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Season 2 episode 3 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we talk about some unhelpful frames* that come up when we think about conflict.

'Conflict may not be the choice of how you’d choose to improve relationships, but given the conflict will happen... play the hand you’re dealt'

'We need to be in it with each other, which makes the conflict worth it'

* We give examples of different “frames” in this episode, but don’t define the term “frame” (for shame!). To plug that gap:

A frame is a lens you look through to see the world. When looking at conflict through the frame of essentialism, you will see people who do bad things as inherently bad people. Frames will always highlight some things (‘they did something I didn’t like, so they must be a bad person’) and hide others (e.g. questioning what could have led them to act the way they did).

No frame is an accurate summary of the world. To adapt a phrase we’ve alluded to before, “all frames are wrong but some are useful”. A few other ways of thinking about it:

“mental structures that shape the way we see the world” (George Lakoff)

“The frame around a painting or photo can be thought of as a boundary between what has been left in and what has been left out. Each of the elements placed inside the frame is significant, and makes a difference to the meaning of the piece.” (Common Cause)

Show notes, links

A very condensed summary of what we talked about:

How we think and feel about conflict is shaped by our histories, our society, our traditions

People often don’t consciously know what these ‘norms’ around conflict are, though they can affect how we act, how we approach conflict -- and as they sometimes make us act out of line with our values

And the zine that was mentioned was "You can't blow up a social relationship".

Perennial resources:

our sister facilitation collective Navigate have a conflict facilitation booklet (from back when they were called Seeds For Change Oxford).

See our "What is facilitation?" podcast episode page for more general facilitation resources.

Transcript

ALI

This is Resist + Renew,

KATHERINE

the UK based podcast about social movements,

SAMI

what we're fighting for, why and how it all happens.

ALI

The hosts of the show are

KATHERINE

Me, Kat.

SAMI

Me, Sami,

ALI

and me, Ali.

SAMI

I'm recording this now, baby!

ALI

Shit, it's a podcast!

KATHERINE

Welcome to the second episode of the Resist+Renew Season Two toolbox.

Last time we talked about conflict in general, we talked about how we three feel about it: as facilitators, as people in groups, as people. We talked a bit about what we're going to cover in the toolbox this season. And we also had some introduction to what we mean by conflict, and and some of the ideas that we're, sort of, using throughout this toolkit to shape our thinking.

In this episode, we're gonna do a deeper dive here on ideas that people often have about conflict, and why they might not be so great. Sami, do you wanna tell us more about that?

SAMI

Sure, yeah. So I guess, maybe we can start by just, like, putting forward some like, axioms or assumptions, I guess, about, like, conflict and our thoughts around it, just to make sure we're all starting from the same page.

So one is that like, and we touched on this a lot in the last chat, like how we think and feel about conflict is shaped by our histories, the society we live in, cultures, internal norms, assumptions, all these kinds of things. Like, there's a hodgepodge of different different things that go into that mix of how we think about conflicts and how we interact with conflict. And what that means in practice, is that the ways in which we interact with conflict will be like shaped by a lot of that stuff, but,