“Many people associate ambivalence with things like indecision, confusion, contradiction,” says Cecilia Morales, member of the Ambivalence Project, a Collaboratory Project Grant team. In contrast, she says, their project sees ambivalence “as a productive emotional state” that is associated with “nuance, flexibility, empathy, or resiliency.”
With that core understanding in mind, the Ambivalence Project is at work on a comprehensive resource to put theory into practice: an Ambivalence Toolkit.
Leading the toolkit’s working group is Lisa Harris (MD, PhD), who explains that their aim “is to make the conceptual and theoretical work we are doing as a team practical and applicable in real world work.”
Harris continues, “While academic life is wonderful, it’s common to ask if what we are doing in our scholarly life can make a difference in day-to-day social life. The toolkit is our effort to bridge academic and advocacy work.”
The toolkit’s recommendations, says Morales, “will be centered on helping advocates recognize ambivalence in their various audiences — as well as in themselves — and in a sense ‘lean into’ that ambivalence, rather than seeking to resolve it or bypass it, which is what many traditional political campaigns do.”
Advocacy work is the guiding purpose of the toolkit. “The toolkit needs to be grounded in the perspectives and professional experiences of advocates who do the actual work,” adds Morales, a full time staff member at the Ginsberg Center. “We spent a lot of time early in the project imagining an audience for the toolkit, and then we realized that we needed an actual audience that we could be in regular conversation with. So, with the help of the Ginsberg Center’s match-making process, we recruited eight community partners to serve on an Advocate Advisory Board.”
Team member Eshe Sherley (PhD student in history) adds that the toolkit will serve as “a guide for advocates, organizers, and activists on how to engage with audiences that might be ambivalent toward their policy goals.” Says Sherley, “the toolkit will help potential constituents or potential supporters to not let ambivalence get in the way of supporting their organizations’ causes.”