Tag Archives: gun violence

Spring PEAC course partners with guncrisis.org

In the wake of the Newtown, CT shootings and a renewed national conversation over gun control, “Peace Studies and Action”  PEAC 077 will partner this spring with GunCrisis.org, an open source reporting community developed to address the epidemic of homicide by gunfire in Philadelphia through online journalism and social media.

Peace Studies and Action aims to bridge the gaps between peace research, theory, and implementation by encouraging students to move between each as we study nonviolent ways of conducting conflict and the challenges of developing and sustaining effective peace work, like GunCrisis.org. Emphasis is placed on getting close to the experience of peacemakers and activists by reading autobiographical writings, visiting local peace organizations, and/or dialogue with invited guests. As a class, we will collaborate with GunCrisis.org to contribute to the work of the organization while developing our own research skills.

Discussion over course readings and exploration of peace studies literature will also be emphasized. This course will encourage collaboration and active participation in delivering the content of the course.

The spring semester begins on Martin Luther King day, and as on many topics, Dr. King illuminates peace studies with his vision for education:

Rev. Martin Luther King “Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions. When we go into action and confront our adversaries, we must be as armed with knowledge as they. Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis beneath them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go from here: Chaos or Community? (p. 155)

The class will meet on Tuesdays 1:15-4:00 in the Lang Center Seminar Room (#106).

The pre-requisite of PEAC 015 Introduction to Peace and Conflict Studies has been suspended, so the course is open to all students.

For a brief introduction to the problem of gun violence in Philadelphia, view this short video by Jim MacMillan, a founder of GunCrisis.org and Journalist in Residence at Swarthmore.

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/