The World Café: Research Explorations through Conversations That Matter

Flavio Mesquita da Silva, Student, School of Human & Organizational Development

My purpose is to explore the World Café, a very effective conversation process, as a mode of inquiry because of its virtue of enabling more participation of the subjects in the research process. The questions I am playing with are: a) would the World Café be itself an adequate research methodology? b) to what extent would it support other research methodologies to become more effective?

The field of application of the World Café has been a project that I have designed and am both coordinating (as the leading consultant) and exploring (as an HOD graduate student), which aims at intervening in a statewide, thus complex situation that comprises the state school system of Ceara, Brazil. This project has the objective to build networks of culture of peace between almost 700 schools and their respective communities.

The broad scope of this project will also serve to challenge the living principles of the World Café in the context of macro social architecture processes. By doing so, it will be verified if or when other research methodologies should be necessary to support the research process.