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Master’S Project: Building Practices Of Accountability Capable Of Engaging Harm With Rigorous Interrogation And Love, Sarah Mcilvennie

Rubenstein School Leadership for Sustainability Project Publications

This report discusses a 10-month exploration of how our capacity to hold relational harm with complexity impacts our ability to interrogate systemic harm without discarding parts of ourselves and/or each other. Embedded in this inquiry are dynamics of positionality, privilege, identity, belonging, conditionings, and nervous system regulation. This exploration is shaped by my experience as a white cis-gender woman navigating intimate partner violence with a white cis-gender male police officer in the state of Vermont, between 2018-2020. The methodology of this experiment is grounded in the concept of Witnessing: Courageously being with what is happening without looking away nor needing …