Montessori meeting: connecting in times of division

Connecting in times of division

About 200 years ago, the German scientist and explorer Alexander Humboldt made a long journey through North and South America. Humboldt was very impressed by the grandeur and splendor of nature and while observing he discovered that nature is an enormously complex system in which everything reacts to everything because everything is related to everything. Today, we are once again aware of how dependent we are on our living environment, on nature. At the same time, we no longer know very well how we could shape that dependence in a way that contributes to the well-being of all living things. In this meeting, Noelle will take a closer look at different dependencies that are at play and how to deal with them.

About the speaker:

Noelle Aarts is professor Socio-Ecological Interactions. Focusing on conversations between people in different contexts, she studies inter-human processes and communication for creating space for sustainable change. She has published on several topics, such as framing of complex and contested life science issues, conflict and negotiation in the domain of nature and land use, dealing with paradoxes, ambiguity and ambivalence, and network building and self-organization for regional innovation and healthy landscapes.

The starting point of Noelle Aarts’ work is the self-organizing capacity of people, constructed and expressed in the conversations they have and the stories they share. Structures arise from people excluding and including other people, resulting in more or less desired developments and changes.

Noelle Aarts is one of the directors of the ‘Centrum voor Dialoog’ (CVD).