Bringing It to the Table
ROLE
RESEARCHER
ILLUSTRATOR
WRITER
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
TEAM
EMMA VENDETTA REIMERS
LAURA FITTZ PARKS
Bringing It to the Table is a guide for White allies who want to build bridges within their families and friendships, especially at holidays. Through an imagined family and conversations at their gathering, readers gain linguistic tools and scripts for similar situations and learn how to bravely navigate difficult conversations with family over the winter holiday season.
TIMELINE
1 WEEK
YEAR
MAY 2021
Problem Space
White families are often White echo chambers. The winter holiday season is often a time when conversations about politics and religion (and other topics of disagreement) emerge. We need tools to help us build bridges with our families around topics of equity and diversity.
Project Goals
take responsibility for educating our White friends and family on equity and diversity
provide realistic conversational scenarios to prepare readers for charged holiday interactions
demonstrate self-care and healthy boundaries in difficult conversations with families of origin
leverage critical race theory and intersectional approaches to inform our product
Collaborators
Laura focuses on diversity, equity, and justice in public education. Her work has guided student leaders through award-winning restorative justice practices.
Dr. Emma Vendetta Reimers
My research centers adult learners interactions with sound and mixed media in order to increase empathy. I work on topics related to race, gender, equity, literacy, and place-making.
Research Question
How can we model adaptive conversational tools for White people to use to navigate challenging and disagreeing conversations while advocating for racial, gender, health, and other forms of justice?
Design Process
We took our own experiences with difficult conversations with family in the past and our learning from critical race studies and paired them to imagine ways to help us bravely navigate real-life scenarios with our families.
Working together, we created characters to represent caricatures of both people in our families as well as caricatures of people we’d imagine being at other family tables over the holidays. We then imagined the sort of conversations that would organically arise at those family tables, and we then imagined how the Bridge Builder would navigate these conversations.
You will notice that the Bridge Builder has just as many—if not more—questions than answers. We conceived our role in these conversations not to be as the “knowledge keeper,” but instead to be a facilitator of listening and learning.
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1
Develop outline.
2
Create characters for imagined family.
3
Illustrate the characters, write the copy, and design booklet for e-publication.
eBOOK
Now it’s your turn! Download the conversation guide and use it at your own table.