The Transformation Project focuses on communicatively transforming lives and relationships at all levels of human interaction. We are a consortium of faculty, students, and community members who seek to discover and promote creative change processes that encourage healthy communication patterns, collaborative group behavior, and equitable forms of social organization. Our work centers on harnessing the energy and urgency inherent in problematic situations and directing it toward empowering individuals, nurturing relationships, enriching organizations, and cultivating community.
To accomplish our mission, we engage in activities such as:
- Sponsoring meetings that bring together scholars and practitioners to address strategies for creating change;
- Conducting research, teaching courses, and leading workshops, that focus on transformative communication;
- Organizing community events to promote civil dialogue;
- Facilitating dialogue and peacebuilding with groups in conflict;
- Partnering with indigenous communities to promote sustainable development;
- Working with organizations to create compassion, resilience, and generosity;
- Exploring issues of emotion, stress, and burnout, emotional abuse, and bullying;
- Investigating how we understand and construct our gendered/raced/aged identities;
- Engaging with task forces on topics such as sexual harassment and workplace bullying;
- Creating educational and training material on work-life balance, the division of household labor, and the economy of gratitude.
Teaching, Research and Application
- Both undergraduate as well as graduate courses on transformative communication are offered across the discipline, including seminars in interpersonal conflict communication, group facilitation, and leadership.
- Faculty have combined quantitative and qualitative methods (including conversational and observational analyses, experimental designs, and suveys) to author scholarly research articles and chapters that address a variety of issues related to conflict and its transformation, including competent management of conflict, abuse in marriage, promoting peace in Cyprus, workplace bullying, interpersonal stress, and counteracting aggressive driving and road rage. See more in Media, White Papers, & Publications.
- Associates have also applied their research and expertise to valley communities, including: (1) training workshops for public and private employees; (2) facilitation and mediation of conflict between people and groups (including a partnership with Stand-Up for Kids, a Phoenix shelter that provides assistance to adolescents); (3) conferences on conflict transformation that include both researchers and practitioners; and (4) public presentations on conflict transformation. See more in Transformation Project Associates.