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Healing a divided nation: Transforming spaces through Sustained Dialogue
The 2016 election season brought with it increasing division, conflict, and anger. In the aftermath of the election, the national rhetoric has continued to emphasize the embittered divide that the election of Donald Trump thrust to the fore (Friedersdorf, 2016; Hellman, 2016; Itkowitz, 2016; Wallace, 2016). In the months after the election, it has become increasingly apparent that our division is geographically spatial (as illustrated through Tim Wallace's [2016] mapping of Clinton and Trump voters into imaginary nations), at the same time as our divisions and misunderstandings lie deeper than geography. Massey (2005) describes spaces as particular moments of relations, a coming together of intensities and forces that are constantly producing and constructing space. This kind of space, a layered and complicated space of relations, produces the possibility that a Harvard Business school student who voted for Clinton had never met a Trump voter (Itkowitz, 2016). Not because of geography but due to other spatial practices, the ways that spaces are produced and reproduced through relations and connections. This kind of spatial divide is what calls to bridge and mend and repair relationships speak to (Friedersdorf, 2016; Itkowitz, 2016). This paper takes up the charge to consider the role of spatial practices in producing (and bridging) divisions through unfolding the processes of dialogue modeled by The Sustained Dialogue Campus Network (SDCN). I will argue that not only does dialogue, as a series of layered spatial practices, offer an opportunity to interrupt the reproduction of divided spatial practices, but that dialogue offers a set of practices to apply in order to move forward into new possibilities and make our spaces differently. As we look to the future in this uncertain time, the site of higher education as a threshold of learning and development is an integral space in which to consider the possibilities that dialogue offers, pointing to healing, peace, and reconciliation (Gildersleeve & Kuntz, 2011).
A spatial turn asks how we take up, create, and produce space, not only at the local and bounded level of individual institutions and campuses but space as enfolded and layered nationally and globally, including national politics and legislation (Massey, 2005). The language spatial "turn" is not to suggest a turning...