The post Episode 21: Michelle LeBaron Riffcast appeared first on On Conflict.

• Why she believes that artists will be the ones to save the world
• How conflict lives in the body
• Increasing our proprioception (our awareness of our bodies in space)
• How to calm the constant commentary that goes on in all of our heads
• The need for more dialogue and engagement around deep worldview differences with creativity
• “Aestheticizing negotiation” through the four philosophical elements
• The symbolic domain

More about Our Guest

Michelle LeBaron is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar on conflict transformation, arts, and resilience. She directed the UBC Program on Dispute Resolution from 2003-2012, and as an Associate Professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution and the Women’s Studies program at George Mason University from 1993-2003, she did seminal work on intercultural conflict engagement. This work built on community-based research she conducted as director of the Multiculturalism and Dispute Resolution Project at the University of Victoria in the early 1990s. Michelle was called to the Bar of British Columbia in 1982 and practised for ten years. She gives keynotes and consultations around the world on intercultural conflict resolution, the role of arts in fostering resilient leadership, and creative ways of engaging religious and political conflicts.

GUEST Resources

• Academic website
• Books:
  • Her newest book – AVAILABLE FOR FREE! – is Changing Our Worlds: Art as Transformative Practice → “This book is published by Sun MeDIA in Stellenbosch, South Africa. We felt it important to publish it in the global south as a way of decentering the tendency for scholarly publications to come from the global north. The book can be downloaded for free from one of two platforms, and the steps to the App required for free download are attached here.”
  • The Choreography of Resolution: Conflict, Movement and Neuroscience
• A copy of her chapter The Alchemy of Change: Cultural Fluency in Conflict Resolution from the Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, 3rd Ed. (2014), Peter Coleman, Morton Deutsch and Eric Marcus, eds.
• Copies of her two co-authored contributions to the Negotiator’s Desk Reference (2017, Honeyman and Schneider, eds.):
  • Aesthetics in Negotiation: Part One—Four Elements , and
  • Aesthetics in Negotiation: Part Two—The Uses of Alchemy Aesthetics in Negotiation: Part Two—The Uses of Alchemy

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

• Margie Gillis
• Carlo Aldrovandi
• Dancing at the Crossroads (a radio broadcast about it)
• Jean Houston and Margaret Mead
• Rena Sharon
• Kim Berman
• Picasso quote: “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
• Herb Kelman
• Jim Lowery
• Nadja Alexander
• Freedom Writers (movie)
• Follow your bliss – Joseph Cambell
• Mary Clark
• Ian Goldin
• David, by Michelangelo
• Robert Fritz’ The Path of Least Resistance
• Quote by Albie Sachs about how art and human rights overlap and reinforce each other
• Dan Bruiger’s The Found and the Made (book)
• Quote by Seamus Heaney: “So hope for a great sea-change / On the far side of revenge. / Believe that further shore / Is reachable from here. / Believe in miracle / And cures and healing wells.
• Burning Man

Quotes From The Episode

• [2:26] “I’ve read quite a number of things where conflict engagers are saying, ‘Oh gosh, we can’t touch that, it’s too complicated, it’s too charged, it’s too difficult, it’s too complex, it’s too political,’ and in fact, the vast majority of people in the world profess a religious faith, so I think it’s really important for those of us in the field, whatever our own convictions might be, to think about how we engage people from a variety of different worldviews and cosmologies, even those vastly different from our own.”
• [3:23] “I and others, as you know, are very suspicious about the concept of neutrality, and I think that the idea that we’re a secular field is actually quite repressive to those people who may not see themselves as having a secular worldview, so I think that calls our neutrality into question in a different way.”
• [5:02] “In fact, we in our world have created such a mess that we need really concerted efforts of people from many different standpoints and many different places to try to address the many issues that surround us, whether they’re political or about climate change, and so forth. And I became convinced that if anyone could save us, it would be the artists.”
• [5:52] “I think the central challenge for us as conflict engagers is that we’re way too much in our heads, and we need to get into our bodies and we need to help parties get into their bodies, and of course artists know how to do that.”
• [6:30] “When worldviews or religious differences are part of a conflict, it turns out we don’t have very good tools to actually acknowledge and work with those very different worldviews, which cannot be negotiated. You can’t imagine that you can negotiate away some aspect of someone’s deep conviction about their relation with the divine.”
• [7:25] “We have a lot of conflicts which are intractable, which are quite chronic, if you will, if we look internationally, but not only. If we look here in Canada or here in British Columbia, we see a lot of intractability in relation to conflicts between Indigenous people and others in Canada, and we seem to move at snails’ paces – I wouldn’t say glacial paces, because glacial changes quite rapidly these days, and we’re not even doing that! We’re moving in a very slow and often regressive way to address issues, for example between Indigenous and other people in Canada, and part of it, I’m quite convinced, has to do with a lack of really acknowledging, understanding, and then acting from an awareness of deep cosmological and worldview differences.”
• [10:25] Julia asks Michelle to elaborate on how Michelle sees differences between ‘bridging’ and ‘engagement.’
• [11:26] Gord asks Michelle to elaborate on what happens to the head after we get out of our head. In her response, Michelle laughs and says “I wasn’t suggesting that we should chop ours off, but rather that I think the conflict field has been far too cognitively centred,” and “If we actually are whole bodies and our entire self is our resource, then how can we engage our whole selves?” Michelle then speaks about what she’s read about intuition and how people describe it in a physical way, yet we’re often not training ourselves and each other to attune to our bodies. Later, Michelle discusses proprioception – the awareness of our bodies in space
• [13:26] “Conflict lives in the body. I find it very curious sometimes working with people who work in our field who are actually unaware of how much conflict, or how much very latent emotion, they carry, whether in relation to their own unresolved issues or in relation to things they’re picking up from the parties and not setting down.”
• [15:05] “If you’re triggered by something, and that means your emotions suddenly get activated, the way to diffuse triggering is through the body. It isn’t by thinking, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t need to be worried about this.’ That actually doesn’t shift it. We need to use breathing, we need to use body-centred awareness approaches whether mindfulness or other things to actually bring ourselves back from a kind of neural hijacking, if you will. […] It also can really help calm, when we can move out of that constant commentary that goes on in all of our heads.”
• [17:00] Julia asks Michelle to elaborate on what she meant about creativity when she talked about the need for more dialogue and engagement around deep worldview differences with creativity.
• [19:10] Michelle talks about the complexity of communication among chamber musicians in the moment and compares it to conflict. She says, “That’s been very inspiring to me, because it has led me to wonder, “What is it that’s going on in a conflict engagement process that is outside the verbal?” Julia shares how meaningful music is to her and shares that she took up the bass. Julia points out, “It’s the perfect instrument for conflict engagement because rhythm and bass and heartbeat are so central.”
• [21:35] Michelle discusses a colleague of hers in South Africa, Kim Berman, who is a professor of visual art at the University of Johannesburg. “Kim is anything but a conflict engagement specialist, and yet she knows more about how to address conflict because of her aesthetic education than many others know.” Michelle then shares a story from 2005 about Kim addressing conflict around HIV/AIDS in South Africa, when South Africans were dying at a rate of about 900 a day from HIV/AIDS.
• [25:07] Gord brings up a quote by Picasso that Michelle included in one of her writings and asks her to elaborate on what that quotes means to her. (The quote is “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”)
• [28:17] Julia asks Michelle to elaborate on how Michelle suggests we can, starting tomorrow, deepen our creativity and learn from artists. In her response, Michelle says, “I think, yes, we befriend artists, but we also befriend the artist in ourselves. We also say, ‘When have I had moments when I’ve felt very creative, and how can I bring that into my leadership? How can I bring that into my management of other people? How can I bring that awareness of the importance of that quickening that creativity brings into whatever context I’m working in?’”
• [32:09] Gord asks Michelle to tell the story about a three-day conflict engagement workshop in Dublin with Israeli and Palestinian diplomats. Michelle shares how this conference – which was “the worst thing you’ve ever been at” – went from a very diplomatic and surface-y stalemate to authentic, nuanced interactions and meaningful conversations between participants thanks to a spontaneous bus trip to Belfast on the third day. Michelle says this experience helped them learn “to simply focus not just on doing and on problem-solving, but on being, and that when you’re able to do that, then something new can finally arise.”
• [35:43] Gord asks Michelle to elaborate on the phrase “aestheticizing negotiation” through the four elements (earth, water, air, fire). Julia expands on the use of aesthetics to stimulate dialogue and mentions the thought of a weaving of the aesthetic into whatever we do. Michelle responds by saying “I think both of you know, and certainly I would know, that if I want to address an issue with some people, perhaps at my workplace, then what’s really important is being in a beautiful room.”
• [43:39] “The most powerful motivator I have found over the last several years of wanting to integrate more and more of the aesthetic and ideas about the four elements into my work with groups and communities – the most powerful motivator I have found is neuroscience, because in fact, people trust science, and now we know, from neuroscientists, that in fact, these activities, for example, engaging in some sort of physical activity with each other before sitting down and talking, whether it’s simply going for a walk or something more programmed, more patterned – that actually changes the state that we’re in when we sit down and talk about whatever our issue is. And so that, for me, has been the thing that has worked with groups of people in suits who otherwise come into the room with lots and lots of apprehension, making lots and lots of jokes about whether they need to bring their tutus with them, wondering at the terrible prospect that they might be asked to remove their shoes in order to engage in movement with each other. […] The ‘B’ word – body – had not been part of their education or experience for a long time. I found that through framing what we were doing in terms of what neuroscientists have learned and have shared with the world about why engaging our whole selves is important and how engaging our whole selves can be important, that created more permission.”
• [46:32] In response to the hosts’ question of what conflict looks like in a peaceful world:
  • “Conflict in a peaceful world is present because there’s always difference and difference is essential, and so it’s present, omnipresent even, and engaged in respectful and constructive and open ways.”
  • “I believe we have all the wisdom we need in the world to be able to have that peaceful society where conflict is amongst us and yet we manage it. I think we have what we need and we don’t always implement it, partly because our political systems are exploited by people who actually want to escalate conflict.”
  • Gord points out the similarity of her answer to our other guests’ responses, highlighting the universality of conflict being an unavoidable part of society.
• [48:23] Gord ponders existentially with Michelle about what she’s wrote about origin stories, change, and conflict. All three of them discuss how conflict is seen by some as an immense danger and scary thing, and by others as an immense opportunity and positive experience. Michelle says, “I’ve learned, sometimes through hard experiences, pretending it’s not there doesn’t work. And therefore, we have to find some way to engage. Indirect, as it may be, because I’ve also learned through hard experience that simply naming things and imagining that we, where we is, can have a direct exchange about the issues, isn’t often how things are addressed. Isn’t often how problems are solved.” Gord shares a story he heard from a Maori man who spoke of how in his culture, they dealt with conflict by sitting in a circle and talk about anything but the conflict, and then they would get up and through that changed connection, they would behave differently and conflicts would get worked out in that manner.
• [53:58] “I think that what we need to be able to do when addressing conflict is not focus so much on the material, on whatever issues we identify, or even on the relationship. We have this tendency to say ‘Let’s work on our relationship,’ which is also very earnest and a bit harsh, and instead we need to drop to what I talk about as the symbolic domain, where in fact, we’re engaged in rituals, we’re sharing experiences, we’re basking in something aesthetic. And that changes everything.”
• [54:45] Julia brings up high-and low-context cultures and asks Michelle if there’s more of a tendency to be indirect and aesthetic in a collectivist culture, or if the aesthetic is missing from both orientations of cultures. Michelle clarifies and says that the aesthetic is often more involved in everyday life in traditional cultures.
• [57:28] Julia asks what listeners can start doing tomorrow, and Michelle says “As soon as you have on your map of what’s important the aesthetic, then you notice it more. […] Then you think about, ‘Maybe we won’t have styrofoam cups. Maybe I will bring my teacups from home. And then you think about, ‘Well let’s not just take a break in this windowless room, let’s go for a walk.’ And then you think about, ‘Oh wow, I’ve talked with people in this organization who are all very upset with each other, and yet they aren’t comfortable telling each other about that. How can I help them create an experience where the skeleton of those interactions becomes more clear, becomes more obvious.’” Michelle also shared a story about a workplace conflict, and how once the group was asked to work silently and was given various physical objects to communicate with, they were able to communicate and connect with each other on levels they hadn’t been able to with words
• [1:01:52] Michelle talks about Ian Goldin’s book in which he compares our current times to the Renaissance. He said that in the Renaissance, “all sorts of pieces got thrown up in the air and certain things changed. Paradigms changed. Ways of looking at who we are as humans changed. And he gives the example of Michelangelo’s David. […] That David marked a complete departure from other depictions of David and Goliath before, because that David is focused and poised for action with uncertain results, and previous depictions of David had been triumphant and victorious. And so the Renaissance, Goldin says, was a time when people realized, ‘Oh wow. Life is more uncertain than we thought. There’s more complexity than we knew. And the results of any action I might engage in are uncertain.’ And he says that we moved then from a triumphant gaze to one which is more human-centred and nuanced. And if this time, as Goldin says, is like the Renaissance, again when many things are being thrown up in the air and the things we thought were givens are not necessarily givens, then we have the question, ‘How do we navigate through this time of complexity and mystery?’ Because there’s much we don’t know. I think our best answer to that comes from the arts.”

The post Episode 20: Michelle LeBaron – The Art of Conflict appeared first on On Conflict.