A Conversation with Netta Avineri, the New Executive Director of Middlebury’s Conflict Transformation Collaborative

This summer, Professor Netta Avineri will become the new executive director of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation, taking over the reins from Professor Sarah Stroup.

Funded by a $25 million grant, the initiative’s goal is integrating conflict transformation (CT) knowledge, skills, and dispositions into the Middlebury education. 

An applied linguistic anthropologist, Dr. Avineri joined the faculty of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in 2013. She has led the graduate component of the conflict transformation initiative since its founding, and has chaired the Institute’s Intercultural Competence Committee for the past decade. She emphasizes the importance of building community partnerships through service-learning, which she has done through CoLab and other partnerships.

We caught up with her as she reflected on what the initiative has accomplished so far and what’s next.

How did you come to be interested in conflict transformation?

I grew up in a multilingual, multicultural immigrant home, constantly navigating different languages and cultures. This led me to anthropology, then linguistic anthropology, focusing on heritage languages and their emotional significance. My academic journey at UCLA involved anthropology, applied linguistics, and teaching English to speakers of other languages. 

As a scholar and practitioner focused on language and social change, intercultural communication, and critical community engagement, I have found that the conflict transformation approach connects with all of these areas in generative ways.

What was the genesis of this initiative, and how did you come to get involved?

The vision for the conflict transformation collaborative came from former President Laurie Patton. She brought several colleagues together around the time of COVID and, over many Zoom calls, we outlined the structure, curriculum, audience, and impact. It was wonderful to be engaging in a forward-looking initiative at that strange and difficult time. 

When it was officially launched, President Patton asked me to serve as the collaborative’s graduate director. I worked closely with then–Executive Director Michelle McCauley and the other leads to create an infrastructure for the work. This includes curricular components, faculty and staff training, and integrated work with our research centers and initiatives, as well as an interdisciplinary fellowship program with about 50 fellows each year.

How does this initiative meet the current moment?

We are all experiencing constant change, personally, interpersonally, institutionally, systemically, and globally. There seems to be a hunger for relationship building that fosters a better future. The collaborative fosters the ability to create new relationships and perspectives, allowing people to collectively and creatively imagine novel ways forward. 

We seek to equip students, faculty, and staff with what they need to navigate those dynamics and create constructive futures.

In many cultures, individuals are socialized into the idea that conflict is inherently negative and should be avoided. Sociologist John Paul Lederach asks us: How can conflict be a window? How can we shift this conflict from being destructive to constructive? The initiative funds diverse faculty research projects focused on examining and transforming these dynamics.

How do educators help students build conflict transformation skills? 

The key is multifaceted engagement and enacting an ethos with concrete applications. To build that, students need a holistic approach, including coursework, experiential learning, peer-to-peer discussions, and targeted workshops. This helps them develop a deeper, more integrated understanding. 

Understandably, students may sometimes want to rush into fixing an urgent situation, but we encourage them to slow down. Are they analyzing the conflict? Observing it? Engaging in transformation themselves? Conflicts exist on many levels, from personal to global, and understanding those layers is vital. A core component of this is intercultural competence, which has been a focus for me as chair of the Institute’s Intercultural Competence Committee for the past decade. 

I have learned so much from engaging with Sarah Stroup, current executive director, who constantly seeks to foster students’ and colleagues’ skills to engage meaningfully in critical self-awareness, interpersonal listening, structured dialogue, and generative spaces within the institution. I had a chance to observe the College’s Conflict Transformation Skills class during J-term, where students learn in hands-on ways how to integrate these approaches into their daily lives, their academic journeys, and their professional pathways. Undergraduate students can now go even deeper through the Conflict Transformation Academic Cluster, as well as through experiential learning and global education opportunities. Graduate students can engage in the fellowships, graduate assistantships, coursework, and experiential learning programs.

Learning these skills isn’t about checking a box—it’s about ongoing reflection and iteration. You need to understand the range of tools available—mediation, restorative justice, negotiation, and advocacy—and choose the right one for the context. Just as important is knowing when to step back and recognize that you may not be the right person to take action and instead should depend on collaborators and those who know a community best. Peer-to-peer learning and mentorship are critical to these forms of engagement as well. 

At its core, conflict transformation is about relationship building. I remember in one of our monthly fellows meetings an MA student from the School in France who was studying Molière’s work in relation to conflict connected with an international policy and development student from the Middlebury Institute who was exploring urban spaces as battlegrounds through photography. Despite their different academic backgrounds, they found common ground and shared creative insights.

Experiential learning is a hallmark of a Middlebury education and this initiative especially. What makes it so powerful?

While classroom learning can involve moments of spontaneity, the structure of a syllabus and coursework provides a certain level of predictability. In contrast, experiential learning offers a different kind of emergence.

It’s not just about having an experience—you have to critically reflect on that experience to deepen your understanding. Experiential learning at Middlebury is designed to follow the full learning cycle—preparation, active engagement, and ongoing reflection at both individual and cohort levels. This process is stewarded by skilled educators who can facilitate that. Whether students are speaking with restorative justice practitioners in the United States, peacebuilders in Rwanda, or translators in the Balkans, they are continuously processing and making sense of their experiences.

The collaborative creates spaces where educators, students, administrators and external partners can share good practices, points of tension, and opportunities for collaboration. These conversations are critical to the experiential learning cycle. What’s important is to balance humility and expertise. That’s what allows for meaningful engagement all around.

I collaborate with Dana Anderson for the Middlebury Social Impact Corps program each summer, where students work with a community partner on a project here in Monterey. We have seen how integrating conflict transformation approaches makes the experiential engagement deeper and more meaningful, not only for the students but also for our partner organizations, and community members themselves—for example, in our recent work with Big Sur Land Trust, Blue Zones of Monterey County, and the Civil Rights Office of Monterey County. Recognizing the productive potential of conflict allows for different forms of impact for students and community members alike.

What has been a memorable experience for you personally?

The moments that are punctuating my experience with conflict transformation are where there’s something that happened that nobody could have predicted. When people come with an open heart and an open mind, it allows for new forms of knowledge and new forms of sharing that didn’t exist before. I always note that we should “pay attention to the tension to set intention.” When we have these moments of reflection, meaningful learning happens. 

We had two facilitated discussions around Israel and Gaza for our graduate fellows where I saw students grappling with complexity and every layer of conflict from the internal to interpersonal to global. During one session, we hosted a couple (Israeli wife and Palestinian husband) who shared about their personal lives and their creation of an interfaith school for children. We used this session as an opportunity to workshop curious (vs. persuasive) questions as a CT practice. In a different session, students engaged with a Palestinian man and a Japanese American pastor who discussed the decade-long partnership between a small village in the West Bank and a Methodist church in the Bay Area. In these dialogic spaces, I saw students exploring the emotional components of “conflict analysis” and shifting beyond binary understandings of conflict.

How are faculty integrating conflict transformation into their courses?

We see so much variety and creativity in how colleagues are integrating these approaches into their work across disciplines. Lida Winfield, who teaches in the College’s dance program, brings a background in restorative justice and has been exploring how conflict is embodied in daily life, how our bodies demonstrate conflict, and how we react when engaging in conflict. She’s been able to connect her professional work and conflict transformation and has also become a facilitator for the Engaged Listening Project, which trains students, faculty, and staff in listening and dialogue.

Then at the Middlebury Institute, we have Marie Butcher, who specializes in assisting international students with their oral and written proficiency in English. She has incorporated conflict transformation into her courses using poetry, bringing in guest speakers, and exploring different approaches to teaching English. She also built conflict transformation into an experiential learning course in Costa Rica that she co-led, which explored the UN’s sustainable development goals in action.

Many faculty have found that incorporating new frameworks and readings from conflict transformation into their existing teaching energizes students and enhances their engagement.

What’s next for the initiative?

In the first few years, we have been focused on building a robust infrastructure across Middlebury, integrating coursework, experiential learning opportunities, and partner engagement. We have begun connecting undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff working on conflict transformation across all components of Middlebury. Next, we plan to broaden and deepen our impact through strategic collaborations across higher education and with community partners around the globe. 

For example, we are partnering with George Washington University’s Planet Forward on integrating conflict transformation into their environmental storytelling for change. We will continue to build networks and meaningful opportunities for collaboration through convenings, resource creation, and knowledge sharing. Ultimately, we seek to weave this approach into a holistic Middlebury education and cultivate reciprocal partnerships, collectively envisioning a future full of hope and promise.