In an increasingly divided world, the need for civil discourse and strategies to bridge perspectives has become a central topic of discussion — not only at Duke but worldwide.
At Duke, several current initiatives aim at fostering inclusive dialogue across differing viewpoints. From courses to a Provost Forum, including a living-learning program, faculty and students across campus are exploring how to work together effectively, even in situations involving disagreement.
Among them, three Trinity professors are tackling this topic from very different angles.
Ashley Harrell studies the way humans cooperate and interact. Arkadev Ghosh runs youth camps meant to brings Hindu and Muslim youth together. And through her classes, Bethzaida Fernandez introduces Duke students to the Latino community in Durham. A common question underlies their work: How do you foster collaboration between people who might not agree?
“I study what makes people be nice to each other,” says Ashley Harrell, assistant professor of Sociology.
As an undergraduate, she started asking questions like, “What makes people help other people?,” “What makes people cooperate?,” “What makes people get along?” Her research still asks the same questions today.
Harrell says that in her field, there are three R’s of why people cooperate: Rules, Reputations and Relations.
“Rules entails punishments, rewards or social norms,” says Harrell. “If I look around me and I see that everyone picks up their trash, then I'm going to do it too, because that's what the norm is in the community.”
Harrell says the inverse is also true — if someone sees that no one is picking up their trash, for example, they will infer that the community is okay with littering.
“Reputation has to do with the fact that people care about what they look like in front of others,” says Harrell. “They’re more likely to cooperate if they know that their behavior is public or their behavior might influence the likelihood that someone else will want to work with them in the future.”
She uses the example of a group project. If a student doesn’t pull their weight, then other students won’t want to work with them in the future.
“Relations is another way of saying networks,” says Harrell. She says that people are more likely to cooperate with the people in their in-group than with people in their out-group. “I would be more inclined to help or cooperate with my close friends than with people I don’t know.”
Harrell also says that the reasons people cooperate differ throughout cultures.
“In some cultures, it's perfectly acceptable and fine to not cooperate with anyone except for your closest friends and family,” she says.
What are ways to get people who might not normally cooperate to do so? Harrell says that a good place to start is appealing to an identity shared by the entire group, no matter how broad. She uses the example of appealing to a group of people as Americans, rather than by their political views.
“If we appeal to that broad identity, people are more likely to see you as someone in their in-group,” she says. “Cooperative behavior spills over, so if I have a positive interaction with someone, I'll be nice to someone else because of our positive interaction.”
Growing up in India, Arkadev Ghosh, assistant professor of Economics, has always been interested in development and intergroup dynamics between religious populations in that country.
“Economics is very broad,” Ghosh says, “and I think integrating sociology and anthropology with economic methods is the direction the field is going.”
Ghosh was raised in West Bengal, an area of India with marked religious segregation, and that brought many questions to the front of his mind.
“When does intergroup contact — getting people from different groups to interact — really work? Under what context can we mix people to improve outcomes related to attitudes, behaviors, altruism, morality, as well as productivity?” he asks.
To look into this, Ghosh and his co-authors set up youth camps for both Hindu and Muslim boys ages 13-18 in West Bengal.
“I wanted to know if we could integrate young boys in these impressionable years,” says Ghosh. “This is the age where people start to form opinions and it’s still possible to change people’s minds.”
The idea of the camps, Ghosh says, was to bring together otherwise very segregated populations in India. Segregated by neighborhoods and schools, these teenagers would otherwise not interact naturally.
“We were motivated by classic work in psychology and sociology that says if you participate in group rituals, such as dancing or taking a pledge of brotherhood, and you do it repeatedly, this helps to form a shared identity,” Ghosh says.
The camp was held in a massive soccer stadium, every day for two weeks. Ghosh and his team went door-to-door, talking to parents and kids and recruiting participants. In the end, the camps were about 35% Muslim and 65% Hindu, which gave the majority Hindus sufficient exposure to Muslim boys.
They split the kids into three groups: a control group of kids who didn’t attend the camps, a “ritual group” who would perform a specific ritual — in this case, singing the national anthem very loudly in unison — every day, and a third group of teenagers who participated in the camp, but not in the ritual.
The final results suggest that the camps improved intergroup relations and also psychological well-being. They followed up with the boys a year after the camps ended and found that the camps led to enduring intergroup friendships.
“Some of the friendships formed during the camps did decay over time,” says Ghosh, “But we found that the participants also expanded their network of out-group friends through the people they had met at the camps.”
In Durham, there’s often talk about the divide between what happens inside of Duke’s walls and the reality of those outside. For years now, Senior Lecturer Bethzaida Fernández of Romance Studies, has been working on bridging that divide through her classes.
Fernandez began working more intentionally on these connections through the one-year project “Two-Way Bridges,” which she and two colleagues, Miguel Rojas Sotelo from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Charles Thompson from the Center for Documentary Studies took on in 2013.
As a result of that project, Fernandez developed the course “Bridging Cultures: Latino Lives and Experiences in NC.” Like its name suggests, the goal of the course is to bridge the gap between Duke and Durham Latino communities, and create a "two-way bridge," where both communities work together, visit each other, and learn from each other. The goal is to replace the more common one-way dynamic where Duke students and scholars would be the ones visiting Durham communities to do work, volunteer and research.
“Through my interactions with the Latino communities and organizations that work with them, I learned that some were disappointed with the collaborations established with Duke,” says Fernandez. Many students only lasted one semester, and after the project ended, the collaboration ended. The students and faculty did not return, or moved on to another project, so some organizations felt like they were being used.
With the “Two-Way Bridges” project, Fernandez and her colleagues sought to open an opportunity for the community to come into Duke, and they focused on education. The faculty members recruited nine undocumented DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) students from Durham public schools and invited them to take their course as guests, three students with each professor. The other students in Fernandez’ class at the time were not aware that there were “guest students” in the course. She guided class discussions normally, discussing issues surrounding immigration such as the economic impacts of immigration, education and labor. All of the students participated in the discussions and the projects equally.
“We wanted the DACA students to know that there was a space for them in a place like Duke,” says Fernandez. “They provided us a lot of knowledge, plenty of experiences and a lot of stories that were important for my students to hear.” Fernandez remembers fondly one Duke student for whom the experience was particularly transformative. During the course of the class, she became close friends with one of the three DACA students without knowing her immigration status.
Toward the end of the semester when the DACA students introduced themselves as such, the Duke student shared with the class that she had been taught by the people around her that immigrants were a problem and a load on the country’s resources. This new friendship and experience had changed her perspective.
“I tell my students that my goal is not to convince them to take a particular position on this issue, but rather to have them meet and engage with this population, hear their stories, share some research and facts, so that they can make their own conclusions,” says Fernandez.