Transformative Dialogue: Co-Creating Conversations in Communities and Organizations
In Person
Political polarization seems to be a feature of modern societies. This is as true of advanced democracies as it is of countries coming out of civil wars. In the United States, politics as well as culture divides us, whether questions of gender and sexuality or this year’s Super Bowl half time show. People often avoid difficult topics, including politics, altogether. Many feel it is increasingly difficult to have constructive dialogue across political and cultural divisions, yet they long for connection and relationship and agree that dialogue is a necessary and good thing.
Many existing dialogue processes do not really address serious divisions either because the processes limit the expression of ideas and emotions, avoid disagreement, or steers people towards what facilitators deem to be the main issues. Transformative Dialogue is a process where participants make decisions about the content, process, and outcomes of dialogue, as well as who will participate. It puts the agency and self-determination of participants at the center, thereby empowering people to find their own voice and to decide what they want to do about their relationships and their communities. In this talk, Erik Cleven will present the basics of Transformative Dialogue and how it has been used to help people have difficult conversations that transform relationships, while allowing people to continue to disagree.
Biography
Erik Cleven is a professor in the Department of Politics at Saint Anselm College, where he teaches courses in international relations and comparative politics. He is a fellow and former board member of the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation. With institute colleagues he has helped develop Transformative Dialogue. He has extensive experience with dialogue in post-conflict settings in the Balkans, the Russian Federation, and East Africa, as well as Norway, where he lived for many years.
He has offered training in transformative dialogue in Kenya, Jordan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United States. He is the co-editor, with Judith A. Saul, of the book Transformative Dialogue: Co-Creating Conversations in Communities and Organizations published in 2025 by Rowman and Littlefield (now Bloomsbury). His research has been published in journals like International Interactions, Ethnopolitics, Conflict Resolution Quarterly, and Interpretation. He is currently working on a book about the philosophy of dialogue building on the work of the thinkers Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gabriel Marcel.