Frank Dukes
Education
BA University of Virginia; MS and PhD., George Mason University
Biography
I help groups address complex public problems and conflicts in ways that strengthen communities and organizations when other forces are pushing them apart. Each year I work on a dozen or so collaborative change projects involving environment and land use, water, historic landscapes, community development, education, and health. I also have intensified my emphasis on race and equity, including work within UVA as well as outside the University.
The bulk of my work involves equitable collaboration - work that emphasizes relationship and that is trauma-informed, inclusive, responsive, truth-seeking, deliberative, and adaptive to organizational and community needs and circumstances.
My teaching integrates knowledge developed over 30 years of my own and my colleagues' practice as well as that offered in academic literature. My teaching takes place through courses, class and community presentations, independent studies and intern mentoring, and professional training. I help students and others develop the knowledge, skills and critical thinking to be successful at helping shape their built and natural environments in ways that are healthy, resilient, and sustainable ecologically, socially and economically. I also emphasize the need for self-directed learning with students becoming increasingly responsible for their own learning during a semester’s course.
As a mediator and facilitator, I seek to help communities address complex problems and conflicts in ways that build community resilience and that strengthen organizations. My work fits within one of three broad categories: building knowledge; building capacity; and building sustainable solutions. Underlying all of the work is a commitment to justice and equity.
In recent years I have gravitated towards two geographic areas of focus. These are the coalfields of Appalachia and the Chesapeake Bay watershed. I also am working on a number of projects involving the transformation of historic sites and communities, including founding UCARE (University & Community Action for Racial Equity), serving on the design team of UVA's Memorial to Enslaved Laborer, serving as co-facilitator of Africatown's (Mobile, Alabama) Heritage Preservation Foundation, and more.
My discipline is that of those who seek to find ways to inhabit our spaces in healthy relationship with one another and with the environment that sustains and inspires us. I am a designer not of things but of equitable collaborative change processes.
Equitable collaboration focuses on relationships and is trauma-informed, inclusive, responsive, truth-seeking, deliberative, and adaptive to organizational and community needs and circumstances. When done well, equitable collaboration can promote new understanding, generate innovation, build connections and social capital, promote individual and collective growth, foster healing and reconciliation, and build legitimacy for actions.
Classes taught include collaborative planning for sustainability, environmental conflict resolution, mediation, consensus building, public and community involvement, comparative aspects of violence and non-violence for political change, and reparations and restorative justice for addressing irreparable wrongs including UVA History: Race and Repair.
2020 - Advisory Board, Memory Project (UVA)
2017 - National Board Member, Not in Our Town
2016 - 2017 - Member, Charlottesville Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces
2012- 2018 - Fellow, Healthy Appalachia Institute
2014 - 2016 - Virginia Rural Health Advisory Board
2013- 2014 - Visiting Scholar, Institute for Water Resources, US Army Corps of Engineers
2008-12 - Visiting Scholar, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution and Dept. of Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University
2006 - 2017 - National Board, Policy Consensus Initiative (now Kitchen Table Democracy)
2006 - 2012 - Member and co-Chair, Women’s Center Advisory Council (University of Virginia)
Books
Mountaintop Mining in Appalachia: Understanding Stakeholders and Change in Environmental Conflict. With Susan Hirsch. Ohio University Press, 2014.
Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Theory and Practice, Lead editor, with Karen Firehock and Juliana Birkhoff. University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Reaching for Common Higher Ground: Creating Purpose-driven, Principled and Powerful Groups. With Marina Piscolish and John Stephens. BookSurge, 2009 (originally Jossey-Bass, 2000).
Collaboration: A Guide for Environmental Advocates, with Karen Firehock. Institute for Environmental Negotiation, The Wilderness Society, National Audubon Society. June 2001.
Resolving Public Conflict: Transforming Community and Governance. Manchester University Press, United Kingdom, and St. Martin’s Press, U.S., 1996.
Conflict: Practices in Management, Settlement and Resolution, with John W. Burton. St. Martin's Press, 1990.
Conflict: Readings in Management and Resolution, edited with John W. Burton. St. Martin's Press, 1990.
Articles and Chapters
"Leaning into Justice." In Susanne Terry, More Justice, More Peace. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.
“Trauma, History and Resilience: A Charlottesville Story.” Ohio State Journal of Dispute Resolution, 2019 34(5).
“Disrupting Deliberative Discourse: Strategic Political Incivility at the Local Level,” with Kirk Emerson, Alexandra P. Joosse, Wendy Willis, Kim Hodge Cowgill. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Winter 2015. Online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/crq.21114/full
“How Should FDA Implement a More Rational and Workable Approach to Regulating Tobacco, Nicotine, and Alternative Harm Reduction Products?” with Tanya Denckla Cobb and Scott Ballin. Food and Drug Policy Forum, Food and Drug Law Institute. October 2013.
“Human Needs and Conflict Resolution Practice: Environment and Community.” In Kevin Avruch and Chris Mitchell, eds., Conflict Resolution and Human Needs: Linking Theory and Practice. Routledge Press, 2013.
“Collective Transitions and Community Resilience in the Face of Enduring Trauma,” with Jill Williams and Steve Kelban. In Goldstein, Bruce, ed., Collaborative Resilience: Moving Through Crisis to Opportunity. 231-252. M.I.T. Press, 2011.
“The Promise of Community-Based Collaboration: Agenda for an Authentic Future.” In Dukes, E. Franklin, Karen Firehock and Juliana Birkhoff, eds. Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Theory and Practice. University of Virginia Press, 2011.
“Truth, Understanding and Repair.” Law and Contemporary Problems. Special issue "Group Conflict Resolution: Sources of Resistance to Reconciliation," 72(3)., 101-105. 2009.
“Rethinking Community Involvement for Superfund Site Reuse: The Case for Consensus-Building in Adaptive Management.” 211-243. In Reclaiming the Land: Rethinking Superfund Institutions, Methods and Practices, eds. Gregg Macey and Jonathan Z. Cannon. Springer, 2006.
“Linking Theory to Practice: A Theory of Change Model of the Natural Resources Leadership Institute,” with four co-authors. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Winter 2006.
“The Landscape: Why and Why Not Dialogue?” In The Dialogue Series, ed. G. Sigurdson, Simon Fraser University, 2005.
“What We Know about Environmental Conflict Resolution: An Analysis Based Upon Research.” Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Fall-Winter 2004.
“From Enemies, to Higher Ground, to Allies: The Unlikely Partnership Between the Tobacco Farm and Public Health Communities”, in Participatory Governance: Planning, Conflict Mediation and Public Decision-Making in Civil Society, eds. W. Robert Lovan, Michael Murray and Ron Shaffer, Ashgate Press, 2004.
“Integration in Environmental Conflict.” Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Fall 2001.
“Structural Forces in Conflict and Conflict Resolution in Democratic Society.” In Ho-Won Jeong, ed. From Conflict Resolution to Peacebuilding. Ashgate Publishing, 1999.
“Why Conflict Transformation Matters: Three Cases.” Peace and Conflict Studies, 6(1&2), November 1999, p. 53.
“Coordinating Integrated Environmental Management Studies: Lessons From the Theory and Practice of Negotiation,” with Bruce C. Glavovic. The South African Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, 4(1):45-55, 1997.
“Training and Educating Environmental Mediators: Lessons From Experience in the United States,” with Bruce Glavovic and Jana Lynott. Mediation Quarterly, Fall, 1997.
"The Ethics of Environmental Mediation," with W. O. Stephens and J. B. Stephens. In J. W. Blackburn and W. M. Bruce, eds., Mediating Environmental Conflicts: Theory and Practice. Quorum Books, 1995.
"Public Conflict Resolution: A Transformative Approach," Negotiation Journal, January 1993.
2020 - Multiple awards as member of the design team for UVA's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, including Design of the Year by Architect News
2018 - Community Service Award, Central Virginia Chapter, American Institute of Architects.
2017 - Z Society Recognition
2016 - John T. Casteen III Diversity-Equity-Inclusion Leadership Award, UVa
2015 - Jefferson Dinner honoree by UVa’s 7 Society
2014 - Kente awarded by the Office of African American Affairs, UVa
2012 - University of Virginia Women’s Center Distinguished Service Award
2012 - Sharon M. Pickett Award for Environmental Conflict Resolution, International Association for Conflict Resolution
2007 - EDRA Places Award (national) for Money Point Revitalization consensus building
Dr. Dukes has been awarded over five million dollars in grants and contracts since joining IEN.
