Author Archives: Lee Smithey

Michael Doyle to speak on Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler

“Radical Chapters: How Pacifist Roy Kepler Changed the World”

Popular Reading Room, McCabe Library, 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., Thursday, October 25, 2012

Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park, CA was long the hub of literary bohemians, counterculture musicians, and those in search of a good read. It was one of the most influential, independent bookstores in the history of America, and created a community space which particularly fed the minds of young beatniks like Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and Willie Legate. The store’s owner, Roy Kepler, was a radical pacifist, World War II conscientious objector, anti-nuclear activist, influential member of the War Resisters League, protester against the war in Vietnam, and a pioneer in promoting the “paperback revolution” in the middle of the twentieth century.

Speaker Michael Doyle is the author of Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution. Using resources from the Swarthmore College Peace Collection and other sources he will speak about Kepler and his decades-long fight for social justice, the independent bookstore movement, and creating a vibrant community. Doyle is a reporter in the Washington, DC, bureau of the McClatchy newspaper chain. He holds a master’s degree in government from Johns Hopkins University and a master of studies in law from Yale Law School, where he was a Knight Journalism Fellow.

Reception to follow talk.

Open to the public

Atlas.ti orientation

You are welcome to attend an orientation to Atlas.ti data organization software on Monday, Sept. 24 at 3:00 p.m. in Kohlberg 228. Anyone is welcome to attend.

Atlas.ti is software designed for organizing multiple forms of research data (e.g. text, video, audio, survey, and geo-spatial) to facilitate theorizing and smart retrieval of information. Atlas.ti is available in select computer labs on campus, and personal student copies (for PCs and Macs running Windows) can be purchased at 5% of the cost of a regular single user license. For more information, visit http://www.atlasti.com/

If you hope to attend, it would be helpful if you would register your interest in attending via this simple form at http://bit.ly/n0h9iq

Contact: lsmithe1

THURSDAY Information Session: Northern Ireland Semester

Interested in conflict and peacebuilding? Social entrepreneurship and sustainable organizing?

Come learn about the Northern Ireland Semester, a study abroad program of Swarthmore College. We will hold an orientation session on Thursday, September 20th at 3:30 in SC145. Dr. Denise Crossan (Trinity College Dublin), our in-country supervisor and instructor, will join us via Skype.

The program provides students a unique opportunity to study conflict, ongoing peacebuilding efforts, and social entrepreneurship in local communities in Northern Ireland, a region in a critical transition after 30 years of violent political and ethnic struggle. Students work (for supervised credit) within local community organizations while studying conflict, peace, and reconciliation at the Irish School for Ecumenics of Trinity College at its Belfast campus. Community placements can be tailored to fit your particular academic interests (e.g. theatre as peacebuilding, culture and conflict, transitional politics, segregated education, cross-border economics, etc.)

The Northern Ireland Semester is based in two geographic locations, Derry / Londonderry or Belfast, but student involvement with community groups may take place elsewhere in Northern Ireland. Students may register for one semester or two, and further possibilities for summer research and /or service work may arise.

Visit the Northern Ireland Semester website where you can read more about the program, including student contributions to the program’s blog.

All students are welcome to participate in the program. For Peace and Conflict Studies students, all four credits may be applied toward the minor.

Download, print, and hang a flyer, and invite your friends!

Information for this and other programs is available in the Off-Campus Study Office Visit the OCSO web site.

Contact: Lee Smithey at lsmithe1 or Rosa Bernard at rbernar1

Culture and conflict in Northern Ireland. Photo credit: Lee Smithey

Bonfires and national flags, such as this Union Jack and the Tricolour on the hill, assert political claims and identities in Northern Ireland

International Day of Peace this week

I just wanted to draw everyone’s attention to the fact that this Friday, Sept. 21 is International Peace Day.

Checkout http://www.peacedayphilly.org/

The United Nations unanimously voted to establish the International Day of Peace (“Peace Day”) in 1981. Peace Day was given the fixed calendar date of September 21 by a second unanimous UN resolution in 2001. Peace Day is now estimated to be observed by over 100 million people annually. The 2012 Peace Day global theme is “Sustainable Peace for a Sustainable Future.”

In recognition of this important annual day of commitment, Richard Unsworth (grandfather of Hannah Gotwals ’13) will be speaking on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in the Scheuer Room on “Magda and Andre Trocme and Nonviolent Resistance” See https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/academics/2012/09/17/magda-and-andre-trocme-and-nonviolent-resistance/

Magda and Andre Trocme and Nonviolent Resistance

As part of our recognition of International Peace Day this year:

Two Pacifists and Their Way of Life: Magda and Andre Trocme and Nonviolent Resistance

Thursday, September 20, 2012

7:30 p.m.

Scheuer Room

Richard Unsworth, author of A Portrait of Pacifists: Le Chambon, the Holocaust and the Lives of Andre and Magda Trocme (Syracuse University Press, 2012) will visit Swarthmore College on September 20, 2012, to talk about this new book.

Unsworth, grandfather of Hannah Gotwals ’13, and a senior fellow at the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College, taught religion at both Smith and Dartmouth Colleges. He served as headmaster and president of Northfield Mount Hermon School. His years of involvement with the College Cevenol in France led to a friendship with Andre and Magda Trocme.

A Portrait of Pacifists tells the story of Andre and Magda Trocme, two individuals who made nonviolence a way of life. During World War II, the southern French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its surrounding villages became a center where Jews and others in flight from Nazi roundups could be hidden or led abroad, and where children with parents in concentration camps could be nurtured and educated.

The courage pf Andre and Magda during World War II has been well documented in books and film, yet the full arc of their lives, the impulse that led them to devote themselves to nonviolence and their extensive work in the decades following the war, has never been compiled into a full-length biography.

Based on their papers in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, including their unpublished memoirs, interviews, and the author’s research, the book details the couple’s role in the history of pacifism before, during, and after the war. Unsworth traces their mission of building peace by nonviolence throughout Europe to Morocco, Algeria, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States.

Jim MacMillan on WHYY’s Radio Times

In our last blog post, we announced that War News Radio’s pulitzer-prize-winning journalist-in-residence, Jim MacMillan, had launched an innovative online campaign to facilitate Philadelphia’s citizens collectively outsmarting the epidemic of shootings and homicide in the city, #guncrisis at guncrisis.org.

Jim recently appeared on WHYY’s program, Radio Times. You can listen to the recording of that broadcast right here.

Prof Jim MacMillan launches guncrisis.org

Many of you will know or will have taken “Peace and Conflict Journalism” with Visiting Assistant Professor, Jim MacMillan, who teaches Peace and Conflict Journalism and serves as the Journalist in Residence for War News Radio, Lodge6.org, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. Jim is turning his decades of experience as a journalist to help fight rampant gun violence in Philadelphia with a new project to shine as much journalistic light on the problem as possible. Visit guncrisis.org and follow on facebook and Twitter @guncrisisnews

Philadelphia Weekly: How Two Photojournalists Are Taking on the City’s Gun Crisis

By Tara Murtha

Midnight comes and goes. For the first time in 11 nights, the city of Philadelphia has gone a full day and night without a homicide. The relief doesn’t last long. Just before 1 a.m., the scanner resting in photojournalist Joe “Kaz” Kaczmarek’s lap crackles to life: report of shots fired at 40th Street and Girard Avenue.

Kaz has been driving around the city with journalist and fellow crime-scene vet Jim MacMillan for hours when the call comes in….

Back in the car, MacMillan is already iPhone-editing video he shot of pulling up to the scene. In a few days, he’ll post the video to GunCrisis.org, an “open-source journalism experiment” he launched last month that aims to explore the city’s homicide-by-gun epidemic and possible solutions while carefully, purposefully, avoiding slipping down the rabbit holes of the gun-policy debate.

“The gun debate has been around as long as I’ve been alive,” says MacMillan, 51. “I’m looking for new solutions. I’m not interested in the gun rights debate from either side or blaming the police, or the mayor, or city budget. I want to know what we haven’t talked about and I want to know who is doing things that work. I just want to know what’s going to work.”

MacMillan doesn’t know what solutions will curb the gunfire crisis in Philadelphia, and he doesn’t yet know how to financially sustain the independent, new-media project he envisions, either. What he does know is that murder by gun is the most important story in Philadelphia-in national newspapers, it’s the story of Philadelphia-and that it needs to be explored intensely, from every angle, with every journalistic resource in the city.

“First thing I’m trying to do is build a community of like-minded people and start to gather information on all the other individuals and organizations in the city working on it,” says MacMillan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and 17-year veteran of the Daily News. “It’s open-ended. I don’t know how it’s going to play out but I want everyone to participate.”…

After returning from Iraq, MacMillan grew increasingly interested in the intersection of journalism and trauma and new-media models. While he wasn’t sure of the exact direction of impactful, sustainable journalism, he was pretty sure it wasn’t happening at 400 N. Broad St. In 2007, he took an early buyout.

He spent the last few years studying the impact of violence on communities and exploring the impact media could have on reducing that violence. In 2007, he was an Ochberg fellow at the Dart Center. He taught classes in “Journalism and Psychological Trauma” at Temple University; “Multimedia and Social Media Journalism” at the University of Missouri; and “Peace and Conflict Journalism” at Swarthmore College, where he is currently the journalist-in-residence at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. Meanwhile, he built his own indie-journalism following online. Today, he has more than 79,000 Twitter followers and more than 43,000 subscribers on Facebook….

Photo by Joe Kaczmarek. More: http://joekaczmarek.blogspot.com/

War News Radio becomes Lodge6.org

We would like to share some of the latest developments with War News Radio at Swarthmore College.

Since 2005, Lodge 6 at Swarthmore College has housed the newsroom, studio and community of War News Radio, a weekly public radio program intended to fill the gaps in the media’s coverage of the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond by providing balanced and in-depth reporting, historical perspective, and personal stories.

In late 2011, the WNR staff elected to suspend the weekly program in favor of focusing on more topics, more media platforms and more audience engagement.

In 2012, Lodge 6 is expanding to develop a media incubator, inviting more Swarthmore students and student groups interested in expanding or developing new endeavors in journalism.

During the spring semester, the students who staff War News Radio set out to raise the bar, confronted complex new challenges and eventually broke through to new levels of journalism innovation.

They chose to embrace new tools and media, and a broadened spectrum of topics — limiting themselves only to the boundaries of social responsibility and the principles of journalism. We launched Lodge6.org as a platform for new topics.

Jim MacMillan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and War News Radio Journalist in Residence has compiled some of the work from the past semester into a “Best of Spring 2012” report at http://warnewsradio.org This includes an announcement that War News Radio has been honored with two 2012 Mark of Excellence awards from Region One of theSociety of Professional Journalists. And, you can view radio and multimedia reports from students in Jim’s “Peace and Conflict Journalism” course.

Other highlights include:

* Amy DiPierro, Caroline Batten and Collin Smith collaborated to produce a multimedia report, curating existing content — but also producing our first remote video interviews via Skype — starting with an activist who was arrested in Bahrain on the anniversary of the 2011 uprising. Their companion reports reports challenged the validity of a press release from the government of Bahrain — claiming there had been no injuries to protesters — and another story traced tear gas used in Bahrain back to a company in Pennsylvania.

* Klara Aizupitis produced a pair of video reports following the #KONY2012 debacle. The Philadelphia report includes her own field reporting, studio narration, remote video reporting and curation of existing video. Collin produced a companion video report on the complexity of addressing human rights issues.

* Amy produced and compiled radio reports on oil and agriculture in Kurdistan into a feature length radio program. She sent a WNR recorder to Sulaymaniyah with an American aid worked and produced an accompanying video slide show from the resulting audio diary.

* Caroline produced a radio report entitled After the War: PTSD and Veterans’ Care, and Elliana Bisgaard-Church produced another on conditions for Iraq interpreters after the war. Aaron Moser produced a report on The Rebecca Davis Dance Company and their project intended to empower children through teaching dance in Rwanda.

* Alan Zhao produced a multimedia report, combining new remote audio interviews with an Afghan rock band he had interviewed two years ago — Kabul Dreams — with their online rock videos. Aaron produced and narrated an aggregated a video news report when the US Places $10 Million Bounty on Hafiz Saeed.

* Finally, Amy found the perfect balance while pressing traditional boundaries to produce our first musical news report: Uke the Nukes.

Next year, returning seniors Aaron and Elliana are the likely leaders, while Amy and Carolina will be returning from public radio internships — at One the Media and WBUR, respectively.

Please follow warnewsradio.org and Lodge6.org !

Trip to the PJSA meetings in Massachusetts

I hope everyone’s summer is off to a fine start and congratulations to all of our seniors who graduated yesterday.

Time to start thinking about next year already!

The 2012 Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference will be held October 4-6 at Tufts University in Medford, MA, which is within driving distance of Philadelphia (about 7 hours). The theme this year is “Anticipating Climate Disruption: Sustaining Justice, Greening Peace”

We are exploring student and faculty interest in driving a van or two up from the Tri-Colleges, probably departing on the morning of October 4 and returning on Sunday, October 7. Stay tuned for information about accommodation and registration. Information about the conference is available at http://www.peacejusticestudies.org/conference/ If you are interested in going on the trip, please fill out the form at http://bit.ly/tricopjsa12 We will be in touch with more information as it becomes available. Contact Lee Smithey at lsmithe1 if you have questions.

Please indicate your interest in attending by filling out the form below by midnight Wed. Sept. 6. Thank you! (You can also access the form at http://bit.ly/PJSA2012 )

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Prof. Lakey nears Pittsburgh in walk across Pennsylvania for jobs, justice, and a sustainable environment

For those of you who are not aware, Professor George Lakey is walking 200 miles across Pennsylvania as part of Earth Quaker Action Team to promote sustainable environmental strategy and challenge PNC bank to stop funding mountaintop removal.

Today is Day 13 (nearly two weeks!) and the team expects to arrive in Pittsburgh on Wednesday. George has been blogging each evening along the way, and you can follow his posts via the greenpnc.org website.

Here is his first post and video:

Why I’m walking to Pittsburgh

George Lakey walking across PA

Blog post 4.18.2012

I come from Bangor, a Pennsylvania slate mining town, and identify with the hard work, strong community, and bonding with nature in my heritage. When I visit Appalachian people I see those same qualities, but I also see the horror of beloved mountains blown up, cancer rates rising, and jobs lost.

I’m sad to imagine what it’s like to have your water and air contaminated by poisons, your town on the skids, the jobs disappearing, and 500 mountains destroyed while more mountains are on the kill list.

I was proud to join others in starting the Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT) in 2010 with its first campaign targeting PNC Bank: Bank Like Appalachia Matters! PNC is one of the major funders of mountain top removal coal mining.

I also figured that I was doing something for the future of my four great-grandkids, who will join the miners in the catastrophes of climate change if PNC and our country don’t convert to renewable energy.

In the beginning of this year I was led to step up my own commitment. I felt called to walk to Pittsburgh to challenge directly the corporate CEO of PNC Bank: “Why would you rather fundfewer jobs – while blowing up mountains and spreading cancer – than fund more jobs for clean wind power from those same mountains?”

EQAT supported my calling, and is initiating the

Green Walk for Jobs and Justice

Start: April 30 in Philadelphia, walking 200 miles of the route

Arrive: May 16, at PNC Bank’s headquarters in Pittsburgh

Stops at PNC branches along the way.

Please sponsor me on this walk, and join me for part of the Walk or events along the route if you can. Financial sponsors are needed to make the Walk possible.

I also want to know from bank officials: “If PNC calls the destruction of Appalachia ‘responsible banking,’ why should any of us do business with you?” I pledge to close my account in PNC on June 1 if it does not promise to stop funding mountain top removal coal mining.