Re-Imagining our Public Space: Questioning with Humanness and Generosity

CMM Institute Alumni Presentation

Thursday, July 13, 2017

SLS Summer Session  in Tucson, AZ

The CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution is hosting a Fielding community conversation about asking our “big questions” in ways that communicate an openness to connecting around our shared humanity and desire for community.

PRESENTERS:

Kimberly Pearce, MA                      President, The CMM Institute

Jan Elliott, PhD                              HOD, 1997

Ilene Wasserman, PhD                     HOD, 2004

Romi Boucher, PhD                          HOD, 2014

Barton Buechner, PhD                    HOD, 2014

This session will explore how our questions determine what gets our attention, what gets made and what we talk about. Given what is happening with communication in public spheres in many countries today, we will lead a session on how we personally can help to change this for the better.

Our dialogue will focus on the place and power of questions that matter, especially in these challenging times where we don’t hear questions infused with humanness and generosity. All “sides” are guilty of not asking these kinds of questions that invite stories about our humanness and that help create greater understanding- and possibly even a caring for – the “other.” We envision a community conversation that matters, guided by principles of “circular questioning” and CMM heuristics to help uncover the assumed and possible meaning(s) behind our questions and the importance of how we ask them. We know that we are living in times in which our social contexts may be challenging to our deeply-held principles and values. CMM Institute presenters will lead the dialogue, drawing on stories from the Institute’s Fellows program, Learning Exchanges, International partnerships, and other initiatives of the institute and its members that support the emergence of “better social worlds.”

The CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution is a community of scholarship and practice around the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory by the late Fielding Professor Emeritus, W. Barnett Pearce and his colleagues.  We extend a welcome to students interested in exploring this theory as part of their dissertation work, and as an introduction to the many ways that this body of theory has been used in practice, and impacted both the practice and the personal lives of those who have learned to embody it. Learn more about the CMM Institute at http://www.cmminstitute.net/

The CMM Fellows Program is a partnership with several other institutions with allied goals, including Fielding Graduate University, and the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4) at Columbia University. Work of past and current fellows may be presented as examples to engage discussions with related interests of all students and alumni present. This year’s CMMI Fellows theme is “Minding the Gap” as a metaphor for shifting focus to possibilities for new forms, possibilities, and shared meaning that might emerge in the “gaps” that seem to be appearing everywhere in our global society.

CMM Learning Exchanges are annual gatherings of CMM scholar-practitioners, built on the principle of going beyond the sharing of knowledge to building and sustaining a shared personal and group ethos of “who we be” in the CMM community. The LE’s have supported or efforts to further build our relationships with each other, CMM theory, and practice of CMM in the world.  LE’s have alternated between Autumn gatherings in Oracle, Arizona with co-hosted international venues, including a 2015 collaboration with the Institute for Global Integral Competence in Munich, Germany. This year’s LE will be at the Institute of Family Therapy in London, UK, October 23-24, 2017.

The Fielding SPCL Concentration in Somatics, Phenomenology and Communicative Leadership includes the “communication perspective” of social construction in communication as an integral component. Alumni will be present to discuss research interests of students considering the SPCL concentration, and ways that the CMM Institute and its network of scholar-practitioners in CMM can support them.

Interested in attending Summer Session? Contact Hilary Molina for more information hilarymolina@fielding.edu or 1.800.340.1099 x 2947