JANICE M. ELLIOTT, PhD [back to faculty list]

Jan Elliott is a Senior Associate with the Public Policy Forum, a Canadian independent non-profit organization devoted to promoting excellence in government through improved dialogue among business, governments, the voluntary sector, labour and citizens.

She joined the Public Policy Forum as Vice President in 1999 to integrate her public policy experience and doctoral work. Her work involves creating neutral forums and spaces for multisectoral engagement about public issues, often among stakeholders who are deeply divided and with vested interests. An important part of her work has been to actively promote and develop deliberative processes involving the public. An integral aspect of all of these processes involving leaders and ordinary citizens is creating connections to governance and decision-makers at all levels of government in Canada. She designed and implemented the first deliberative poll® involving citizens in Canada and continues to innovate approaches to engage citizens in democracy.

Her work as a scholar-practitioner is dedicated to expanding practices to create a more robust and deliberative democracy. She works actively to advance both the knowledge and practice of public deliberation and dialogue. She is also particularly interested in policy work that creates social innovation. She has authored several articles and publications and sits on a number of public and voluntary sector advisory committees and Boards in Canada.

Jan completed her PhD in Human and Organization Systems in 1997 at The Fielding Graduate University. Her dissertation, "Bridging of differences in dialogic democracy", examined dialogue and deliberative processes involving the public with different, and often opposing, interests regarding public issues. She has a Master's in Education, a Master's in Human and Organization Systems and an Executive MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Prior to joining the Public Policy Forum, she spent much of her career in public policy with the Government of Canada. This experience has made her keenly aware of the importance, and related challenges, of involving the public in defining and achieving the public interest. Her policy experience intersects the social and economic fields, ranging from the social policy framework, to skills development, education and innovation, health care, employment, aboriginal policy, regulatory reform, the third/voluntary sector and the social economy. She also worked in international trade policy for several years where she participated as a member of negotiation teams for the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and the North American Free Trade Agreement. In her years as a senior executive with Finance Canada, she was involved in the development of a number of Canadian federal budget initiatives in areas of social and economic policy.

She currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario, in Canada.

KEITH MELVILLE, PhD [back to faculty list]

Keith Melville, PhD , has been working in the field of public deliberation for more than 20 years. For 16 years, we was senior vice president at Public Agenda Foundation, where he worked with Daniel Yankelovich and others on moving beyond public opinion, helping policymakers understand the public's concerns and perspectives about major issues.

He was one of the founders of the National Issues Forums -- a nationwide network that was started in the early 1980s and is today the largest consortium of community-based deliberative forums. For 15 years, as editorial director and senior writer, he was responsible for the issue books used in the NIF.

He worked with James Fishkin and McNeil-Lehrer Productions on the National Issues Convention held in 2003, and wrote the issue book on America's Role in the World that was used in the NIC. He has framed and helped to write issue books on more than 50 topics.

Dr. Melville has been a faculty mentor in the Fielding Graduate University's program in Human Organization and Development since 1982. Among his recent writings are a chapter about the experience of the National Issues Convention, and a chapter in a new volume (edited by Peter Levine and John Gastil, 2004, Where the Public Meets) about the National Issues Forums, co-authored with Taylor Willingham and John Dedrick. He is an associate at the Kettering Foundation.

W. BARNETT PEARCE, PhD [back to faculty list]

Barnett Pearce is a teacher, facilitator, and theorist. He has consulted with communities and organizations, facilitated public and private meetings, and trained professionals in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. He is a Professor in the School of Human and Organization Development, Fielding Graduate University (www.fielding.edu), a member of the Public Dialogue Consortium, and co-principal of Pearce Associates, Inc.

Known for his work in developing communication theory, he has written seven books and over one hundred scholarly articles and chapters. He was a Senior Visiting Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford University, in 1989, and a Fulbright Fellow in Argentina in 1997. Before joining Fielding Graduate University, he was a member of the faculty at the University of North Dakota, University of Kentucky, University of Massachusetts, and Loyola University Chicago, serving as Department Chair at Massachusetts and Loyola. He was awarded the PhD degree in 1969 by the College of Communication at Ohio University.

Among his publications are:

• Kimberly A. Pearce and W. Barnett Pearce (2001). "The Public Dialogue Consortium's school-wide dialogue process: A communication approach to develop citizenship skills and enhance school climate." Communication Theory, 11, 105-123;
• W. Barnett Pearce (1998), "On Putting Social Justice in the Discipline of Communication and Putting Enriched Concepts of Communication in Social Justice Research and Practice," Journal of Applied Communication Research, 26: 272-278;
• W. Barnett Pearce and Kimberly A. Pearce (2004). "Taking a communication approach to dialogue," in Anderson, R., Baxter, L. & Cissna, K. (Eds.) Dialogue: Theorizing difference in communication, pp. 39-56. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage;
• W. Barnett Pearce (2003), "Civic maturity: Musings about a metaphor." In Peter Park & Robert Silverman (Eds.). Fielding Graduate University Action Research Symposium: Alexandria, Virginia July 23-24, 2001: http://www.fielding.edu/research/ar_papers/Pearce.pdf;
• W. Barnett Pearce (2001), "Toward a National Conversation about Public Issues," in William F. Eadie and Paul E. Nelson (Eds.). The Changing Conversation in America: Lectures from the Smithsonian, pp. 13-38. Sage;
• W. Barnett Pearce and Stephen Littlejohn, Moral Conflict: When Social Worlds Collide. Sage, 1997;
• W. Barnett Pearce, Interpersonal Communication: Making Social Worlds. HarperCollins, 1994;
• Michael Weiler and W. Barnett Pearce, Eds., Reagan and Public Discourse in America. University of Alabama Press, 1991;
• Uma Narula and W. Barnett Pearce, Eds., Cultures, Politics and Research Methods: An International Assessment of Field Research Methods.
  Erlbaum, 1990; and W. Barnett Pearce, Communication and the Human Condition. Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.

HAROLD H. SAUNDERS, PhD [back to faculty list]

Hal Saunders is Director of International Affairs at the Kettering Foundation and Chairman and President of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue (IISD). For twenty years, he worked at the National Security Council (NSC) Staff in the White House (1961-74) or the State Department (1974-81) at the center of U.S. policymaking toward the Middle East and South Asia. Since leaving government in 1981, he has developed and practiced the process of sustained dialogue-a "public peace process"- to transform racial and ethnic conflicts.

Through the IISD, he moderates dialogues among citizens outside government-from the civil war in Tajikistan, the military stalemate in Armenia-Azerbaijan-Nagorno Karabakh, and the deep tensions among Arabs, Europeans, and Americans. He is collaborating with established organizations in South Africa, New Zealand, and the Americas to embed sustained dialogue in their programs. He supports a student-managed network that conducts sustained dialogues to improve relationships on more than a dozen college campuses.

In the State Department, he served last as Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (1978-81). He had been Deputy Assistant Secretary (1974-75) and Director of Intelligence and Research (1975-78). He was a key member of the small US team that mediated five Arab-Israeli agreements (1974-79), including the Kissinger shuttle agreements, the Camp David accords, and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. He helped negotiate the release of US hostages from Tehran in 1981. He received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service-the US Government's highest award for civilian career officers-and the State Department's Distinguished Honor Award.

As a US Air Force lieutenant (1957-59), he served in the Central Intelligence Agency and stayed as an intelligence analyst until he moved to the NSC Staff. From 1981-91, he was a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and then at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

His latest book is A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts (St. Martin's Press, 1999; Palgrave paperback, 2001). He is writing Politics Is about Relationship: Dialogue Makes It Happen-A Paradigm for the Citizens' Century. He has also written The Other Walls: The Arab-Israeli Peace Process in a Global Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1991). He co-authored American Hostages in Iran: The Conduct of a Crisis (Yale University Press, 1985) and co-edited The Middle East in Global Perspective (Westview Press, 1991).

He was a Trustee of Princeton University (1996-2000) and is president of the Class of 1952. He received its "excellence in career" award in 1997. From his Philadelphia secondary school, Germantown Academy, he received its first Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002. He received Search for Common Ground's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.

He has served on the Executive Committee of the university for East-West Security Studies (1982-89) and on the boards of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (1993-1998) and Internews (1999-2001). He serves on the board of Partners for Democratic Change and is a member of the International Negotiation Network at the Carter Presidential Center. He served on the Governing Council of the International Society of Political Psychology, which presented him the 1999 Nevitt Sanford Award for "distinguished professional contributions to political psychology." He has taught international relationships and conflict resolution at George Mason University and The Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Diplomacy and a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

A Philadelphian, he earned an A.B. in English and American Civilization from Princeton (1952) and a PhD in American Studies from Yale (1956). He was awarded a Doctor of Letters by New England College (1999). A former widower (1973-90) with a daughter (Harvard '86, Ph.D Princeton, '02), son (Penn '88, MFA Virginia '97) and three grandchildren, he is married to the former Carol Jones Cruse and has a step-daughter (Randolph-Macon '91). They live in McLean, Virginia. He is an elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and has participated in dialogue between the Roman Catholic and Reformed Churches.

PHILIP D. STEWART, PhD [back to faculty list]

Sustained Dialogue Experience: Since its founding in January 2002, Phil has been a member of the Board of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue. Since 2000, Phil simultaneously has been a Senior Associate at the Kettering Foundation, Dayton Ohio.

As a Board member of IISD, Phil has been an active in the management and conduct of two major dialogues: The Inter-Tajik dialogue and the Dialogue on Nagorno-Karabakh. The Inter-Tajik dialogue began in 1993 as civil war raged throughout Tajikistan, a war that claimed 50,000 lives out of a total Tajik population of only 6.8 million. Phil joined this dialogue in 2000, as he approached mandatory retirement age at Kellogg Europe. Phil today participates in the work of this dialogue as it supports the development of the practice of dialogue throughout the country as a nation-building, democracy-building exercise.

Phil has been a part of the small American team moderating, together with Russian colleagues, the dialogue among Armenians and Azerbaijanis on the deeply-rooted, holocaust-tainted, and frozen conflict among the two nations themselves and the most prominent manifestation of that conflict - Nagorno-Karabakh. Since October 2001, through 6 intensive, 2.5 day rounds of dialogue the moderators have encouraged the participants to bring to the surface the scars, the fears, the threats, the hurts, as well as the aspirations and hopes that lay at the core of the fundamentally broken relationships that constitute the heart of this conflict. While flickers of hope and promises of progress emerge from time to time, this dialogue remains a profound and magnetic challenge to the power of Sustained Dialogue to open people in conflict to a readiness to heal the fractured relationships as the only secure foundation for lasting peace among peoples.

In addition to analyzing and writing about these experiences, Phil co-authors with a Russian colleague, Denis Makarov, an annual paper, using the concept of relationship which forms the core of the theory of Sustained Dialogue, on the U.S. - Russia relationship. The primary data for this analysis comes from dozens of citizen forums held in both Russia and the United States. This paper serves as a primary resource for annual Russian-American policy dialogue on the kinds of relationship their peoples want.

Business Experience: From 1988-1990, Consultant to Kellogg Co. In this role, Phil helped negotiate a joint-venture agreement to create a company and plant in Riga, Latvia to produce and distribute Kellogg cereals throughout the-then Soviet Union.

1990-2001, Phil served first as Director Eastern Europe, Kellogg (Deutschland) GMBH in Bremen, Germany (1990-1993) in which role he oversaw the construction of a plant near Riga, Latvia, and opened all of the major East European markets for Kellogg, building distribution and sales.

1993-2001, Phil served as General Manager, Kellogg Latvia, reporting to the President, Kellogg Europe. In this capacity, Phil bought out the Latvian partners, developed plant production, built a sales, merchandising, and marketing force in the Baltic States and Russia. Prior to the financial collapse of Russia in 1998, Kellogg products could be found from Vladivostok in the East, to Kazakhstan in the south, and throughout European and northern Russia. Phil retired from Kellogg Europe in December 2001.

Academic Experience: 1964-1990, Phil served as Assistant, Associate, and Professor of Political Science, at The Ohio State University, where he taught comparative politics and Soviet politics. Phil received his BA from Northwestern University in 1960, his MA and Russian Area Certificate from Indiana University in 1962. He spent the academic year 1962-1963 as an exchange student at Moscow State University conducting research for his dissertation. Phil completed the PhD degree in 1965 at Indiana University.

Consulting Experience: From 1972-1990, in a consulting capacity, Phil served as the Executive Director of the Dartmouth Conference, the longest-running U.S. - Soviet dialogue. Other consulting experience includes the State of Ohio, the Central Intelligence Agency, The Limited, Inc., and others.

DR. LYNN CARSON [back to faculty list]

Lyn Carson was a local government representative with a regional council (Lismore City Council in eastern Australia) from 1991 to 1995. During that time she developed a particular interest in participatory techniques that can capture voices that are missing from typical community consultation processes. She is now experienced with the design and coordination of public deliberation methods that are highly representative of the entire population.

She has been commissioned by state planning authorities to write various handbooks on innovative consultation methods. In 2001, one of these handbooks, Ideas for Community Consultation, was distributed, by the former Department of Urban Affairs and Planning (DUAP), to all local councils throughout NSW (an Australian state), to assist with the implementation of DUAP’s PlanFirst. Dr. Carson is regarded as an international expert in the field of public participation, having served on an expert panel for the United Nations, participating in the Prime Minister’s Australian 2020 Summit and attending as a distinguished expert the Australian Davos Connection Future Summit in 2008.

Dr. Carson has written extensively on the subject of citizen involvement in policy making.  Her work includes a book, with Brian Martin, on random selection in politics. She has co-authored four handbooks which describe principles and procedures for effective citizen participation (including how to convene citizens’ juries, youth juries and residents’ feedba ck registers or people’s panels). She has also participated in many examples of active democracy—for example Australia's first consensus conference, Australia's first two deliberative polls, a number of citizens' juries and a youth jury, and a combined citizen's panel and televote. She maintains an active democracy website: www.activedemocracy.net

Her doctoral thesis, “How do decision makers in local government respond to public participation?” (1996) was completed while serving as a local government councillor. During this period Lismore City Council completed its award-winning 2020 Strategic Plan. Dr Carson now draws on her local government experience to design and conduct consultation processes. As an associate professor in applied politics with the School of Political and Social Sciences (currently on secondment to the United States Studies Centre), The University of Sydney, she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses about public participation in decision making, and continues to conduct research into aspects of deliberative governance and public engagement in Australia and globally. She is part of a research team which will convene an ambitious experiment in deliberative democracy, a Citizens’ Parliament, in 2009.

DR. KATH FISHER [back to faculty list]

Dr. Kath Fisher divides her time between mentoring and supervising postgraduate students in her role as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Southern Cross University, Australia and working as a consultant facilitator to government and non-government organisations. She has many years experience in facilitation and group processes, especially in community consultation, strategic planning and team-building. She has both a research interest and practical skills in community consultation processes that incorporate deliberative processes, particularly citizens' juries.

Kath has also been a teacher in universities and TAFE for over 30 years in the areas of politics, sociology, economics, participatory democracy, group processes, communication and social research. Her research interests are in deliberative democracy and innovative consultation methods, critical reflection, social activism, community capacity building, and emancipatory education. Her PhD used an emancipatory action research methodology to investigate critically reflective approaches to teaching and demystifying economics.

She has recently co-authored a book for postgraduate students: Organizing and Managing Your Research: a practical guide for postgraduates published by Sage Publications London, 2007 www.scu.edu.au/omyr. Kath has lived on an intentional community for 20 years, which offers ongoing practical experience of participatory decision making and small group processes. Kath can be contacted by email at kath.fisher@scu.edu.au and by phone at +61 2 6620 3473.

DR. LINDA BLONG [back to faculty list]

Linda Blong is a facilitator and project manager whose work is grounded in a commitment to bringing diverse voices into empowering conversation around social issues that affect their lives. She works with organizations and public agencies focused on developing effective and responsive human service systems. Linda specializes in projects aimed at systems change informed by broad based stakeholder input and involving collaborative learning and planning processes. For the past 10 years she has primarily worked with government-funded statewide projects in California focused on improving the lives of individuals with disabilities.