Use a seven-perspective reflective heuristic (locus, process, politics, metaphor, history, existence, systems) to respond to professional conflict¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The author offers a set of simple questioning perspectives as starting points for re-reading conflict and making space for responses other than somatic ones: locus (where the conflict resides), process (its narrative, causes, effects), politics (forces, power, beneficiaries), metaphor (Elbow-based metaphor creation), history, existence (alternative explanations), and systems (how the system supports or perpetuates the conflict and where leverage points lie). Each perspective is a set of guiding questions applied to a live conflict.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• A reflective and reflexive stance in which the administrator becomes an active reader of her conflicts

Constraints¶

• The author offers these only as starting points, calling them "simple and like weak potion" against somatic responses

Target Learners¶

• Writing Program Administrators and academic administrators facing institutional conflict

Target Learning Goals¶

• Reframing and taking action on workplace conflict instead of expressing it somatically

Related Strategies¶

• Exploit marginalized difference through mimetic and disruptive readings (Irigaray's mime, Bell's philosophical clitoris) rather than expressing conflict as illness
• Calm and Honest Reflection

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Gradin, Sherrie. (1998). Inscribing Our Work as WPAs: Gendered Bodies and Conflict as Physical Trope. ERIC. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED422588