Dialogue across Difference

The Dialogue across Difference (DaD) Initiative is charged with promoting the development of the tools and mindset needed to engage in productive and respectful conversations with individuals from various backgrounds, cultures, disciplines, and perspectives. In an increasingly diverse and complex world, the ability to engage in meaningful dialogue across differences is both an urgent societal need and essential skill.

Since the 2023-24 AY, the Fiat Lux Seminar Program has partnered with the DaD Initiative to elevate its goals and to contribute to the long-term, sustained effort of bridge-building for the UCLA Community.

These spring quarter Fiat Lux seminars seek to foster a culture of dialogue and to advance kindness and empathy across lines of difference. The seminars have provided faculty and students opportunities to explore difference in either form (e.g., practicing dialogue skills in conversation on controversial topics) and/or content (e.g., exploring different disciplinary or ideological perspectives on a given subject).

Read more about the Dialogue across Difference Initiative.

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Spring 2024 Spring 2025 Spring 2026

Living with Violence Through Feminist Genealogies of Unknowing

Instructor: Wang, Lee Ann

Subject Area: Asian American Studies

Course Description: What does it mean to unknow something? This course explores “unknowing” within the works of feminist of color thinkers, artists, writers, and social movement organizers across racial and ethnic difference, indigenous time and place, and experiences of borders. The focus of this course is to introduce students to literature and creative works that play with “unknowing” as a practice to address gender and sexual violence, racial punishment, finding healing, and building care.

Language, Identity, and Power in the Post-Communist World

Instructor: Shneyder, Vadim

Subject Area: Central and East European Studies

Course Description: Inspired by the power of words to unite and divide, as well as to conquer and liberate, this Fiat Lux seminar explores the interrelationship of language, identity, and power in post-communist European countries. Team-taught by instructors of languages offered by the Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, the course will be based primarily on discussion of assigned readings and multimedia materials.

Writing for Wikipedia: communicating science to a global audience

Instructor: Chen, Irene

Subject Area: Chemical Engineering

Course Description: Advances in science and medicine are made with lightning speed in today’s world. People across the globe turn to Wikipedia to understand increasingly sophisticated concepts and technologies, with over 300 different language versions. This crowd-sourced encyclopedia depends on a diverse base of knowledgeable people to communicate and curate information for others. Join the community of people who write and edit for Wikipedia! This course will introduce you to the mechanics and best practices of being a Wikipedia contributor. Edit, write, translate, review and discuss articles with your peers during our seminar.

Understanding the Autism Spectrum and Neurodiversity

Instructor: Demer, Linda

Subject Area: Disability Studies

Course Description: This course will allow students to explore the differences between individuals on the autism spectrum, known as “neurodiverse,” and those in the general population, known as “neurotypical.” It will include the diverse perspectives of individuals with autism, their families, their educators, medical professionals, therapists, neuroscientists, advocates and attorneys, policy makers, and the media. Special attention will be paid to disparities in the diagnosis, treatment and support of individuals with autism based on race, ethnicity, and language spoken at home. Topics will include differences in: communication, gender identity, relationships, and sensory responses, as well as how these differences affect social opportunities/isolation, employment, human rights, and access to health care and support services. Key figures and concepts in the autism field will be discussed to build a cultural awareness of autism at the interface between disorder and diversity, preparing students to become advocates for inclusion in education, employment, and community life.

Forget the vaccine, give me ivermectin! Dialogue Around Disinformation

Instructor: Macey, Paul

Subject Area: Fiat Lux

Course Description: We explore how to talk with people who hold different views on health treatments, following practical steps. People have different views on covid vaccines and treatments, and telling people they are wrong does not change minds. We may view vaccines as effective and important for friends and family to get, yet struggle to get this view across. If you want to change someone’s mind about a treatment, you need to dialogue. Seek to understand by first asking what they think and why. People will happily tell you they think vaccines are pointless or harmful because research has shown they don’t reduce deaths and have side effects. Ask about the evidence they refer to, and see their perspective. Understand how they came to their view based on that evidence. Next share your viewpoint. You have a different view, but rather than starting with what you think -vaccines work!-start with what is known. The key is to dive into details of the evidence. As you discuss the evidence, maybe diving into scientific facts, you’ll discover that you may both change your views.

Tasting the difference: Terroir, pleasure, and the politics of food and drink

Instructor: Traweek, Sharon

Subject Area: Food Studies

Course Description: Food can build community but exacerbate disparities. We examine how connections between taste and place create ‘differences that make THE difference.’ What makes “excellent” food and wine: geology, climate, vines, barrels, reputation, scientific innovation, folk beliefs? Do such “quests for excellence” exclude certain producers and consumers? Do they promote new tastes from new places? Using academic and public debates about food, drink, and terroir, we consider taste as sensory experiences embedded within scientific, socio-cultural, and industry practices. Through tasting exercises and conversations with invited experts, we explore these five topics:
-Histories and definitions of terroir and taste
-Meanings of “good taste”
-How differences in taste heighten discernment, pleasure, and conviviality, plus anxiety and tension
-Examples of how and why food “connoisseurs” attune to differences
-Implications of cultivating an awareness of the kinds of difference that make a difference and why, in contrast to rankings based on algorithmic averaging of what can be count

Keywords: How Do We Talk about Terms of Contention?

Instructor: Myers, David and Bakhos, Carol

Subject Area: History

Course Description: This seminar will focus on what Raymond Williams calls “keywords” – “strong, difficult and persuasive words in everyday usage.” American political culture has been dominated in recent years by wedge issues -or better, wedge terms such as “critical race theory” or “DEI” -that evoke radically different interpretations and sentiments. Moreover, the aftermath of October 7, 2023, has produced widespread divergence, especially on college campuses, around terms such as Zionism, settler colonialism, and “from the river to the sea.” Each week, the seminar will explore a different keyword-its origins, diverse meanings, and impact. It will also explore the praxis and ethics of conducting a respectful dialogue across difference.

The Principles, Politics, and Poetics of Engaged Dialogue

Instructor: Lal, Vinay

Subject Area: History

Course Description: This seminar is informed by the instructor’s four decades long experience of living between several cultures, the deep study of at least two very distinct civilizations (“Western” and “Indian”), the principles of nonviolence, and the Jaina philosophical idea of anekantavada, that is “the many-sidedness” of perspective. The Jaina doctrine has often been explained by the parable of the six blind men who sought to describe an elephant: all were partially right and all were partially wrong. We will begin the course by discussing what we mean by “dialogue” and entertain some thoughts on the Socratic method and consider some stories and parables from three religious traditions. We will then consider some dialogues on race and the Palestinian-Israel conflict, before moving to consider the role of reflection and not only “listening” but “silence”. This course will argue for the centrality of nonviolence and interculturality in creating the conditions for any meaningful dialogue. In Gandhi’s view, to commit violence is to (falsely) lay claim to the entire truth.

Cultivating Cultural Understanding and Intercultural Competency through Music

Instructor: Chen-Hafteck, Lily

Subject Area: Music

Course Description: Music is an important form of cultural expression. We can learn a lot about a culture through its music. A number of research studies have shown that music has the capacity to promote empathy and cultural understanding.

In this course, we will discover the relationship between music and culture, and learn about the research literature on the effects of music on developing cultural understanding and positive racial attitude. Students will also explore their own musical and cultural backgrounds through research and reflections, and share them with the class. All students in the class will become a community of learners who will learn from each other and develop understanding of each others’ music and cultures. This will foster intercultural competence and dialogue across cultural differences among students of the class.

The class will meet on Friday 1.00-2.50 on 4/5, 4/12, 4/19, 4/26 and 5/3.

Radical Disagreement

Instructor: Lohmann, Susanne

Subject Area: Political Science

Course Description: This course explores why we disagree, and can’t agree to disagree. The approach is applied and empirical relying as it does on case studies and game play data.

We shall cover normative disagreement between and within ethical frameworks: utilitarianism, rights, justice-fairness, and virtue ethics; effective altruism vs. effective accelerationism.

We shall study theories of disagreement, such as evolutionary psychology, cultural theory, world values, systems theory, and the nature of belief systems in the mass public and in expert systems.

We shall explore types of disagreement: moral; political and party-political; religious and spiritual; between men and women; intra-cultural and cross-cultural; generational; expert-expert and expert-lay; insider-outsider, center-periphery, cosmopolitan-parochial, and urban-rural; premodern, modern, and anti-modern; scientific and conspiratorial; and meta-ethical.

The last class session will feature a conflict-resolution simulation with student groups representing the Israeli and Palestinian positions.

Treat Yo’self: Examining Evidence Behind Modern Self-Care Movement

Instructor: Callaghan, Bridget

Subject Area: Psychology

Course Description: Generation Z are looking after their health with greater intent than any previous generation. From tailored diets, daily workout routines, and meditation practice, to therapy, life coaches, and spiritual guides; today self-care is a $10 billion industry.

Where did self-care come from and does it actually improve wellness?

In this Fiat Lux seminar, we will explore the history behind the modern self-care movement, from ancient practices to Western medicine, through the American civil rights and women’s liberation movements, to current incarnations such as the Goop Empire. Using case examples, we will assess the evidence behind several self-care trends, and try them out for ourselves along the way.

Assessments will include class participation, engagement in a self-care practice for a week, and a short reflective essay. Classes will meet for 2 hours a week for the first five weeks of the Spring quarter (weeks 1-5).

Elite Capture: Rethinking Identity and Power

Instructor: Laura Chavez-Moreno

Subject Area: Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Course Description: Explore how identity politics-intended to challenge power-can be co-opted by elites to maintain the status quo. This seminar centers on Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s acclaimed book “Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics”, which examines key concepts like power, justice, and collective action. Together, we will discuss how identity is used, misused, and understood in contemporary movements. Engage with timely debates on social change, deepen your understanding of identity politics, and reflect on how these ideas shape your role in creating equitable futures. Join us for a critical and conversational space to unpack power, privilege, and possibilities.

Forget the vaccine, give me ivermectin! Dialogue Around Disinformation

Instructor: Paul Macey

Subject Area: Nursing

Dialogue across Difference: Why and How?

Instructor: David N. Myers

Subject Area: History

Course Description: This Fiat Lux course will explore diverse approaches to dialogue and bridge-building. Each class session will focus on different tools, strategies, approaches, and challenges necessary to meeting the declared goals. It will also feature a guest with real life experience who will provide students with a taste of that framework, approach, or skill. And there will also be an opportunity in each session to practice the skill discussed that day.

Brain, the Final Frontier: Communicating the Secrets of Our Inner Cosmos

Instructor: Stephanie White

Subject Area: Integrative Biology and Physiology

Course Description: Welcome to “Brain, the Final Frontier: Communicating the Secrets of Our Inner Cosmos.” This 10-week seminar dives into effectively communicating about neuroscience to the public. Students are invited to explore the intricate workings of the brain and develop skills necessary to share these fascinating insights with non-experts. Students will participate in discussions with guest speakers from the fields of neuroscience, policy, and public outreach, and hands-on activities designed to enhance their understanding of both neuroscience and the principles of effective communication. Key topics include crafting compelling narratives, understanding audience perspectives, and using multimedia tools to make neuroscience both accessible and engaging. Students will undertake science communication projects to demystify scientific jargon and present complex ideas through storytelling. By the end of this course, participants will be equipped to bridge the gap between scientific communities and the public, fostering greater awareness and appreciation for brain science.

Going Beyond Empathy: Emotional Connections in Diverse Relationships

Instructor: Lene Levy-Storms

Subject Area: Social Welfare

Course Description: Ample research reveals insights into “mother/infant” and “romantic” positive emotional connections, but what about other types of relationships like father/child, siblings, friend, workplace, sports, or online? Within these relationships, how does the topic influence positive and negative emotional connections? This course will explore empathy as a basis for emotional connections in different types of relationships across different topics, including but not limited to social, political, cultural, historical, and scientific issues, but engage students in experiential learning to see what occurs when two people can go beyond empathy to form positive or negative emotional connections. To accomplish this purpose, students will read a 2019 book about empathy and engage in biweekly reflections of their own relational experiences outside of class having or not having positive or negative emotional connections with different people about different topics in their lives. After an overview of key concepts, subsequent sessions will discuss each of the chapters. The final two-hour session, students will present to the class a synopsis of their out-of-class experiences with emotional connections including both positive and negative ones.

Colliding Perspectives: Navigating Debates over Sex and Gender

Instructor: Abigail Saguy

Subject Area: Sociology

Course Description: Is gender a system of inequality that should be abolished? Alternatively, is it a social identity that should be celebrated? Should gender identity-one’s internal sense of being a man, woman, or neither/both-replace birth sex in the law and in society? Or are there situations in which birth sex remains relevant? Can we acknowledge the importance of birth sex in certain situations without causing harm to transgender people? This Fiat Lux addresses these questions and helps students build the skills and courage to discuss them with people who hold different perspectives. This class will not teach students how to think about or discuss these issues. Rather, it offers analytical tools and skills that will help them better understand, navigate, and discuss some of the most crucial and fraught topics of our time.

The Post-AI Slow Classroom: Re-Imagining Learning, Thinking, and Creativity

Instructor: Cindy Nguyen

Subject Area: Information Studies, Digital Humanities Program, and Asian Languages & Culture

Course Description: In 1926 Henry Ford famously declared that technological advancement would liberate humanity from drudgery and tedious labor, creating time for leisure, art, and play. In past history, similar ‘dreams’ were promised by global communications, automation, the internet, and now AI. As research and news reports already expose, the ‘liberation’ of human potential comes at the expense of exploitative labor exported to other parts of the world and the extraction of natural resources. Furthermore, AI has completely shifted the knowledge and creative industry, homogenizing culture, shifting language and writing practices, and changing human thinking. The time that was usually dedicated to ‘tedious’ work (searching for answers, thinking about questions, struggling through a writing or creative prompt) are the moments in which creativity and entrepreneurship happens. This fiat lux confronts the contradiction of AI liberation and human creativity, by taking the classroom as a space for re-imaginination of how to learn, think, and be creative in a post-AI world.

Forget the vaccine, give me ivermectin! Dialogue Around Disinformation

Instructor: Paul Macey

Subject Area: Nursing

The New Book Banning: Restricting the Freedom to Read

Instructor: George Dutton

Subject Area: Asian Languages and Cultures

Course Description: The past five years has seen an explosion in book banning across the United States. Right-wing parent groups, backed by conservative school boards and legislatures have targeted books in both school and public libraries, while also going after books in school curricula from elementary school into higher education. This course examines this surge in book banning and focuses on how anti-book activists have especially targeted books by and about people of color as well as members of the LGBTQ+ community. The course explores the motivations driving book banning, the nature of the books being banned, the diverse ways in which they are being banned and restricted, and the range of responses by authors, librarians, teachers, and activists. It contrasts current book banning movements with older efforts to restrict books, and considers how book bans harm students by narrowing the diverse representation that is available to them.

Films of Rebellion and Resistance

Instructor: Celine Parrenas Shimizu

Subject Area: Film, Television and Digital Media

Course Description: Course examines filmmaking of resistance by Third Cinema-a global film movement rooted in the national liberation struggles of the Global South in the 1960s and the LA Rebellion- a UCLA-based movement that transformed American cinema and higher education in the 1970s and 1980s. We will identify and interrogate the socially impactful filmmaking philosophy practiced at the highest levels of aesthetic innovation, and situate our discussion in history and the legacy inherited by filmmakers working at UCLA today. We will also investigate the television series RESERVATION DOGS to interrogate how it ripples from these two cinema and social action movements. As part of the Dialogue Across Difference initiative, the course will promote the development of media and institutional literacy in building bridges across communities. These movements encouraged accountability to communities of a diverse and culturally abundant Los Angeles and collective filmmaking where we learn about each other in order to feel for and include each other.

Care, Meaning, and Solidarity in Medical Practice: The Relational Act

Instructor: Mario Deng and Federica Rala

Subject Area: Medicine; Education

Course Description: The course explores care as a shared human practice of meaning-making and solidarity, especially in situations marked by illness, uncertainty, and vulnerability. We engage with recorded medical encounters involving patients, families, and clinicians as they navigate what is happening in relation to themselves and to one another. We examine how illness, responsibility, and presence are felt and negotiated; how practitioners come to understand who they are in moments that matter; and how teaching and learning are woven into everyday acts of care. Centered Relational Medicine’s Relational Act core concept, the course explores care, personhood, and intersubjectivity in the uneven relationships of high-tech medical practice. Students reflect on listening to the Other as someone who always exceeds our understanding, cultivating humility, embracing difference, and solidarity. The course also serves as an entry point into WeCREATE a community-school-university partnership where interested students may continue through collaborative research, and community-based work.

Disability in Broadway Musicals

Instructor: Ray Knapp

Subject Area: Musicology, Disability Studies, and Humanities

Course Description: We will survey some of the Broadway musical’s engagements with disability, as a theme, in representation and embodiment, and in terms of practices. Possible focuses include Deaf West Theater’s productions of Big River and Spring Awakening, Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma!, The Music Man, and several musicals dealing with neurodiversity directly, including Next to Normal, Light in the Piazza, and Man of La Mancha.

Is Aging Good, Bad, Happy, or Sad?

Instructor: Yeonsu Song

Subject Area: Nursing

Course Description: This seminar invites students into an open, interactive conversation about what “aging” really means in today’s world. Aging is just not getting old. It begins the moment we are born and continues throughout our lives. How do we think about aging, happiness, success, and challenges as people grow older, and why do these ideas matter to all of us, regardless of age? In a rapidly changing society shaped by social change, technology, and global events, our views of aging are evolving. Each week, we will explore aging from a different perspective, such as social and political life, psychology, economics, and the environment (e.g., natural disasters), and technology. Through discussion, short readings or videos, and real-life examples, students will examine key issues faced by older adults and consider creative, innovative ways to address them. By end of the seminar, students will reflect on their own beliefs about aging, how these beliefs have changed, and how younger generations can contribute to a more resilient and age-inclusive society.

So Let’s Talk about Caste

Instructor: Gyanam Mahajan

Subject Area: Asian Languages and Cultures

Course Description: The goal of this seminar on Caste is to raise critical awareness of the social inequities arising from systemic discrimination in South Asia and the US. Aim of seminar is to facilitate dialogue across different campus communities by focusing on caste in South Asia with race in the US using Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, 2020. Seminar goal is to conscientize student understanding through dialogue the oppression of Caste apartheid. Course will also study works of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar and his role in trying to establish an egalitarian society in India. Course will compare discrimination issues in India and the US and study Constitutional protections and remedial actions in the two countries. California state which has recognized caste as a special category under anti-discrimination laws and course will discuss the current status of the bill that passed but was later vetoed by the Governor. This seminar will provide students an opportunity to reflect on their own experiences and action.

Body language in the justice system: From pseudoscience to conversation analysis

Instructor: Giovanni Rossi

Subject Area: Sociology

Course Description: Popular culture routinely claims that body language “gives us away”; that liars avert their gaze, nervous suspects fidget, and truthful witnesses appear calm and confident. These ideas are not just entertainment: they shape how law enforcement and legal professionals make judgments about suspicion, credibility, and guilt. This seminar critically examines such claims by distinguishing pseudoscientific approaches to body language from scientific research on communication and social interaction. We consider eye gaze, facial expressions, head movements, gestures, and body posture, while emphasizing why the study of nonverbal conduct requires situating it within conversational and social structure. Empirically, the seminar centers on two areas of the justice system: policing and courtroom trials, with a focus on suspect interrogations, traffic or street stops, and witness examination in court. Students are engaged and guided in audiovisual analysis of interaction across these settings.