Welcome to A Different Future
Hi, friends.
On the pages that follow, I hope to chronicle my journeys over the next year, as I travel the world on sabbatical (and, OK, some vacation, too) visiting centers, interviewing experts, and dreaming about how to build a new, innovative, and creative center dedicated to civic dialogue, conflict transformation, mediation, and peacebuilding.
We as a nation stand at an impasse in our ability to talk to one another. Discord has silenced dialogue, debates derail into division. Our inability to have real dialogue across political, scientific, cultural, and personal divides has fractured our political and communal conversations. At the same time it has impoverished education, even at the highest levels. A critical need has arisen to teach our students, and our communities, how to engage constructively with those holding differing ideologies and viewpoints, to have meaningful conversation across our divides. Emory University is poised to take a bold step with the establishment of a new center of conflict transformation, mediation, civic dialogue, and peacebuilding; but more profoundly, the initiative is a commitment to reimagine our educational priorities, strengthen community ties, and enrich democratic engagement at a pivotal moment in our nation’s history.
The chronicle you are reading records my odyssey to research, design, and build this new center. It is also an invitation to join me on this journey with your reactions and ideas. Starting with a sabbatical year of traveling the globe, visiting centers in places like The Hague, Geneva, Oslo, Helsinki, Belfast, Johannesburg, and other cities renowned for their relationship to some of the world’s greatest historical efforts in peacemaking, I will be seeking out new models, innovative curricula, and novel approaches to conflict, which will be built into the bones of the new center. Please come along - I need your creative minds, and I promise to listen carefully to anything you have to contribute.
Let’s create something new, together!
