Exit Interview Summary of 2011 Spring/Summer Arthur Clark Research Fellowship
Abram Trosky
The program statement I wrote before arriving in Calgary to assume the
Clark Fellowship made the following claim:
“My recent transformation within international relations from skeptic
to apologist of just war theory represents a rare plateau in that quest
for clarity—ground I wish to cultivate while at the University of
Calgary’s Consortium for Peace Studies. It is my conviction that
misconceptions regarding just war theory [prevent] ethical progress
toward peace.”
While my dissertation topic and work toward the stated goal of an ethical peace
remain, my experience at the Consortium for Peace Studies supplanted one
certainty with another: that reframing debates in international relations, while
important, may not be the most direct path towards promoting cultures of peace.
That path runs not through nations but through the communities that comprise
them.
In the same program statement, I remember articulating a pregnant hope,
“[T]hough I envision this break from teaching responsibilities as
primarily a time to research and write, I have never been one to
cloister myself…My latest extracurricular activities are permaculture
and bike repair, both of which are mirrored by activism for food and
energy independence and for the transition to sustainable agricultural
and transportation infrastructures. I look forward to learning about
the strategies Albertans have devised to address these global
environmental issues.”
I really had no idea just how vibrant Calgary’s activist community is in these
and others areas, nor could the internet have fully communicated the rich
web of relationships that have come to characterize for me the heartbeat of
this high desert place.
I wish to recount my assimilation into this community in these brief
five months, what I left here, and how my experience of sharing and learning
here have been instrumental to my individual and academic development. I
will focus on the places where these two realms—the personal and the
professional—met for me, and end by sharing how their confluence afforded
some clarity on a persistent question of the syntax of social change.
Arriving with the April thaw at the end of the semester and start of election
season, I began a full and immediate immersion in Calgarian and University life.
Monday I was whisked from a provocative book release on “A People’s Power” by
Hugo Bonjean to a town hall meeting with Bob Rae, each of whom entertained my
questions on our duties to others in terms of economic gradualism versus more
aggressive interventionism. Tuesday brought Jean Beliveau to Calgary to share with
Project Ploughshares some of his experiences during his 74,000 km walk for peace. I
was back again Wednesday to Parkdale United Church for another talk on
peacebuilding in refugee camps. Thursday saw the first of many “Getting to Know
You” gatherings at the home of my fellowship’s namesake, Dr. Arthur Clark. I was
happy to shake the hand of the man responsible for bringing me to Canada—a man
who, amid his demanding career, makes time for the seemingly small act of
introducing his neighbors to each other with an eye to improving a country in which
he himself began a guest. Days later, we engaged in a longer, impromptu
conversation, sussing out some of our similarities and differences on foreign policy.
The next week I attended Green Party candidate Elizabeth May’s downtown
rally in advance of the national election. Something about my “outsider” status made
it easier for me to publicly dissent when candidate May espoused a hardline noninterventionist stance in Libya in her stump speech—not as an American but as a
Green, an international party to which I have belonged my entire voting life. I had
toed this line before, of questioning liberal orthodoxy while foregrounding areas of
democratic agreement, like respect for human rights and promoting political and
religious pluralism. But doing so in the context of a new national “us” made me even
more deliberate about emphasizing the universality of these shared values as the
source of their authority, and our consequent duty to uphold them for others when
threatened. I later had the opportunity to author a pointed question on the subject
of leftist isolationism and distrust of democracy that kicked off audience
participation at a Consortium organized lecture series at the Calgary Public Library,
and again while facilitating a discussion as part of a Project Ploughshares speaker
series on non-violence.
My early participation these events followed through on the first part of my
project statement and reflected its conviction. The gathering at Dr. Clark’s and my
reading of his book detailing a paradigm for global citizenship began to give shape
to the pregnant hope articulated in the second quote and the contours of its
connection to the first. I saw a compelling range of political possibility, from
individual and neighborhood, to church and civil society, from local politics, to the
highest levels of government and the international community. Very little of this had
to do with the nation, the atomic unit of international law so salient in just war
considerations. As a visitor, it might have been easy to feel like a detached observer
of another nation’s, another neighborhood’s business. It became for me instead a
liberating moment—an opportunity to experiment with this idea of global
citizenship. The Peace Consortium was affording me an opportunity to “act as if”: as
if every facet of my residence in Calgary—city and university, the area in which they
meet, and the international arena in which both are recognized—were truly
interconnected, so that every small act reverberates throughout and could be held
up as vertebral, helping the whole stand aright.
Upon arriving, I was in the process of completing two academic projects that
I thought of as partially constitutive of my contribution in the preceding regard. The
first was the integrative title chapter in a book contracted to the research team I am
a part of, The Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and
Peace: the International Handbook on War, Torture, and Terrorism (Malley-Morrison,
Hines, & McCarthy, eds., New York: Springer [in press]). Coming from a background
analyzing domestic violence and ableism, our group leader from Boston University’s
Psychology Department has always incorporated a more fine-grained definition of
peace and human security into GIPGAP’s work than the mere absence of war.
The second project was a chapter in an edited volume, Agitation with a Smile:
The Legacies of Howard Zinn and the Future of Activism, titled, “Of the People, By the
People, and For other People?: The state and the morality of violence in the political
philosophy of Howard Zinn.” With the encouragement of the Consortium’s George
Melnyk, this project will likely find separate publication. Zinn was an invaluable role
model throughout his career for his conscientious refusal to separate the personal
from professional. His argument that one’s values can and should infuse one’s
reading of history, writing, teaching—indeed, every aspect of one’s life—resonates
deeply with me. What appears to the scientific type as contradicting the vaunted but
quixotic virtue of scholarly objectivity is actually a more fundamental consistency.
This ethos aligns with an idea from another Boston University figure, The
Reverend Howard Thurman—mentor to a young graduate student in theology
named Martin Luther King Jr. His quote, "Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what
makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who
have come alive,” became a sort of mantra while in Calgary for this merging or
infusing of the workaday world with an unabashed and contagious passion.
Though I came to Calgary nominally as a researcher, I was already equally a
searcher, sniffing out opportunities for meaningful interaction and the liberation
and implementation of ideas from behind the dusty horizons of book bindings and
computer screens. My next weeks in Calgary were as full as the first and presaged
the extracurricular dimensions of my time here. I was lucky to attend a talk by
extreme outdoor sports pioneer Will Gadd that hatched an idea for a possible
fundraising opportunity (emphasis on the “fun”): an attempt to set the tandem
gliding record across the Eastern Alberta badlands with donations for every
kilometer to his charity of choice (a Tibetan organization devoted to ending human
trafficking in that region). Though this proposal never took flight, neither my
budding interest in grant-writing nor my resolve to appreciate the beauty of the
province were dampened. I began to explore volunteering at the outdoor center,
using my experience as a whitewater raft guide. I am happy to report that though
originally deferred, my persistence under new leadership led to a fruitful
relationship helping impart teamwork skills and an appreciation of nature to dozens
of novice rafters. These included 60 exchange students from the Calgary Youth
Orchestra and 40 Down syndrome youth and adults from Calgary’s Dolphins Swim
Club.
Notwithstanding the revitalizing effect of following Thurman’s formula, there
were challenges and disappointments that tested my resolve. Since arriving, I had
been experiencing persistent computer problems. Discouraged after continued trips
to different computer stores to recover my data with only partial success, I tried to
take the loss as an opportunity to again reevaluate the dissertation’s direction and
go “back to the drawing board” for the prospectus. I am pleased with where it has
arrived and am happy to share drafts as it progresses.
Once back on my own machine, I began two applications: one teaching
philosophy at Tufts University and another as the Hood House lecturer in the
international relations honors program at the University of New Hampshire. When a
recommender had to drop out for health reasons, University of Calgary faculty
member Ronald Glasberg, with whom program manager Saima Jamal had only
recently arranged a meeting, was unbelievably kind to write a letter on my behalf to
Tufts. Dr. Glasberg’s reputation as a teacher preceded him and our philosophic
interests overlap broadly; we remain in contact.
Though these applications came to naught, I wish to focus on the several
times when persistence paid off. It was persistent, open communication with
university administration (against the advice of my department’s graduate director)
that convinced the Dean to grant the traveling scholar status that landed me in
Calgary in the first place. It was the same courage to cc: the “higher-ups” on such
communication that resulted in my being included in a fundraising event featuring
Calgary’s dynamic Mayor Naheed Nenshi after initially being rebuffed. And it was
similar naïve doggedness that allowed a seed planted on my very first day in Calgary
sprout into the accomplishment there of which I am most proud.
At a student activities fair that day, I was introduced to The Bike Root—a
student and volunteer-run organization promoting biking through free workshops
and subsidized and recycled parts. Having recently become involved with
community bike shops back in Boston and already put in hours at Calgary’s popular
nonprofit, The Good Life community bike shop, I was acquainted with the role such
a non-hierarchical cooperative groups could play in promoting alternative
transportation strategies, culturally appropriate technology, energy independence,
occupational-training, and generally fostering creativity and social justice. When I
followed up, I was saddened to hear that they had lost their space and profile on
campus due to competition from the university-endorsed repair shop in the Outdoor
Centre (where I would soon be volunteering).
Daily, I was reminded of their plight by a dated, three-by-five posting on a
community bulletin board around the corner from my office in the Faculty of Social
Work. Back below the spacious four-bedroom remodel Dr. Clark was graciously
renting to me, there was an unused double garage. Seeing that this location was
evolving into the de facto housing for each semester’s Clark research fellows, I asked
him if he had designs on that space since we came carless with nothing to store save
two empty suitcases. He approved of the idea but when I emailed the news, got no
response. I emailed another former officer and got a referral but no follow-up.
When I finally got in touch with The Bike Root’s founder, Justin Brown, he
was kind to meet and see the space in person. Excited by the prospect, we sketched
out a formal proposal for a trial period and brought it back to the organization and
Dr. Clark respectively for approval. Before I left, the first phase of this collaboration
had been implemented, with three work-stations and the Bike Root’s full
complement of tools and parts available in that formerly dormant part of the house
to anyone who cared to learn. In exchange, the Bike Root agreed to continue
cultivation and expansion of the small garden I had begun with the help of Dr.
Melnyk in the backyard and to create a community space up front where neighbors
could gather and talk, perhaps planting further seeds for creative land use and
swaps.
As a holding of Dr. Clark and an extension of his focus on community
organizing, the house at 2248 Uxbridge Drive was already a home to more than just
its residents, hosting meetings of his Calgary Centre for Global Community. While I
find contemporary accounts of the supernatural power that attracts resources to
people and people to places unconvincing, I think there is a very real sense in which
the contagiousness of passionate people creates relationships of reciprocity that
expand exponentially, seemingly with their own inertia. What these networks
promise is not always commensurate with what they accomplish once congealed
into an organization, but occasionally they catch fire in a way that can’t be explained
simply by the sum of their individual members. I believe that both the Consortium
and the Calgary Centre have this potential.
I was privileged during my time in Calgary to have a unique vantage point to
see such a web unfold, drawing in participants from all walks and locales in almost
providential fashion. There is a sense in which the modest garden I mentioned is at
the center of this web—ironic, since it was the very modesty of the projected
harvest that had prevented me from taking all the necessary steps in the past:
securing seeds, soil, and tools; transplanting sprouts; pruning, irrigating, and
composting. It may not have yielded that many edibles this season, but it did
inadvertently serve to bring people together, as I hope it and the Uxbridge home will
continue to do.
To that end and in gratitude for the space, I had the idea of hosting a Canada
Day barbeque there in the backyard, a proposition to which the other residents of
2248 kindly agreed. The Consortium staff sent the invite to their entire mailing list
and we were pleasantly surprised with how many of they and their friends and
family turned out on such a popular holiday with generous gifts of food and
household items for our still bare abode. We were pleased to meet among our
attendees, neighbors Mahendra Singh and Naomi Turner and their daughter Sasona,
who lived down the block. As was the case with Dr. Glasberg, I had heard of
Mahendra’s heart for teaching before this meeting, but the manner in which I heard
is demonstrative of the deep but often unappreciated interconnectedness that I’ve
mentioned.
My first week in Calgary, Saima virtually introduced me to two of the “nodes”
in the local food activism scene—Kris Vester and Paul Hughes. Paul and I had
discussed collaborating to plan a permaculture makeover for the Uxbridge property.
To develop the garden, he put me in touch with Calgary Food Policy Council’s
Donations Coordinator, who provided me with some sprouted edibles discarded
from the plant section of some local box store locations. Her husband, Ian McNairn,
an educator and aspiring M.D./Anthropology Ph.D., told me of a Gandhian-trained
ethicist and his wife—also both educators—with whom they used to live and to
whom he thought I’d enjoy speaking. (To complete this particular pedagogical circle,
I arranged a meeting between Dr. Glasberg and Mahendra to discuss, interestingly
enough, the implications of their heterodox views on the implications of philosophy
of physics for human connectivity.) Mahendra and family became dear friends and
now reside at 2248, where their expertise in vegetable and herb growing and
cooking will be yet another asset in the Bike Root and Calgary Center for Global
Community’s related projects of community knowledge exchange and
empowerment.
On the topic of knowledge exchange, late in my stay, I was fortunate to
participate in two intensive summer courses: the Consortium’s annual class in
peacebuilding and social justice taught by Dr. Thomas Turay, and Mahendra’s
“jeevan vidya” workshop on coexistentialist philosophy, emphasizing the tangible
connection between realizing peace in oneself and relationships, and building a
peaceful world. Having never taken a formal course in peace studies, nor having
found a satisfactory basis for universal cosmopolitan values, both were hugely
helpful in providing insights into a field in which I hope to contribute further,
including through the dissertation project. There is only room enough here to say
that although I might be less clear that just war principles need to be vindicated to
the public at large, I am comforted by the fact that in my many conversations, these
principles seem to largely align with peoples’ intuitions about justice. One must only
thoughtfully demonstrate how everyday (e.g. consumer) choices align with these
intuitions or not, and if not, how the “collective action problem” of others’
thoughtlessness does not present an insurmountable barrier the change we desire.
Thus, my emphasis in the dissertation has shifted to exploring the normative
significance of both these intuitions, and of academic and activist criticism of
them—a vindication of the power of authentic democracy over traditional loci of
power to effect global justice.
Being a student again gave me wonderful perspective on how I wish to
further develop my own teaching style. It helped me identify a set of ideas and
methods that might better reach the powerful and powerless, the right and the left,
and, crucially, facilitate communication between them over shared values. In brief, it
is a holistic way of conceiving the relationship between the various types of peace,
from inner/personal/spiritual, to interpersonal/relational/familial, to national and
international. Arguments about aggression and violence are conflict-centric,
focusing unduly on the “bio-psycho-social” or historical/political matrices at the
expense of positive ways of understanding and promoting peace and justice in
communities; they are systemic versus ecosystemic.
As is evident in this summary, although some of the most gratifying and
instructive aspects of my experience as a Clark research fellow were, technically
speaking, extracurricular, they were not fundamentally distinct from the thrust of
the Consortium’s aim of building peace and social justice in their community and
abroad. My education came from myriad sources: observing the surprising
similarities between white Canadians’ way of navigating the multicultural society
and first nations tribespersons struggles to forge identity; becoming acquainted
with members of the subcontinent’s marvelously diverse diaspora such as the
Ismaili Muslim community and their role at the vanguard of religious and political
pluralism; and listening to leaders of local and regional movements in food and
transportation policy reform. I am humbled to have played some small part in
helping strengthen alliances between these seemingly disparate groups and can act
again as an emissary, painting with words the colorful life of our neighbors in the
Great North. In each case, it was the Consortium that introduced me to the key
actors and/or gave me the platform for initiating contact. It is my hope that these
seeds will too be cultivated long after my departure, that the Consortium—soon-tobe Institute—for Peace Studies, University, and city of Calgary might all benefit from
their civic fruit, and that I might soon return with something new to teach and learn.