Can a Wall Connect Us?

Nick Longo shares the origin story behind Providence College's “dialogue walls,” a creative public-art tool designed to spark conversations in polarized times. Longo, professor of Global Studies and co-director of the Dialogue, Inclusion, and Democracy Lab, recounts how speaker cancellations and national political controversies pushed him and his students to build proactive spaces where questions—not shouting matches—lead. Longo takes us inside the craft of asking genuinely invitational questions and the challenge of creating nuance in public spaces. Ultimately, he frames dialogue as the “narrow ridge” where curiosity, humility, and real problem-solving begin.

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Transcript

Michael Lee : [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. Why does the last word in an argument feel so important? The recency effect, which is our tendency to remember and overweight recent information. Explains why the ending of a conversation often matters more than everything that came before this memory quirk, first documented by Hering Ebbing House in the 1880s shapes how we experience and remember every disagreement we have.

Think about your last family gathering. Hours of pleasant conversation hopefully can be overshadowed by one tense exchange over dessert. A productive meeting gets remembered as a disaster because of a contentious final five minutes. A relationship that was mostly happy gets defined by how it ended. Our brains don't keep balanced accounts.

They're biased towards whatever happened last. The recency effect makes timing critical in [00:01:00] disagreements. Lawyers know that closing arguments disproportionately influenced juries. Salespeople know that final impressions, seal deals and personal arguments. Whoever speaks last often feels like they won, even if their point was weaker the whole time.

This creates perverse incentives to keep conflicts going. Each person trying to land a last blow. Rather than seeking resolution in ongoing relationships, this recency effect creates cycles of conflict. Today's argument overrides weeks of harmony. Your partner becomes, quote, always critical because they complain this morning for getting yesterday's support.

We live in an eternal present where recent events eclipse patterns. But here's the flip side, the recency effect also means relationships can be repaired more easily than we think. A sincere apology can overwrite an hour of arguing, a gesture can reset the emotional tone ending difficult conversations with affirmation.

This was hard, but I'm glad we're talking about it shapes [00:02:00] both people and how they remember the entire exchange and the relationship. I'm Michael Lee, professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. Today's guest on when we Disagree is Nick Longo. Nick is a professor of Global Studies and the co-director of the Dialogue, inclusion and Democracy Lab at Providence College.

Nick tells an argument story. 

Nick Longo : Well, thanks for having me on Michael. My argument story tells the story of my desire to create space on my campus for constructive dialogue, and it goes back to 2013 and our campus had a speaker coming on to campus. I'm on a Catholic campus and the speaker got canceled.

I was teaching a course at the time, a community organizing course, and my students organized at the same time in the same location that the speaker was scheduled to speak a dialogue on free speech. And for me that that kind of embodied the importance of creating space for dialogue on our campus [00:03:00] and how dialogue might be a way to get past some of the divisiveness and the really complex issues we're dealing with.

So we came up with this idea that we said we need to be proactive. We, we need to think about this stuff before, you know, a speaker gets canceled. So we wanted to put dialogue wall, a dialogue wall in the center of campus. We did some research. We saw that schools like IUPU, I had a democracy plaza. We saw art examples like Candy Chang's before I die.

And so we put together this proposal. We said we wanna have a dialogue wall right in the center of campus. Had so many meetings and what we got was no, you know, it's not possible concerns about you know, folks writing something that's offensive, triggering, and making things worse. So at the end of that academic year, we were kind of where we started.

We felt like we had a good idea, but didn't know how to move forward with it. 

Michael Lee : Could you say more about the context of this 2013 cancellation of the speaker? [00:04:00] Who was it? What were they gonna talk about? And then how, how was that activating for you in the sense that you wanted to do more on campus to create a more inclusive, free speech environment, and then leading into this dialogue wall.

Nick Longo : Yeah, so the speaker was a, a philosopher from university from Michigan, who was gonna speak on gay marriage. And so this was a time where this was, you know, it was still a public debate about whether or not gay marriage should be legalized. Our campus, we, we kind of organized it. We had the speaker coming.

Yes. And then kind of, I think two days before he was supposed to speak, we got a message from the provost that the, the talk was canceled. So, so that kind of led us to like, what are our policies around this? What is our way that we can create space for dialogue? At the end of the year, we kind of felt like we didn't make much progress.

And then a couple years later, so this is where it kind of comes back around a couple years later, we had another national news story, another controversy. 

Michael Lee : Okay. 

Nick Longo : This time it was in the residence hall. [00:05:00] Resident and RA put up a bulletin board that said, you know, marriage is between a man and a woman. And that again became a national news story about whether or not that bulletin board should come down.

So this is kind of over a four year span. We had these two big national news stories where there was controversy in our campus. And so at that time we brought back this idea of a dialogue wall and kind of a, a approach it in a different way. 

Michael Lee : How did you come to the idea of a dialogue wall as a solution to these controversies and more?

Nick Longo : Yeah, so we, I mean, we had this small pilot example, in 2013, a couple of our students organized kind of posters around campus and they asked some questions and they said, you know, what should we be talking about on campus? What does my college degree mean? And it was kind of their capstone project and it, it kind of ignited a bunch of conversations.

So then we did some research and saw these other examples. [00:06:00] We realized that, you know, this isn't gonna be the silver bullet, but this was one potential solution. When we returned to it in 2018, we kind of had two different insights. One was instead of starting with the center of campus, let's start with a pilot example.

And so we used the wall right outside my office and said, Hey, can we start it here? And then the other thing that we did was we said, we're gonna embed this in a course. So it went into a course. There's a course on public art. A group of students helped us come up with guidelines for the wall. And then I was teaching a course the next semester with Quincy Beverly, who's my co-director of the Dialogue Inclusion Democracy Lab.

And we said we will use that course as a way to get the, the first wall started on campus. And in 2018, we got the approval to do it, and we embedded this project in the course. 

Michael Lee : Let me ask a, a really high level question just so I make sure I'm following exactly what this is. What is a dialogue wall?

Nick Longo : Yeah, a dialogue wall. It's a, a board on campus [00:07:00] where folks ask questions. So when we got it approved in 2018, we used a big chalkboard that was well designed by one of our art students. And the thing that we use it for is to ask questions and to create an opportunity for conversation. So the very first question that we asked was what differentiates hate speech from free speech?

And so we wanted that to kind of be the guiding principle of this wall that we were using outside our office. And it was really interesting. We got responses that helped to guide how we thought about these things. We got responses like, you know, I remember in Big Chalk letters one of these students wrote, you know, intentionality versus impact 

Michael Lee : uhhuh, 

Nick Longo : and think about, you know, that's a core principle and, and it kind of brought me to, you know, Martin Boomer talks about this idea of the narrow ridge.

And so the kinds of questions we ask. Can allow us as a community to start being in that narrow ridge, being in that space for dialogue, being in that space for conversation, which is kind of the space between objective truth and [00:08:00] complete subjectivity. It's a space where we're co-creating meeting, and so we use these boards as a space to do that and ask a rotating set of questions.

Michael Lee : Say more about these questions and then I wanna come back to ER's Narrow Ridge. And you, I love that you dropped a subjective versus objective truth in there. We're gonna come back to that. Yeah, of course. Let's flag that and come back to that in just a second. 

Nick Longo : Martin Buber grounds a lot of the work I do.

I I read 'em in graduate school, but they, I mean, so this is, so this is, I, I, these dialogue walls we were talking a lot about, but it's really a project based learning opportunity. Okay. And what I think it does is it helps our students and we have a group of student fellows who come up with the questions.

And what they're learning how to do is to name and frame questions. They're learning to name issues, right? Like, so what do we need to be talking about on our campus and what's timely? And then also once we decide this is an important topic, how do we frame a question in a way that people on all sides of an issue will feel comfortable responding to it?

So the kinds of questions people ask are, you [00:09:00] know, everything from, you know, what does democracy mean to you? Bigger picture questions to like, how do we depolarize our political environment? So really thinking about getting some strategies. We have things like what are your hopes for the year at the beginning of the year?

What's your favorite song or movie? You know, we do things that are topical, like, is sports betting good for people involved? So it's, it's a really a range of questions, but the students in our dialogue, inclusion, democracy Lab, come up with the questions. And they kind of figure out what, what do we need to be talking about?

We try to connect it with issues and things that are happening on campus. And then it gives a public voice to the campus. The campus gets a chance to say, Hey, this is what I think about these issues. We curate the questions. They're often connected with, you know, things that are happening on campus, like speakers.

Mm-hmm. Or kind of a, a decision that needs to be made. 

Michael Lee : There's lots of approaches to this nationally, and of course on campus. Ranging from debates, to dialogues, to conversations, [00:10:00] podcasts like this one. But this is pretty unique. Y'all have gotten a decent amount of attention for the participatory environment that this dialogue wall creates.

Tell me about your, your highest hopes for the dialogue wall and maybe for art as a connection, as a, as a place of connection in a polarized world. And then I wanna transition to say. You know, what hopes did you have that have not been met, or how would you change art generally in terms of connection and then also the dialogue wall specifically.

Nick Longo : And our hopes very much can started as and continues to be to create a culture on campus where people feel like their voice matters. Mm-hmm. Where they can talk across differences, where they can learn to ask questions and they could learn to, you know, appreciate folks who disagree with them and say, Hey, you know, just because we disagree doesn't mean we can't work together to solve a problem.

And so I think we need lots of different tools on our campuses. Public art is one [00:11:00] example. Dialogue Walls are another example. Different kinds of civil discourse programs or other models for doing this. The thing that we've seen with the dialogue walls, which have been success, so we started 2018 outside of our office, and now it's kind of grown to where we have seven different dialogues on walls on campus.

We now have one in the middle of our student center, which was our original goal. And then this, just this year, we opened a new nursing school. The nursing school's a $80 million new building on campus, a big investment. And without even talking to us, they, the design team put a dialogue wall in the center of that new building.

So one of the things I think we're seeing and what we're hoping for is like to change the culture of campus and to make it so that everyone's thinking about how do we use public space to promote dialogue? Mm-hmm. How do we invite students to ask questions and how do we give the community a public voice about things that matter to them?

Michael Lee : One. One thing that you're doing in practice that I'm interested in [00:12:00] very generally is that in this polarized culture where there's this emphasis on dialogue and, and new connections, whether that's in a political space or, or frankly in the dating world, there's been so much attention on having better conversations and even more specifically.

Asking good questions. You have a lot of experience now both asking hopefully good questions, as well as teaching folks to do so in a way that invites engagement on these dialogue walls. So to put it broadly, how do you ask a good question? 

Nick Longo : Yeah. Well, that is a good question. And yeah, I think of as, as an educator, as a facilitator, questions are your default position.

So you've gotta bring curiosity and humility. So I think part of asking a good question is that kind of mindset, but then it's also a skill development. So this is something that we can teach students to do. How do you ask questions where there is an open-ended opportunity for folks to, you know, you're not gonna ask a leading question where it's like, [00:13:00] why don't you agree with the thing that I already think?

Mm-hmm. Right? You're asking a question that invites people to think about things they hadn't thought about before. And then I think the other thing that you ask questions, especially when you're starting a relationship and you're building towards something, is questions that invite stories. Mm-hmm. So I think stories are our connecting point.

So asking questions that ask people to share their stories are a way to find a common ground that gets us to a space that we can then talk about more. Polarized issues. So if you're thinking about something like immigration, let's start with the stories of all of our immigration stories, and then maybe we move towards, after we've built some relationship, I think about, okay, how, what are the policy ramifications?

What do we do about this? But starting with stories. So I think part of the craft of asking questions is thinking about the question as an invitation. And it's an invitation for people to share stories, to explore, to have fun and to co-create. 

Michael Lee : Are there topics that are difficult to ask those [00:14:00] kinds of invitational questions around?

Or is that just a failure of us to be creative in the way that we ask questions? 

Nick Longo : I think there are topics that are more difficult, and I think the, so there's you asked before about the limitation of the dialogue walls. Mm-hmm. I think, 

Michael Lee : yeah, 

Nick Longo : topics like the war and ga. You know, where there's very polarized views where the walls don't always allow for nuance, right?

They don't allow for complexity. So there are certain topics that that doesn't work as well. Topics where there's a really kind of heated in the moment, passions around. Those, it's a lot harder to use those kinds of topics, both on the dialogue wall and in general in, in kind of creating questions for conversation.

So, so there are certainly kinda limits situations for, for dialogue and for question, asking 

Michael Lee : to press on that a bit, you and you were, this comes back to the larger points I wanted to get to what you call the narrow ridge linking to Martin Buber between. Individual stories and our subjective [00:15:00] experience than what you might call objective or factual truth.

And then the limitations, the practical limitations of the wall. And so you mentioned tough, tough spaces for the wall to engender this kind of invitation has space limits. So how if we're inviting, using good questions to invite stories, but the wall functions as more of like a Twitter X in the sense that you can't get your full story out there, then how is that invitation accepted?

Nick Longo : Yeah. Well, we've learned a couple. One of the things is that these kind of interventions work best when they're complimented with like in-person conversations. Mm. So, as one example. Our campus does this series called With Mutual Respect, and it was, it's, it's kind kind of to have the difficult conversations and where we think about different viewpoints.

The first topic was probably the most difficult topic for our campus to talk about was about abortion, right? So we use the walls in that case. To curate questions. What kind of questions should we be asking at this event [00:16:00] to ask the community? So both kind of builds momentum for the event coming up and then curates a set of questions.

And then the event itself is the example of how kind of people can come together and have dialogue across really contentious issues. We've also added on in the fall, we did a follow up to that event, 'cause that event is kind of a panel format. Okay. And then after the panel format, we brought people together.

And had a dialogue at tables where people were talking about the issues. In this case, it was the, the upcoming, it was right before the 2024 election. So, so that's, I I think you need multifaceted approaches, 

Michael Lee : right? 

Nick Longo : And 'cause if you really think about this building a culture of dialogue, you can't just have kind of one approach.

That's how people are gonna intervene. You have to think about how we can do that as a campus and as a community. 

Michael Lee : As we close, let's close on on the high level here and talk about Boomer's Narrow Ridge. Why is that such an important concept for you in this work? 

Nick Longo : Well, I think it, it kind of gets at the [00:17:00] uncertainty that we live in, but then the willingness to kind of step forward in that uncertainty and these difficult things.

I mean, a lot of people wanna avoid disagreements, right? They wanna avoid difficult conversations. It comes up 

Michael Lee : from time to time on this show. What's that? It comes up from time to time on this show. 

Nick Longo : Oh yeah. Yes, exactly. So folks wanna avoid it. So with boomers, I think arguing and what I, what I believe is that we make meaning in dialogue.

We made meaning in relationships and we, when we to do that, we have to kind of put our whole selves in. We have to bring humility and curiosity. And the other thing I think is really important, and I'll, I'll close with this, is. Our initiative is called Conversations for Change, the work we're doing, and ultimately what we're trying to think about is how we have these conversations with each other, talk with people we disagree with, but with the idea that the only way to solve a problem is to talk with those folks we disagree with.

So it's building space for conversation to ultimately [00:18:00] build, have, build solutions, solve problems, and make the world a better place. 

Michael Lee : Nick Longo, thank you so much for coming on when we disagree. 

Nick Longo : Thanks. Very. Thanks for having me, Michael, 

Michael Lee : when we Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee.

Recording and sound engineering by Jesse k and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at When We disagree@gmail.com.