If you feel the impact of division right now, you’re not alone. Massive wealth gaps, ideological polarization and other fault lines run across communities of all sizes, from nation-states to schools. At the George Washington University last week, faculty members from the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences convened with colleagues from Queen’s University (QU) Belfast for “Divided Communities,” two panel conversations on how academic work and practice can bridge these rifts and what may be gained when they do.
“This seminar is an opportunity for us to convene multiple times this year to talk about difficult topics [around] social and political divisions and how we deal with those in our teaching, research and scholarship,” said Corcoran School of the Arts and Design Music Department Chair Loren Kajikawa, who co-organized the “Divided Communities” series alongside Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies Rachel Riedner.
The idea for this seminar series arose out of GW’s Global Bachelor’s Program (GBP), Kajikawa said. While visiting QU Belfast to learn more about the opportunities available to GBP students, Riedner and Kajikawa became curious about how their colleagues address the dense history of the city in which they think, research and teach. Like Washington, D.C., Belfast is a site of ideological, political and material division. Both cities have a living memory of political and ethnic violence: Washington witnessed the Jan. 6 insurrection in 2021 and the Mt. Pleasant riots in 1991, while Belfast was an emblematic site of “the Troubles,” decades of sectarian clashes that ravaged Northern Ireland in the second half of the 20th century and left thousands dead.
Most panelists addressed that geographic history indirectly, keeping the focus on how their scholarship deals with unresolved conflict and how they deal with identities—their own, their students’, their colleagues’ and others—that are themselves divided. A professor may occupy space as a researcher interested in expanding a particular area of knowledge, a teacher committed to elucidating it, a writer or public intellectual whose goal is to entertain and inform, an activist who wants to make change, and so on.
In the afternoon, CCAS Director of Creative Writing and Assistant Professor of English Lisa Page discussed the radical possibilities and limitations of the writer’s workshop—Can absorbing another person’s story, taking it seriously, result in mutual breakthrough and material change?—while Associate Professor of Writing Jessica McCaughey focused on the multiple identities inherent in research. Her current research is in collaboration with a former student who is now an entrepreneur, bringing healthcare access to his rural home community in Guinea. As such, he has to occupy many roles simultaneously: as a healthcare provider, an efficient businessman, a boss, a neighbor and community member and a collaborator with international funding organizations. Navigating these multiple identities can be problematic but can also create opportunities for new ways of thinking, McCaughey said.
One way to spark new connections is to help people think about their situations in unconventional ways—kinetically, for instance, rather than intellectually, said speaker Ali FitzGibbon, a senior lecturer in the School of Arts, English and Languages at QU Belfast. A specialist in cultural labor and the role of the artist, FitzGibbon’s work has included convening artists with nonprofit staffers and government funders to explore how money and art intersect and how those intersections impact the culture and may impede artists’ ability to produce meaningful work.
One of FitzGibbon’s’ relatively simple exercises involves sticky notes on which participants write down people or groups of people involved with their chosen art. A workshop of theatre professionals, for instance, might have notecards for established producers, mid-career directors, emerging playwrights, aspiring actors and every variation thereof. Then participants place their stickers at the center or edge of a posterboard to indicate how “important” that person or group is to the artistic landscape. (In the theatre professional workshop, institutional power, money and seniority tended to form the central ring: One playwright wrote her own name on a post-it, stood up, walked out of the room and stuck it on the door to indicate her distance from that powerful epicenter.) As they visualize these power structures and validate their own experiences, participants begin to see new webs of connection and, together, map new ways to access the resources currently allotted mostly to the central group.
“What they're doing begins to liberate their minds, and they start having these interesting dialogues, and I felt myself able to observe this and help them out but not really get directly involved,” FitzGibbon said.
More than anything, in divided places and times, panelists agreed that the “easy answers” are rarely the best. The human impulse for narrative resolution sets us up to take sides; if we want to create new, collaborative paths forward, we have to learn to sit with uncertainty and discomfort, and not to flinch when new contradictions arise. Research, writing and teaching aren’t just about asking good questions, panelists said—they’re also about devising new and better questions to ask.
