Tag Archives: conflict

Peace and Conflict Studies Film Series – Spring 2023

Please join the Peace and Conflict Studies Department for its Spring 2023 Film Series. Five films will explore the evolution of militarism and the role of art and personal narratives in overcoming violence, trauma, and conflict.

All film screenings will be held at Singer 033 starting at 4:30 p.m. The screenings are followed by debrief discussions with faculty and guest debriefers. Pizza, salad, and drinks will be provided during the screenings! Open to all Trico colleges (Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore).

Print and hang a flyer and share with a friend.

Below are the trailers and synopses for the films included in this Spring 2023 Peace and Conflict Studies film series.

Exterminate All the Brutes EP.3
February 15 (Wed), 4:30 PM
Singer 033 Swarthmore College

Trailer: Exterminate All the Brutes

“Exterminate All the Brutes, is a four-part hybrid docuseries that provides a visually arresting journey through time, into the darkest hours of humanity. Through his personal voyage, Peck deconstructs the making and masking of history, digging deep into the exploitative and genocidal aspects of European colonialism — from America to Africa and its impact on society today.”

Dawnland
February 22 (Wed), 4:30 PM
Singer 033 Swarthmore College

Trailer: Dawnland

“The feature-length documentary DAWNLAND follows the TRC to contemporary Wabanaki communities to witness intimate, sacred moments of truth-telling and healing. With exclusive access to this groundbreaking process and never-before-seen footage, the film reveals the untold narrative of Indigenous child removal in the United States.”

Coexist
March 1 (Wed), 4:30 PM
Singer 033 Swarthmore College

Trailer: Coexist

“In Coexist, Rwanda’s unprecedented social experiment in government-mandated reconciliation is revealed for the first time through the eyes of a diverse range of survivors: victims, perpetrators, and those who bore witness to the 1994 genocide. What they share is breathtaking, heartbreaking, and inspired.”

500 Years
March 15 (Wed), 4:30 PM
Singer 033 Swarthmore College

Trailer: 500 Years

“500 Years tells the epic story that led Guatemala to a tipping point in their history from the genocide trial of former dictator General Rios Montt to the popular movement that toppled sitting President Otto Perez Molina. Focusing on universal themes of justice, racism, power and corruption, 500 Years tells the story from the perspective of the majority indigenous Mayan population, and their struggles in their country’s growing fight against impunity.”

The Art of Un-War
With Director Maria Niro
March 22 (Wed), 4:30 PM
Singer Hall Room 033 Swarthmore College

Trailer: The Art of Un-War

“The Art of Un-War is an in-depth exploration of the life and work of renowned artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. The film features Wodiczko’s artistic interventions that he creates as powerful responses to the inequities and horrors of war and injustice. Throughout the film, the artist’s powerful interventions become examples of how art can be used for social change and for healing.”

Come watch the films (with pizza, salad, and drinks) and stay for discussions.

Rebecca Subar on When to talk and when to fight (book talk)

Please join us for a book talk by a compelling author, educator, and practitioner.

Rebecca Subar
When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice Between Dialogue and Resistance
Thursday, March 24, 2022
4:15 – 5:30 p.m.
Lib Lab (McCabe Library Room 104)

When to Talk and When to Fight is a conversation between talkers and fighters. It introduces a new language to enable negotiators and activists to argue and collaborate across different schools of thought and action. Weaving beautiful storytelling and clear analysis, this book maps the habits of change-makers, explaining why some groups choose dialogue and negotiation while others practice confrontation and resistance. Why do some groups seemingly always take an antagonistic approach, challenging authority and in some cases trying to tear down our systems and institutions? Why are other groups reluctant to raise their voices or take a stand, limiting themselves to conciliatory strategies? And why do some of us ask only the first question, while others ask only the second? Threaded among examples of conflict, struggle, and change in organizations, communities, and society is the compelling personal story that led Subar to her community of practice at Dragonfly, advising leaders in social justice organizations on organizational and advocacy strategy.

“Rebecca Subar’s rich personal background and distinguished career advising political negotiators, organization-builders, and movement strategists have positioned her as one of the world’s leading voices on conflict management. Here Subar combines profound insights from both practitioners and theoreticians, offering her readers invaluable paradigms on conflict transformation. When to Talk and When to Fight is the book many of us having been waiting for!”
— Professor Sa’ed Atshan

This event is free and open to the public. Please see and follow the College’s COVID policies on vaccination and masking. You can find directions and a campus map on the College’s website.

Sponsors: Peace and Conflict Studies Program and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology

“Half-Mile, Upwind, on Foot” film screening and panel

Please join us for a film screening of Half-Mile, Upwind, on Foot, with the filmmaker and anti-pipeline activists featured in the film.

This film documents the efforts of two communities challenging fossil fuel pipeline projects in Pennsylvania, including the Mariner East 2 pipeline that cuts through Delaware County, not far from Swarthmore College.

Wednesday, 13 November 2019
7:00 – 8:30 P.M.
Scheuer Room in Kohlberg Hall
Swarthmore College

This event is open to the public. You can find directions and a campus map on the College’s website. Download a flyer and bring a friend.

Brian McDermott, the filmmaker, writes:

Half-Mile, Upwind, On Foot tells the story of communities who are working to challenge two different pipeline projects in Pennsylvania that are considered by many to be disruptive, dangerous, and unnecessary. Through use of eminent domain, billion-dollar pipeline projects are being developed close to homes, schools and community centers—all for the delivery of natural gas and “highly volatile liquids” overseas. The film shares stories of people who are rising up to assert their basic right to a clean, sustainable environment and a safe community as they are confronted by extraction companies and an unfriendly system that often favors corporate power over the rights of people.

In the film, we meet Ellen Gerhart, a retired special education teacher and grandmother who was jailed twice for protesting the taking of three acres of her land (through eminent domain) for use by a pipeline company. Ellen catalogues the degradation of nature that has been taking place on her property, and she gives an overview of some of the ways companies take advantage of their use of eminent domain. We then follow Ginny Marcille-Kerslake, a geologist who testified in court against a pipeline company and successfully stopped construction on her land by documenting how the pipeline construction was damaging the environment.

We also hear from a group of Catholic Sisters known as the Adorers of the Blood of Christ who built a chapel in a pipeline’s path on their land as an expression of religious freedom and their belief in caring for the earth. Sister Bernice Klostermann provides us with a history of the Adorers who settled in Pennsylvania and she teaches us why it is important to preserve the land.

Untitled design

We are then introduced to Malinda Harnish Clatterbuck (a Mennonite pastor) and Mark Clatterbuck (a Professor of Religion at Montclair State University), the Co-Founders of Lancaster Against Pipelines who have been working tirelessly for the past four years to protect communities and to inspire others to take action. They reveal what they’ve learned about eminent domain law and regulations regarding pipeline construction, and they provide insight into how extraction companies are able to receive permits for projects even when those projects may be damaging to the environment or disputed by a large number of citizens. Mark and Malinda also demonstrate how communities can move forward in peaceful ways to protect what they love.

Ultimately, we hear Senator Andrew Dinniman reinforce what many citizens had suspected all along: eminent domain is being compromised in Pennsylvania, and those who oppose the demand for public safety and a clean and sustainable environment, are actually opposing the Constitution of Pennsylvania.

Co-sponsors: Peace and Conflict Studies, Environmental Studies, the Office of Sustainability, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsiblity.

Download a flyer:

Dr. Amy Kapit to Join Faculty in Peace and Conflict Studies

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Amy Kapit will join the Peace and Conflict Studies program, starting Fall 2019.

Professor Kapit will offer a range of exciting new courses:!

Humanitarianism: Education and Conflict
Afghanistan: Where Central and South Asia Meet
Peace Education
Senior Capstone Seminar

(Scroll down to the bottom of this post for course descriptions!)

Dr. Amy Kapit

Dr. Kapit graduated from New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development with a Ph.D. in International Education in 2016. She holds a B.A. in Religion and Peace and Conflict Studies from Swarthmore College.

Dr. Kapit’s research, scholarship, and teaching focuses on the relationships between education and conflict, and on the field of education in emergencies—the provision of education as a form of humanitarian aid. Most recently, she has worked as the Research Director of the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA) and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in International Education at NYU Steinhardt, where she has taught courses on Politics, Education, and Conflict and Qualitative Research Methods. As GCPEA Research Director, she has developed the organization’s research agenda related to monitoring and reporting violence committed against students, educators, and educational facilities in areas of armed conflict and political violence. She was the lead author of the report Education under Attack 2018.

During her graduate and post-graduate career, Dr. Kapit has conducted research on education in emergencies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in Afghanistan. From 2014 to 2016, she was the Research Director of the Assessment of Learning Outcomes and Social Effects of Community-Based Education in Afghanistan. The study, led by professors at New York University and the University of California—Berkeley, examined a community-based education program being implemented by two NGOs in approximately 200 villages in Afghanistan.

In addition, Dr. Kapit has studied the origins of the global movement to protect education from attack and how that new international advocacy network has—or has not—shaped efforts to address violence, harassment, and threats against students, teachers, and educational facilities in places where these attacks occur. Specifically, she has conducted research on the humanitarian community’s efforts to protect students, teachers, and schools in the Middle East.

Dr. Kapit has previously worked on projects with numerous organizations focusing on education, child protection, and children’s rights, including Human Rights Watch, Education Above All, the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), Save the Children, the Scholars at Risk Network, and UNESCO.

We look forward to having such a remarkable scholar and teacher join our program!

New courses by Prof. Amy Kapit:

PEA 072 Humanitarianism: Education and Conflict
(Fall 2019, Fall 2020)

This course will introduce students to the theory and practice of humanitarianism and, specifically, the provision of education as a humanitarian intervention—what practitioners call “education in emergencies.” The course will delve into the foundations and history of humanitarianism and track how humanitarian intervention evolved over the course of the 20^th century, broadening and deepening in scope. It will explore continuing debates over the appropriateness of education as a humanitarian intervention and examine what types of educational interventions are prioritized by humanitarian agencies, as well as the goals that those interventions are trying to achieve. For example, what is the relationship between education and conflict and how do education in emergencies providers intervene to alter that relationship? Students will have the opportunity to study specific examples of education in emergencies programming in countries such as Afghanistan, Colombia, Nepal, Sierra Leone, and Syria, and to hear from guest speakers working in the field of education in emergencies. The course will encourage students to apply what they have learned to policy-oriented exercises.

PEAC 052 Afghanistan: Where Central and South Asia Meet
(Fall 2019, Fall 2020)

This course examines conflict, politics, culture, and daily life in present day Afghanistan. Occupying a historic crossroads in Asia, Afghanistan is a place of regional, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, internal and external actors, including the British Empire, Pashtun dynasties, the Soviet Union, the Taliban, the United States and its allies, and the Islamic State, have battled for control of Afghanistan. Today, as conflict continues, the international community exerts significant influence on Afghanistan’s politics, security, economy, and social institutions. This course will explore themes related to conflict, peacemaking, statebuilding, and international intervention, and their intersection with cultural and ethnic diversity, religion, gender norms, and the lived experiences of Afghan people. Students will read memoirs, literature, and scholarly work from various disciplines.

PEAC 022 Peace Education
(Spring 2020, Spring 2021)

In this introductory course, students will explore the historical, ethical, and theoretical foundations of peace education, a subfield of peace and conflict studies. Students will consider different approaches towards peace education: should peace education be oriented towards eliminating physical violence? Facilitating co-existence and understanding? Teaching human rights or citizenship? Empowering the dispossessed and eliminating inequality and injustice? Is peace education best integrated in the existing schooling system, an extracurricular activity, or should it be distinct from schooling? Using case studies, students will critically examine different types of peace education and explore existing research on how they do—or do not—work.

War on Humanity: Healthcare under Attack in the Syrian Conflict

The Arabic Section of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the Islamic Studies Program, the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, and the the Health & Societies Program at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility are pleased to present:

A lecture by Dr. Hani Mowafi, Yale University
War on Humanity: Healthcare under Attack in the Syrian Conflict

Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Scheuer Room at 7:00 p.m.

The Syrian war, now in its 7th year, has been one of the most brutal modern conflicts in the world. With estimates of over half a million deaths since the war’s inception and roughly 13 million displaced the conflict’s effects for Syria and the world will be long lasting. Combatants on all sides but primarily those allied with the Syrian government have used indiscriminate military force against civilian populations. In addition, the deliberate targeting of medical facilities and personnel, in flagrant violation of international law and global norms, has created a new dimension of brutality – one that is being emulated in other conflicts around the world. These violations in the way war is waged have occurred largely with impunity and have grave consequences for the future impact of armed conflict on civilian populations. Dr. Mowafi will discuss some of the unique elements of the Syrian conflict and its impact on civilian populations as well as highlight efforts to combat these developments on both the international and individual level.

Dr. Mowafi is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Chief of the Section of Global Health and International Emergency Medicine at Yale University. His interests are in developing the science and practice of emergency care with emphasis on low- and middle-income countries where the burden of emergency conditions is greatest and is combined with an unmet need for emergency services. Dr. Mowafi’s current research includes evaluation of health data from a network of hospitals operating inside war-affected Syria and modeling household income effects of road traffic injury in rural Uganda. He has 15 years of experience in consulting and research in emergency medicine and global public health.

For further information about this event, please contact Khaled Al-Masri: kalmasr1 *at* swarthmore.edu

UPCOMING WORKSHOP — Weaving the Threads: Intersectionality, Sustainability & Environmental Justice

How do we identify and address intersectional concerns (e.g. from racism, to poverty, to militarism, to homelessness, and more) in our sustainability work and activism? How do we connect our various initiatives within a framework of environmental justice? How do we communicate these visions with others?

On Monday, November 20, join Peace and Conflict Studies and Environmental Studies for a workshop with Prof. Randall Amster, former Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Weaving the Threads: Intersectionality, Sustainability & Environmental Justice

The confluence of contemporary crises represents a direct threat to human existence, yet also a remarkable opportunity to implement alternatives and cultivate visions for a more just and sustainable world. The framework of “climate justice” increasingly subsumes many of these issues and possibilities, providing a basis for transforming our thinking and acting in relation to essential resources including food, water, and energy production. Likewise, critical issues of equity, access, and distribution are brought to the fore, with the nexus of environmental justice and peacebuilding offering potential avenues for change. What theories and actions are informing current movements and responses? How can policymaking and the lived experiences of people and communities equally inform the discourse? How can we promote an ethos of responsibility in both senses of the word, as a form of accountability and a locus of empowerment? Drawing upon examples from local to global scales, this session will seek to spark a collaborative dialogue for cultivating resilient responses to today’s most pressing challenges.

Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., is Director and Teaching Professor in the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. He serves as Editor-in- Chief of the Contemporary Justice Review. He teaches and publishes widely on subjects including peace and nonviolence, social and environmental justice, political theory and movements, and the impacts of emerging technologies. His recent books include Peace Ecology (Routledge, 2015), Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012), Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB, 2008); and the co-edited volume Exploring the Power of Nonviolence: Peace, Politics, and Practice (Syracuse University Press, 2013). His current research interests include environmental peacebuilding, climate justice, intersectionality and ecology, community and sustainability, and the justice implications of contemporary technology.

The workshop begins at 4:15 pm and will take place in Kohlberg Hall, Room 116.

This event is sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies, Environmental Studies, the Provost’s Office, the President’s Office, and the Office of Sustainability.

Three “Reflections From the Field” events

We are thrilled to announce three upcoming events in “Reflections From The Field”, a new speaker series at Swarthmore College, which brings people working on the front lines of conflict and social change to campus to reflect upon *what* they do, *why* they do it and how *they* came to do it.

1. “These Birds Walk”, a film screening and conversation with director and cinematographer Omar Mullick.

Monday, March 13th @ 7:30PM
Science Center 101

In Karachi, Pakistan, a runaway boy’s life hangs on one critical question: where is home? The streets, an orphanage, or with the family he fled in the first place? Simultaneously heart- wrenching and life-affirming, THESE BIRDS WALK documents the struggles of these wayward street children and the humanitarians looking out for them in an ethereal and inspirational story of resilience. Listed by The New Yorker as one of the best foreign films of the 21st century, this is a must see!

Omar Mullick is a film director and cinematographer known for his work on the 2013 feature film THESE BIRDS WALK. A 2016 Sundance Institute fellow, his most recent work can be seen on VICE’s HBO series, Black Markets, and the Gloria Steinem hosted show Woman on VICELAND. Current clients as a director and cinematographer include CNN, PBS, HBO, VICE, Discovery and The Gates Foundation. Trained as a photographer, his work has been published in The New York Times, Foreign Policy Magazine, National Geographic and TIME. He has received awards from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Western Knight Center for Journalism, Annenberg and Kodak.

2. “Closing the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want”, a virtual conversation with Ricken Patel, Founding President and Executive Director of Avaaz.org, the world’s largest online activist community.

Monday, March 27th @ 4:30 PM
Science Center 199

Ricken is the founding President and Executive Director of Avaaz, the world’s largest online activist community with 44 million subscribers in every country of the world.

Ricken has been voted the “ultimate game changer in politics” (Huffington Post), listed in the world’s top 100 thinkers (Foreign Policy magazine) and described as “the global leader of online protest” with a “vaunting sense of optimism” (The Guardian). Prior to starting Avaaz.org, Ricken was the founding Executive Director of ResPublica, a global public entrepreneurship group that worked to end genocide in Darfur and build progressive globalism in US politics, among other projects. Ricken has also lived and worked in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and Afghanistan, consulting for organizations including the International Crisis Group, the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Harvard University, CARE International and the International Center for Transitional Justice. Born in Canada, Ricken has a B.A. from Oxford University and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard.

3. “From the streets of Kabul to the streets of New York: Reflections on covering war and crime”, a conversation with New York Times reporter,
Joseph Goldstein.

Friday, April 7th @ 4:30 PM
Science Center 105

Joseph Goldstein’s first newspaper job was at the 6,000-circulation Daily Citizen in Searcy, Ark, where he wrote, among other things, a feature story about how meth-fueled treasure hunters in rural Arkansas were creating an underground economy for arrowheads and other Native American artifacts.

He soon moved to New York City, where he worked at The New York Sun, until its demise, and later at The New York Post. He joined The New York Times in 2011 and writes mainly about the criminal justice system in New York. He has reported on the N.Y.P.D.’s over-reliance on stop-and-frisk tactics and about a secretive police unit that combs the city’s jails for Muslim prisoners in the hopes of pressuring them into becoming informants. He has covered Ferguson, the emergence of the alt-right, and Afghanistan, where he was based for a year.

Sponsored by the Department of Political Science, Global Affairs Program at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Media Studies, Career Services, and Peace and Conflict Studies.

Fall 2015 Line-up of Peace & Conflict Studies Courses

In addition to all of the excellent courses offered across campus that may be counted toward a minor in Peace and Conflicts Studies, our own program curriculum is expanding next year!

PEAC 015. Introduction to Peace and Conflict Studies

In Introduction to Peace and Conflict Studies, we learn that peace and conflict are not mutually exclusive. To paraphrase Conrad Brunk, the goal of peace and conflict studies is to better understand conflict in order to find nonviolent ways of turning unjust relationships into more just ones. We examine both the prevalence of coercive and non-peaceful means of conducting conflict as well as the development of nonviolent alternatives, locally and globally, through institutions and at the grassroots. The latter include nonviolent collective action, mediation, peacekeeping, and conflict transformation work. Several theoretical and philosophical lenses will be used to explore cultural and psychological dispositions, conflict in human relations, and conceptualizations of peace. The course will take an interdisciplinary approach with significant contributions from the social sciences. U.S.-based social justice movements, such as the struggle for racial equality, and global movements, such as nonviolent activism in Israel/Palestine, and the struggle for climate justice around the world, will serve as case studies.

1 credit. Tues/Thurs. 1:15-2:30 pm

Instructor: Sa’ed Atshan

PEAC 039. Social Entrepreneurship for Social Change (NEW COURSE!)

By integrating innovative approaches with revenue-generating practices, social entrepreneurs and their ventures open compelling and impactful avenues to social change. In this course, students will learn about the pioneering individuals and novel ways that social entrepreneurship responds to social needs that are not adequately served by the market or by the state through in-depth case analysis of social change work (locally, nationally, and globally).

1 credit. Mondays 1:15-4:00 pm

Instructor: Denise Crossan, Lang Professor for Social Change

PEAC 053. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (NEW COURSE!)

This course will examine the historical underpinnings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how they have shaped the contemporary context in Israel/Palestine. We will approach this from a demography and population-studies framework in order to understand the trajectories and heterogeneity of Israeli and Palestinian societies and politics. For instance, how has the relationship between race and period of migration to Israel impacted Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israeli sub-populations differently? What explains divergent voting patterns between Palestinian Christians and Muslims over time? How can we measure inequality between Israeli settlers and Palestinian natives in the West Bank in the present? The course will also synthesize competing theoretical paradigms that account for the enduring nature of this conflict. This includes—but is not limited to—the scholarly contributions of realist political scientists, US foreign policy experts, social movements theorists, security sector reformers, human rights advocates, international law experts, and negotiations and conflict resolution practitioners.

Eligible POLS and ISLM credit.

1 credit. Tues./Thurs. 2:40-3:55 pm

Instructor: Sa’ed Atshan

PEAC 071B. Research Seminar: Strategy and Nonviolent Struggle

(Cross-listed as POLS 081 and SOCI 071B)

This research seminar involves working with The Global Nonviolent Action Database built at Swarthmore College. This website is accessed by activists and scholars worldwide. The database contains crucial information on campaigns for human rights, democracy, environmental sustainability, economic justice, national/ethnic identity, and peace. Students will investigate a series of research cases and write them up in two ways: within a template of fields (the database proper) and also as a narrative describing the unfolding struggle. Strategic implications will be drawn from theory and from what the group is learning from the documented cases of wins and losses experienced by people’s struggles.

1 credit. Mondays 1:15-4:00 pm

Instructor: Lee Smithey

Theater of Witness covers new ranges of emotional spectrum

The following piece appeared in the most recent issue of The Phoenix.

Theater of Witness covers new ranges of emotional spectrum

By Daniel Bidikov on February 12, 2015

Theater of Witness is a series of staged dramatic performances and cinema pieces through which subjects recount complex personal histories. It was brought to Swarthmore on Monday, February 10 by its founder and director Teya Sepinuck. Sepinuck served as adjunct faculty in member in the college’s dance department for almost 20 years before leaving to found the Philadelphia-based TOVA: Artistic Projects for Social Change in 1991. More recently, she has been in Northern Ireland expanding the Theater of Witness program.The program opened with Sepinuck reading a short passage from her book, describing an encounter with children who were unwitting victims of war. It seemed generic, too distant to be meaningful. Sepinuck then moved towards presenting the actual “theater” of witness.She started with some footage of a young boy narrating on and off camera, accompanied by footage of his Philadelphia neighborhood. It is part of a piece connecting mothers of young gang violence victims to the perpetrators of said violence. The relationship between victim and perpetrator is essential and unique to Sepinuck’s work.“It’s harder to identify with the perpetrator,” said Sepinuck. “But it’s important.”

After a brief and interesting, if not completely comprehensive, introduction to the methods of the program, Sepinuck showed a few particularly powerful Theater of Witness performances.The first video featured a man named Hakim Ali telling his story. Ali had committed acts of gang violence, and had not spoken about it or outwardly reflected on it before participating in Sepinuck’s program.

“It’s very healing,” said Sepinuck.

On stage he is full of emotion, the kind of regret and loss that is easy to feel and almost impossible to communicate. Sepinuck shared a story about how the mothers of victims and convicted perpetrators alike were in tears, moved to unabridged expression by the stories of their sons. But none of them were shown on screen, and the distance remained.

Next was the story of a couple from Sepinuck’s film “Raising Our Voice.” The work was inspired by a man who called Sepinuck, requesting to participate after having seen one of her programs. He confessed to committing domestic abuse and told Sepinuck that he kept hearing her name when he was praying. The film opens with a monologue from the man’s wife, who decided to participate in the program after watching him. She fights tears on screen as she outlines a history of helplessness and running away, ending on a note of strength and confidence. The scene then cuts to the man’s own story as the film follows him through a saga of masculine pressure that poisoned his protective instincts of love. The two end up on stage together, dancing closely. The “healing” capability that Sepinuck had referred to earlier was more than just cathartic introspection. It unifies parties that have damaged each other. As the couple dances on screen, there is not exactly forgiveness, but there is still love.

Sepinuck then presented her more recent work on the lives of those who had lost loved ones due to separatist and military violence in northern Ireland. She showed individually narrated short films: one of a young woman named Victoria, whose father was killed in an IRA related bomb attack and one of a young man named Fionbarr, whose father died at the hands of suspicious British police. Sepinuck then showed a Theater of Witness project featuring a young woman who had given herself to the IRA years ago as she tells the story of her impassioned extremism and its abrupt end due to a brain hemorrhage. She is then shown on stage together with the wives of men killed by IRA activity, in an example of the show’s careful exploration of the relativism of innocence and the universality of pain.

To conclude, Sepinuck showed material from her film “Living with Life”, a Theater of Witness project done at the State Correctional Institute in nearby Chester. A group of men sentenced to life in prison are interviewed about their free lives and current emotions at an unexpected, almost inconceivable depth. This is followed by their performance of an original composition by the prisoners, about how they must hold on to some fragments of sanity while confined. It is a perspective on life that, as consumers of a media saturated with grotesquely fantasized prison environments, is almost never seen.

Update: Feminist Perspectives on Resistance and Solidarity in Palestine and Israel

The event originally announced for March 2 featuring Dr. Simona Sharoni is being updated to include Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

Feminist Perspectives on Resistance and Solidarity in Palestine and Israel

Dr. Simona Sharoni and Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

Monday, March 2, 2015
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Bond Memorial Hall
Swarthmore College (directions)

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi and Dr. Simona Sharoni met over twenty five years ago and have collaborated over the years on multiple scholarly and activist projects. Aside from sharing a life commitment to the struggle of peace with justice in Palestine and Israel, these two prominent feminist scholars have made contributions to other struggles for social, gender and sexual justice in the academy as well as at other international and North American sites.

Abdulhadi and Sharoni will offer such analyses including:

The distorted dominant media coverage of the assault, which ignored the power disparities between Palestinians and Israel
The racist and gendered images and statements deployed by Israeli officials and citizens to legitimize the violence.
The impact of the violence on, and the responses of Palestinian and Israeli women
The response of the international community with particular attention to the growing visibility and impact of the global movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), on one hand, and efforts to hold Israeli officials accountable and investigate possible violations of human rights and international conventions.
Prospects for a just and lasting peace in the region in the aftermath of the Israeli war on Gaza and the earlier repressive campaign in the West Bank.

Dr. Simona Sharoni is a feminist scholar, researcher, and activist. She is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at State University of New York in Plattsburgh, and her research includes a comparative analysis of gender dynamics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in the North of Ireland as well as a critical explanation of militarization and masculinities and especially the interplay between political violence and gander-based violence.

She is the author of Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance and was the founding Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and a founding member of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section at the International Studies Association. For more information about Dr. Sharoni: http://www.plattsburgh.edu/academics/gws/faculty/sharoni.php.

Rabab Abdulhadi is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies and the Senior Scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, at the College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. Before joining SFSU, she served as the first director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She received her BA (Summa Cum Laude) in Special Honors Curriculum, Sociology and Women’s Studies from Hunter College in New York and her MA, MPhil and PhD from Yale University.

A co-founder and Editorial Board member of the Islamophobia Studies Journal, she co-authored Mobilizing Democracy: Changing US Policy in the Middle East, and co-editor Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, winner of the 2012 Evelyn Shakir National Arab American non-fiction Book Award, and a special issue of MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies special issue on gender, nation and belonging (2005).Her work has appeared in Al-Shabaka; Gender and Society; Radical History Review; Peace Review; Journal of Women’s History; Taiba: Women and Cultural Discourses; Cuadernos Metodologicos: Estudio de Casos; This Bridge We Call Home; New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life in America; The Guardian, Al-Fajr; Womanews; Palestine Focus; Voice of Palestinian Women; and several Arabic language publications, such as Falasteen Al-Thahwra; Al-Hadaf; and Al-Hurriyah.

Abdulhadi taught at eight transnational sites of higher education including the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Birzeit University in Palestine. The recipient of several honors and awards (including the New Century Scholarship, Sterling Fellowship, Phi Beta Kappa, and teaching excellence awards from Yale University and AUC), she serves on the Board of Policy Advisors of the Palestinian Think Tank, Al-Shabaka and the International Advisory Board of the World Congress of Middle East Studies (WOCMES). As a scholar/activist committed to justice-centered scholarship and pedagogy, she co-founded the Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America (UPWA), the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), California Scholars for Academic Freedom and the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). She co-organized and led several delegations to Palestine made up of Indigenous scholars and scholars of color and has participated in academic, intellectual and public sites in the Global South and North, including World Social Forum in India, Brazil, Kenya, Senegal, and Tunisia.

The event is sponsored by War News Radio, J Street, SPJP, and the Peace and Conflict Studies Department.

For more information on the event, please contact Sabrina Merold (smerold1@swarthmore).