This text has two main topics at its heartātransrational peace research and elicitive facilitation in Peace Studies. I look at these through the particular lens of the peace researcher or elicitive facilitator, in order to better understand how the self can be a source for and resource during the research and facilitation process as regards topics of peace and conflict. To guide the reader towards this complex terrain, I have structured this introductory chapter in the following manner. The subsequent Authorās Perspective provides the personal background on how I approach these topics. Written in a more free-flowing manner it details the biographical lenses from which I commence my research. The Research Interest and Questions then frames the topics in academic terms. The section on Method and Structure answers the question on how I proceed throughout the research and addresses the (writing) style and structure of the text. In the State of the Art I make explicit on whose shoulders I stand and present those key-authors and fields of study I consider to be the most relevant for my work.
By proceeding in this manner, I seek to provide my audience with a systematic introduction that prepares the ground for the discussion of contents that is to follow in the two main parts of the text. All throughout this book I argue that research can be more than just the gathering of cognitive information and can lead to a deeper, more comprehensive understanding. I also argue that facilitation can equally be a comprehensive practice that engages facilitators and participants as full human beings. I hope that this is not only conveyed in what is written in this book but also becomes apparent through how it is written and structured. It is with this thought in mind that I now approach the Authorās Perspective and what continues to draw me to this exploration.
1.1 Authorās Perspective
This book has been a long time in the making. As I am starting to write, it has already been with me as a steady companion for quite a few years. During many months of contemplation, research and practice its outlines have taken shape, been reworked and changed, led to many surprising turns and new directions. I am grateful for many insightful conversations and comments that have both challenged and encouraged me on this journey. Accompanying me through what still feels like an intense professional and personal life, parenting, moving to new places, facilitating embodied practices and teaching across the world, repeatedly I wondered whether this project would ever see the light of day. When I first committed to it, my daughter would not be born until several years later. Now Rosalie has entered her last year of kindergarten. I hope to be able to complete this book before she starts school. Throughout all this time and all these changes, the quiet intuition insisting that it is necessary for me to write this text has persisted. Whenever my heart and soul speak in this manner, I tend to follow. Some reasons why this might be so have become clear to me over the years, some are yet to be explored, some likely will remain a mystery.
1.1.1 On Rhythms and Cycles
In between the time since this project has begun and now, the rhythms of my life have changed. In the language of Gabrielle Roth, whose work inspires so much of the following pages, the pulse of my life today feels decidedly Lyrical. I have entered the middle years of adulthood. Perceived through the system of the Medicine Wheel (cf. Foster and Little 1998), I am now moving under a Northern sun, within the shield of Winter. Gone are the Summer of childhood and the Autumn of puberty and youth. I have said a fond farewell to Chaos, my home rhythm for so many years. Not just a son, today I am a father. On the far side of today the wisdom of advanced age still appears rather distant on my horizon. I am neither a youngster nor an elder. Gabrielle Roth says that while puberty is the time to find out what you have to give, maturity is the time to give it (Roth 1998a, 124). Within the cyclical turning of the generational wheel, I believe that personally and collectively it now falls on my generation to bear our share of responsibility and contribute with what we have to give. In this text, I choose the topics of research and facilitation to do so.
For the past seventeen years, the project of Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck has been my vocation. During these years, my own rhythms have been joined to those of our semesters at our Master of Arts Program. I helped to shape and then followed the cyclical ebb and flow of students in Innsbruck that corresponds to the seasons. The months of summer and winter of an academic year here coincide with the presence phases, whose intense pulses took up almost all of my waking hours. When the students are in Innsbruck during hot summers and cold winters, it is time to be present, focused and aware. I enjoyed teaching and accompanying students through their particular Heroās Journey that is a semester in Innsbruck (cf. Campbell 2008; Gilligan and Dilts 2011; Rebillot 1993). The online phases of an academic year, during which students take part in the virtual classroom, coincide with fall and spring. I spent those preparatory seasons teaching internationally and facilitating workshops on embodied practices of transformation.
1.1.2 On Transformation
As a corollary to the above, in recent years I have found increasingly less time to do this systematic type of reflection that leads to research and insights. Yet my practice needs to be self-reflected. Particularly when it comes to such deeply personal and subjective topics like peace and conflict transformation, when it is about accompanying people through their own processes of learning, unfolding and transformation, the deeper questions of who we are as facilitators and teachers also need to be raised from time to time. I find myself compelled to search my soul for what fulfills me, what moves me. I am drawn to the deeper symmetries of my becoming and how they are reflected in my doing. I do not hold this to be navel-gazing, but see it as a necessary inquiry into how the intrapersonal, interpersonal and transpersonal aspects of this particular contact boundary at work that I call my āselfā resonate, and how this can be made useful for research and facilitation.
1.1.3 On Research and Facilitation
Most immediately the two topics of this book are a reflection on what I have been practicing during the past years. They result from teaching Peace Studies at my home university in Innsbruck and internationally and perceiving the need of many of my thesis students for a different research methodology. A methodology that allows them to do research the same way that they are also trained in elicitive facilitation during their studies: not just intellectually but as whole human beings. This corresponds to my own need. As I became particularly aware again during the research for this text, I deeply appreciate it when I can feel connected to what I do and to the people around me, when I can understand through all the means I have available and when I allow myself to be touched by my work. When I, as contact boundary at work, am open and permeable, I believe that I am also at my best when I can do what I do authentically and from the depth of my being. I try to teach, facilitate, work and live according to this, and I do not see why it should not also guide my research.
With this book, I hope to be able to open the space for a different way of doing research that caters to a more comprehensive understanding of who we are as researchers and how our being is connected to our doing. What I am looking for is a methodology for peace research that corresponds to the transrational philosophy we developed in Innsbruck and that allows me to understand my topic, research participants and also myself through all the faculties I have at my availability.
The second focus on elicitive facilitation in many ways is the corollary of the first. During the past decades, we have cultivated an elicitive style of teaching at the MA program at the University of Innsbruck. This approach seeks to address the students in their full human potential, on all levels of their being. For the teacher, this means that she also must understand herself as engaged in the act of teaching as a full human being, which is present and addressed in all her faculties. This at times puts the act of teaching more in line with facilitation as it is known from applied peace and conflict work. It also means that who the teacher is, her qualities of being and relational skills are crucially important. Teaching has come to mean a relational encounter that is not just intellectually challenging, but addresses both students and teachers in embodied, emotional, psychological and at times spiritual ways. The students from their side have gotten used to such an intense classroom setting and knowledge about it seems to percolate between generations. These days, the students of each incoming new group almost naturally come to expect and demand it from their professors. From my side, I feel the time is right for a systematic reflection. I want this text to be useful particularly for all those colleagues within Peace and Conflict Studies who share this understanding of teaching as facilitation and are looking for a way to both conceptualize (think) and implement (live) it.
1.1.4 On Dancing the Rhythms
Sweat Your Prayers could have been my mantra even long before I ever heard of Gabrielle Roth, her book of the same name or of the Five Rhythms dance. The Five Rhythms are a revelation to me. Previously, I had only taken dancing lessons in High School. The approach adopted by the trainers was very much oriented on the classical dances and on āgetting it right.ā This means that there is a ārightā way to move, which derives from following a pre-given sequence of steps, executing the movements as exactly as possible. Deviation is wrong, implying a humiliating fault. A good dance ensues if both partners have learned the moves and executed them flawlessly; not knowing the moves appropriate for the dance implies one simply doesnāt know how to dance. The long shadows of the Viennese Waltz as the penultimate expression of Austrian ball dance and of a standardized education model loom large in this understanding.
The Five Rhythms free my mind and body from this pernicious idea of a correct sequence of steps. There is no way to get it right or do it wrongāthere is only the dance. Dancing by myse...