Tag Archives: pjsa

PJSA thesis award

Daniel Hirschel-Burns ’14 awarded PJSA thesis award

Last week, the annual meeting of the Peace and Justice Studies Association was held at the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego.

At the closing banquet, Daniel Hirschel Burns ’14 was awarded the undergraduate thesis award.  As Danny was unable to attend, Professor Smithey had the honor of accepting the award on his behalf.

We offer our congratulations again to Danny for his outstanding and now internationally-recognized work.

Hirschel-Burns '14 award

Prof. Lee Smithey received the 2014 Undergraduate Thesis Award from Randall Amster, Executive Director of the PJSA,, on behalf of Danny Hirschel-Burns ’14.

 

Daniel Hirschel-Burns '14

Daniel Hirschel-Burns, class of 2014

PJSA thesis award

Another Philadelphian, Nico Amador, Co-Director of Training for Change, received the Peace Educator of the Year Award.

Nico Amador PJSA 2014

Nico Amador, Co-Director of Training for Change, received the Peace Educator of the Year Award

Swarthmore alums win PJSA thesis awards two years in a row

Elowyn Corby ’13 received the Undergraduate Thesis Award from the Peace and Justice Studies Association this weekend. Sa’ed Atshan ’05 was there in Waterloo, Ontario to congratulate her.

Elwoyn Corby

Elowyn Corby presented her thesis at the annual PJSA meeting, held this year in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

We also learned that last year’s Graduate Thesis Award went to a Swarthmore alum, Sara Koopman, who graduated in 1993. Prof. Joy Charlton was her adviser and she was a Sociology and Anthropology major.

Dr.Sara Koopman

Dr. Sara Koopman ’93

Dr. Koopman won the award for her geography thesis, “Making Space for Peace: International Protective Accompaniment in Colombia (2007-2009)”

The website of the Balsillie School of International Affairs of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), the University of Waterloo (UW), and Wilfrid Laurier University (Laurier) offers the following information about Dr. Koopman:

Dr. Koopman is a feminist political geographer who does collaborative research with international solidarity movements to support their efforts to decolonize the relationships between global North and South. Her work also speaks to dynamics in humanitarianism, development, and peacebuilding more generally.

She has written about the movement to close the US Army’s School of the Americas, the World Social Forum, and her most recent research is on international protective accompaniment, a strategy used in conflict zones which puts people who are less at risk literally next to people who are under threat because of their work for peace and justice. The paradox of accompaniment is that it uses global systems that make some lives ‘count’ more, to build a world where everyone ‘counts’. In doing so it can both reinforce and wear away systems of inequality.

Her postdoctoral research builds on her arguments for understanding some grassroots activism as altergeopolitics by asking what an alterbiopolitics might be, and how the two might work together to foster peace, rather than war. To do so she is creating a public digital archive of stories from conflict zones in Colombia shared by international accompaniers (often as calls for action to pressure states), and engaging in a collaborative analysis with both accompaniers and those accompanied as to what worked well in those stories, with the intention of focusing on best practices for sharing stories online from conflict zones for purposes of solidarity and peace building.

Select Publications

  • Making Space for Peace: International Protective Accompaniment. 2013. Invited chapter in Geographies of Peace, ed. Fiona McConnell, Nick Megoran, and Philippa Williams. (I. B. Tauris), forthcoming.
  • Alter-geopolitics: Other securities are happening. 2011. Geoforum 42:3 (June), 274-284.
  • Let’s take peace to pieces. 2011. Political Geography 30:4 (May), 193-194. (cited 3 times)
  • Cutting through Topologies: Crossing Lines at the School of the Americas. 2008. Antipode. 40:5, 825-847.
  • Imperialism Within: Can the Master’s Tools Bring Down Empire? / Imperialismo Adentro: Pueden las Herramientas del Amo Derribar el Imperio? 2008. Acme: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. 7:2, 1-27. (cited 21 times)
  • A liberatory space? Rumors of rapes at the 5th World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, 2005. 2005. Special Issue of Journal of International Women’s Studies on Women and the World Social Forum, 8:3 (April), 149-163. (cited 7 times)
  • Bringing Torture Home: Women Shutting Down the School of the Americas. 2006. Field note in special issue on the Global and the Intimate. Women’s Studies Quarterly. 34: 1-2 (Spring/Summer) 90-93.

Congratulations to both Sara Koopman and Elowyn Corby for their continuing contributions to the field of Peace and Conflict Studies.

Elowyn Corby ’13 Awarded Undergraduate Student Thesis Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association

We are thrilled to announce that Elowyn Corby, class of 2013, has been awarded the 2013 Undergraduate Student Thesis Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) for her honors thesis titled “Training for Change: Moving from Theory to Practice in Adult Education for Empowerment.”

The PJSA is a professional association for scholars, K-12 teachers, and grassroots activists in the field of peace, conflict, conflict resolution, and justice studies, and it is the North-American affiliate of the International Peace Research Association.

Elowyn CorbyElowyn was an honors student, who graduated with majors in Peace Education and Political Science and a minor in Peace and Conflict Studies.

Here is the abstract from her thesis:

This research examines the possibility of using adult activism training to facilitate the development of participatory skills.  It considers the impacts and pedagogy of Training for Change, a social action training collective in Philadelphia.  As well as surveying the major democratic theory on participation and the educational theory dealing with education for empowerment, the research includes a qualitative and quantitative analysis of Training for Change’s work.  Based on a survey of past-participants, Training for Change tends to increase participatory skills among trainees, as well as identification with social change maker identities like ‘leader’ and ‘organizer’ and the frequency and intensity with which trainees participate in social change work.  These effects were disproportionately pronounced among participants of color.  This finding counteracts the effects of more traditional skill-development institutions such as the workplace or non-political organizations, which disproportionately increase participatory skills among the most privileged members of society.  At the same time, people of color were slightly less likely to report that they felt the training was designed to be helpful for people like them, indicating that TFC has a complex relationship with questions of cultural relevance in the training space.

The award will be presented to Elowyn at the Awards Banquet during the association’s annual meeting October17-19, 2013. The meeting will be held in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and it will be hosted by Wilfrid Laurier University Department of Global Studies, Conrad Grebel University College, and the University of Waterloo Peace and Conflict Studies Program. Elowyn will have the opportunity to present her research at the conference.

We would like to offer our warmest congratulations to Elowyn. That her work was recognized as exemplary by a committee of peace scholars and educators is a testament to her hard and careful work.

Prof. Lee Smithey and Prof. Diane Anderson, who co-advised Elowyn’s thesis and submitted it to the competition, report that they are excited that Elowyn has been honored in this way and that the award is fitting, not just with regard to the final thesis but for the way Elowyn executed the research for more than a year.

 

Report on Tri-college trip to PJSA 2012

Fifteen peace and conflict studies and environmental studies students and faculty from the Tri-Colleges (Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr) attended this year’s Peace and Justice Studies Association meetings at Tufts University October 4-6, 2012.

[Tri-College Trip to the 2012 Peace and Justice Studies Meeting at Tufts University from Swarthmore Peace Studies on Vimeo.]

This year’s theme was “Anticipating Climate Disruption: Sustaining Justice, Greening Peace”, offering a perfect opportunity to team up with the Environmental Studies Program and our Tri-college peace studies partners for a joint trip. The opportunity also aligned well with President Chopp’s leadership on climate issues and Swarthmore College’s long commitment to peace and social justice concerns. In fact, a write-up about our trip appeared in the conference program. You can also read more about the trip in a story by Taylor Hodges that appeared on October 11 in The Phoenix.

We would like to express our deep gratitude to our co-sponsors: The President’s Office at Swarthmore College, The Dean’s Office at Swarthmore College, The Center for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haverford College, The Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Swarthmore, Peace and Social Justice Program at Bryn Mawr, Peace Conflict and Human Rights at Haverford, and the Tri-College Environmental Studies Program. Thanks also to George Lakey of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Swarthmore and Chloe Tucker of the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haverford who also went on the trip.

The conference organizers were very helpful in organizing homestays for our students with Tufts students, many of whom take Swarthmore alum Sa’ed Atshan’s ’06 course at Tufts, “Introduction to Peace and Conflict Studies”!

Students speak for themselves about their experience at the conference in a story that appeared in The Phoenix and in the video interviews above.

In order to bring some of the flavor of knowledge of the conference back, we have also curated tweets from the conference below (in reverse order).

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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Follow the Peace and Justice Studies Association conference online

The Peace and Justice Studies Association 2011 meeting is being held at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, TN, October 20-23.  The PJSA has partnered with the Gandhi King Youth Conference to design a joint conference this year.

You can follow the conference online. Follow and contribute to the #pjsa-gkc hashtag on Twitter, or watch the conference Livestream embedded on this page. The schedule for the conference is also available online.

Video streaming by Ustream