Whether looking at divided cities or working with populations on the margins of society, a growing number of engaged academics have reached out to communities around the world to address the practical problems of living with difference. This book explores the challenges and necessities of accommodating difference, however difficult and uncomfortable such accommodation may be. Drawing on fourteen years of theoretical insights and unique pedagogy, CEDAR—Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion—has worked internationally with community leaders, activists, and other partners to take the insights of anthropology out of the classroom and into the world. Rather than addressing conflict by emphasizing what is shared, Living with Difference argues for the centrality of difference in creating community, seeking ways not to overcome or deny differences but to live with and within them in a self-reflective space and practice. This volume also includes a manual for organizers to implement CEDAR’s strategies in their own communities.
Adam B. Seligman is Director of CEDAR and Professor of Religion at Boston University.
Rahel R. Wasserfall is Director of Training and Evaluation for CEDAR and a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
David W. Montgomery is Director of Program Development for CEDAR.
"The authors have the courage as well as the philosophical skills to challenge the sentimentalities designed to help us all to just 'get along.' Instead, they draw on their pedagogical experience to provide an account of how difference can be lived. This fascinating book has the potential to change the discussion about how we might live at peace without the peace achieved occluding our rightly lasting differences."—Stanley Hauerwas, Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University
"Both a work of scholarship of value to the academy and a practical guide for improving intergroup relations. The material is fresh and the work innovative, with new and illuminating insights. I cannot think of a comparable work.”—David Smock, Vice President of the U.S. Institute of Peace
"This book challenges readers to engage intellectual and human experiential resources to acquire empathy and celebrate differences as part of the knowledge of the self. An interdependent and interconnected reality can be realized when we interact with others in fully authentic ways."—Abdulaziz Sachedina, Professor of Islamic Studies at George Mason University
232 pp.6 x 9Illus: 27 b/w photos
9780520284128$19.95|£16.99Paper
Jan 2016