Tag Archives: guns

Upcoming Lecture by Binalakshmi Nepram Manipur

Armed Conflict, Small Arms Proliferation and Women’s Non-Violent Peace Movement in Manipur

Lecture by Binalakshmi Nepram Manipur Women Gun Survivor’s Network, Control Arms Foundation of India & Northeast India, and Women’s Initiative for Peace

Wednesday, March 2, 2016 4:30 p.m.
Science Center 101

Northeast India, home to 45 million people belonging to 272 ethnic groups, has been facing the onslaught of multiple armed conflicts for the last 60 years. This talk will unravel the Northeast Region of India, the complexities of the on-going conflicts, from the struggle over natural resources, ethnic strife, illegal migration, displacement and social exclusion, and discuss the unique and courageous way in which the Meira Paibis or the non-violent “Torch Bearer’s” Movement, led by women, has shown the path for peace and reconciliation. Binalakshmi (Bina) Nepram, born in the state of Manipur located in India’s Northeast region, is a writer and civil rights activist whose work focuses on women-led disarmament movements. She is the author of four books, a recipient of the Dalai Lama Foundation’s WISCOMP Scholar of Peace Award, 2008; the Sean MacBride Peace Prize, 2010; and the CNN IBN Real Heroes Award in 2011. In 2013, the London-based organization Action on Armed Violence named Nepram among the “100 most influential people in world working on armed violence reduction.”

A special luncheon with Bina Nepram has been organized on Thursday March 3, 2016 at 12:30 p.m. at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. Due to limited seating, please contact Anna Everetts at aeveret1 if you would like to attend the luncheon.

Sponsored by: Asian Studies, Religion, Peace and Conflict Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, the President’s Office, and DESHI.

David Kennedy ’80 to speak on an applied ethics of crime control

“What if criminal justice had a Hippocratic Oath? Toward an applied ethics of crime control”

justice_oath David Kennedy ‘80

Director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City

April 14, 2014

2:00-3:30 p.m.

Science Center 199

Swarthmore College (directions)

Download a flyer (follow the link, and click on the gear icon)

David M. Kennedy (Swarthmore class of 1980 and an honorary degree recipient in 2011) directed the Boston Gun Project, whose “Operation Ceasefire” intervention was responsible for a more than sixty per cent reduction in youth homicide victimization and won the Ford Foundation Innovations in Government award. He is the author of Don’t Shoot, One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America. Read more about David Kennedy.

Watch David Kennedy address the senior class of 2011 during the Commencement in which he received an honorary degree from the College:

You have disabled JavaScript or you have an old version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Download the latest version of Flash Player.

Sponsored by the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.

GunCrisis.org: Seeking Solutions to Gun Violence in Philadelphia with Digital Journalism

A public lecture sponsored by our friends at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility

“GunCrisis.org: Seeking Solutions to Gun Violence in Philadelphia with Digital Journalism”

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013

4:30-5:30 p.m.

Scheuer Room

Swarthmore College

Maps and Directions

Download a flyer

Jim MacMillan

Former Journalist-in-Residence for War News Radio and Manager of Media and Social Responsibility for the Lang Center, Founder, GunCrisis.org Current Assistant Director for the Center for Public Interest Journalism at Temple University

How do we address the epidemic of homicide by gunfire in America? What is the future and impact of journalism in response to epic changes in information delivery? How can social media be put to use for positive social change? On average, at least one person has been murdered in Philadelphia every day over the last 25 years, and more than three-quarters of them have been killed with a gun.

The Gun Crisis Reporting Project is a non-profit independent journalism organization intended to fill the gaps in gun violence reporting, and to help seek solutions.

Visit: GunCrisis.org.

Sponsored by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.

Peace Studies and Action Course Partners with GunCrisis.org

From the Daily Gazette

By Cristina Abellan-Matamoros

January 31, 2013

Professor Lee Smithey’s class, Peace Studies and Action, is partnering this semester with GunCrisis.org, which aims to provide a hard look at the gun violence situation in Philadelphia and innovative solutions to it.

“I think the College as a Philly neighbor, so to speak, can be a voice in raising concern about the epidemic of gun violence,” said Smithey, who teaches sociology and coordinates the Peace and Conflict Studies Program.

According to Smithey, the Peace Studies and Action course is designed to use peace building to bridge the gap between academic peace research and peace action.

Taught each spring semester, the course is meant to provide a service to a local organization focused on solving a social problem.

“It’s also a peace and violence problem in our backyard and in many ways we’re isolated from the gun violence in North and West Philadelphia,” he added.

Smithey said the objectives for the course would be to learn more about the program as well as understand the range of initiatives addressing gun violence in Philadelphia while situating it within peace and conflict studies literature.

Aaron Moser ’12, who interned with GunCrisis.org last summer, hopes that the class will educate students about what goes on in Philadelphia concerning gun violence.

“I hope the extra mind power and writing power of these students will allow the organization to have a wider reach to continue building a network in the city and around the country as well as to bring more attention to the gun violence in America’s urban settings and look for solutions,” he said.

The students will be writing journalistic style pieces that GunCrisis.org can post as content for its blog.

Jim MacMillan, co-founder of GunCrisis.org and Manager for Media and Social Responsibility in the Lang Center, hopes that the class will help him build a peace-oriented vertical on the site.

He hopes to encourage use of a “‘#phillypeaceplan’ hashtag to every communication on social media, so we can gather information and get an idea of what the community thinks we should do,” he said.

“There is an opportunity now to embrace the momentum across the nation to reduce gun violence and the human suffering in Philadelphia. The sooner we can expedite the process of ending this violence the fewer people will die, if somebody wants to stop the shooting we would love to work with them,” MacMillan said.

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/