Careers in Conflict Transformation and professional peaceworking: Envisioning

What?

Years ago I was fortunate enough to travel with two workmates to a Quaker retreat center, Stonybrook, in rural New York, to take part in a week-long seminar in Envisioning a World Without Weapons. It was transformative. 

It was led by a protege of Elise Boulding, Warren Zeigler, and it was a process that 20 of us were guided through, a step-by-step project that was theory and simulation. Not so incidentally, the participants were 18 women and just two of us men. I bunked with the only other guy, who was almost exactly 50 years older than I. It was a week of opening to a new way to think about creating a future, individually and personally. 

Had I not been in that workshop, I am convinced that I would never have written books, earned advanced degrees, or become a professor. Everything that flowed out of that seminar for me synthesized my ideals, my groundtruthed experience, and turned my fantasies into dreams, then into visions.

And so, when I advise students, the first thing I ask them is, "In your hopes, if they were reality, describe yourself in 10 years. What do you do for a living? What are you achieving?"

There is often hesitation, which I completely get. The envisioning workshop featured much of that amongst the 20 participants; we had some skills, we had ideals, but we somehow had internalized a paralyzing trait from our culture of modesty and humility--we consciously or unconsciously seemed to believe that daring to even formulate a vision was an act of hubris. 

When students get to think this over and some form of fantasy emerges, it is often blocky, unclear, and seemingly unrealistic, but it gives me something to work with, to help them choose classes that can serve their formulating educational and career goals. They actually do the work; I simply try to facilitate. I'm sure some would say I am not so effective and some might say it helped, but the seeds of envisioning frequently lead to their personal focus and progress. That focus might lead them to want to learn very specific competencies that can open doors to the path toward their vision. 

Example: A student realizes that working for a nonprofit with the goal of transforming a town into a far greener, more sustainable place to live means they should learn how nonprofits work, how to message to various target audiences, how to help formulate public policy that can work upon implementation, how to encourage pilot civil society initiatives that can model the necessary steps on a small, doable scale, how to raise funds to make it happen, and more. They may find courses across campus in other departments that offer some of the competencies they need, and they come to me to see if those courses can be used toward their degree. I look over the course description, ask them to obtain a syllabus from a previous section, and if it is clear that the course will help round out the skills they need to gain employment in conflict transformation-related work, I arrange for the course to count as an elective. 

So the "what" students learn as they earn their degree in conflict transformation and peace studies can vary as widely as the arc of careers that relate to the degree, and that are is wide indeed.