Page 47 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

car long afterwards because she felt disempowered by her race and gender. An example of implicit

stereotype on the other hand is one that is relatively inaccessible to conscious awareness and/or

control. Even if you say that men and women are equally good at math, it is possible that you

associate math more strongly with men without being actively aware of it. In this case we would

say that definitely you would have an implicit math + men stereotype.

(https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html#faq1)

‘Implicit Bias’ was the topic of the Albany, New York series of Community Conversations

that I have documented and written about as one of the two case-studies I have included for this

dissertation. The other case study observed the Zeidler Center’s facilitation of the Red Blue

(Across the Divide) Milwaukee dialogues sponsored by the Millennium Action Project (MAP).

In this research I explored the experience of engaging in Community Conversations

observing the combined mechanics of group interactions and influences of collective behavior and

disagreement within the context of relating to one another as others are also dealing with these

perceptions in the occurrence of having a civil dialogue in a deliberative process. I have attempted

to model this experience from the openly shared perspective of group participants and facilitators.

In addition to my making informal observations, I interviewed Community Conversation

attendees about their personal experiences to zone in on how it felt to talk during their public

engagement processes. Specifically, the research examined the acknowledgement of conflict (in

the form of tension and disagreement) and considered how it is responded to and addressed among

members of the group. Yankelovich (2001) referred to this sequence of events in group dialogue

as the “working through” (p. 64) process. The term working through is described as a realization

or a shift in direction of dialogue and engagement from one of information and idea sharing to

dialogue that turns to addressing hard issues that can only be resolved by a change in perspective.

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