Civic Fusion and the Hidden Connective Energies of Conflict

Event Date: Thursday January 20, 2022
Time: 12:00-1:00 pm
Location:

The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School is pleased to present:

PON Live!

Civic Fusion and the Hidden Connective Energies of Conflict

A discussion with:

Susan Podziba
Principal, Podziba Policy Mediation

Thursday, January 20, 2022

12:00 – 1:00 pm ET (US and Canada)

Free and open to the public.

About the talk:

Public policy mediators engage with complex conflicts that are often rooted in disputants’ moral and substantive certainty. The passion that disputants bring to deliberations hints at energies available for connection across deep differences. Within the context of well-designed processes focused on clear goals, mediator interventions may cause disputants to shift from certainty to curiosity.  Such emotional and substantive shifts unleash bonding energies that break habitual thought patterns to innovate consensus solutions. In her talk, Susan Podziba will discuss building capacity for such shifts within process designs that harness newly available connective energies to resolve conflicts.

About the speaker:

Susan Podziba, Principal at Podziba Policy Mediation, has served as a public policy mediator for more than 30 years.  Most of her projects include working with senior leadership of governments, representative stakeholders, civil society, and the general public. Her clients have included the United States Departments of Commerce, Defense, Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Transportation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Senate, U.S. Institute for Peace, United Nations, The World Bank, British Council, Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, Emilia Romagna Regional Authority of Italy, and Negotiation Strategies Institute of Jerusalem. She is listed on the United Nations Mediator Roster, is recipient of a National Partnership for Reinventing Government Award, and recently traveled to Bahrain to participate in the King Hamad Global Center for Peaceful Coexistence conference, Ignorance is the Enemy of Peace.

Recently, Podziba created a process design tool for World Bank mediators and assisted with the process design for a national economic policy dialogue in Sudan. She is author of Civic Fusion: Mediating Polarized Public Disputes and Our City: From Corruption to Participatory Democracy as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her projects have been reported on by the New York Times, The Washington Post, and major radio and television networks.

Podziba is director of the Sacred Lands Project and an expert for the course, Religion and Conflict Transformation, which is organized by SwissPeace at the University of Basel. She is faculty for the Program of Negotiation Advanced Mediation course, has served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Peace and Conflict Resolution, taught graduate seminars at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and guest lectures internationally. Podziba has a Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied mediation and international conflict resolution, and a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.


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