Background

In October 2023, a small group of faculty and staff from many backgrounds and areas of expertise, came together to seek common ground for holding educational events on the Israel-Palestine conflict.  We developed a set of shared principles that have successfully guided our educational events since then, events that have contributed to community and civility on our campus. These principles center around our commitment to teach the multiplicity and complexity of historical narratives and contemporary claims, eschewing overtly “one-sided” programming and the denial of “either side’s” right to exist.

Many of our events draw on expressive arts and other humanistic tools to help students and other community members find understanding, empathy, and common humanity in a context of intense suffering and pain. Our most successful events have done this by reaching out not just to ears and head, but also to the heart and other senses. It’s no accident our first event was Theater for Empathy in understanding the conflict.

We firmly believe that the messier and more painful the conflict in the world, the greater the need for educational events that combine learning about empirical complexity with activation of empathy by way of the expressive. We experiment with distinct combinations of the factual and the expressive in each event, always aiming to increase understanding, curiosity, empathy, and civility among our students and in our community.

We dedicate ourselves to this work in order to contribute to a flourishing community and complement what our many concerned colleagues on campus do in the classroom, trainings, workshops, and other more formal presentations of information.