Faculty Focus: Associate Professor and Director of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Jill Stauffer

Haverford has a long history of graduating world-changers steeped in a culture of collaboration, consensus-building, and compromise for the greater good. From the Honor Code, to student-life policies, to participation in governance committees - they even have a place at the table set by the Board of Managers — students acquire the lived experience of constructive engagement across difference and through conflict.

When it comes to examining such issues through an academic lens, no Haverford program does more to prepare and empower students than the concentration in Peace, Justice, and Human Rights.

Program Director and Associate Professor Jill Stauffer created the program as an opportunity for students to gain insight into a wide range of issues, while helping them develop an aptitude for communicating and collaborating with peers—and audiences in the wider world—whose disciplinary language, values, and methodological concerns may differ from their own.

Stauffer's research and scholarship focuses on human communication about justice, recovery from violence, restorative approaches to addressing harm, international law as a form of cooperation or of domination, and "settler colonial silences"—the way those of us who dwell on stolen land aren’t taught to see the lingering effects of the theft and unjust treatment that made the present moment possible, nor are we taught to see that these injustices haven’t ended but rather continue in new forms. She sees the work as fundamentally concerned with listening in order to better understand where others are coming from. When we become more aware of the many ways we may be failing to hear well what others are saying, she says, it gets us closer to being able to understand what really needs to be done in the wake of injustice, so that we stop acting only on existing solutions that may not really be working. For instance, you’d think that post-genocide trials of perpetrators, or truth commissions that take survivor testimony, would be ideal places for hearing. But in her book Ethical Loneliness she shows how various factors like training, cultural assumptions, ideas about how the world ought to work, even an instinct to protect the self from another’s trauma, can get in the way, leaving people who are trying to listen incapable of truly hearing. The book includes stories such as that of a Holocaust survivor speaking for an archive of testimony, faced with interviewers who want to hear the story of resilience she wants to tell but not the one about the parts of her that did not survive; a survivor of police torture in South Africa who wants to tell a story of his heroism, but whose testimony is reduced only to suffering by academic interpreters; a woman testifying before a truth commission who seeks to tell a complex story of harm and disrespect whose story is received only as a rape story; prisoners in solitary confinement whose removal from human interaction renders them incapable of knowing what is real; and many others.

Crucially, a process that addresses this very human failing requires a willingness to accept our own role in failures to connect. "We're all approaching how we see the world with frames that we've inherited," she notes. "Getting better at seeing that makes us more sensitive to being able to break our frames and find, at times, that we are the problem–it’s us who are not hearing well, despite all our good intentions—rather than someone else."

Her scholarship reflects this interest in determining what's required in order to truly understand another's perspective and, with that, promote positive change. As she puts it, “Such change comes less from relying on institutional responses and more with changing how each of us think of our own responsibilities for the worlds we build by inhabiting them as we do. We cannot expect our institutions to be responsive if we ourselves can’t step outside of assumptions we make about the harms we are all implicated in daily, such as the environmental and social impact of mineral extraction that's essential for the tech that's as close as our smartphones, or the fact that in the US we all live on stolen land in one way or another."

"My first book, Ethical Loneliness," she says, has had considerable crossover appeal for general-interest readership since publication by Columbia University Press in 2015. It has been used as a model for the Uluru Statement from the Heart proposed by indigenous groups in Australia, is currently being used as the basis for the design of a new source of quantitative measure for survivors of childhood abuse in Germany, was featured as the title and basis of an essay by Claudia Rankine in her book Just Us, and has been cited as supporting evidence in scholarly papers in linguistics, indigenous studies, nursing, political science, literature, philosophy, and so forth. She gets frequent emails from strangers, most of them not academics, thanking her for writing the book.

"The title is a term that I originated to describe what happens when someone has undergone an experience that has left them abandoned by humanity. Maybe they've endured long standing oppression, or mass violence. And then, on top of that, when they testify about what happened, quite often they still can't get properly heard. Why is that? Why is this double failure so common? The book examines different cases of what you might call 'failed hearing.'"

The lessons she learned in the course of writing that book have helped Stauffer deepen her thinking around how we can overcome obstacles to understanding in order to promote conflict resolution. "I realized that the process of looking at failed hearing is twofold. First, you have to be willing to accept that even if the first solution you come up with might be a good idea, it could be happening within the terms of a system you need to break out of. So then you have to figure out what those systemic structures are, dismantle them, and see what they're keeping you from seeing. Ask yourself: am I bringing the same system along with me, or is there some other way to look at it? Because sometimes you're going to be talking to someone who has inherited different frames."

Stauffer found the field as a "late-bloomer" who was a "language geek" – she studied Greek and Latin – at Berkeley. "I got involved with social justice causes in college but moved into various unrelated jobs before going to grad school at age 29. I wanted to pursue legal studies, thinking that would be the most direct and effective way to integrate my academic and personal interests. But I quickly realized how limited the law can be, and how we rely on it to fix things that it really cannot. So I thought about how we as a society might become more reasonable in our expectations, and accept that the law won't solve every problem. And by reframing that perception – that it's not the law's fault, it's our fault – I started thinking about how that framing can be applied to more generally, and how breakdown in communication leads to conflict."

Indeed, Stauffer says communication is at the heart of her engagement with this material – and her life, generally. "I have always been pretty good at seeing why people aren't understanding each other, and helping smooth that over. I’m not saying that I’m a perfect communicator (I definitely am not), but that when I see two people who are disagreeing because they don’t see that they aren’t talking about the same thing, whether that’s happening at a hangout with friends, in a meeting with other faculty, or in the classroom, I can usually point out in a diplomatic way what the disjunction is between the two views, and how the conversation might move forward more productively. Understanding the ways people argue and what matters to them helps with this—that’s what we do formally in my applied ethics course. And I’ve had many students contact me years later to tell me how much this has helped them in their lives after college, including an alum who was working at the state department under Obama."

Ethical Loneliness is about social abandonment compounded by failure to listen—and one of her main points is that those guilty of this are usually the people trying to do the right things. Her next book pursues a similar line in a different register. Temporal Privilege will be focused on time, and how time can favor certain ways of building worlds. As she puts it, “There tends to be this part of us that receives time as only linear, even though life give us so many other temporal experiences: Some are bodily, like our hormonal cycles, circadian rhythms, growth and healing and aging, or experience of how long things take; some are earthly, like the seasons, and hours of light and darkness; some are useful devices, like clocks and calendars—these save us from the labor of determining time by natural cues (but also may take from us the ability to stay attuned to those natural cues); some temporalities are religious or spiritual, like rituals and sacred days; others are communal or institutional, like weekends, semesters, holidays, renewing your passport, knowledges about when things happen and when they don’t, stories that can only be told at night or at a certain time of year; there’s also generational change, a group form of aging.

"The book aims to get us to see at least two things: (a) the story we Westerner/settlers tell about time is one that has been imposed on many other worlds, and (b) it is a story that could be and is being told very differently—and that has ethical ramifications.” To tell this story, Stauffer is focusing on some legal cases that, if we thought about them as being about time instead of only about law or justice, certain truths get easier to see.

With respect to the classroom, Stauffer says her students have always brought a desire to build a more just and peaceful world. But she has noticed a profound change in their outlook over the course of her Haverford teaching career, which began as a fellow with the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities in 2005.

"Ten, 15 years ago, my students were more like,' I'm going to change the world.' My job was to make sure they understood the complexity of conflict and were careful about their interventions in any given setting. Now, the current generation of students – what with COVID, climate change, growing up with mass-shooter drills – they really need to be encouraged to see that it is possible to change some things, even though it can be hard. Even if it seems impossible. When your world surrounds you with huge, deep, systemic injustice, it is both easy to despair at what role an individual can play and hard to imagine a way forward. I aim to help them see how to begin. Most important: I don’t tell them what to do. I help them open up their thinking so they can see that on their own."

But she finds that all generations of her students tend to approach her applied ethics class with a hope of learning how to win an argument. The arc of their relationship to the material often follows a particular line of engagement. "I tell them that winning is not always winning, because if you win but you haven't actually persuaded someone to agree with you or you have failed at hearing why they think differently, that's not much of a win. They start to realize how difficult conflict resolution can be. And many respond to this by thinking, 'Oh no, I'm a terrible person!' Like they feel that they aren't living up to expectations they have for themselves. But because such disappointment prompts a realization that there's no such thing as ethical purity, it's a valuable, if not essential, step in the learning process. Accepting that we're all – at least those of us who do so in good faith — that we're all doing our best, deciding what we can stand for, and what we won't stand for, every day. It becomes a constant practice."

Whether they take one course or complete the concentration, Stauffer wants students to emerge with a combination of confidence and humility. "And it's funny," she says, "because you'd think sometimes those things would be a tough combination. But if you accept that it's your responsibility to deal with the world you inherited, and that you could make a grave ethical failure at any moment, but you also could make a large or small difference in what it feels like for people around you to live in this world, you are living what it means to be an ethically responsible person."

Ultimately, she sees Peace, Justice, and Human Rights as a vivid, high-impact expression of the liberal arts experience. "It's interdisciplinary by nature and in execution. Students must pull from a lot of different areas of study at once, and be open to having their preconceived thoughts interrupted. They need to be sensitive to what other people think and need, while also holding onto what matters to them. Hopefully, they will emerge as changed citizens of the world."

Given the emphasis on ethical engagement in Haverford's new, strategic plan for 2030, the concentration is likely to be central to Haverford's ambitions for its students as they engage with conflict – be it personal, professional, or societal. Stauffer sees the formal and intentional foregrounding of ethics as a natural next step for a campus that depends upon direct, person-to-person engagement with both day-to-day and broad, institutional matters.

"Confidence and humility. When communication isn't going well, we tend to think that the other person – the person we can't understand – is doing a bad job communicating. But sometimes we are simply not allowing ourselves to be open enough to be surprised by something we didn't expect."