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Season 2 episode 1 of the Resist + Renew podcast (we're back!). In this one, we go over what we think conflict is, why we're focusing on it, and some ways to understand it.
'Conflict is both the spark, the fight, the loud things, the incidents which you notice above the water, but it's also the things that have been going on under the water'
Show notes, links
Our sister facilitation collective Navigate have a conflict facilitation booklet (from back when they were called Seeds For Change Oxford).

As we only briefly touched on the idea of "cancel culture", check out this longer ep from You're Wrong About getting into more depth.

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!

ALI
It's the toolbox again. And as we said, in our teaser, we are gonna do a theme for the whole of the toolbox. And that is conflict. So, in this episode, we are going to talk about framings to help understand conflict. We're going to share our aims of this toolbox for the season, why we're focusing on conflict, how we feel about it, and then we're going to share some frameworks that we find helpful to understanding conflict, and that will shape a lot of the other episodes which are coming up. And we'll, we'll come back and reference those.

But Sami, do you want to start us off by giving us a bit of a framing as to like, What even is conflict?

SAMI
Yeah, we’re, I thought this would be a good thing to start with. I just, I have a memory of a session. Like a training for trainers thing that I attended once, where there was a session on, like, managing conflict, conflict resolution; and someone maybe got 10 minutes in looking really confused. She was like a woman from the Balkans and was like, ‘Why are you talking about just like arguing with each other in like a conflict resolution session?’ Because she thought of it in like a statecraft kind of way. So that, to be clear, that's not what we mean, we're not talking about like wars.

And there's a, there's a description of conflict. And that comes from a person called adrienne maree brown, she’slike a writer, amongst many other things, and facilitator. And, and I think it's quite just like a helpful summary of what conflict is, which is disagreement, difference or argument between people. And, and so when we talk about conflict over the course of this toolbox, that's broadly what we're going to be referring to. So, like, more the like interpersonal, like kind of beef-within-a-group type stuff, less the like, society to war, nation state to nation state, kind of deal.

And so probably makes sense for us to start by talking about, like, why we thought this was a good idea for a podcast. Who would like to start?

KATHERINE
I can start. And so I am interested in conflict, mainly because I'm quite scared of it. And I find it difficult, I avoid it quite a lot.