Blog Posts

CHRISTY-VINES-FLYER-FOR-PRINTING

Mark your calendars for the next installment of the DCI’s Deliberative Citizenship Speaker Series! We are proud to present our fall 2023 speaker, Christy Vines. Vines will visit Davidson on September 28^th and 29^th, during which time she will give a public lecture, host a workshop, and lead a training session following a film screening. She will focus her time here on exploring with the Davidson community how to cultivate empathic intelligence and how to heal the rifts that exist in our society and our communities due to our political, social, religious, and racial differences.

We are excited to have Christy Vines join us on campus this fall because it is part of the DCI’s mission to build a community in which we all feel a sense of belonging and make commitments to one another to improve and sustain our social and civic relations. She can help us build such a community that values listening and engagement even as we disagree deeply on difficult issues, so we hope that you will join us for at least one of our events with her.

Christy Vines’ visit to Davidson is co-sponsored by the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, Office of the Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, Dean Rusk International Studies Program, Chaplain’s Office, and Public Lectures Committee. It is part of our ongoing speaker series designed to bring scholars and practitioners to campus who can provide useful insights on how best to enable productive public discourse in pluralistic, democratic communities. Previous speakers include Eric Liu (Citizens University), Leila Brammer (University of Chicago), Debra Hawhee (Penn State), Martin Carcasson (Colorado State), and Sara Drury (Wabash College/Unite America).

About Our Speaker

Christy Vines is the President and CEO of Ideos Institute, a research and practice institute dedicated to advancing empathy in leadership, culture, and spiritual formation. She is best known for her unique perspective on faith, society, and culture, and her ability to help people bridge differences and connect more authentically.

After working in the fields of peacemaking, conflict transformation, and women’s leadership across a variety of global and religious contexts, in 2015 Vines focused her attention on advancing the burgeoning field of empathic intelligence in order to better understand the disconnections, biases, and misperceptions that often underlie conflict in the first place. She now leads the Ideos Institute’s research and its application to efforts to transform intractable conflicts, build social cohesion and community resiliency, and encourage servant leadership. 

Vines is a published writer, speaker, and the executive producer of the 2022 documentary film, Dialogue Lab: America, a moving take on the current state of division and polarization in the U.S. She has been interviewed in a number of published articles, interviewed on numerous podcasts, and has published her own articles and op-eds in publications like The Washington Post, Christianity Today, and Capital Commentary. Vines received her Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School and lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband, Anthony.

Public Lecture: FAITH, RACE & POLITICS: Can empathy help bridge our divides in a polarized world?

Vines has dedicated herself to advancing empathy in leadership, culture, and spiritual life. In this forum discussion, she will discuss her work on understanding why, as humans living in a dense and diverse society, we remain divided over long-standing issues like religion, race, and politics. She will unpack how empathy can help us not only understand one another better, but also heal our human propensity towards division, dehumanization, and hate.

Workshop: EMPATHIC INTELLIGENCE: What it is and how to cultivate it in the classroom and beyond

In this workshop, Vines will share insights from the Ideos Institute’s work in the field of Empathic Intelligence, which it describes as a pursuit of knowing that gives us the ability to understand and act upon the experiences of others without negating our own. Participants will walk away with a better understanding of the science and research behind the Empathic Intelligence framework, as well as the underlying skills and practices necessary to both increase their own empathic intelligence and apply it in their work with students, colleagues, and beyond.

Documentary Screening & Training Program: THE DIALOGUE LAB METHOD: Creating Shared Meaning and Enabling Meaningful Action

The last event in our series will be a screening of the Ideos Institute’s 2022 documentary, Dialogue Lab: America, a story of 12 strangers who came together in an audacious social experiment on political polarization. The hour-long film chronicles the group’s journey as each individual shares their story, discovers common ground, and forges a path to mutual understanding. 

The screening will be followed by a mini Dialogue Lab workshop where you can experience Ideos’ training in the art and practice of dialogue-based relational, social, and systems change. At the end of the 60-minute training, you will walk away with new skills and tools that can help you: 

• challenge your unconscious biases and misplaced judgments
• break down barriers that can lead to misunderstanding and isolated thinking
• create shared meaning and mutual understanding with those you disagree with
• lay the groundwork for authentic relationships and meaningful action.

Please join us for our event series with Christy Vines! Sign up on WildcatSync!

Today, September 7^th, is our deadline for fall 2023 D Team registration. If you’ve never been part of one of these groups, the key takeaway is that D Teams provide a great opportunity to connect with others over contentious and difficult topics and to deliberate about them in community with others. You can learn more about our topics here and sign up today!

D Teams provide an opportunity for you to bring a friend and/or recruit someone with whom you know you disagree. Disagreement not only makes things interesting, but it’s something that we hear again and again our D Team participants crave. At the DCI, we know that people want a space to engage in genuinely challenging and yet productive conversations, and that’s what D Teams are all about.

If you’ve been part of a D Team before, you might be asking yourself: what’s new this year? Not only will we be talking about especially timely problems—abortion, book censorship, and the relationship between speech and harm—but we’re also investigating how the value of autonomy crops up in each of these topics, and how concerns about autonomy can or should be balanced against other values we hold.

Finally, a note for everybody here: D Teams are for everybody. They provide opportunities for those unaffiliated with Davidson to be a part of these conversations, as well as opportunities for those most deeply connected to it, and everyone in between. We seek people with conservative, liberal, radical, activist, or agnostic perspectives, and people from every walk of life. Having a diversity of perspectives around the table helps everyone better understand the issue at hand. It also enables the group to explore a fuller range of options and arguments as they seek out new positions that might transcend where they all started from.

Not sure you can commit to a D Team this fall but want to hear from us about our other fall programs or our spring 2024 D Teams? Subscribe below for DCI updates and follow us on your favorite social media site.

This Friday, September 1^st, as part of Davidson’s back-to-school Welcome Week, the DCI is hosting a Semester Kickoff Party in the 900 Room at the Alvarez Student Union from 11 AM to 1 PM. We welcome all Davidson students, faculty and staff to join us for pizza, deliberation about some hot topics, and even a few prizes. You don’t need to RSVP—bring your friends and drop in any time!

Our Kickoff Party is a place to learn how you can get involved in deliberation about contentious topics of public interest on campus and beyond, and to meet others interested in deliberation on campus. You will also get a chance to meet current DCI Fellows, Senior Fellows, and some members of the DCI leadership team along the way. You’ll also be able to talk with us about our upcoming programs  and to find your own way to get involved—whether that means joining a D Team, attending a Deliberative Forum, and/or attending our Deliberative Citizenship Speaker Series.

This fall, our programming is focused on three main themes. We will host a Deliberative Forum in partnership with Davidson’s Political Science Department which will focus on what kind of role, if any, democratic nations ought to take in promoting and defending democracy across the globe (we’ll be sharing more info soon about this event). We have also organized this semester’s deliberative D Teams around three topics—abortion, book censorship, and the relationship between speech and harm—all of which are connected in some ways to autonomy and its relationship to other rights and values. (Sign up for D Teams by Sept. 7^th here!) And we’ll have a speaker come to Davidson to discuss how we can bridge divides across political, racial, and religious differences – stay tuned for registration info coming soon!

Of course, we’ll also be hosting our annual Deliberation Facilitator Training Program again at the beginning of this term, too. Learn more about it here, and sign up by Sept. 5^th.

We think these topics are all ripe for public deliberation right now, and we hope that you will join us on Friday to learn more and to practice some deliberation with us as we get energized for the coming year. Follow us on your favorite social media site to learn more about our upcoming events!