Newsletter Nr. 14 (December 2009, subsequent to our 14th Annual Conference, our 2009 NY Workshop)
Compiled by Evelin Lindner, in NY, USA, and Germany, Europe (December, 2009)
(Note: This newsletter is written in American English, since this conference took place in the U.S. In our outside-of-the-U.S. workshops, we often use British English.)
Contents
• Pictures
• Thanks!
• Announcements
• What Is the Aim of Our Work?
• Moving Our Work onto Cyberspace
• Thinking of New Economic Frames
• Messages from You
• Welcome Again!
Pictures
(Important note to our conference particants: During our conferences, we always make an effort to ask for your permission to have your pictures posted on this website. However, you may have overheard or misunderstood our question, or you may have changed your mind since, either in total or for specific pictures/videos, please let us know! 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 do not wish to gather written permissions from you during our conferences, since we value the building of mutual trust in relationships, and we would like to refrain from contributing to an ever more bureaucratic and legalistic society. Again, thank you so much for kindly holding hands with us in respectful mutuality in this matter!)
Morton Deutsch received the HumanDHS Life Time Award on Friday, December 11, 2009, on Day Two of the 2009 Workshop of Humiliation and Violent Conflict! |
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| - Please click on the picture on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. - Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera. - Please see also a photo album of the award ceremony. |
| The pictures come in four main webgalleries: |
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Morton Deutsch honored us with his presence, and we celebrated his profoundly influential, important, and eminent life and life-work with the first life-time award of the HumanDHS network! Please click on the picture above to see it larger. |
| Pictures of all of Day One of the workshop, Thursday, December 10, 2009. - Please click on the picture on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. - Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera. Thank you dear Camilla for taking such great pictures! |
| Lunch on
Day One of our workshop, Thursday, December 10, 2009. Please click on the pictures above or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera. |
| Round Table 1 on
Day One of our workshop, Thursday, December 10, 2009. - Please click on the picture on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. - Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera. |
| Public Event on
Day One of our workshop, Thursday, December 10, 2009. We opened the evening with music from Mali and then we welcomed Queen Mother Dr. Delois Blakely, Community Mayor of Harlem, Ambassador of Goodwill, FESMAN 2009 Ambassador of Goodwill, Goree Island. - Please click on the picture on the top left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. - Please click on the picture on the top right or here to see more photos from Benedicte Gauthier's camera. - Please click on the pictures below or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera. |
| Pictures of all of
Day Two of our workshop, Friday, December 11, 2009. - Please click on the pictures on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. - Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera. |
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Michael Britton gave the Don Klein Memorial Lecture on
Day Two of our workshop, Friday, December 11, 2009. Michael uses Don's metaphor of a scrim, a transparent stage curtain, where one believes that what one sees is reality only as long as the light shines on it in a certain way: see Don's explanation. - Please click on the pictures on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. - Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera. |
Round Table 2 on
Day Two of our workshop, Friday, December 11, 2009. |
| Lunch on
Day Two of our workshop, Friday, December 11, 2009. We sing together: Please click on the pictures or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera |
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Morton Deutsch received the HumanDHS Life Time Award on Friday, December 11, 2009, on Day Two of the 2009 Workshop of Humiliation and Violent Conflict! - Please click on the picture on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. - Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera. Please see also a photo album of the award ceremony. |
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| Round Table 3 on
Day Two of our workshop, Friday, December 11, 2009. - Please click on the pictures on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera. - Please click on the pictures on the right or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera. |
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Closing our workshop on Friday, December 11, 2009: - Please click on the pictures on the left or here to see more photos from Evelin's camera - Please click on the picture on the right or here to see more photos from Camilla Hsiung's camera |
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December 8, 2009, first pre-workshop meeting with Miriam Marton and her husband. Please click on the pictures above or here to see more photos. |
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December 9, 2009, second pre-workshop meeting. Please click on the pictures above or here to see more photos. |
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December 9, 2009, third pre-workshop meeting. We were kindly invited to the annual party of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR). We thank Aldo Civico and Peter T. Coleman for making our annual Workshop on Humiliation and Violent Conflict possible. Please click on the pictures above or here to see more photos. |
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December 12, 2009, first post-workshop meeting with Linda M. Hartling, Rick Slaven, Judit Revesz, Tony Webb, and Tony Adolf, and later the same day, the second post-workshop meeting with Camilla Hsiung. Please click on the picture above or here to see more photos. |
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December 13, 2009, third post-workshop meeting: Kristabelle Munson presented the Capstone Project for her Master's Thesis on the HumanDHS network to her colleagues of the Master of Science in Negotiations and Conflict Resolution program, Fall 2009. Please click on the picture above or here to see more photos. |
Dear Friends!
We had a wonderful workshop in NY! It was titled:
2009 Workshop on Humiliation and Violent Conflict
(representing the Fourteenth Annual HumanDHS Conference)!
Thanks!
Morton Deutsch received the HumanDHS Life Time Award on Friday, December 11, 2009, on Day Two of the 2009 Workshop of Humiliation and Violent Conflict! Let us celebrate him and his extraordinary life-work, and express our gratitude to him for his invaluable continuous support to our HumanDHS initiative!
Please let us continue by sharing with you our deep gratitude to Linda Hartling. Without her wisdom, love, care, and huge investment of time since 1999, when we met via email, and then, in full intensity, since our first conference in 2003, our network and our conferences would not be there.
Please welcome and celebrate Linda’s leadership! In November 2008, Linda relinquished her administrative responsibilities at Wellesley College to devote more time in service of HumanDHS and she is our new HumanDHS Director! (Evelin remains the HumanDHS Founding President). A big welcome to you, dearest Linda!
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 all of your relevant books to be included in the HumanDHS library!
May Linda and I express our sincere gratitude and appreciation furthermore to all of you who co-created our 2009 Workshop on Humiliation and Violent Conflict representing the Fourteenth Annual HumanDHS Conference! You ALL made our workshop a unique and extremely exiting experience! Many said afterwards that it was, as all our workshops and conferences, extremely intense, stimulating, and nurturing, however, that this workshop was of particularly high quality in all these aspects!
Our workshops are closed conferences, only upon invitation. We could have had many more participants and unfortunately had to say "no" to many of you who wrote to us and wished to participate. We would like to express our regret to all of you who did not have the opportunity to participate. We will try to broaden our activities (and resources!) in the future! Please bear with us and give us your support so that we can grow in constructive ways!
Now we would like to thank Morton Deutsch, our honorary convener, together with our generous hosts, Aldo Civico, Ph.D., and Andrea Bartoli, Ph.D., current and former Directors of the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR), and member of the Columbia University Conflict Resolution Network (CU-CRN), now AC4, as well as Morton Deutsch and Peter T. Coleman, Founder and Director of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) at Columbia University and their wonderful team. Particularly loving thanks go to Juliette de Wolfe, whose wonderful support with reserving the rooms went beyond all expectations! We also wish to give special thanks to Beth Fisher-Yoshida, Academic Director of the Master of Science Program in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the School of Continuing Education at Columbia University. Furthermore, we wish to thank Judit Révész. We were able to build on the work she did for our first workshop in 2004, and without her continous support throughout all the years since 2001, our work would not be possible. She untiringly guards our Contact page!
Please let us furthermore express special thanks to Rick Slaven, Tonya Hammer, Michael Britton, Camilla Hsiung, Hua-Chu Yen, Sarwar Alam, Adenrele Awotona, and Tzofnat Peleg, who so wonderfully helped to keep our workshop in shape, with caring for our food, and with video-taping the entire conference. Our special thanks, as always, to Linda M. Hartling for setting the frame of appreciative inquiry in and Donald Klein's spirit. Our warm thanks furthermore to our moderators Michael Britton & Grace Feuerverger, Beth Fisher-Yoshida & Miriam Marton, and Emanuela Del Re & Sondras Perl!
And, of course, our warmest gratitude to Alan B. Slifka for his financial help for our workshop! We were able to have catering and participants who otherwise would not have been able to attend, received support!
May we end by thanking our presenters for their inspiration at our Public Event on the afternoon of Thursday, December 10.
Finally, Michael Britton moved us all deeply on Friday morning in his Don Klein Memorial Lecture for Don's originally planned lecture 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!
A very very warm thank-you to all!
Evelin & Linda, on behalf of our entire network.
Announcements
Announcement of our Latest News!
What Is the Aim of Our Work?
Please read more in newsletter12.
Moving Our Work onto Cyberspace
(See also newsletter 9 and newsletter 10 and newsletter 12)
Linda M. Hartling explained (December 18, 2009):
Over the last year we have explored more than 100 potential cyber solutions for HumanDHS! From the very beginning of this effort we were guided by the goal of mobilizing technology to facilitate mutual appreciation, warm connection, and creative collaboration. Keeping the relational values of our network in the forefront of our thinking, we pursued a vision of a hi-tech, hi-touch, “lean, green, but not mean” e-frastructure to maximize our collective efforts!
After attending a cutting-edge workshop on social media in British Columbia, we began to realize that there is no single cyber solution that would address all of the needs of our diverse and growing network! Rather, it is would be more efficient and cost effective to develop a variety of social media and cyber services to match the diverse needs of our network. Using “social media for social good” can help us grow a virtual community that is supported by a resilient and sustainable e-frastructure. Inspired by this new approach to using technology, we began implementing a plan that maximizes our existing webhost services and incorporates a wide variety of social media and cyber services, including Thunderbird, Constant Contact, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, and more! We will continue to look at additional cyber solutions combined with the creative use of social media as members of the network provide us with feedback!
Thinking of New Economic Frames
During the past year, Linda, Rick, Michael, and I are trying to familiarize ourselves with economic theory and practice, since we observe that the priority given to profit maximization has a profoundly destructive influence that permeates all walks of life and thus has a humiliating effect on the humanity of the human family. We see three goals, long-term, medium-term and short-term:
1. Our long-term goal is to contribute to developing visions for future economic systems, institutions, rules and regulations, globally and locally, that will enable humankind to give dignity to our life on Earth and make life on Earth worth living for all, not just for a few. See also our World University and Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Global Education Fund and a manuscript in progress, titled Dignity or Humiliation in Economic and Monetary Systems: Can We “Occupy Wall Street” and Transcend the Old Cs (Communism and Capitalism) through Economic Systems of True Inclusion? What about Inclusionism? Or Dignism?
2. Our medium-term goal is to develop hybrid approaches that bridge the past with the future already now. See, for example, our World Clothes for Equal Dignity project.
3. Our short-term goal is to refrain from being co-opted into the profit motive. We reject "mission creep" (thank you, dear Reinaldo!) and the cynical tweaking of our values to obtain funding. We do not wish to doubling humiliation by entering into a demeaning competition with other not-for-profit organization to do "good" with the funds from those who may have gained these resources by doing "bad."
Messages from YOU
(with the authors' permission, listed chronologically)
Dear participant in our workshop! You contributed to bringing dignity and love into our workshop! Your contributions spoke to the need to start with ourselves if we are serious about bringing more dignity into a world riddled by crises, from economic crisis to climate crisis.
Debate:
You gave dignity to how we related to each other, and in this way you brought out the best of what is called debate, namely clarity of argument. You left behind the dynamics of humiliation that all too often undermine this clarity when the integrity and dignity of the relationships between the participants is not attended to first. In this way you contributed to creating the seed for new ways of conducting gatherings, and ultimately also the seed for new ways of shaping cultural scripts for a future global community that cherishes cooperation rather than competition (to say it with Morton Deutsch). Peter Coleman and Morton Deutsch address this in "Some Guidelines for Developing a Creative Approach to Conflict" (2000), p. 363. We did this together in a shared spirit of humility and mutual support, since we all are learners.
Professional versus private life:
At the current point in time, it is established practice to divide professional and private life. It is supposedly professional not to mix both. In professional life one is required to behave "professionally," which means putting aside ethical qualms if asked for, qualms that are relegated to private life. As a result, we may do the very "bad" in our professional lives that we then may try to undo by doing "good" in our private lives. This dichotomy of professional versus private life, this training to fill roles that may even require unethical behavior, is underpinned by a certain formality of style: role bearers address other role bearers. In our conferences, we attempt to overcome this hideous division that entails the risk that we may humiliate our very humanity as a result.
Culture of cooperation and connectivity:
As we try to encourage us all to relate to each other in more mutually supportive ways, it would be good to mainstream this new culture of connection and make it part of "normal life." Skeptics tell us that it is impossible to bring together people in connective and dignified ways in "normal life;" that this is only possible in "not-normal" contexts, such as in a religious or spiritual contexts.
We would be so glad if you could help us find words for the experience of our gatherings! We need YOUR help to put words to this effort!
• Leland R. Beaumont kindly wrote (December 17, 2009):
Evelin,
Thanks you so much for organizing this and inviting me to attend again. I enjoyed it, learned lots, and met many thoughtful people. I found myself wide awake at 4am Friday morning compelled to write notes that became this blog/article: “A path toward peace-An invitation”.
Thanks,
Lee & Eileen Beaumont
PS: See a “word cloud” from the text of that blog• Hagitte Gal-Ed kindly sent us her reflections (December 21, 2009):
Dearest Evelin and Linda,
It is now a week after our workshop, and I wish to respond to your request by reflecting upon what made this meeting an extraordinary experience for me.
To start with, the unusual path you are carving as women and leaders, makes your 'workshop' project an interactive work of art on a scale beyond conventional measures. In addition, the collaboration between the two of you seemed at times like two hands of one artist. Together, you have created a most welcoming and respectful environment for every participant, allowing every one of us to see each other and be seen as a specific and authentic person with specific and authentic contribution to make. This allowed a genuine dialogue to take place, in which differences were articulated, listened to, and responded to with deep respect, and growing understanding of the human condition we share. It is this measure of mutual vulnerability and yet growth that provided for the sacred space of 'Between', as Buber called it, to emerge, where the possibility to recognize peace as a process of mutual change is conceivable.
What you have created with the Human Dignity and Humiliation Study project is indeed a human 'workshop' in its deepest sense. Your dialogic success in establishing a safe framework for open elaboration of the experience of change in real time, is what makes your project of such critical importance.
Thank you for the privilege to be a part of this experience.
You are a source of inspiration!
Hagitte Gal-Ed, Ph.D.• David Yamada kindly wrote this blog about our workshop.
• Linda M. Hartling kindly sent us a few of the highlights from our workshop that she has shared with colleagues and friends (January 5, 2010):
We convened our 14th Annual HumanDHS Workshop on Humiliation and Violent Conflict at Columbia University on December 10-11. It was kindly co-sponsored by the Center for International Conflict Resolution and the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, as part of Columbia University Conflict Resolution Network. This is the sixth year of working with Columbia and we plan to be back there next year!
1. It was a special treat to have David Yamada at the workshop this year! David is a Professor of Law and Founding Director of the New Workplace Institute at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. During his round table presentation David mentioned how he incorporated Linda Hartling's Working Paper, "Relational Practice in a Nonrelational World," into his efforts to end workplace bullying and create more dignifying work environments. Specifically, he drafted the Healthy Workplace Bill that was adopted in Massachusetts. It serves as a model for anti-bullying legislation being introduced in over a dozen state legislatures!
2. At this conference we had an evening event open to the public. Linda Hartling facilitated a conversation with Evelin Lindner, Founding President of HumanDHS, and our special guest Queen Mother Dr. Delois Blakely, the Honorary Community Mayor of Harlem. Queen Mother Delois Blakely champions the aspirations of women, children and youth, dedicating her life to community service and social change.
3. A most joyful moment during the conference was presenting Morton Deutsch with a Lifetime Achievement Award! Mort is one of the world's most respected scholars of Conflict Resolution and is considered to be the father of the field of modern conflict resolution. Over a span of 50 years, he conducted groundbreaking studies on cooperation and competition, intergroup relations, conflict resolution, social conformity, and the social psychology of justice. His work on “constructive conflict” is consistent with Jean Baker Miller's ideas about “waging good conflict”!
Welcome Again!
We would like to end this newsletter by thanking you again for all the wonderful mutual support. You contributed sogenerously, therefore let us give our warmest thanks to ALL OF US! We very much look forward to our upcoming two conferences in 2010!
Please be warmly invited to our next HumanDHS conference in Istanbul in April 2010!
In the meantime, we are looking forward to a book project with Dan Christie, editor of the Peace Psychology Book Series at Springer. He invites our network to create an edited book in his series on the role of dignity and humiliation. Be part!
Linda & Evelin, December 2009
2003 – present, Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies
