Dr. Morgan Braganza, assistant professor of social work, has published The Caring Encounters Guiding Framework: A Narrative Inquiry-informed Innovative Model for Navigating Diversity in the British Journal of Social Work, one of the leading academic social work journals in the world.
Comprising nearly a decade of research, the article presents a framework for navigating contentious differences, an increasingly complex and relevant area of study.
Braganza’s research explored the question, how can people better interact or engage with people who hold differences that they view as difficult or contentious? She looked at the kinds of differences that tend to provoke negative feelings like fear, distaste or anxiousness.
Referred to as a caring framework, Braganza’s approach involves a number of unique aspects that sets it apart from other frameworks meant to help people navigate diversity. The framework is based on a combination of scholarly literature and the lived experiences of people who hold what research might suggest are examples of contentious differences, including religion and sexual orientation. The framework prioritizes the care and wellbeing of people in interactions.
Braganza’s research was informed by her faith. “Part of my motivation is to live into the biblical imperative to love our neighbours, particularly when they are not like us and we find it hard to engage them. With this said, I didn’t want to just reserve the learnings to a Christian group, because I think the learning can be for anyone. We collectively as humans struggle to engage each other across differences, so I had a motivation rooted in my faith, but I also heard the same motivation–to learn how to better engage people across differences–coming from the participants that I spoke to.
“What I wanted to hear from these [research] participants were things like how they have been treated in interactions on the basis of their identities, how they would like to be treated, and even how they have interacted with other people who hold what they considered to be contentious differences.” Based on their stories, Braganza identified a lot of commonality. She used this research to create a framework that comprises strategies for how to better navigate difficult conversations and coming together across difficult differences.
Part of my motivation is to live into the biblical imperative to love our neighbours, particularly when they are not like us and we find it hard to engage them.
The framework is not intended to be prescriptive. It instead provides broad guidance on what might cause harm and things to bear in mind when navigating differences. “Sometimes what I’ll get asked is, ‘What do I actually say to this person?’ and the framework doesn’t really work like that. Instead, it recognizes that every conversation is going to be unique, every interaction and every person is going to be unique. It actually challenges us to add a little bit of complexity … human beings are complex, so we need flexibility to understand them, how the context in which we are meeting might influence interactions, and their previous experiences.”
As she has shared her research with others, she has found that communities and organizations are searching for new ways to have conversations across differences. After offering an academic presentation, she began to receive requests for training. She has had the opportunity to present this training to a wide variety of audiences including community groups, leadership teams, post-secondary institutions, and most recently, to a public school board. In one training, she describes the result of leaving some time for participants to use the framework with colleagues to engage in difficult conversations across deep differences.
“It was phenomenal. People actually had really rich, deep conversations. They entered with a posture of trepidation … but left having built better relationships and learning about and from each other.”