Reporting on Conflict | Media Watch Blog

• News source:
• Vancouver2010.com

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.

• News source:

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

Full details (pdf)

• News source:
• 23 February 2010
• Art Threat: Culture+Politics
• By Amanda McCuaig

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.

• News source:
• CoRe Clinic, UBC

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

• News source:
• 21 February 2010
• Globe and Mail
• By Guy Dixon

Last Train Home follows the travails of a couple who leave their children to work 2,100 kilometres away in a garment sweatshop.

Filmmaker Lixin Fan’s documentary chronicles one Chinese family’s struggle to make ends meet as employees of a garment factory, and a whole country’s reliance on migrant workers.

• News source:
• 11 February 2010
• A Peace of Conflict
• By Rebecca Sargent

Many of the peace strategies used in current conflict zones focus on reducing the direct violence or the structural violence within the government systems while neglecting to truly address the cultural violence that lingers within the society…

Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed is an approach to social change that allows for protected dialogue into an issue behind a veil of theatrics…

• News source:

University of British Columbia
Conflict Resolution, Arts and iNtercultural Experience (CRANE)

CRANE is pleased to sponsor an Interactive Symposium during which visionary leaders in conflict resolution will present on creative approaches to social change on divisive issues including race, climate change and crime.

March 26, 2008, 12:30 – 4:30 pm
The Coach House, Green College, UBC

Please RSVP at craneevents@gmail.com

• News source:

The first ever Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival will be held in Silver Spring, MD (just outside of Washington D.C.) from April 23-25, 2010. This multi-venue, multi-media event will bring together artists, local businesses and politicians to use socially transformative art to raise awareness of human rights and justice issues, as well as the important work of Amnesty International.

• News source:
• review published 23 January 2010
• Times Colonits
• By Adrian Chamberlain

The Belfry Theatre offers one of its most powerful productions in years with Where the Blood Mixes, a moving and personal examination of the residential school legacy.

Penned by First Nations playwright Kevin Loring, this amalgam of comedy and drama grapples with the devastation caused by Canada’s notorious residential school program. For years, children were pulled from their families and confined within prison-like institutions. Youngsters were beaten, sexually molested and cruelly kept from their parents — who sometimes lived within sight of the schools. This abuse, an example of ethnocentrism gone mad, is one of the darkest chapters in our country’s history. The schools were closed in the 1960s.

Loring has won a Governor General’s Award for Where the Blood Mixes which, remarkably, is his first full-length play. With this 90-minute piece, he enters an arena fraught with peril — artistically as well as politically. Loring’s ethnicity gives him licence not permitted to others. Nonetheless, it is highly difficult to navigate such hot-button history, especially as the wounds are so fresh.

Achieving the right balance is tricky. Yet Loring, director Glynis Leyshon and a talented cast of mostly aboriginal actors nailed it Thursday night. This is a socially conscious show that fires on all cylinders — a rare thing. It is important, redemptive theatre that makes us laugh and weep.

• News source:
• 17 January 2009
• Washington Post
• By Manuel Roig-Franzia

PORT-AU-PRINCE — At night, voices rise in the street. Sweet, joyful, musical voices in lyric Creole. A symphony of hope in a landscape of despair…

Seekers stream into the parking lot of the ruined Sacre Coeur Catholic church, a 105-year-old brick gem that was turned into a grim, hollowed-out shell, its stunning stained-glass windows tossed to the ground in shards. There, the Catholics and the Protestants and others seek solace from Father Hans Alexander, a Haitian priest who took his decidedly un-Haitian first name from his German father. He doesn’t ask them about their religion; he asks them about their pain.

“Catholics and Protestants and other religions are praying together now,” Alexander says, as two tearful women slump over his thick, broad shoulders. “We are saying, ‘We love Jesus; we don’t care about religions. We just care about the Lord.’ ” He has tried to teach his followers this lesson for years but did not always succeed in changing the minds of parishioners who thought their religion was better or truer than others. The quake, he says, has done much to convince those he could not.

• News source:
• 11 January 2010
• Afghan Women's Writing Project
• By Freshta

There is a knocking on the door
Then let the door open…
Towards what?
Towards peace … (more)

• News source:
• 9 January 2010
• VOA
• By Natasha Saini | London

Humanitarian groups and wold renowned musicians are calling on the British government and world leaders to prevent Sudan from slipping back into what has been Africa’s longest running civil war

• News source:
• originally published 14 December 2009
• Institute for Policy Studies
• By Split This Rock. Edited by Sarah Browning

This Rock, the national organization of socially engaged poets and presenters of the biannual Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness (March 10-13, 2010, Washington, DC), offers the following poems for your vigils, demonstrations, and actions…

• News source:
• December 2009
• YouTube
• By Maya Lin

Unchopping a Tree, part of Maya Lin’s last memorial entitled What is Missing?, debuted at COP15…

YouTube | What’s Missing Foundation

Maya Lin explains her last memorial, “What is Missing?”

YouTube | San Francisco Arts Commission

• News source:
• 18 December 2009
• Independent
• Hip-hop music is helping heal the wounds in post-conflict Lebanon
• By Katherine Butler

John Lennon springs to mind, or perhaps a youth orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim. But hip-hop as the music of peace? It sounds implausible that a genre often associated with glorifying violence could help spread the “give peace a chance” message. Lebanese rap, however, is different.

In a small crowded bar in Hamra, West Beirut, an appreciative young audience is enjoying FZ’s beatboxing and the rapping of MC Yassin (aka Yeah-Seen).

• News source:
• 16 December 2009
• Pressenza

At 8 pm Thursday, December 16, a free concert is being held in the Navon Auditorium -The Jerusalem Rubin Academy of Music and Dance, in Givat Gan. The concert will include Medieval Sephardic music, Arab music, and choral music in support of the World March for Peace and Non-Violence which began in New Zealand and is set to end in Punta de Vacas, Argentina, on January 2, 2010.

• News source:
• 9 December 2009
• Nashville Arts Scene
• By Lyda Phillips

In a new book, Andrew B. Lewis follows the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its leaders from Nashville’s north side into the heart of Dixie

The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
Hill and Wang, 356 pp., $28

Nashville’s north side had it all going on in the late 1950s. Jefferson Street was jumping with students from Fisk, Meharry Medical College, Tennessee State and American Baptist Theological College. The clubs along the strip between Fisk and TSU were packed with kids out to hear Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, Tina Turner and Ray Charles. The postwar economic boom had brought new prosperity to the entire country, and teenagers, black and white, bopped to the beat, self-identifying as part of a new, hipper culture.

In that electric atmosphere, a group of earnest and thoughtful Nashville students became leaders in one of history’s most impressive—and successful—mass movements, as they threw their bodies, their very lives, on the line to end segregation in the South. The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation by Andrew B. Lewis is a new look at this era, examined through the lens of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its leaders—Diane Nash, John Lewis, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Marion Barry, Bob Zellner and Julian Bond.

• News source:
• 11 November 2009
• Pressenza
• By Kostas Klokas

Yesterday a delegation of the World March for Peace and Nonviolence reached in Torino to be extremely warm welcomed by the gathered 1600 people in the theatre Regio where an internationally famous classical concert has been held.

• News source:
• 9 November 2009
• Digiactive
• By Mary Joyce

A massive system of human rights abuse is occurring in the United States. Activists, intent on putting a human face on the mass tragedy, appropriate photographs of victims and disseminate them through their social networks. Soon the mainstream media catches on, furthering the outcry. The year is 1863 and the human right abuse is slavery.

• News source:
• originally published 28 October 2009
• Huffington Post
• By Josh Ruxin

Earlier this month the film As We Forgive, a documentary about Rwanda, was released on DVD… It does not chronicle the 1994 genocide, but what has come after: Rwanda’s struggle to rebuild itself…

The filmmaker, Laura Waters Hinson, took an impromptu trip to Rwanda while pursuing a master in filmmaking at American University. She expected to find stories of devastation, and found stories of hope instead. As We Forgive has since been shown in Congress, at the State Department and in dozens of universities, churches and communities nationwide.