By Addison Martin
Students and community members gathered at the Iowa City Public Library on Wednesday morning to learn how to discuss hot topics after this tumultuous election season.
The event, titled “How to Talk to Your Neighbor,” came in reaction to an election campaign that divided many into opposite sides, but it was also a general lesson on how to have productive and respectful conversations.
One of the graduate students who organized the event, Elizabeth Handschy, said the main objective was to “reflect and engage” in a productive way and to try to understand both sides of many common arguments. Handschy is a second year Ph.D. student studying cultural anthropology.
“Try to speak and listen from a positive standpoint,” she said as the event began. It later broke into small-group discussions.
The organizers kicked off the day by using the Brexit in Europe as a parallel to the problems in the United States and as an example of another place divided by political stances.
By showing a video interviewing residents in a small town in northern Britain, the majority of whom voted to leave the European Union, the graduate students hoped to use this as an example of understanding both sides of an argument.
“We hope, even if you all don’t have a connection with Europe, some of the stuff they talk about resonates with things talked about in our country,” said Scott Olson, also a Ph.D. student studying cultural anthropology.
After the video, the students and community members broke into small groups to discuss some readings, the three excerpts covering such topics as the Western view of Arab women, police brutality, and homophobia. These issues brought out some passionate and thoughtful responses from the participants, who used the time as a guided practice in respectfully talking about topics that may hit close to home for some.
Shane Weitzman, a first-year Ph.D. student, was a group facilitator, leading discussions and asking questions of the group as well as analyzing responses to better direct the conversation.
When discussing an excerpt from Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which addressed the issue of police brutality against African Americans by writing to his 15-year-old son, people went back and forth about responsibilities of both police and citizens.
“What I think we need is to make it so that we have a community where we all see each other, not where we all watch each other,” Weitzman said.