Newsletter Nr. 41 (December 2024, subsequent to our 41st Annual Conference, our 2024 Workshop)
Compiled by Evelin Lindner in December 2024
Contents
• Pictures
• Thanks!
• History of this Workshop Series!
• 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.)
Thank you so much, dear Anna Strout for taking so many lovely pictures! |
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  Linda Hartling and Evelin Lindner are the conveners of the annual workshops at Columbia University, together with honorary convener Morton Deutsch. He 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. • The photo with Morton Deutsch was taken in 2014. Please click on the pictures above to see it them larger. |
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| 11:00 – 11:15 am Welcome and Greetings — Linda Hartling, Director of the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (HumanDHS) network — Evelin Lindner, Founding President of HumanDHS (Video)  Building a Mutual-Learning Community: The Appreciative Enquiry Approach by Linda Hartling 2024 Video (see also the 2023 Video and 2022 Video) |
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This wonderful Dignity Anthem was kindly created by Michael Boyer in November 2022
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11:15 am – 12:00 pm
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| 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm Dignilogues for Leaders, Helpers, and Healers |
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• Ragnhild Nilsen: |
• James "Jimmy" May: |
• Peter Barus: |
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1:45 – 3:15 pm
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Ideas for Dignifying Action Strengthened by Compassion
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3:45 – 4:00 pm |
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Musical ending |
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Dear Friends!
We had a wonderful workshop! It was titled:
"Toward Dignity for All: Courageously Connecting as Leaders, Helpers, and Healers" representing the 21st Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict and the 41st Annual HumanDHS Conference
All our events are part of an ongoing effort to build a global dignity community.
This was a hybrid workshop with 28 participants in person and more than 50 registered online from all continents.
Thanks!
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, our 2020, 2021, and 2022 workshops were virtual gatherings. The 2023 and 2024 workshops were hybrid gatherings. This was the 21st workshop in this series.
First, please join me in expressing the deepest of gratitude to Linda M. Hartling. Linda Hartling nurtured also this workshop into being, as she did with so many previous ones. Without Linda's wisdom, care, and huge gift of time and energy, without her loving nurturing, our network and our conferences would not be there. I met Linda first through email in 1999, it was Don Klein who introduced us. Our collaboration began in full strength when we met in person in Paris, France, in September 2003. She and her husband came to our foundational Dignity Conference that took place at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris (the other foundational conference was convened by Morton Deutsch in New York City in July 2003, see more further down).
Please join me in celebrating Linda’s leadership since 2003! In November 2008, Linda relinquished her administrative responsibilities at Wellesley College to devote more time in service of our dignity community, as our HumanDHS Director. Rick and Linda moved across the North American Continent and found a physical home for our Pacific Rim Branch of HumanDHS and the first HumanDHS Dialogue Home in Portland, Oregon. A BIG thank-you to you, dearest Linda and Rick!
Everyone is invited to visit! Please send Linda all of your relevant books to be included in the HumanDHS library!
This year, our very special thanks go to Linda for repeating last years' success with creating a virtual platform for our hybrid workshop! As always, she first set the frame of appreciative inquiry in Donald Klein's spirit, and then led us through the entire workshop, keeping all participants connected through her unique way of nurturing a spirit of dignity and weaving a web of connections.
There is no monetary remuneration involved in our dignity work, and this includes 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 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 everyone contributing according to ability.
In this spirit, instead of "shareholders," we have Careholders! This year's Digni-Planners deserve more gratitude than ever, given the challenges of holding a hybrid workshop! Thank you so much, dear Janet Gerson, Elaine Meis, Fatma Tufan, Anna Strout, Bhante Revata Chipamong Chowdhury, and Michael Britton in the room, with Phil Brown and Sharon Steinborn online!Dear All!
Linda and I, we would like to express our sincerest gratitude and appreciation to all of you who co-created The 21st Annual Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict hosted by the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR), Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, representing the 41st Annual HumanDHS Conference in total! Your contributions made our workshop a unique and exiting experience! We are immensely grateful to all of you for so generously gifting your time and energy to our dignity work!
We are deeply grateful to the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR) of Teachers College of Columbia University for their faithful support for our global dignity work since 2001! Late Morton Deutsch convened the first of this workshop series in July 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 would like to thank Peter T. Coleman, and Danielle Coon, Director and Associate Director of the MD-ICCCR until August 2023, together with their wonderful team, particularly Ann Charlott Macek, for their ongoing support. 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 honored Morton Deutsch with our first Lifetime Commitment Award in 2009, with Peter Coleman being the recipient of the 2020 HumanDHS Lifetime Commitment Award. In 2022, Peter presented The Way Out Challenge.
We would like to send words of support to the President of Teachers College, Thomas R. Bailey, who had to face a pandemic, followed by deep polarization due to war and suffering in the Middle East. We send words of support also to Portia Williams and Jennifer Govan, as well as to our friends from media, facilities, and security at Teachers College — this includes wonderful Kofi Asare and Jasmine Ortiz, together with great Stanley Yu, Thulasi Rajasekaran, Alpha, and Zelina, as well as Hua-Chu Yen, and always helpful Kevin Waldron and Yeremy Chavez (send greetings to my dear friend James Kearney!), then wonderful Luis Barbito, to name only a few of all those valued friends at Teachers College who are so kind as to make our annual workshop series possible since 2003!
While Morton Deutsch founded this workshop series in 2003, Andrea Bartoli helped design it. In 2003, he was 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 and honored us with registering for our 2023 workshop and joining us for our 2024 workshop! This meant that we had two people in the room, Janet Gerson and Andrea Bartoli, who also participated in the first workshop of this series in 2003!
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). Since 2015, the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies (SIWPS) at the School of International and Public Affairs offers courses in a specialization in conflict resolution (ICR Concentration). Thank you, dear Alba Taveras, for always supporting our work, since 2003!
This was yet another workshop with what we call Digni-Gardeners. Their role is 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 us rather than tearing 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, and Gabriela Saab's Dignigardener Tips created on December 6, 2016. See, furthermore, our reflections on Appreciative Nurturing and Appreciative Enquiry.
We thank Anna Strout for being our most remarkable nurturer of dignity! She always takes such lovely still photos! And equally many thanks to Chipamong Chowdhury for joining Anna!
Our warmest thanks go furthermore to our contributors! Michael F. Britton moved us all again deeply with his Don Klein Celebration 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! Janet Gerson and Elaine Meis guided us through the entire workshop with their wise and caring digni-leadership!
We had five wonderful Dignilogues, with Ragnhild Nilsen, James May, Peter Barus, Erin Hilgart, and Merle Lefkoff.
Please join us in celebrating again our dear Francisco Gomes de Matos, whom we had the privilege of honoring with the 2023 HumanDHS Lifetime Commitment Award! These were Francisco's words, transcribed by Linda Hartling:
AGRADECIMENTO: A digniappreciation to HDHS
"What a privilege to receive your Award! May I humbly say I am proud to have been committed to Dignity studies firstly through online and then briefly face to face with Evelin Lindner during her lecturing visit to Recife -- UFPE and ABA. For the publication of my Dignity book by Dignity Press in 2013 I am deeply grateful. I have a list of things to be thankful for, but instead, may I close by saying you helped me become a dignilinguist now."
Cofounder of ABA Global Education Recife
Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Universidade Federal de PernambucoSee also the virtual book table of Dignity Press with its imprint World Dignity University Press. 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!
We would like to thank you all for your wonderful mutual support!
History of this Workshop Series
Our conferences are events upon invitation. You are warmly welcome to contact us at to workshops@humiliationstudies.org if you wish to join us next year in this workshop series in December 2022. Please know that we always invite you to spend the entire duration of our conferences together so that real dignity-family-building can emerge!
For the past decades, we have continuously worked to dignify the traditional institution of a "conference." Therefore, our events differ from mainstream conferences where speakers are invited and funded by organizers, and audiences pay a registration or entrance fee to listen to the speakers. Usually, organizers gather speakers who will "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, which we have named Dignilogue. This format is very open, in practice it means that the conference is self-organizing. In our NYC workshop, we tried this approach in the beginning, but, as it turned out, for our NYC participants more structure was needed, which led to the concept of Pre-Planned Dignilogues. Only many years later, in 2012, did we dare again to leave the workshop to self-organize, at least partly. We invited participants to be with us without the ambition to "present" something, rather, to get a feel for the dignity-family-building work that we wish to nurture first and foremost. As a result, the workshop has been more open since 2012. Participants are required to bring themselves as whole persons, including their private and professional identities, always prepared to use the flow of the workshop and contribute in the most nurturing ways possible. As background reading you might enjoy "Are College Lectures Unfair?" by Anne Murphy Paul, The New York Times, September 12, 2015.
As mentioned above, we have created a new role in our workshop series, 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 in our events to nurture mutually dignifying connections with the other participants also after this workshop and to experiment with new forms of "conferencing" wherever they 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.
Dear participant in this year's 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
What Is the Aim of Our Work?
Please read more in newsletter12.
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 conferences in 2025!
Please let us know as early as you can if you would like to join us! Thank you!
Linda & Evelin, December 2024
2003 – present, Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies