Peacemakers Trust posts news, reports or announcements of interest to people studying or working in the field of dispute resolution, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Inclusion of an item on the media watch blog does not imply endorsement or agreement of Peacemakers Trust with views expressed by authors of posted items.
As a former ballet dancer, a teacher, and a technologist, it dawned on me what incredible power there is in flexibility. It’s not uncommon to assume an easily movable object is a flimsy one. People tread nervously across suspension bridges and balk at the thought of buying a camera tripod as silly-looking as this one. And yet, the more I think about it, the more I realize the ingenuity and inherent power in flexibility. Surveying many educational environments reveals that some of our most powerful assets as teachers and learners are, in fact, the most flexible ones. These assets include the wires beneath our school grounds, the resources we find online, and most importantly, our very selves.
European Graduate School | Arts, Health and Society Division
The Expressive Arts and Conflict Transformation (EXA-CT) M.A. is a three year program concentrating on the use of creative methods to address conflicts within teams, communities, and international states…
Professional artists, peaceworkers, art therapists, mediators, educators, coaches, and humanitarian workers are encouraged to pursue the EXA-CT MA program.
For further information please contact the Program Director MaryBeth.Morand(at)egs(dot)edu
Today’s edition of Reporting on Conflict was stimulated by a short electronic conversation with a colleague about the ethics of using photos of horrific suffering to raise funds or to sell news or causes during disasters, famine or armed-conflict. We have posted six stories:
We acknowledge Susanne Ure of Amnesty International Canada who pointed out most of these articles. Please let us know about other articles on this topic or online policies or standards of humanitarian organizations of which you are aware.
By http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/movies/Tibet+In+Song-8956.html
Tibet in Song is both a celebration of traditional Tibetan folk music and a harrowing journey into the past fifty years of cultural repression inside Chinese controlled Tibet.
Director and former Tibetan political prisoner, Ngawang Choephel, weaves a story of beauty, pain, brutality and resilience, introducing Tibet to the world in a way never before seen on film… more
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YouTube clip:
Washington – Mural art, popularized in Mexico by artists such as Diego Rivera, is public property, accessible to everyone, that can highlight community issues. In Arroyo del Indio, a neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez, for example, murals testify to the resilience of a community devastated by a flood in July 2006.
In 2009, the U.S. Consulate in Juarez partnered with the Chihuahua Business Foundation ( FECHAC ) to bring Michelle Ortiz and Julia Lopez, artists from a Philadelphia-based arts group called Las Gallas, to use murals to address another issue: violence in the community. Ortiz and Lopez worked closely with nearly 80 artists, community members and even gangs, encouraging them to add their own ideas to the murals promoting nonviolence that they painted on the wall of a public park and canal.
Christians are being encouraged to “share a little peace with their neighbours”, in the form of a new booklet from the Methodist Church.
Lavishly illustrated, A Gift of Peace features quotes from the Bible as well as reflections on peace from a variety of authors including Lao Tzu, Benjamin Franklin and Mother Theresa of Calcutta.
Churches are encouraged to give the booklets away as well as using them for personal or small group reflection.
Though their countries are rattling sabres at each other, Pittsburghers and Tehranians are only too glad to share a meal across a webchat platform.
Illah R Nourbaksh is part of a small but vibrant Iranian community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a scientist. An associate professor of robotics and head of the Robotics Masters Program at the Carnegie Mellon University, to be precise. Six years ago, he took a break from the university, and led the Robotics Group at Nasa—an unlikely place for an Iranian to be nowadays.
Sohrab M Kashani is an artist based in Tehran. He was born more than a decade after Nourbaksh left Iran for the US in 1976 to study at Stanford University to become a scientist. Though born in the same city, it was unlikely that the two would ever have met or collaborated. One is an American scientist and teacher, the other an Iranian artist and curator.
But Iran’s conflict with the US has brought the two together—albeit virtually—at Conflict Kitchen, a takeout restaurant at Pittsburgh run by three artists: Jon Rubin, Jon Pena and Dawn Weleski. It is not just a restaurant, but ‘an experimental public art work’, according to Jon Rubin, assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon, and the man who came up with the idea of Conflict Kitchen with fellow artists Weleski and Pena.
The desire to belong. To belong to a pandilla, a mara, a barra brava. That is what drives Central American youths, as noted by filmmaker Marco Nicoletti while recently shooting a documentary for the NGO Interpeace, that works with building lasting peace in various conflicted areas around the world.
Clint Eastwood’s latest film ‘Invictus’ is not his best film but it celebrates a man – Nelson Mandela – who enabled a society to make a huge transition. He defeated the dynamics of violence through connecting people and showing magnanimity.
Eastwood built a reputation as an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble and sometimes with pleasure. His outsider heroes were angry enforcers of order, defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge. ‘Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot’ – Dirty Harry in ‘Magnum Force’ (1973).
It is the great film ‘Unforgiven’ (1992) which makes a significant transition.
New York – A video telling the story of Kiran Yadav, an Indian woman who died needlessly in childbirth, has been nominated for a prestigious Webby award, Human Rights Watch said today. The video, produced by Human Rights Watch with award-winning Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, is nominated for Best Documentary: Individual Episode. It highlights the dangers faced by women in India, where more than 60,000 pregnancies end each year in preventable deaths.
Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. The Human Rights Watch video, produced with Magnum In Motion, is also eligible for the Webby People’s Voice Award, which is determined by online votes cast by the global Web community. Supporters of Human Rights Watch have until April 29, 2010, to cast their votes in the People’s Voice Awards at http://webby.aol.com/entries/49544.
Vancouver artist Ken Lum’s East Van cross at East 6th Avenue and Clark Drive is impeccable in its timing as a work of public art reflecting this period. As a piece that is partially about pain and suffering in the city, it is a stunning visual landmark that is daring in its scale. We are a city divided, and it’s important to be reminded of that.
The housing movement that has emerged during the Olympic period in Vancouver shaped the 2008 civic election. It pushed a provincial government which had done nothing on the file since cancelling the 2002 Homes B.C. program, an initiative that used to build 1,200 units annually, in addition to buying SRO buildings and starting construction on some units. This movement will also blow back if the City of Vancouver attempts to erode the social-housing units at the athletes’ village site.
On February 18, 1977, a thousand Nigerian soldiers surrounded the Kalakuta Republic and burned it to the ground.
As republics go, Kalakuta wasn’t very large. Only 100 or so people lived there. But the immensely popular musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had created this compound, in the Nigerian capital of Lagos, as a joyful and democratic space in an otherwise corrupt and dictatorial country. The sovereignty of Fela’s republic was always under threat. And even though the invaders threw his mother from the second floor on that day in 1977, and even though the soldiers cracked his skull, and even though the government jailed him for trying to defend himself, Fela continued to fight back. He used his Afrobeat music and biting lyrics as his weapon.
Children Inspiring Peace (ChIP) is a character education project by students in Grades K-6 at Leslie Park Public School [Nepean, Ontario]. The message of ChIP is that we can come together as a community and get along when we learn about one another and listen to each other’s story. ChIP’s goal is to gather stories from children and youth around the world. Already, ChIP has been shared with students in Israel and in Palestine. We invite classes across Canada to participate in our project and add your story to the ChIP album.
The Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence’s Drawing Peace Contest strives to foster a culture of nonviolence and peace by raising awareness among children ages 6-12 from all over the world, through the medium of art. The objective of this contest is to allow children and youth to appreciate the value of nonviolence, the potential of nonviolent action to address conflicts, the value of social responsibility, the interconnected nature of the human experience, and the planet’s natural environment.. more
Yuri Arajs, a Kelowna born artist who recently returned to Vancouver after a 30-year stint in Minneapolis, Minnesota, first heard about the Pivot Legal Society’s Red Tent campaign from his mother…
So inspiring that within four days of talking to his mom, Yuri had rented time at a screen printing studio and had already created the two colour prints that would become the basis of his art-meets-fundraising efforts to help raise money for the Red Tent campaign.
Yuri created 125 prints in the studio, and has been selling them online for $25.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010 Wednesday, 17 March 2010 Wednesday, 14 April 2010 Monday, 10 May 2010
2010 CoRe Clinic Speaker Series
Singleton Urquhart LLP, sponsors and host of the CoRe Speaker Series located at
1200 – 925 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC
Vicki Trerise
“Disputes Between the Canadian Polity and Aboriginal Peoples: Is Neutrality Possible?”
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 – Time: 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Nancy Cameron Q.C.
“Litigation, Dispute Resolution and the Brain: What do These Have to do with One Another, and with us as Practitioners?”
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 – Time: 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Christine Mingie
“Online Dispute Resolution – A Quiet Revolution in Justice?”
Wednesday, April 14, 2010 – Time: 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Sharon Sutherland and Carrie Gallant
“Improvisation and Mediation”
Wednesday, May 12, 2010 – Time: 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
