to name only a few of all those valued friends at Teachers College who are so kind to make our workshop possible!
We are extremely grateful to the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR) of Teachers College for giving us this wonderful gift each year of hosting our global dignity workshop! We would like to thank Peter T. Coleman, and Danielle Coon, Director and Associate Director of the MD-ICCCR, together with their wonderful team, including Keenan Powers, Charlott Macek, Andy Chan, and Jaspar Leahy. Late Morton Deutsch convened the first workshop in 2003, and he has been its honorary convener until his passing in 2017. We wish to honor his memory by conducting this workshop also in the future. MD-ICCCR is a co-founder of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4) (since 2009).
We also wish to thank Josh Fisher, PhD, Director of the Advanced Consortium for Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4) at Columbia University, and Beth Fisher-Yoshida, PhD, Executive Co-Chair of the AC4, and Director of the Youth, Peace & Security Program.
We are overwhelmed by the generous support that you all extended, dear friends, and we would like to express our deep gratitude!
While Morton Deutsch founded this workshop series in 2003, Andrea Bartoli helped design it. He was then the Director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR) at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and Chairman of the Columbia University Conflict Resolution Network (CU-CRN). Andrea Bartoli is a Member of the HumanDHS Global Advisory Board since its inception. Also his successor, Aldo Civico, kindly supported this workshop, as did his successor Jean-Marie Guéhenno, who became the President of the International Crisis Group in 2014. In 2009, the CU-CRN was superseded by the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4). From 2015, the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies (SIWPS) at the School of International and Public Affairs offers courses in specialization in conflict resolution (ICR Concentration). Thank you, dear Alba Taveras, for always supporting our work, since 2003!
As always, our very special thanks go to Linda M. Hartling for first setting the frame of appreciative inquiry in Donald Klein's spirit and then, throughout the entire workshop, keeping up the spirit of dignity, and weaving a web of connections, holding us all together!
Rick Slaven always steps up most courageously in this worskhop series, kindly joined by Bonnie Selterman and Mara Alagic, who most lovingly takes over whenever needed! Rick Slaven always creates a unique atmosphere of humor, modeling our motto of "taking ourselves lightly, even when we take our work seriously." A profound thank-you goes to you, dear friends!
Instead of "shareholders" we have Careholders! Thank you so much, dear Janet Gerson, Adair Linn Nagata, Denyse Kapelus, Bhante Revata Chipamong Chowdhury, Anastasia Sarantos Taskin, Anne Wyatt-Brown (timing), Martha Eddy, Robert Anderson, Shahid Khan, and Joni Baird!
This was the fifth workshop with Dignigardeners. David Yamada, Michael Britton, Claudia Cohen, Mara Alagic, and Adair Linn Nagata kindly offered to hold, guard, and protect the most important goal of our work, namely, to place relationships first and nurture them so that diversity of opinions and conflict can enrich, rather than tear the fabric of the relationships apart. Please see an Introduction into the Dignilogue Sessions Format, created by Linda Hartling on August 12, 2012, for our 2012 Norway Conference, and read more about the Dignilogue format and what it entails. See also Linda's Dignilogue Tips and Dynamic Dignilogue List, created on October 10, 2015, for last year's workshop, and Gabriela Saab's Dignigardener Tips created on December 6, 2016. See, furthermore, our reflections on Appreciative Nurturing.
We thank Anna Strout for always taking such lovely still photos! And equally many thanks to our dear Gaby Saab, Ana Ljubinkovic, Fatma Tufan, and Claudia Thimm for doing all our video-recording for us! And we would like to again thank most warmly our friends working with media (Kofi and Louis), facilities (Kevin and Corine), and security at Teachers College (Yeremy and James)!
We are immensely grateful to all of you for so generously gifting your time and energy to our dignity work!
And what book table we had also this year! Thanks to Uli Spalthoff, our not-for-profit Dignity Press has plublished almost 30 books in the past years! Please note that we are looking for a successor for our dear Uli now, who has given his all over so many years!
Our warmest thanks go furthermore to our "moderators of moderators," Phil Brown and David Yamada! David Yamada and Adair Linn Nagata moderated the first Dignilogue, and for the second Dignilogue, Michael Perlin and Janet Gerson stepped wonderfully up to the task!
This year, we had the most outstanding musical performances! We have no words to thank soprano Audrey Hurley! This year, Fred Ellis gave his untiring support not just during our Public Event, but throughout the entire workshop with his wonderful voice, thank you so much!
May we end by thanking the contributors to our Public Event on the afternoon of Thursday, December 6, for their wonderful inspiration! First came Fred Ellis with his students, then Gabriela Saab and Evelin Lindner shared their experiences in the Amazonian Rainforest during our 33rd Dignity Conference in the Brazilian Amazon in August and September 2019! THANK YOU ALL for your great gifts!
Finally, Michael F. Britton moved us all again deeply on Friday morning with his Don Klein Memorial Lecture that he gives in the place of Don's originally planned lecture titled The Humiliation Dynamic: Looking Back... Looking Forward. Don showed us how to live in awe and wonderment. We will always need your wisdom, dear Don!
And, please join us in celebrating our dear Claudia Cohen, whom we had the privilege of honoring with the 2019 HumanDHS (Half!) Lifetime Commitment Award!
Please join Evelin in expressing deep gratitude to Linda Hartling. Without her wisdom, love, care, and huge investment of time since 1999, when we first met via email, and then, in full intensity, since our first conference in 2003, which took place in Paris, France, when we met in person, our network and our conferences would not be there. Please celebrate Linda’s leadership! In November 2008, Linda relinquished her administrative responsibilities at Wellesley College to devote more time in service of HumanDHS as our HumanDHS Director! Rick and Linda moved across the North American Continent and found a physical home for the Pacific Rim Branch of HumanDHS and the first HumanDHS Dialogue Home in Portland, Oregon. Everyone is invited to visit! And please send Linda all of your relevant books to be included in the HumanDHS library! A big BIG thank-you to you, dearest Linda and Rick!
Now, we would like to extend a special thanks to those of you who completed the Appreciative Enquiry note cards at the conclusion of the workshop. As Linda explained, this information is important for us as we begin to reflect on what we could do differently next year and in future years. Your willingness to participate in this process is very important for us, as we very much want this workshop to continue to be a collaborative effort. We extend our warm thanks to each of you for being part of this co-creation.
There is no monetary remuneration involved in our dignity work, including all our events. Participants join the workshop because they wish to share their work, their experiences, and their insights. The main point of our work is the nurturing of a global dignity community. Our events are a labor of love, just as is everything else connected with our work. None of us is being paid, including the organizers, there is no traditional fundraising and no profit involved. We share the minimal overhead in a dignity economy approach by everybody contributing according to ability.
Our workshops are upon invitation. You are warmly welcome to contact us if you wish to join us next year in this workshop (December 10 - 11, 2020). Please know that we always invite you to spend the entire two days of our workshop together so that real dignity-family-building can emerge!
Please let us know as early as you can if you wish to join next year, particularly if you feel that you would like to share your experience and work in one of our Pre-Planned Dignilogues. They are often filled up by July. You can always participate in one of the Co-Created Dignilogues, or as a supporter or observer of the Pre-Planned Dignilogues, where you can also actively participate, for example, by using the empty chair in each Dignilogue. We usually recommend newcomers to be with us as supporters and observers first, so that they can familiarize themselves with the format, and envision to participate more deeply in future workshops.
For the past decade, we have continuously worked to dignify the traditional institution "conference." Therefore, our events differ from mainstream conferences where speakers are invited and funded by organizers, and where audiences pay a registration or entrance fee to listen to the speakers. Usually, organizers gather speakers who "market" their knowledge to an audience. We wish to transcend the separation between speakers and audiences and nurture our gatherings in the spirit of what we call Dignilogue (dignity + dialogue).
Let us explain a bit more. In our out-of-NY conferences we use our adaptation of the Open Space approach, and this is what we have dubbed Dignilogue. This format is very open, it means that a conference is self-organizing. In our NY workshop, we tried this in the beginning (like ten years ago), but it turned out that for our NY participants more structure was needed. In 2012, it was the first year that we dared again to leave the workshop to self-organize at least partly. We invited participants to be with us without the ambition to "present" something, so that we all could get a feel for the dignity-family-building work that we wish to nurture first and foremost. So, from 2012 onward, the workshop has been more open and requires our participants to bring themselves as they are, be prepared for everything, and use the flow to contribute in the most nurturing way they can. As background reading you might enjoy "Are College Lectures Unfair?" by Anne Murphy Paul, The New York Times, September 12, 2015.
Since 2012, our afternoons were therefore also more action-oriented than in earlier workshops. Instead of three Pre-Planned Dignilogues, we have only two, and choose to dedicate the afternoons of both days to Co-Created Dignilogues. These Dignilogues focus on topics of interest proposed by the participants. Rather than planning a “presentation,” we encourage everybody to come "unprepared" and enjoy the mutual learning experience of engaging in — or facilitating — authentic, creative conversations that can lead to new ideas and new opportunities for action. Everybody is always invited to send an abstract or a paper they wish to share, either before or after the workshop so we can publish it on this website — or to develop a new paper as it might emerge from the inspiration that the workshop experience brought.
The grand finale of each afternoon is to invite representatives from each Dignilogue to create a Dignivideo, where they document the highlights of their conversation and insights, and more than that, formulate a "message to the world" as it has cristallized in the dignilogue. These videos are treasured contributions to our World Dignity University Library of Ideas to be shared with the world and will inspire future generations of our community. The aim of this video is "to speak to the world," to offer a message that the world should hear (rather than "report" on what had happened during the Dignilogue). Linda's guideline in 2019: "Please give a short introduction into what the group was about, and then explain what grew out, bring the message, the call to action that your groups wants to communicate to the world!"
As mentioned above, we have created a new role in our workshop, namely the role of Dignigardener (dignity and gardener) for each Co-Created Dignilogue. Our Dignigardeners have the responsibility to remind everybody of the "rules" for Dignicommunication (dignity + communication).
We always encourage all participants of our events to nurture mutually dignifying connections with the other participants also after this workshop and to experiment with new forms of "conferencing" wherever you live in the world. The world is in need of new dignified and dignifying solutions and such conferences can be a way to nurture them in ways that protect them from being "hijacked" by old paradigms (such as paradigms of protest that simply end in new dominators taking over).
Dear participant in our workshop! You contributed to bringing dignity and love into our workshop in unprecedented ways! Due to your presence, it was an unforgettable experience! Your contributions spoke to the need to begin with ourselves if we are serious about bringing more dignity into the world. The motto of unity in diversity provides a path toward dignity, and the diversity of expressions that you brought to the workshop, the diversity of ways in which we touched and moved each other, was astounding and deeply touching!
We thank YOU more than words can express!
Evelin & Linda, on behalf of our entire network.
PS: Dear All! As you know, we would need your permission to place pictures and videos on our website. Please let us know if you would not wish to be included, thanks a lot!
Announcements
Announcement of our Latest News!
What Is the Aim of Our Work?
Please read more in newsletter12.
Messages from YOU
See a post-conference blog by David Yamada
Welcome Again!
We would like to end this newsletter by thanking you again for all the wonderful mutual support. You contributed so generously, therefore let us give our warmest thanks to ALL OF US! We very much look forward to our upcoming conference in 2020!
Please let us know as early as you can if you would like to join us, particularly if you wish to be part of a Pre-Planned Dignilogue in our next Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict, December 10 – 12, 2020! Thank you!
Linda & Evelin, December 2019
2003 – present, Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies