Background

In Fall 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 successfully guided our several events in the last year, events we know contributed to community and civility on our campus.

As we’ve done this work, we’ve realized that our particular focus and contribution is on the intersection between public educational events on the one hand and expressive arts, culture, identity, and a humanistic approach on the other.  We try to help students and other community members find understanding, empathy, and common humanity in a context of intense suffering and pain 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 there is an ongoing need on our campus for educational events that leverage the arts, engage our core identities and values, and activate empathy by way of the expressive. We dedicate ourselves to this work and hope it will contribute to a flourishing community and complement what our many concerned colleagues on campus do in the classroom, in trainings, and workshops, and in more formal presentations of information.