This session is open to all, but there is a limit on the number of participants. Please add yourself to the waitlist if the capacity is full, and please cancel your registration if you know you will not be able to attend so we can offer the spot to someone else. Thank you!

Talking Our Way To Justice: Civic Dialogue for Building the Future

We have likely all had experiences where the reason we left a movement or organization was not because of the mission, but because of how difficult it felt to work with the other people in the movement. The central problem with the ethic of “less talk, more action” is that human action goes through human communities. Therefore, there is no non-authoritarian pathway toward justice that does not at some point include bringing people together to talk about hard problems and develop collective solutions.

However, these conversations can be extraordinarily challenging, and continued failures in these conversations leads to organizational failure, individual disinvestment, and burnout. It can be easy to conclude that the problem is simply that people are bad, inefficient, and self-absorbed, but it is much more helpful to consider that communication about things that are important to us is more difficult than we might like to imagine.

In this session, we will re-center talk as a critical component of justice work, validate the skills and dispositions people need to develop (that most of us have not) in order to have dialogue about justice, and work through processes that been used across communities to help people come together to develop civic solutions that advance justice.

Meet the Instructor:

Ricky Blissett is the Associate Director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Life at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Both within and outside of their role at UMBC, their research primarily focuses on attitudes and ideologies in the politics of educational equity and justice, as well as the spaces in which public ideologies translate into policy action. Their expertise includes educational politics and governance, ideological politics of race- and gender-conscious policy, and program evaluation and research methodology. Further, they are a dialogue facilitator with training in conflict mediation and multiple models of dialogue. They are the principal investigator of the Democracy and Equity in Education Politics research group, program co-chair for the Policy and Politics division (L) of the American Educational Research Association, and principal coordinator for the Just Education Policy institute. Ricky holds a Ph.D. in Leadership and Policy Studies (with a minor in Quantitative Methods) from Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (with a minor in Computer Science) from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.