Conflict Engagement Session for CTLT Staff – November 13, 2018

Event Date & Time

Event Description

Despite our best efforts to create a positive and supportive academic work environment, members of the UBC community regularly find themselves in conflictual situations. In most cases, conflict emerges naturally out of our community’s diversity and multiplicity of views, cultures and experiences. Often conflict brings into light ways that we fail to understand each other, or systemic and structural barriers to inclusion we have not yet successfully addressed. If we know how to work with these conflicts, they can become the doorway to deeper understanding of what it means to live and work with others in equitable ways. Successful engagement with conflict through a full suite of appropriate methods is critical to ensuring the health of our community and can provide the conditions for transformative learning.

In this short session Aftab Erfan (PhD), UBC’s director of dialogue and conflict engagement presents a framework for understanding and working with conflict at the university. She offers a way of making sense of our experiences when we feel marginalized, how we resist and how we experience the resistance of others – and some ideas for how we may productively engage with conflict as alternatives to dismissing or accelerating it.