Queer Reconciliation Across Landscapes
The limitations of the rights-first approach to queer equity, frequent backlash to social policy rooted in ontological fear, and the characteristics that complicate rural life for queer individuals all suggest the need for an alternative to a top-down legal approach to queer equity. Without deemphasizing the necessity for legal protections for queer people, and by recognizing communities as complex adaptive systems, an alternative approach to queer equity would take into consideration the needs of an entire community and from the bottom-up build queer equity by building relationships across differences, separating people from problems, and focusing on positions rather than issues. The hope is that by building relationships within a community, individuals can become more familiar with queer lifestyles and alleviate ontological fear that individuals may experience in response to queer political and social equity. This collaborative intracommunity adaptive mediation process, or Queer Reconciliation Across Landscapes (QuRAL), would bring individuals with oppositional and supportive attitudes towards the queer community together for mediated conversations aimed at building and strengthening queer social equity.
Adaptive Mediation Services
QuRAL is a five-week adaptive mediation program that is intentionally structured to be flexible so that it can better adapt to the specific context and community in which it is being utilized. Each week participants will engage with a topic related to common social institutions: the individual, family, health, work, and faith. QuRAL’s first goal is to fit the needs of the individuals employing it. QuRAL is structured through two guiding principles: relationships are foundational and connections across differences are powerful.
By borrowing from methods described in conflict resolution and management literature, such as separating people from problems, focusing on issues rather than positions, as well as narrative and visual storytelling, QuRAL’s flexibility allows participants themselves to identify the differences, problems, issues, and stories that are important in their community. A more detailed look at the structure of QuRAL can be found here.
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