Week One: Grounding
Welcome everyone, to our first newsletter. There are 700+ of us! Those who introduced themselves are experienced conflict practitioners, educators, organizers, and folks grappling with accountability and harm. All of us are bringing knowledge and skill and I appreciate you being here.
What follows in this first post is not meant to be a textbook sheet of definitions to memorize; these terms are a collection of knowledge across many disciplines and experiences. Their use in this way is uncommon.
Instead, I offer these words as a visceral, multi-dimensional legend for creating conflict maps in my own practice—these maps help me discover where movement, deeper understanding, and transformation are possible. I hope that by starting here, I am sharing the most essential tools for my practice, which you may mold and adapt to suit your needs.
If you scroll to the end of the newsletter, you’ll find an opportunity for interactive discussion taking place tomorrow and throughout the week, as well as opportunities for learning and action beyond the newsletter.
Thank you for being here and I look forward to our time together.
-Luna
[Image Description: a green rectangle with the words “Conflict Layers” in bold yellow letters, with a white line drawing of a mountain, lake, trees, and sun between the words.]
Layers are the topography of our conflict map. We all exist within conflicts happening at all of these layers at all times; sometimes we are a passive or unaware presence in those conflicts, but we are in them all the same. Some conflicts are most salient (impactful) for us in one layer, but that doesn’t mean that is the only layer at which the conflict occurs. For people who experience multiple forms of oppression, conflicts are more likely to happen at every layer simultaneously and potently. Patricia Hill Collins conveys similar layers as “levels of domination” in Black Feminist Thought; in public health and social work a similar framework is the socioecological model. These layers as I see them are:
Intrapersonal: Present within the self.
Example: I shame myself for my weight, eating, and exercise choices.
Practice Questions: How does the individual view, understand, and interpret themself? How do they feel, think, process? How does this impact their sense of self and action?
Interpersonal: Between, among, or through two or more acting beings.
Example: My family shames me for my weight, policing my food and exercise.
Practice Questions: How do people interact, react, respond, relate, communicate, coerce each other? How do people impact one another in the past, present, and over the life course?
Systemic: Within and enacted by institutions, policies, and culture.
Example: Media portrays thinness as valuable (fatphobia), corporations produce the food that is available and sell products that promote certain forms of “fitness”, institutions control how food is distributed and where it is available as well as regulate foods, beverages, and “supplements.”
Practice Questions: How do we create order, process, control, influence, understanding, meaning, relations? How do we distribute food, water, shelter, labor ? Who holds power over whom? What is the impact?
Environmental: Shaped by land & atmosphere; water, air, shelter, health, connection.
Example: Technologies of labor, extraction, and transportation impact the environment and everyone’s ability to draw sustenance directly from the land.
Practice Questions: Who and what survives, thrives, reproduces, grows? What are the conditions?
Spiritual*: Influence and engagement by the divine, cosmos, fate, or supernatural worlds.
Example: We exist to reflect the divine. Gluttony interrupts that reflection. Confession allows us to access the divine.
Practice Questions: How and why do these people exist and for what purpose? Are we/Am I/are they in alignment with that purpose?
*The spiritual layer may not be a consideration for everyone; for those who are deeply impacted by this layer, it is often of great meaning and influence.
Layers as topography: If we think of the intrapersonal as a needle-point on the map, that needlepoint is our experience. We can find ourselves at the peak of a mountain where a conflict runs deep—that depth is the conflict’s salience. Many needlepoints together are systems, which are the breadth or reach of a conflict’s impact—an ocean is broad and contains and influences an entire world. The further we expand across these layers, the deeper and broader the conflict has the potential to become.
[Image description: a teal rectangle with the words “Conflict Elements” in bold yellow letters; a pink coral with tree-like branches is between the two words.]
Elements are some of the factors and components for consideration when determining how a conflict can be transformed, ask: what can I still learn about this element? & how does this element create roadblocks and possibilities? These elements often present differently across layers.
Roots: the ultimate source, where the conflict grows from, the place where every other element could change
Sparks & Suppressants: incidents or conditions that shift the conflict from one state to another
Temperament: the feeling, emotion, visceral experience of the conflict, its vibes or moods
Landscape or Container: where the conflict has presence (a conflict with a boss may be systemic, but may be contained within the self, if avoidant)
Setting: the space(s) where the conflict takes place in the physical world
Fluidity: the mobility, flexibility, adaptability of the participants and conditions
Direct participants: the beings most centrally involved in the events or mechanisms, who may or may not be fully aware of their participation
Indirectly impacted: the beings who experience emotional, social, material or spiritual change as a result but may or may not be aware of why or how those changes occurred
Causes: the many sources or reasons for events, interactions, or struggles to occur, which may or may not be known or perceivable at all vantage points
Shadows: experiences from past conflicts that influence the present
Impacts: the nourishing, neutral, and destructive affects a conflict has on everything around
Means: the strategies, tools, and behaviors used to engage in the conflict
Motivations: the values, nourishment, or meaning that moves someone to engage in a conflict
Interests or Goals: the outcomes participants aim for by engaging in the conflict, often perceived to be most beneficial to self or community
Positions: the stance a participant takes, often framed by ideology or values, which may or may not serve their goals/interests
When we consider these elements and layers together, we come to understand that all conflict is social/political. That’s why Conflict Transformation is primarily concerned with the roots at the systemic and environmental layers. Intra- and Inter- personal behavior change strategies are used as a means of harm prevention and of building collective skill toward systemic change. These individual behaviors are never seen as the cause or the root, because no individual exists in a vacuum (as far as we are aware). Political and social solutions in a criminal-legal or authoritarian-justice framework often focus on individual behavior because doing so deflects dissent against oppressive systems and because this is an area where people exercise the most direct control. Social power built through collective action is a tool within conflict transformation that allows us to move beyond individual behavior, toward upper-layer change. Abolition is a goal that must be worked toward through practice at every layer and by many means. Transformative Justice is a goal, a motivation, a means, and a spark.
[ID: behind a haze or fog, a landscape with a background of blue mountains and grey sky, and a foreground of hills, grass, rocks, and trees. The word “discussion” is in capitalized yellow letters, and “week one” is in smaller, black handwritten script.]
Weekly Discussion: By clicking here, share something (thoughts, feelings, memories, lessons) about salient (present, impactful) conflicts in your life, community, or world. If you can, consider sharing both generative conflicts (giving energy, meaning, growth) and destructive conflicts (taking energy, disrupting meaning, causing harm). Discuss with each other—generously—how these conflicts may be connected on the map of our global web of relations.
Discussion Guidance: While the weekly discussion topic goes out with the newsletter on Sunday evenings, I encourage everyone to sit with the topic at least over night and really reflect on it. On Monday evenings at 6pm EST I will log in to engage with you all in the discussion, feel free to post your answers any time on Monday and continue the discussion throughout the week. I hope that folks will write to each other. I hope folks will be brave in sharing, receiving, and responding to difficult subjects. If sharing conflicts related to abuse, violence, or other sensitive subjects, I’ll ask that you preface your post with a content warning. Please have a plan for debriefing, decompressing, and healing if you plan to engage in discussions that may cause distress.
Opportunities to Learn + Act
Interactive Learning: Colorizing Restorative Justice Book Club & Reflective Circles by Living Justice Press.
Read/Listen: Dr. Austin McCoy writes and speaks about the social movements that inform #DefundThe Police as a slogan and a demand (Austin is a friend who I organized with before we lived in different states! May he return to the midwest promptly, haha).
Donate: Mirror Memoirs is accepting donations to hire Black LGBTQIA+ abolitionist survivors, donate at mirrormemoirs.networkforgood.com
Attend: Critical Resistance (an organization that founded modern movements for abolition) is hosting several events in a series called Imagine Freedom: Art Works for Abolition. Click here to see those opportunities and register.
Image full text: “But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me