Building Bridges on Campus: Dialogue and Care...

Headshots of Jenan Mohajir, Linda Tropp, and Rebecca Russo

Venue: Online via Zoom
Date: Thursday, December 14, 2023
Time: 1:30 - 3:00 pm EST/10:30 am - 12:00 pm PST
Price: Free (registration required)

This webinar was held on December 14, 2023. A video recording is below, followed by the original description.

The horrors in Israel and Gaza have ignited heated debates on college campuses across the U.S. How can campus leaders support constructive dialogue and positive cooperation across differences on campus without stoking conflict between groups and exacerbating divides?

In this free 90-minute webinar, the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) and Interfaith America (IA) will offer guidance and evidence-based strategies for bridging differences on college campuses. It will feature the insights of senior leaders from Interfaith America who have decades of experience working in higher education: Rebecca Russo, an American Jew, and Jenan Mohajir, a Muslim American. They will not only provide lessons learned from IA’s work with hundreds of college campuses but also share their personal experiences as interfaith practitioners who have modeled empathy in their own friendship across their cultural and religious differences.

They will be joined by Linda Tropp, Ph.D., the director of the Intergroup Relations and Social Justice Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a leading scholar of intergroup relationships. Dr. Tropp will offer research-based insights on how to have difficult conversations, exploring the complexities and transformative potential of contact and dialogue between members of different groups.

Moderated by Juliana Tafur, the GGSC's Bridging Differences Program Director, the webinar will highlight the critical role of college campuses to serve as bridge-building spaces, equipping campus administrators, faculty, and all advocates of constructive dialogue with tools to cultivate a culture of respect and understanding across differences in these complex times.

Jenan Mohajir is the Vice President of External Affairs at Interfaith America (IA). In her role, Jenan focuses on building strategic relationships and programs with new partners across IA's emerging sectors. Inspired by faith and family to work for change at the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and religion, Jenan has served in leadership for 15 years at IA, where she has trained hundreds of interfaith leaders from diverse backgrounds to foster a vision and practice of civically engaged interfaith leadership. Jenan completed undergraduate work at DePaul University and is pursuing her MA in religious studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. As a natural storyteller, she performs with 2nd Story, Chicago’s premier storytelling company. Jenan proudly lives on the south side of Chicago with her children and loves to collect vintage children’s books.
Rebecca Russo is the Senior Director of Higher Education at Interfaith America (IA), where she oversees IA's higher education strategy, with a particular focus on bridge-building programs and partnering with senior campus administrators. Rebecca has worked with IA since 2014 and sees college campuses as a laboratory where students can deepen and challenge their own worldviews and learn to build relationships across divides. Rebecca has worked in higher education for over a decade, including roles as the Director of Engagement at Northwestern University’s Fiedler Hillel and Executive Director of the Campus Climate Initiative at Hillel International. Rebecca holds a B.A. in Middle East Studies from Brown University and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Rebecca is inspired by her interfaith experiences living in Morocco and Jerusalem, and by the Talmudic concept of “these and those are words of the living God,” to work toward a society where religious diversity is engaged actively and positively.
Linda Tropp, Ph.D., is a professor of social pyschology in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she directs the Intergroup Relations and Social Justice Lab. For more than two decades, she has studied how members of diverse groups experience contact with each other, and how differences in status and power affect cross-group relations. She has worked with national organizations to present relevant research evidence for U.S. Supreme Court cases on racial integration and equity in education. She has also worked on state and nationwide initiatives to promote positive interracial relations and equity in U.S. public schools, and with nongovernmental organizations to evaluate interventions designed to bridge group differences in divided societies. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Tropp has received distinguished research and teaching awards from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the International Society of Political Psychology. Tropp is co-author of When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact and editor of several books, including Moving Beyond Prejudice Reduction: Pathways to Positive Intergroup Relations and Making Research Matter: A Psychologist’s Guide to Public Engagement.
Juliana Tafur is the inaugural director of the Bridging Differences program at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. Her work centers on strengthening social connections across lines of race, religion, culture, politics, and more, fostering a culture of belonging in the United States and beyond. Her responsibilities include: running learning fellowships and trainings to promote positive dialogue, relationships, and understanding across differences; producing multimedia content that widely shares bridge-building skills and inspires change; and facilitating strategic partnerships to expand the depth and breadth of bridge-building work. Juliana is a TEDx speaker, a workshop creator, an award-winning filmmaker, Emmy-nominated senior producer, and a social entrepreneur. She’s an honors graduate of Northwestern University and a 2021-2022 Obama Foundation Scholar at Columbia University.